aa5874

Sweet sounding nothings.

"Christ speaks only to those who are spiritually receptive" but "we require the works of others to help us live, think and act in the spirit of Christ".

Who knows and can identify the spiritually receptive, or even Christ, and the works of others?

No Robots

By their fruits you shall know them.

aa5874

Who on earth will identify the fruits? Explain the fruits of the Phantom Jesus.

Clivedurdle

Actually, looking at the teachings may strengthen myth/story arguments.

It is agreed the moral teachings are pre existing Greek ideas, from cynics etc.

Think about the context - the biggest Temple (on the planet?) looted. The Hebrew god again not winning, leading to more heart searching, what have we done this time, other solutions - this is a sign of the end times, the messiah is coming. Prepare ye the way of the lord!

TV programme about the bombing of Coventry showed the morning after that morale had completely collapsed, everyone was shell shocked, looting was starting. It might have led to surrender.

King sent in very quickly, food and water supplies very quickly arranged, government took control and in fact things turned round so amazingly that arguably this was a turning point in the war. Arms production dramatically up, with very high quality levels, workers continuing to work during air raids.

The gospels should be seen in this context, the moral stories as possibly propaganda to get people to behave properly towards each other.

The pre existing idea of the messiah christ saviour turned into a "real" Jesus with the same name as a previous well known war hero - very suspicious.

Clivedurdle

The other thing that happened after Coventry was Bomber Command and the revisiting with a true righteous wrath of the experience on Germany.

Arguably in the same way the world wide evangelism of the one god can be seen as a Xian Bomber Command, that eventually destroyed the old world of the true gods.

Clivedurdle

Coventry turned Britain from a really amateur war fighting machine, oh we will fight reasonably with the Germans, (Football on Xmas day in ww1) into a true professional war fighting machine.

Maybe the same thing happened at Jerusalem - world wide professional evangelistic religion was invented.

Chaucer

Precisely because he wasn't. Paul was an obsessive, authoritarian, ruthless, misogynistic eccentric with little patience for his fellow man. A very untrustworthy model for anything having to do with proper evaluation of countercultural thinkers who habitually turn social hierarchies upside down. Jesus did precisely that, while Paul instead reaffirmed all the traditional hierarchies that were out there (for instance, slavery). There's a reason why Paul "wasn't concerned" with the original teachings. He wanted to ignore them, possibly because he was more interested in putting the consolidation of a special niche for himself on a fast track than on circulating any uncomfortably new social notions.

Sincerely,

Chaucer

aa5874

This is just pure speculation. No external source of antiquity supports what you have stated.

And, internally, Paul was in touch with Jesus through some kind of revelations. Paul got nothing about Jesus from any man or tradition.

A Pauline writer will destroy your speculations.

Galatians 1.10-12

Clivedurdle

In Christ there is neither male nor female. Send greetings to various senior women.

We have an original gnostic Paul and later edited Pauls.

And could we get back to the OP and my point that the moral teachings do show something.

spamandham

The problem is, what Jesus "really" said, is just as enigmatic as who Jesus really was. I think it's fair to say that there are no authentic sayings of Jesus. Everything attributed to him was put into his mouth by someone else.