Elijah

Well you were arguing against the idea of him being a peasant, I thought you had some reasoning or evidence to support it. If historical I see no reason to expect him to be anything more than a peasant and if a peasant I see no reason to expect unbiased corroborative evidence of his life. Asking for evidence for a peasant from 2000 years ago is just a cop out in my mind.
It’s easier to explain how he made a religion if you understand the self sacrifice meme and it’s affect on those who have witnessed it. There is no reason to expect his sacrifice to have made any impact on any contemporary that didn’t witness it. It wasn’t until later when more and more of his followers were imitating that sacrifice did he get the attention of the world.

For me it’s harder to explain how a myth was confused for history and becomes a world dominating religion but that is more of a result of the theories pushed forward that I don’t think show how it happened much less support that how. Feel free to educate me though, I’m sure you are much more informed on the myth theories than me.

Elijah

Sounds like he is talking about a messiah who has a platonic/idealist understanding of God. The idea of him speaking of Christ like out of a cartoon is kind of silly in my opinion.
Yes it begs the question of his historicity because I haven’t heard of an even slightly probable alternative.

But in regards to Paul, he didn’t know Jesus nor were any of his stories/words in written form for him to check out of the local library. His conviction came from Stephen’s sacrifice/imitation of Jesus’ sacrifice. Paul was a real religious person and able to distinguish followers from true conviction. Now Paul seems to take Stephen’s sacrifice as a sign of convection of an actual resurrection instead of imitation of a sacrifice but regardless the story goes on that he tries like Peter to follow suit and martyr themselves in Rome and then we supposedly had a whole smorgishborg of people trying to martyr themselves in his name. IMO this is how Christianity became what it became, by conviction to sacrifice your own life spread by one man’s sacrifice thru his followers’ imitation.

Not God incarnate, the Messiah. He willingly sacrificed his life as willingly as you can when you are a determinist. The evidence that he did is that his followers followed suit for a while until they took control of the empire that was occupying Jesus’ homeland.
What he did was pretty unique. Codrus is the best example I know of (points for J-D) of the sacrificing king but Jesus seemed to have a plan involving the imitation of his sacrifice. Most martyrs before Jesus were death before dishonor type martyrs not if I sacrifice myself I get a heavenly reward.

Jesus was deified because he was setting himself up as the good king everyone was waiting for and then he sacrificed himself for the people, instead of the usual king asking the people to sacrifice themselves for the king/dom. He was trying to fulfill prophecy so he could establish a new one.

bacht

I don't know if the doctrine of Christ's Atonement, based on the OT scapegoating ritual, can be traced back to the earliest layer of belief. We don't need an HJ for this anyway. The epistle to the Hebrews lays out a version of this idea without saying anything about your peasant messiah from Galilee.

Religiously-motivated self-destruction can just as well be interpreted as psychosis (do we really know there is an eternal reward?)

No Robots

What I'm saying is that our culture has always been mistaken about this particular man, and that mythicism is just an attempt to replace one mistake with another.

No Robots

I'll just quote Spinoza:

Whether things exist or not, whenever we consider their beingness, we find that it implies neither existence nor duration.--Ethics I, prop. 24, Cor.

No Robots

Perhaps so, but, as I wrote above, this is the same as some Christ-mythicists who do not deny the existence of a Galilean preacher, but do deny that there exists any proof that he bears any strong resemblance to the man portrayed in the Gospels.

patcleaver

We all understand what your saying, but the problem is that its just made-up BS with no reasonable evidence to support it.

Your only argument seems to be that you wish that the gospels were reliable, but we all know that they are not reliable.

You wish that the sayings of Jesus were special in some way, but they are not, and even if there were a human on which the gospels were based, we know that he probably would not have said any of the things attributed to him in the Gospels.

Even the best of historians of the time just made up the words of historical figures in their histories.

patcleaver

My MYTH THEORY is that JESUS IS A FICTIONAL MYTH.

The authors of Mark developed a fictional story about a fictional character named Jesus Christ. I do not know why any fictional author creates the story that they create. I can not think of any fictional story that I have ever read where I could explain why the author invented the fictional story that they invented. They simply imagined the story, and thought it was interesting, and wrote it down.

There is lots of ancient fiction, and today millions of authors create fictional stories every year for no particular reason except they like writing fictional stories that they think are interesting.

Historical Jesus is no more likely than Peter Parker or Klark Kent or Huckleberry Finn or Harry Potter

No Robots

I'm taking a scientific approach. I am testing the hypothesis that he did exist, and that the Gospels provide a more-or-less faithful representation of him. I have found that the hypothesis is amply sustained by the evidence, and that activity on the basis of the truth of the hypothesis is extremely effective. I find Christ useful. Q.E.D.

patcleaver

So you are just a mind numbed evil Christian robot. Who, just like the evil robots on Dr. Who, are spreading your evil (superstitious dark age beliefs) over humanity. Why are you trying to do this to us, when we just want to be able to be free to think and feel and be human?