sotto voce

Based on which books of the New Testament?

Note that the word 'christ' is completely meaningless unless it recognises divine presence.

Huon

the word "anointed" is completely meaningless unless it recognises divine presence ?

The kings of France were anointed by the Archbishop of Rheims when they began to reign.

Maybe there is divine anointment and ordinary human anointment...

sotto voce

So is that what 1st century Jews took as their context? Remarkable.

'The Archbishop of Rheims' would have punched your nose for saying so. "Prends ça!" il dit.

Iskander

Followers of Jesus became known as Christians because they believed Jesus to be the messiah (Christos) prophesied in the Hebrew Bible.

So, what did the Hebrew Bible say about the messiah?

aa5874

Again, you are spreading Propaganda. You fail to recognise that your credibility is at stake when you make claims that can be shown to be UTTERLY erroneous.

I will NOW expose your Blatant Errors.

Q,M, and L do NOT even exist and have NEVER been found.

In gMark, Acts and the Pauline writings it is claimed Jesus was the SON of a God.

Mark 5:7 NIVActs 9:20 NIV The Pauline writer claimed he was NOT sent by a human being but by Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead.


Galatians 1:1 NIV Please, the Pauline writer claimed his Gospel was NOT from Human beings and was NOT made by human beings.

Galatatians 1.11-12 NIV Please, the Pauline Jesus was the Son of a God.

Galatians 4.4 It is CLEAR that you are presenting Mis-leading information NOT taking into account that people here will observe that you are NOT CREDIBLE.

Apologetic sources that used gMark, Acts and the Pauline writings ALSO claimed Jesus had NO human father and was BORN of a Ghost and a woman, and was God the Creator.

Toto

These few cults did think of Jesus as an ordinary man, but then they added the spirit of Christ who descended upon him, so "Jesus Christ" was something beyond ordinary.

If any of these heresies existed before the gospels, you would have clear evidence of a historical Jesus. But they all seem to be later. (Perhaps because we know little about them, and only from the heresiologists.)

Toto

The claim that Jews were slaves in Egypt, and escaped and conquered Canaan after wandering in the desert for 40 years, has been falsified by the lack of archaeological evidence.

The claim that Christianity started with a spiritual, mythical Jesus could be falsified (to the satisfaction of most) by the discovery of a single document.

The claim that Christianity started with an obscure failed prophet who was later elevated to deity by a second or third generation of followers, leaving no evidence of his existence because he was so obscure, is not falsifiable, and not especially useful for understanding the development of early Christianity.

Grog

We can hold the theory that there is not a teapot orbiting Mars until presented with contradicting evidence.

Similarly, I believe it is legitimate to hold that Christianity was not founded by followers of a Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified under Pilate.

Abe's Null Hypothesis is not a workable null hypothesis, by the way. It allows for the gap escape, much like the "missing link" criticism of evolution. If we find hominid remains that fill in a link in the chain, that only creates two more gaps to fill. If we point to similarities that abound, not just in Roman myths, but in Jewish beliefs (Isaiah 53, WoSolomon, Enoch, etc), it cannot be similar enough. It would help if Abe would present some threshold that would have to be reached to argue that Jesus-belief emerged from pre-existent ideas.

Similarly, mythicism lacks a coherent theory of emergent memes and how that could apply to the evolution of Jesus-belief--but I also believe that it could be an interesting area to explore. When Abe denies that Greek gods were similar to Jesus or that the Jesus ben Ananias is not similar enough to Jesus of Nazareth, it reminds me of creationists proclaiming that Lucy is "just an ape" or neandertalis is just a malformed human. It is failure to recognize the gradation of change and evolution. It also fails to recognize the ability of human writers to incorporate all sorts of ideas in infinite ways. "Fillory" is not "Narnia," Martin Chatwin is not a carbon-copy of Edmund Pevensie, Fillory has two gods and they are goats (or something) while Narnia only has a single Lion. Still, no one would deny that the author of the Magicians based his world on that of C.S. Lewis, despite the many differences. In fact, other than theme, you would be hard-pressed to come up with similarities, yet, the influence is obvious.

How similar do ideas have to be to accept that one idea emerged from previously existing ideas? Right now, it seems the last stand has been made at the "dying messiah" belief and whether it was possible for Jews to have come up with that idea. I think even here, historicism fails to make its case (not that "dying messiah" beliefs may not have existed, but that Jews couldn't conceive of that idea).

sotto voce

Or, we can suppose that there was not at least one teapot in Bertrand Russell's kitchen.

With the same likelihood of there being no teapot in Bertrand Russell's kitchen.

><

mountainman

But that's precisely what Arius claimed about Jesus.

But back to tanya's OP it is good to see the Logos mentioned in first place. Logically how is it that the Christians simply rebadged the Logos of Heraclitus and got away with it for so long? Why did they openly rob the Logos from the Greeks? Have they ever been taken to account for this intellectual robbery?