spamandham

Although I find merit in your reasoning, I don't believe large quantities of time are required. All that is required is that someone who has only a surface level knowledge of Judaism pick up a Greek translation and start running with it.

Such a person, if he suffered from delusions of grandeur, might even write that he once persecuted the church because he was previously such an amazingly zealous Jew.

aa5874

But, in Josephus, Jesus/Joshua was just a common name from a mad-man, a robber, a murderer to high priest.

Even today, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are called JESUS from child molesters to muderers.

It would appear based on Josephus that meaning of the name Jesus/Joshua had no bearing whatsoever on the characteristic of the recipient of the name.

This is found in The Life of Flavius Josephus 22
See http://wesley.nnu.edu

Loomis

Yahweh was not Israel’s namesake. Yahweh was not Israel’s original god. Yahweh was never fully accepted. Evidently some folks tried to weasel Yahweh in, and other folks tried to weasel Yahweh out.

Loomis

The real-life Jesuses were probably named after the hero(s) in Jewish folklore.

The real-life Jesuses were probably named after the Christian Jesus - who never existed.

Sort of like Darrin Stevens in Bewitched. Darrin was an African name. But the TV show made it popular with Americans.

The fictional Darrin begat real-life Darrins.

gurugeorge

If that's what you were saying, I'd have no problem with it. But that's not what you are saying - you are making blanket assertions that it's ALL A PACK OF LIES (as opposed to lies, plus mistakes, plus errors, etc., etc.). Not only that, but you are capitalizing and bolding every such assertion, which makes you look a bit mad and hysterical.

Once again: people can be factually wrong about something without having had to lie about it.

Because it would be too easy, and probably wrong, to claim that all claims of error are the result of LIES.

May have been, sure - but not necessarily.

Again, yes, they could be lying, but they could have just made mistakes.

The whole problem comes in with your ascription of LYING. As I've said, that's a strong claim, involving intent to deceive. As I've also said (several times now), I have no problem in principle with any of these people having set out to deceive, but their merely being factually wrong or in error about something doesn't necessarily show they were lying.

The first thing you'd have to do to pin down whether lies were being told (as opposed to errors being made, superstitions being repeated, etc., etc.), is to find out who actually wrote the documents, when and why.

Maybe, or maybe that bit is an interpolation in an otherwise genuine text - any number of options are possible other than lying, and I don't think you've given any of the alternatives much thought, because you've got this word "lying" fixated in your mind.

Is this part of a general hobbyhorse of yours, that all religious people are liars or something like that? Because that's sure what it sounds like.

In english, the notion of "fabricating" something, like "lying", implies intention (i.e. it's willed, the thoughts are directed at fabrication). Fabrication means it's DELIBERATELY MADE.

But these kinds of visions aren't deliberately made, they are experiences that HAPPEN TO someone - and they can be very convincing, in seeming real. They are not "made up" by the person, like you'd make up a lie to appease someone, or a story to impress someone.

So the point of the comparison is: if someone told you that your experience of talking to your granny was unreal, you'd laugh, because the feeling of reality was very strong. The same goes for these types of experiences.

Another way of looking at it: under certain conditions, the brain is capable of producing a "feeling of reality". It so happens that we've evolved so that it produces that feeling when there are real things there (like: talking to your granny feels real and is real - in that case your brain has produced the feeling correctly). With these types of experiences, the same "feeling that this is real" is attached to experiences that have nothing objective behind them.

So you can hardly blame the people who have these experiences for reporting them excitedly to others - especially, you can't really accuse them of lying. It's the wrong concept (in English). The right concept is simply that they are (in fact) mistaken, in error, etc., having a hallucination, etc., etc.

Think of an analogous situation: one of those visual illusions (e.g. lines that look bent but are really straight). If I've never seen one of those illusions, and the lines look bent to me and I report "they're bent", that's not a fabrication, or a lie on my part, is it? I am merely the victim of a peculiar little confluence of brain jiggery-pokery that's giving me an ILLUSION of bent lines when bent lines aren't really there.

The situation is analogous with visionary experience: it's something that happens to the person, so that the person may be honestly reporting how it seems to them (e.g. "the lines are bent"/"an entity called Jesus Christ is talking to me, and tells me he was on Earth in the recent past, etc., etc.").

aa5874

You are the one who made BLANKET ASSERTIONS.

