Analyst

I'm claiming you don't have a single one of them.Make up your mind.Why would skeptics and pagans care? You have a delusional notion of life from 50 CE until the printing press was invented.

aa5874

So, you have them?
You know what the letter writer would have written?

I think you should review your copying error theory with respect to the letters, do you realise the word "Jesus" is found over 200 times in the letters?


Well, if the letter writer actually lived in the 1st century and never claimed Jesus lived, or had never preached about a man named Jesus, then the skeptics and pagans to whom the letter writer preached , or the people he tried to convert would have remembered what he told them.

These people would have immediately recognised that the letters did not represent what was preached by the writer in an attempt to convert them. Or even if they were copied after the writer died, anyone, any skeptic or pagan, who was familiar with letters before the addition of "Jesus" would have noticed the fraud or errors.

dog-on

Steven,

We know of at least two. One a Jew, the other a ghost, of some sort. There could have been others, now lost to time and/or purges...

Doug Shaver

In a sense, they obviously didn't. Even if there was a historical Jesus, it's pretty clear that early Christians had no consensus as to what he had taught his disciples, whoever they were.

Analyst

A bunch of people who couldn't read would "have noticed the fraud or errors" in letters they never saw and didn't understand? Yeah, that's convincing.

aa5874

But, look at the words of the supposed man in Mark 13.6[quote] Many shall come in my name saying I am Christ and shall deceive many.

And 1John 2.18 Then, read Against Heresies by Irenaeus.

Christians do not really know who or what is a Jesus Christ.
He is a bird, a plane.........?

gstafleu

I don't know. "Jesus" means "God saves" while "Christ" means "anointed." The latter simply indicates that someone has been appointed to a certain position, in this case presumably that the Jesus person had been appointed (by God) to the position of Savior. Wouldn't that make "Maitreya" analogous with "Jesus"?

Also, "Jesus" was a common name ("Christ" was not, although it was a fairly common designation, I think), and its meaning may not have been in the foreground for most believers. I suspect that the same can be the case with "Maitreya": it may not be a common name, but may well be perceived as a name nevertheless. All in all I think Steven has a point, the point being that it is easy for a mythical person to take on various instantiations in the minds of various groups of believers--each group obviously denouncing any but their own instantiation.

Gerard Stafleu

aa5874

No, the bunch of people who could read like Philo, or Josephus.

And, based on your theory, it would be useless for there to be writings if the ancients were a bunch of people who could not read.

mountainman

Dear Steven,

I dont think it does. The propaganda consists of blanket assertions from authority, for the edification of authoritarian followers.

As far as I am aware there was an epoch when the name of Jesus was not written in full but -- for some reason yet to be explained by historians -- was presented as an abbreviated form, or to use the popular term "nomina sacra". This epoch continued until at least perhaps as far as the late fourth century because our earliest codices of the greek NT, and all of the fragments do not present the name of Jesus in full. Just the I_S abbreviation, which was shared for centuries with the name of "JOSHUA" in the greek, and the name for "THE HEALER" in the Coptic.

Therefore to address your closing question "How do we know that all Christians believed in the same historical Jesus?" we might be able to say that whatever authority then abounded in the creation and the preservation of literature in a technological control sense, there appears to be one centralised (perhaps state level control) and orthodox rendition of the representation of the name of Jesus. And that this abbreviated form was made a standard to imply the one fixed centralised state Jesus. The holy writ and the canon show the abbreviated name. But the abbreviated name had been earlier in use for other purposes. The name of Jesus was recast into the same nomina sacra as earlier figures. Writing was High Technology. He who controlled the High Technology controlled the belief of the empire.

This fourth century jesus was a symbol. Those who could read and write in greek were the preservers and interpretters of the symbol and the symbol was high technology for most of the uneducated people of the empire. Only once the symbol of the abbreviated name was explained, could the story of the man who had the full name of "Jesus" be told and explained by those who could read the greek codices and understand what was written in these sources.


Best wishes,


Pete