Steven Carr

A doomsday cult, hey?

So Jesus was a figure who appeared at the end of time, or just before the end of time, after being the agent through whom God created the world, and whose body was conjured up by the early cult in a ritual meal.

Sounds like a myth to me.

Toto

Anyone except Detering, and those persuaded by his argument. THE SYNOPTIC APOCALYPSE (MARK 13 PAR): A DOCUMENT FROM THE TIME OF BAR KOCHBA by Hermann Detering

ApostateAbe

I do have some vague memories of other members of the forum having that position. Do you remember who they were? Vorkosigan, maybe?

ApostateAbe

Right, and Jesus predicted the end of the world within his own time and he led a cult. There are many other such myths, the myth of Jesus belongs among them, and they are seemingly all founded on actual human cult leaders or doomsday prophets of the same rough profile as that of the respective myths. What do you take to be the myth that is the closest analogy to Jesus? I maintain that the closest analogy is the myth of Joseph Smith, the reputed founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

ApostateAbe

"By someone who knew Jesus" ...such as who, exactly? Peter? John? James? Someone who seemingly had neither the wealth nor the inclination (doomsday being right around the corner) to write anything?

"Are you seriously claiming that you would predict that a historical figure would disappear from history and be mentioned only several generations later?"

Yes. Apparently happened many times before. John the Baptist, for example. Apollonius of Tyana, as another example. The unnamed Egyptian messiah found in Josephus. But, Jesus was not one of them. Paul wrote within the same generation as Jesus. Mark and Q were written within only one generation of Jesus.

"Alexander was written about by his contemporaries, men who fought with him (or against him.) These sources have been lost, but we know they exist because they were used as sources by later writers."

Very well. You expect something similar for Jesus, I take it? People who knew Jesus to write about Jesus? Why? Did anything like that happen for John the Baptist?

"If they were truly embarrassing, they would have been dropped at some point in early Christian history."

Yes, and the point about the baptism really was dropped in the gospel of John, but it is not the only expected way to deal with an embarrassing point. If they were well-known undeniable established facts, then often a better alternative is to spin them more in their own favor. You see it all of the time in politics and everyday life.

Toto

You have cherry picked the gospel story for elements that cannot be falsified, so you turn up with an obscure peasant with illiterate followers who nevertheless founds a cult that survives his death.

Think of all the people who might have written about Jesus: a member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, one of the followers who fell away after Jesus was crucified. Or, as the cult reestablished itself after Jesus' death, one of the original disciples could have reflected on Jesus. If anything like this had been written, it had a high probability of surviving.

Instead, we find people like Paul communing with Jesus through the spirit world, and other early Christians reading the Hebrew Scriptures to find out about Jesus.

But my main point is that this is not the scenario you would predict. This is you having to explain the lack of evidence that might be expected.

John the Baptist may or may not have existed. It appears that the Mandean cult did not go back directly to him, but picked him from the Christian story. Apollonius of Tyana seems to have a continuous history, with documented shrines.

Paul's epistles cannot be dated with any degree of certainty, and appear to have been edited to correct his theology to conform to later orthodoxy. He shows no interest in a historical Jesus and learns about Jesus from spiritual sources. Mark was written at a minimum of 40 years after Jesus, after the destruction of the area in question, which is several generations later. Q cannot be dated.

This was answered above. This is an argument for remaining agnostic about John the Baptist.

So you admit there is no embarrassment in Mark?

bacht

You gave it an honest try Vorkosigan, but Abe seems to be on a mission here. Apparently there's a secret cabal of atheist/secularist/mythicists plotting to destroy true religion, and our hero is going to save the day (or something like that)

ApostateAbe

It is all about feeding a delirious obsession and compulsion. Somebody is WRONG on the Internet, and it is SERIOUS BUSINESS! Back when I argued with apologists in Christian forums, they would regularly ask the question, "Why are you here?" or "Why do you care?" It was always a tough question, because all of that arguing didn't seem to make the least bit of difference. Although there were some happy occasions where someone would deconvert, but you can count those people on one hand even after ten years. It wouldn't nearly justify all of the man hours collectively put into it.

Toto

Abe says that at one point, he believed in mythicism of the Acharya S conspiracy theory variety, but lost an internet debate. This seems to have propelled him to adopt the Christian apologetic argument with a vengeance. He is convinced that mythicism is just like creationism, and he thought that calling mythicists creationists would convert everyone to his brand of historicism.

No amount of argument or facts can cure him of this idée fixe.

I tried posting this in the EC forum, in the hopes that he would consider the implications, but it seems to have slipped by.

ApostateAbe

How elegant that the results of the scientific study are adopted in the continuation of the pattern of using reason as a weapon instead of self-correction.