aa5874

You are not making any sense. You are implying that once I believe any character of antiquity did live that I must also believe Jesus Christ of the NT did also exist. Or even more absurd, that if I do not believe Jesus Christ of the NT did exist that I must believe that other characters of antiquity also did not exist.

What nonsense!

The existence of Jesus of the NT, Achilles, Zeus or Julius Caesar must be examined independently using the pertinent EVIDENCE. The existence or non-existence of Achilles has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence of any other character of antiquity.

Julius was just DEIFIED whereas JESUS was the offspring of a Ghost and a Virgin, without a human father, the Creator of HEAVEN and EARTH, who walked on water, transfigured and was raised from the dead and ascended through some clouds.

Why don't you accept the description of Jesus?

Why don't you ACCEPT the mythological description?

Why don't you accept that JESUS was just a story like Achilles?

This is Suetonius on the Life of Julius Caesar.

Do you accept that Julius Caesar had a human father?

This is the author of gMatthew on the father of Jesus.

Mt 1:18 - Do you accept that the HOLY GHOST was the father of Jesus?


You MUST accept that Jesus was a HOLY Ghost of God and Julius was a man who was deified.

Clivedurdle

Alice in Wonderland also fits into a web of interlocking evidence - a character in a book by an author.

So we have at least two types of interlocking evidence leading to conclusions - that Julius Caesar was real, that Alice is a fictional character.

Now, which category is Jesus?

Clivedurdle

Alice may be a very important comparator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice&#..._in_Wonderland

We aren't looking at, in Mark, a literary nonsense genre are we?

ApostateAbe

I very much express my approval for that. It should be the only way theories are chosen in history. Too much of my time has been spent trying to get members of the forum to accept that methodology. I'll answer your challenges, and maybe my answers will come off as unlikely. You know of my evidence for a historical Jesus.
I think there could be a couple of good answers to that one. It is difficult to look inside the mind of a religious evangelist, but the best way to do it if we must is to imagine yourself in his position or in the position of his adherents. My own model of Paul is something like a televangelist, a cult leader, someone who lies in order to gain religious respect and power. In order to do that in the Christian religion, he is best to claim his authority directly from Jesus himself, not from the original disciples. The original disciples were rivals and opponents of Paul, as seen in Galatians 2 and onward. You may have a different model of Paul, and I don't know if there is one model that can be commonly accepted.
Paul's version of Christianity was a little different from that preached by Jesus himself. Paul proposed that Gentiles could be brought into the kingdom, which is not something you would learn from either Jesus or his disciples. If Paul preached things not revealed by Jesus, then he must claim the source of his wisdom from God, not from Jesus, at least not the Earthly ministry of Jesus.
The year 70 CE, the fall of Jerusalem, is a firmly established date. However, the year 30 CE is not firmly or specifically established. A range of traditional dates for Jesus' ministry and death have been proposed. If Jesus lived in the year 30 CE, then it does not seem to be an improbable event. It means he also lived in 29, 28, 27, 26, etc., and maybe 31, 32, 33, etc.
I think that is a good objection, and my own hypothesis is that Jesus' family was not deeply involved in Jesus' ministry. The earliest traditions seem to show disagreement between the family of Jesus and the ministry of Jesus. Leadership of the cult involved mainly Peter, James and John. I have heard a good objection that "James," whom Paul includes as one of the three pillars of the church, may not be the same as the brother of Jesus, but is instead James the disciple, which seems to fit the evidence of the synoptic gospels grouping those three members together as an important core group. Because of the myth, I wouldn't say that they drop off the face of the Earth. Their names are listed in the gospels, myths surround them and James is mentioned by Josephus as an important religious leader who was martyred, reflecting the myth of the time.
I don't think anyone except Christian Biblicists believe that the gospels were written as firsthand eyewitness accounts. We all believe that they were written from myths. The beginning of the gospel of Luke is almost explicit about it. All gospels were written by Greek writers, not Jews. Please be careful to separate the religious from the non-religious schools of thought.

Clivedurdle

AA, now you look like you are putting forward the complex stuff. And if you are correct, please explain why there are no direct references to Jesus in Paul. Even if he were spinning stuff, it is a good idea to quote the guy with chinese whispers!

Clivedurdle

Maybe there is another way to approach this.

Which is more probable, someone gets crucified by Pilate after preaching stuff and this does kickstart this new religion, or the idea of Christ was in the air as part of the evolution of Judaism in the Persian and then Greek and Roman Empires and gets put into a story form after the major shock of the destruction of Jerusalem.

This way Paul is clear evidence of this non Jerusalem based Lord Jesus Christ Judaism that later on gets turned into stories of a real Jesus.

And Paul was writing to existing possibly quite old Jewish sects that had a Christ vector.

Clivedurdle

Thinking about Hannukah, this idea of a Christ may be a logical possibility in the clash between Greek thinking - anti circumcision and silly rules, pro gymnasiums and philosophy, and the fundis - as all fundis do - claiming they are going back to basics but actually completely modern.

Which explains why Paul and the gospel writers found Christ in the Septaguint - to give their Greek introductions to Judaism legitimacy.

But remember the fundi position is no more legitimate - that is also a claim.

mountainman

These scenarios appear to have a great difficulty in explaining how all the output from Paul and the Gospel authors and the rest managed to be standardised with the Universally employed Nomina Sacra Encoding for very important names is this disparately authored series of books we now call the new testament. Who standardised all these books of the NT with the coded forms evident in the earliest Greek (and Coptic) manuscripts?

Could you buy a bible in a Greek bookshop before the 4th century?

aa5874

Which "Pau"l?

Who the hell was "Paul"?

When did "Paul" write anything?

You mean "Saul/Paul" the author of ALL the Epistles with the name Paul that was blinded by a bright light who supposedly persecuted Jesus believers before the Fall of the Temple?

Well, Saul/Paul, the author of ALL the Pauline Epistles, was a fraud and a LIAR.

ApostateAbe

A mythical Jesus does not seem to solve the problem of why Paul does not quote Jesus so much. If Jesus was only mythical, then we may still expect Paul to quote Jesus, would we not? Perhaps you have in mind the theory that Paul actually believed that Jesus was merely mythical or merely spiritual, which is a theory that conflicts with the writings of Paul, which do seem to give plenty of examples of Jesus being human. Good solutions to theoretical problems should entail the least amount of conflict with the evidence, as spamandham has expressed. I would give the same solution if there was a modern cult leader who tended to not quote Jesus so often. He wanted his own words and his own doctrines to be the de facto authority, not Jesus' words. That is just speculation, but it seems to conflict with the evidence the least.