dog-on

It does to me.

aa5874

Now that you have presented what you believe to be plausible, please present the supporting evidence or source of antiquity to corroborate what you imagined happened.

The story that you propagate is not in the NT or found in the Church writings. Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost that truly transfigured, resurrected and ascended to heaven.

If Peter was a dishonest inventor of the resurrection and miracles, then he would have been a most monstrous idiot and deceiver, bearing in mind that Jesus was just executed after being deemed a blasphemer in the very place where Peter would start his campaign of inventions knowning full well that in Judea blasphemy and leading people astray were capital crimes.

Your story when examined properly, taking sources of antiquity into consideration, is highly improbable and irrational.

It is more plausible and likely that Jesus was just a backdated belief.

ApostateAbe

Good to hear. The most plausible theory is the one that should win, and the theory I advocate fits the pattern of almost all other well-known cults-turned-religions, including Islam, Mormonism, Rastafarianism and Scientology. For some reason, or probably many different reasons, people are inclined to believe something weird about Christianity, when Christianity really seems to be just another continuation of the old pattern.

Toto

There may be a lot that you are missing, and you have admitted that you haven't examined Doherty's work. Perhaps it would be best if you framed your posts less dogmatically, with less scorn..

Your theory that Jesus was a cult leader who was executed, and Peter took over the cult and invented the resurrection, is interesting but has no supporting evidence. There are a myriad of theories of early Christianity like that - possible, more plausible than believing in the resurrection, but ultimately, there is no real evidence for any of them.

ApostateAbe

Yes, you are mostly right. I hope to learn about Doherty's arguments, with Doherty's model being as popular as it is. My theory about Peter starts with Paul getting into an argument with Peter, as though he was rival in leadership of the Christian cult. Because of that, and because Peter was reportedly a direct disciple of Jesus, he was probably the successor of Jesus. Whoever the successor may have been, I attribute the myth of the resurrection to him, because it would seem to have been one of the few ways that the Christian cult adherence could stay alive after Jesus was executed in such an embarrassing manner (cults are and need to be continuous). So, yeah, there is a bundle of inference in that, but it seems to be the most likely model of early Christianity that fits the internal evidence and external patterns the best.

aa5874

There is no EXTERNAL evidence for your theory and internally a Pauline writer claimed he was NOT the apostle of a man but of one that was raised from the dead.

The internal inference in the NT is that Jesus was the Word, was God and put on the likeness of man, but was always God before heaven and earth was created.

It makes no sense for the disciples to continue to claim, immediately, that Jesus was a God and resurrected in the very same place where people could be stoned to death for blasphemy and leading people astray.

A Jew claiming Jesus, the executed blasphemer, was God and resurrected was not good news to a Jew in Jerusalem or anywhere in the region.

DCHindley

Guru,

The problem is that there is considerable romance attached to Jesus Christ. Conservatives are in love with the myth of his death serving as a vicarious atonement for the sins of believing mankind. Liberals are in love with the "social gospel" that has been created from the sayings and actions attributed to him. Everyone is eager to reinforce their own romantic notions about him by fashioning him into the image they need him to fill for them.

All of them just find it easier to find the words and deeds attributed to him as evidence for a real person who was either actually son of God (conservatives) or at very least a man around whom myths were woven (liberals), rather than a myth that was personified. Conservatives, however, don't want a HJ who is TOO human (and thus take away from the romance of his divinity), and liberals also don't want the HJ to be incompatible with their romantic notion about his social message.

The other day I quoted Rabbi Jacob Neusner to the effect that the message of sacred literature is more important than speculation about the motives and circumstances that produced the literature. I said at the time that this kind of "reader-response" criticism is often resorted to by conservatives because it revers the sacred texts over the circumstances of their production, but I think it is also employed by some liberals. And so you sometimes hear that the HJ is irrelevant, and thus pointless to try to accurately reconstruct.

Silly people ...

DCH

dog-on

Indeed, so let's look at those relationships.

Islam - Mohammed - God
Mormons - Joe Smith - Jesus/God
Rasta - ??? - Yah (Don't follow this religion, so I do not know)
Scient - Hubbard - Xenu, or who ever

In not one of these, though I cannot say so for the Rastas, was the originator the actualy deity, nor did the originator become the deity.

Steven Carr

So the mere fact that Christians like the author of 2 Peter had to write explaining to other Christians that their stories of a historical Jesus were not cleverly invented stories, counts as a silence?

lpetrich

Why don't you explain why you think that there had been a historical Jesus Christ?

And do so without whining about what crackpottery you think that Jesus mythicism is.

Jesus mythers don't have as their main argument what crackpottery Jesus historicism supposedly is. At least I don't recall ever seeing that argument from a Jesus myther.

Evolutionary biologists have been willing to explain why they think that descent with modification is how species have originated. But I don't see any comparable attempt to explain why there had been a historical Jesus Christ.