Peter Kirby

Getting a little bit personal but...is anyone ever struck at how overwhelmingly odd it is that we should all be worked up over this Christ thing? Nothing polemical, I'm not getting up in the atheist's collective grill when there are obvious sociopolitical factors that prevent anyone almost in western society from turning a blind eye to Christianity. But... why should it be so? Why should the story of Jesus be so fascinating for so many? I don't have the answer to that question. Up to now, it has fascinated me also, and it will probably continue to do so. But I had a moment of nausea, a feeling that all was not well with this kind of devotion, and that there is no reason that it should be. So, please, someone suggest something in history to read that is not overcast with the stretched, pallid shadow of the Galilean. I need to play hooky for a bit. :frown:

judge

Maybe don't read anything. Do something totally different, get involved in something very different. Take risk and see where it ends up. And if you feel the fear we all feel when doing this ...just kkep smiling and keep going.

Something fantastic may happen...get excited.

Even conduct your own experiment, by praying to whatever god you might believe might possibly exist to give something.

GakuseiDon

I don't think there is enough evidence to say conclusively that there was a historical Jesus, nor that there was a resurrection, nor about whether there is a God at all. But the message of the cross -- someone who obeyed God's will even until death -- is a powerful one. I don't think that any study of ancient writings will touch on that. At the end of the day, there is a supernatural aspect to the story that I believe is the source of the controversy. But IMHO the supernatural aspect is no longer testible to any kind of historical analysis. Most of the battles over the historical Jesus are irrelevant to any kind of historical analysis.

Vincent Guilbaud

Go watch Spiderman 3!
It's cool

Maybe in 2,000 years most of the people will really think Peter Parker has existed,
while a good part will be involved in the Spidy Cult

Roger Pearse

It beats me, frankly, why anyone not a Christian is interested. I never was before I converted.

The "Ad familiares" letters of Cicero or those of Pliny the Younger would be my choice.

Or do something with the successors of Alexander the Great; Seleucus, Antigonus One-Eye, and the kingdoms they created and the Hellenistic era.

Or go off and look for King Solomon's Mines with the explorers and soldiers of the British Empire. March to the relief of Chitral, or go up the Nile with Kitchener, as Churchill records in his book "The River War".

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Febble

How about the history of zero?

judge

Because part of us knows there is something there, something extraordinary...but we can't seem to know what it is...whereas Jesus(in the gospels) knows and knows that he knows.

Solo

I had absolutely no interest in Jesus prior to what was diagnosed as a hypermanic episode in 1985 (I was thirty seven). I was an atheist, without any sort of inclination to debate existence or non-existence of God or Jesus.
When I asked a psychiatrist who saw me afterwards how he would explain the religious content of my "phantasms" (I avoided calling them "delusions"), he questioned me on my family background. My mother was a practicing Catholic, I told him. My maternal great uncle had some sort of midlife "conversion" experience. She revered him as a saint. So, we went over family history, and some of the material that played during my ecstasies. The doc seemed interested when I told him that during my episode I remembered some stuff from my childhood. Generally, my memory was shot during the episode. When I later tried to create a record of my doings and goings that summer, I could not remember half of it. Bits were recovered piecemeal over few months. But the episode brought very vividly (to uncanny detail) some stuff from my early childhood - among others little cameos of me with mom and grandma in church. The shrink told me that this is quite common in manic upsets.
As he said that I suddenly recalled my mother talking to me after the death of my dad (I was eighteen), lecturing to me about the need to convert and how it was really easy: "pán řekl, že musêš být jako dêtě, abys vešel do jeho královstvê" (the Lord said you have to be like a child to enter his kingdom). It dawned on me that the utter childishness that I regressed into during the episode, would have been just another variant of my great uncle Jarda's shenanigans in which he raved he had "tělo páně" (the Lord's body) and created scenes at the archbishop's office.

On my way home from the shrink's I picked up the Bible.

Jiri

No Robots

Some of us think that Christ was an atheist, that he was the greatest of atheists, that he was the architect of atheism. The far more interesting question is, why do theists find him so fascinating?

Vincent Guilbaud

Peter Kirby asked
The passion written by Mark is quite a powerful story,
and the way he has melted so many scriptures passages is a sign of a skillful writer.

Still there is nothing exceptional or really original in all NT records that you canno't find elsewhere.
Many ideas developed in these sacred texts are even sectarian and dangerous,
like the ideology of "believe and be saved" and "don't believe and go to hell" which is childish and quite awful.

So the reason lies somewhere else.

Maybe INDOCTRINATION ?
or the FAITH VIRUS ? (if you have read Richard Dawkins)
or that some people are so pride that they canno't accept the death of their ego ?
or that it is a good lullaby for the poor and sick?

**************************
The most fascinating is certainly not this common super hero godman story,
but people fascination and fanatism for it,
and that they still think it relates historical facts that really happened.