You ASSERTED "THEY were LYING and hyped up their origins". THEY MUST BE LYING....

Who are "THEY"?

Now, why have you resorted to demonising me because I say that the Pauline writers were Liars when they claimed to have met the apostle Peter a fictitious follower of the fictitious Jesus Christ.

I made no blanket assertions and you know it.

I have produced sources of antiquity, even apologetics sources, that clearly indicate the Pauline writers were LIARS.

May I remind you of one such source, the Pauline Epistles. Please examine Galatians 1 and 2, and Romans 1 and 11, they have exposed the Pauline writers as Liars and that they hyped up their origin .

Once again, please name ONE VISION from Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost, to a Pauline writer in the Pauline writings that IS NOT A LIE.

You are either mistaken or lying, I made no claim that ALL CLAIMS OF ERRORS ARE THE RESULT OF LIES.

I have bolded and highlighted my position repeatedly PRECISELY to avoid false claims being levelled against me.


But, you have already made BLANKET ASSERTIONS. See post #92

Do not these blanket assertions make you look a bit mad and hysterical?

You obviously have problems. You have no problem making blanket assertions.

But, you have already made blanket assertions...THEY WERE LYING....THEY MUST BE LYING.....

But you have YOUR OWN HOBBYHORSE .

YOU have your hobbyhorse TEENSY-WEENSY JESUS CULT THEORY based on your blanket assertions that "THEY were LYING and Hyped up their origins.

Well, then explain your own blanket assertion that "they were LYING and hyped up their origins." Do you not imply some kind of fabrication by "THEM"? WHOEVER "THEY" ARE?

What are you talking about? This is all very strange. How do "bent lines" make the Pauline writer say that he was in Jerusalem with a fictitious character for fifteen days?

What is this? I don't understand. How do "bent lines" seem like "Jesus Christ"?

Do you not understand that a Pauline writer claimed he was with a fictitious character for fifteen days?

Now, I am going to be specific and not make BLANKET ASSERTIONS like you.

The Pauline writers were LYING and HYPED up their origins.

According to an apologetic source, a source related to the compilation or knowledge of the NT Canon, the Pauline writers were aware of gLuke.

This is no blanket assertion. This is EVIDENCE provided by the Church.

"Church History" 3.4.8Saul/PAUL was not mad, just a LIAR and LAST.

aa5874

But, the name Jesus/Joshua, unlike the Messiah, was given at birth and not after some accomplishment.

Jesus/Joshua was not really a title but the Messiah was.

It must be noted that there was a Jewish Messiah called SIMON not Jesus/Joshua.

avi

Thanks both of you, very thoughtful and provocative posts.

I don't dispute the assessment that Paul suffered from delusions, and hallucinations, i.e. that he was deranged. However, when it comes to Paul's apparent misunderstanding of the need to refrain from mentioning Yahweh, I am genuinely befuddled.

Paul, as I understand it, perhaps incorrectly, was a native Greek writer, correct? Maybe he also knew some Hebrew. I don't know. It is my understanding, perhaps quite incorrect, that 100% of Paul's text is Greek, not a word of Hebrew. Accordingly, I fail to understand, at this late date in the thread, (sorry to be so dense,) why does Paul's use of 'Kyrios' indicate disregard for the prohibition to utter 'Yahweh'?

I thought I had understood, now I am not sure that I do, that 'Kyrios' is the Greek translation of the Hebrew 'Adonai', not 'Yahweh'--> which corresponds to 'Theos', if I am not incorrect. If anything, it seems to me that Paul confounds, deliberately, Jesus and God, both of whom he appears to believe, are 'Kyrios', neither of them, 'Theos', and I had, apparently erroneously, concluded that the early Christians sought to distance themselves from the pantheon of Greek gods, by omitting reference to 'Theos', substituting instead, 'Kyrios'.

