aa5874

Well, I don't think Julian missed it. He called the Galilleans fiction.

Against the Galileans But one major problem is that many persons were superstitous or believed in other pagan gods that may have had some attributes similar to Jesus.

Jesus was presented as God and man, if a pagan argued that Jesus did not exist, then the Jesus believer would counter such an argument by saying that Jesus is no different to the gods of the pagans.

Look at Justin Martyr using such an argument in First Apology XXI

angelo

There was a tradition that Mary was raped by a roman soldier named Panthera which could be the birth out of wed lock story. Less than 20 years ago it was a scandal for a woman to give birth to a child with no known father. Imagine a scene of a woman giving birth out of wed lock 2000 years ago.
It became imperative that a plausible birth was given to Jesus as how could their messiah come into the world in such a scandalous way be accepted. Hence a virgin birth was invented by the gospellers.
They really had no idea where this man preaching the kingdom of god came from. So they tried to seek him out in their scriptures. Was he the one who was predicted by the prophet Isaiah as coming into the world?
This man was preaching that the kingdom of god was at hand, or just around the corner, certainly in his audiences life times.
When all this failed to materialise is when all the myths were born.

show_no_mercy

That's why I put "heretic" in quotes.

aa5874

And now imagine that the Jews called this bastard the son of God of the Jews and asked him to forgive their sins.

2000 years ago, worshipping a bastard as a God by Jews was unimaginable.

It is absolute nonsense or preposterous to imagine that the real Jesus was a bastard, a product of fornication, and people who worshipped him as a God knew he was a bastard and still asked him to forgive their sins while the very same Jews were observing the Mosaic Laws with the Jewish Temple still standing.


You just said that there was a tradition that Mary was raped by a soldier named Panthera.

You story is cracking up already.

Your real Jesus was believed to be the offspring of a rape. Mary must have reported that she was raped by Panthera.

Why would the Jews worship your Jesus as a God when he was the product of a rape?

Your real Jesus story is falling apart.

Up to the 2nd century, based on Justin Matyr, the Jews did not consider Isaiah 7.14 as prophecy about any event in the 1st century.

There is no prediction in Isaiah about your Jesus, a product of a rape. Isaiah 7.14 is about Hezekiah.

And what about the man who was telling Jews that he was the Messiah as predicted by the prophet Daniel?


Your real Jesus story has falied. Your real Jesus was the product of a rape and was worshipped as the son of the God of the Jews and was eventually executed for blasphemy. And his folowers, knowing he was not a God and could not forgive sins, later falsely claimed he was born of a virgin as found in Isaiah 7.14 which was never regarded as a future prediction.

An incredible scenario.


It should be obvious that the "real" Jesus came into the world as a myth and left as a myth. His conception through the Holy Ghost and ascension through the clouds are documented and witnessed by Mary his mother and the disciples.

Jesus of the NT was truly a myth.

No Robots

Exactly. Why is it that so few people who delve into this subject ever engage directly with Judaism? Why are the considered opinions of well-informed Jews on this subject rarely taken into consideration? As Kaufmann Kohler puts it:

Like the dog in the fable, who, seeing his own picture reflected in the water, casts off the piece of meat in his mouth in order to seize upon that held by his supposed rival in the water, so do all these famous scholars cast away whatever is Jewish in Jesus and the New Testament, in order to make the Christ of their own fancy rise who has nothing in him of the Jew. They see not that Apollo and the Muses, whose kinship they claim rather than that of Sinai's God and the Hebrew covenant people, have nothing in common with the man of Golgotha.--"The Attitude of Christian scholars toward Jewish literature" / Kaufmann Kohler.

This same tendency to strip the NT of its essential Judaism is behind the whole mythicist movement.

dog-on

The NT is a rejection of Judaism, but this has nothing to do with the mythicist movement, other than acknowledging this to be the reality.

No Robots

Not according to well-informed Jews.

Both traditional Christian scholarship and mythicism try to strip the NT of its essential Judaism, in fulfillment of what Robert Young calls, "the ultimate Western fantasy - that Christ had not, in fact, been a Jew" (Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, p. 85).

gentleexit

And Porphyry called the gospels fictions based on their contradictions among other things (in this he agrees with Spamandham). But in each case, they were talking of fictions about a real person, tall tales about a real person. Now of course, they could have been wrong about that and you right.

At one point, this thread veered onto a contemporary of Marcus - did Athenagoras "believe" in a real Jesus? That Christian lived 100 years before Porphyry, right at the same time as the Sophist Celsus, the first (we know of) to write a long polemic against Christianity.

Celsus obviously believes in Jesus the man. He is the one who tells us Mary was knocked up and names the knocker! This somewhat learned man of Alexandria attacks the man Jesus and sees that man's reputation as key to Christianity. For him, Christianity builds from that man. And he writes in Alexandria. Knows its ways. If there was still a "gnostic"-"man-god" split in "Christianity" at this stage, don't you think he would have known of it, and noted it?

I think Celsus talks to the mid to late second century as a time where to be Christian meant venerating a man Jesus, not just a emanation, Christ.

Celsus begins his attack by restating existing Jewish attacks on Christianity, among which is Mary's unfortunate carelessness. The influential Jews of Alexandria, at the time of Celsus and Athenagoras, accepted the existence of the man but not the fictions that built around him.

BTW, removing Judaism goes beyond the mythicists. Celsus is usually described as a philosopher with a knowledge of Judaism. Why not a cosmopolitan Jews with a knowledge of philosophy, a later, cruder Philo? Frankly it could go either way. Judaism is walled off from its surroundings far too early in most histories.

aa5874

The Jesus story is fundamentally fiction.

The conception by the Holy Ghost, born without sexual union by a virgin, the miracles where he spit into peoples eyes to make them see, where he raised a man from the dead and walked on water and made the deaf hear by simply talking to them. ( How could Jesus talk to the deaf?)

The fiction continues with the transfiguration, where Jesus brought dead prophets to life after hundreds of years and changes his appearance while God talked to Peter, James and John through a cloud.

And, the fiction is completed with the resurrection and ascension witnessed by the disciples.

No doubt, the Jesus story is creative fiction.

No Robots

Fascinating conjecture. If you come up with anything on this, do let us know.