rlogan

Toto has a better head than me, and I've had enough fun.

So - all the best.

McD

In other words, you finally realized that I was right, and that you have been referring to a mistatement that I made and amended sixty posts earlier and had linked to for your edification at least three times.

All the best to you too.

Geetarmoore

Great post. Spot on. Thanks.

Peter Kirby

I appreciate that you are expressing your own story of evolving beliefs, but this argument from incredulity is not sound.

regards,
Peter Kirby

Toto

Why is it not a valid argument, although it is expressed with the language of personal incredulity? The time frame that it takes to develop various schisms and doctrinal disputes is a valid consideration.

But it doesn't argue against a historical Jesus so much as it argues for a much later date for Paul than is usually given.

Jabu Khan

I just developed a love for mythologies and other cultures at an early age probably because I moved from a really repressed ultra religious part of Pennsylvania to AZ. I had never felt comfortrable with a lot of the stereotypes of the people around me there and though I had little contact with my father and didn't know he was an atheist yet, he said some things and pointed some things out to me that made me more skeptical than I probably would have been otherwise.I read a lot of accounts of archealogy. The biblical archeology always seemes to leap to extrodinary conclusions with little evidence. The rest seemed to leave a lot of open ended questions dispite amountains of evidence. I also noticed a stark contrast between the way biblical and other archeologists did there work. I researched a lot of myths and their cultures and found that In my estimation biblical archeologists had an agenda and were in fact covering up a lot of historically important discoveries so I started ignoring them. I always pretty much expected to be like Myr, mythras excetra no real evidence for Jesus other than the word of the Bible which I never considered to be of any historical or cosmological importance. Periodically I would read things published by either circle and it seems to continue to support that belief to me. Things like the shroud and the James Ossuary and all the hoaxes that come out of biblical archeology also lead me to believe that numerous attempts are being made to insert a historical Jesus into a religion that it seems to me worked very hard to not attach the story to anyone known at the time.

Geetarmoore

I think it speaks to tha fact that Paul was preaching to pre-existing mystery communities, and preaching of a new spiritual savior in the in the middle of the first century.....

Clivedurdle

hmmm!

A continuum of Jesi?

Rabbi, miracle worker, terrorist, carpenter, scribe, member of Herod's family, teacher of righteousness, classic xian hybrid god man model, Dali model, (St john of the Cross), fiction, myth, spirit in the heavens, political invention, cast member of play...what have I forgotten?

Xians are really conjoined historicist spiritual. (Remember spiritual from an atheist perspective is also not real!)

Iasion

Aha

Sounds like a great title for a Jesus book :
The Jesi Continuum


Iasion

Peter Kirby

Because incredulity is all that is offered to support the major premise ("big" movements take more time).

The premise is also not well defined. As concrete as it (the "bigness" angle) got is that there were members of the movement outside Palestine, in Rome and Asia Minor.

It would be a valid consideration if it were based in dated on data rather than thoghts of "how long it should take." Is a doctrinal dispute really more likely in the tenth decade than in the first few decades? Not only is there no data to support that, we have the problem of dueling intuitions: my intuition is that doctrinal dispute is likely in a young movement. But it's not my argument.

regards,
Peter Kirby