aa5874

But what you post is not true at all. You are mis-representing the evidence Marcion did propose that Jesus was fully God. And there were other Christians who claimed Christ was fully Divine, like Valentinus and there were even Christians who did not believe in Jesus Christ at all for salvation like Octavius in Minucius Felix, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras and Tatian. These persons did NOT mention anyone called Jesus Christ with respect to their salvation.

And it must be that non-Christians must have believed Jesus was a God that is why they most likely became Jesus believers.

Now, Julian did state that Jesus was not from Judah. Jesus believers claimed Jesus was from Judah.

Once Jesus was not from Judah, he must have been from fiction.

It must be obvious that Julian thought Jesus was a work of fiction or fabricated from fiction.



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mountainman

The concept of "historical truth" is an ancient and common concept which would have had some form of meaning for every living person irrespective of the age in which they lived. Julian had some form of historical appreciation for the class of people he called "Galilaeans" --- they represented the lawless brigands of the bad lands of Galilee, as written about by Josephus and Epictetus who followed Josephus.

mountainman

What we may say is that the official christian "story-line" is that the orthodox christians presented the arguments by which even today we are induced to believe that nobody in antiquity rejected Jesus as historical. However I believe that this storyline is a fabrication, and that the evidence indicates that the historicity of Jesus was extremely contraversial, and that this controversy over the historicity of Jesus underpins the Arian controversy which effected the entire Roman empire for centuries. The controversy commences with the end of Eusebius' history - ie: the Council of Nicaea. The controversy commences from the precise moment that the Jesus character is raised to a Roman state divinity at Nicaea. Hello? At precisely the time Jesus is brought to the light of day in the empire, a huge controversy arises which was to plague the orthodox imperial christians for centuries. Is this not suspicious?



The conclusion is arguable because of other writings authored by the Emperor Julian such as "Kronia" in which Jesus and Constantine are presented together and treated as common targets of scathing Greek satire:

As for Constantine, he could not discover among the gods
the model of his own career, but when he caught sight of
Pleasure, who was not far off, he ran to her. She received
him tenderly and embraced him, then after dressing him in
raiment of many colours and otherwise making him beautiful,
she led him away to Incontinence.

There too he found Jesus, who had taken up his abode with
her and cried aloud to all comers:

"He that is a seducer, he that is a murderer,
he that is sacrilegious and infamous,
let him approach without fear!
For with this water will I wash him
and will straightway make him clean.

And though he should be guilty
of those same sins a second time,
let him but smite his breast and beat his head
and I will make him clean again."

To him Constantine came gladly, when he had conducted his
sons forth from the assembly of the gods. But the avenging
deities none the less punished both him and them for their
impiety, and extracted the penalty for the shedding of the
blood of their kindred, [96] until Zeus granted them a respite
for the sake of Claudius and Constantius. [97]

It is clear that Julian paints Jesus as a fraud.
He presents Jesus as a simpleton and an incontinent idiot
and places the following words into his mouth ...

"He that is a seducer, he that is a murderer,
he that is sacrilegious and infamous,
let him approach without fear!
For with this water will I wash him
and will straightway make him clean.

And though he should be guilty
of those same sins a second time,
let him but smite his breast and beat his head
and I will make him clean again."

Jesus is presented as Constantine's puppet simpleton
who makes outrageous promises to all and sundry.

Of course Julian did not recognise the divinity of the Jesus character. Why should he have done so? This is entirely obvious to anyone familiar with the philosophy / metaphysics / Hellenistic religion of the Emperor Julian. Julian remained totallt unimpressed by the "Jesus Stories" and in fact legislated that all Christians in the Roman empire were henceforth not to be known as "Christians" but as "Galilaeans" --- a perjoritive term taken from Josephus and Epictetus which roughly translates as "Lawless bigands and outlaws".

Of course Julian rejected the fabricated divinity of Jesus. This is entirely natural. However I put it to you that the argument that Julian also rejected the historicity of Jesus has its own separate merit.

Doug Shaver

Either true or false . . . in their entirety? It's a little more complicated than that.

dog-on

Maybe, mabe not, as far as the actual evidence is concerned.

aa5874

There is nothing complicated about something being either true or false.

arnoldo

The following source claims that Julian was arguing that Jesus was not from the tribe of Judah, rather than from any geographical location which may be referred to as Judah.

mountainman

And was Julian's belief prescient? Are the qualities of "drones" discernible in the generations of children through the centuries between the 4th and the 21st?. Three cheers for the Age of Enlightenment.

aa5874

So if Jesus was from the Holy Ghost where was he born?

Now, the author of gMatthew does not trace Joseph to Judah but to Abraham and the author of Luke traces Joseph back to Adam.

It is clear that Julian was not dealing with tribes. There was no known HOLY GHOST tribe in Hebrew Scripture.

Your source is providing bogus information or mis-representing the evidence.

mountainman

The common equivalent IMO was that "Jesus appeared in the flesh", just like "Alexander the Great appeared in the flesh". So and so appeared on earth in the world as flesh and blood. This I think was the everyday common equivalent of the modern conception "So and so was an historical figure".

etc etc etc

Paraphrasing the last quote we have ....

Chapter V. The Time of His Appearance Among Men.

1 And now, after this necessary introduction to our proposed history of the Church, we can enter, so to speak, upon our journey, beginning with the appearance of our Saviour in history

.