With regard to the time element, and the quantity of generations needed to forget earlier rules of engagement, one may wish to consider the turbulent nature of that fifty-sixty year period of time in the first and second centuries CE, i.e. during the three Jewish-Roman wars. The disruption of commerce, agriculture, and education, implied by these three periods of warfare, is not insignificant, in my opinion, in considering a date for composition of Paul and the four gospels. Warfare, with the consequent disruption of the social fabric, serves as disincentive for sales of literary novelties.

avi

gurugeorge

*sigh* No, you have not. Your claim that the Pauline writers were liars depends partly on the veracity of an apologetic source (re. the GLuke claim) - well, how do you know the apologetic source isn't lying? Based on the evidence, they could simply have been misled by someone else who was lying. Or they could have misheard or misrepresented what someone else said who wasn't lying. There are any number of possibilities that are consistent with the evidence, and consistent with finding that the evidence is stating something that's factually untrue.

Again, for definitely the last time: when you find a factual untruth in a text, it isn't always because the people are lying. I don't have a problem with the concept that any of these people might have lied, and in fact I think they probably were lying (or at the very least exaggerating) about their numbers in the early days. But finding that bit of a lie, or other bits of lying, doesn't give you or I licence to simply assume that every instance of untruth we find in the NT is a lie. Can you not see this?

Regarding blanket assertions - well, that's what you do on this board. Any time someone makes a claim, you pipe up with "LIARS, THIS IS A LIE, LIES, LIES, LIES". Usually with as much caps and bolding as you can find on your computer. IOW, in every instance when you find something untrue in the text, your first port of call is "lies". This isn't thinking, this isn't careful investigation, this is just ranting based on either some obsession about religious people lying, or a severely impoverished understanding of human beings.

Anyway, as I say, it is premature to claim lying in every case, without any further investigation - whether something is a lie depends on other factors than just the fact that a proposition has been found to be untrue. To really establish whether every instance of untruth you find in the text is a lie, as I said, you would have to figure out who actually wrote these texts, when and why.

And, I repeat: while it's possible to draw a firm conclusion about fact (as opposed to the mere validity of an argument in terms of form) from the existing evidence, to do so is more of a game than anything I'm doing. Most conclusions that can be drawn about this stuff are tentative, because we all know the evidence, for all its sheer bulk, is actually quite thin - mainly because we don't actually know who wrote it, when or why. (I mean conclusions at the level of "they're lying/misled/mistaken, etc.", not conclusions at the level of "this probably isn't true, because there's no external evidence to back it up" - the latter is sound, the former is always going to be tentative with the evidence we have.)

aa5874

I have presented sources of antiquity. Are you mistaken or lying?

In a previous post I did quote a passage from an apologetic source as EVIDENCE.

Please look at it again.
"Church History" 3.4.8
Again, you seem to think that I must believe or trust the Bible or the Church writers to show you the evidence that they contain.

I am of the view that the Pauline writers were LIARS, not madmen, with respect to Jesus and the apostles.

In Galatians 1.1, a Pauline writer claimed he was NOT the apostle of a man but by Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead. These are LIES.

Once Jesus did exist he could have only been a man or human. The Pauline writer is a LIAR, not mad at all.

Once Jesus was human he did not resurrect. The Pauline writer is a LIAR, NOT MAD.


Can you not see what you have written in post #92, ..."They were lying.....they must be lying[/b]

But, you have have claimed "they were lying.....they must be lying..

You have failed to produced any sources of antiquity to support your TEENSY-WEENSY Jesus cult and have failed to show that there is one single vision from Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost, to the Pauline writer is true.

Please examine what you have posted. You are the one who make blanket assertions, you have not even identified "they" as yet.

Who are "THEY"?

You need lectures on "Lying". You claimed "they were lying......they must be lying."

You have failed to identify who "THEY" are.

All I need are historical sources of antiquity that can support my SPECIFIC and PRECISE position the Pauline writers were not madmen, but LIARS.

I repeat conclusions are based on extant evidence and can be overturned at any time once there is evidence.

My claim that the Pauline writers were LIARS and not madmen can be overturned once there is evidence.

1. The Synoptics show no awareness of the Pauline writings.

2. An apologetic source, Church History, claimed the Pauline writers was aware of gLuke.

3. An aplogetic source, Justin Martyr, wrote nothing about an author called Luke or the Pauline writings.

4. An apologetic source, John Chrysostom, claimed very little was known about the author of and the book of Acts.

5. The book called Luke has been deduced to have been written after the Fall of the Temple.

The Pauline writer was not mad, just LAST and a LIAR.