Chris Weimer

The main problem with Jobar is that he's proving Christianity to be basically BS, and not even touching the issue at hand. Heck, I'll have my tear-share of the gospels, but it doesn't address the core of the issue.

Lord Emsworth

There might have been a historical Jesus who said none of the things that the gospels attribute to him here. You are, at best, showing a fundamentalist's Jesus to be untenable.

Jobar

Oh yes.
The only saying of Christ that I'm aware of Paul quoting is 1 Cor. 11:23-25, the introductory remarks to the Last Supper. And the Greek wording he used doesn't mean "on the night he was arrested", as some translations say, but more like "when he was delivered up": this phrasing is used in other places to imply the entirety of Christ's earthly soujourn, and not just his last night before his arrest. (According to Wells: I don't speak or read Greek!)

If there are others, do give them.

While I'm certainly not going to dispute that is indeed my opinion of Christianity, I'm really trying to address the issue of historical/ahistorical here. No one argues that there was someone named 'Jesus' who lived around the year 30 AD, because it was a very common name. I'm sure that there were preachers by that name. But the actual Christ Jesus was initially mythical before any human being was even fictitiously labelled with that name. Like the Jewish concept of Wisdom, Christ was first an idea, and was only later presented as an actual man.

Chris Weimer

This may be true, but that site you gave certainly doesn't argue much to its effect.

Not only that, but that site gets a lot of its facts illogically.

His age really shows.

Jobar

So, you're saying that Aramaic wasn't the common tongue of that place and time??

Damn, I guess that *my* age is really showing too, if that's the case!

Chris Weimer

It's far more complex than that.

Jobar

Which answer leaves me no wiser, you realize.

Amaleq13

Nope but it doesn't seem to be question of "as many" as it does "virtually none" and this becomes more problematic the more like the Gospel Jesus we imagine the historical figure to have been. What sort of guy inspires folks to believe that he has risen from the dead despite suffering one of, if not the most, humiliating deaths imaginable at the time? It seems obvious that he was a guy who was astoundingly inspiring while he lived. But the more inspiring we imagine he was while alive, the more difficult it becomes to imagine anyone writing anything, even a letter, without talking about it.

No such thing as "certain" but I find the plethora of source material that has been allegedly identified to be too reminiscent of Rorschach inkblot interpretations to be easily accepted.

Nothing selective about my conclusion that Josephus' references cannot be considered genuine and Tacitus only repeats what he knows Christians to believe.

I base them on my knowledge of basic human psychology and I don't consider that to be necessarily subject to temporal considerations. It is simply human nature to want to tell stories and human nature to tell storiess about people who impress us and human nature to eventually exaggerate those stories in a mythical way.

I don't overlook it so much as recognize it as a small part of the larger, very human, picture presented. The theological mythologizing had to start somewhere.

Yep, that is another monkey wrench good old Paul throws into works.

He generally tends to annoy me.

rlogan

I think he deserves a little more there, Chris.

heh. but this matter might draw our Aramaic energizer bunny to the discussion...

Chris Weimer

Si tu vis. Actually, I'll keep it very short, lest our resident Peshitta-enthusiasts come out to play.

The region of Galilee was a bilingual, Hellenized area, where most speakers had a good chance of knowing both Greek and Aramaic. This, actually, is a great reason why Christianity might have spread so quickly - it was ready for launch at the Hellenic port of Galilee.

To directly address the misconceptions, the Jerusalem area in Palestine were actually largely Hebrew speaking, though they most likely knew Aramaic as well.