aa5874

The second book of Nephi chapter 3 of the Mormon Bible destroys any speculation that Jesus of the NT was likely a man or a cult leader.

If Jesus a cult leader and human then NT CANON would have been about the PROPHET Jesus, But instead, it is about the OFFSPRING of the Holy Ghost and a Virgin, the Creator of heaven and earth who was RAISED from the dead on the third day.

See http://lds.org/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/3?lang=eng

If Jesus was just a man and a cult leader for a Christian religion it would be EXPECTED that NT would be about the PROPHET Jesus just like it is claimed Joseph Smith was PROPHESIED to be a PROPHET.

But, as a PROPHET and HUMAN LEADER of a Cult it would be EXPECTED that JESUS would have WRITTEN BOOKS or WRITTEN the FUNDAMENTAL DOCTRINE of Christianity in order to ESTABLISH the FOUNDATION of the Christian cult.

Virtually all ACTUAL HUMAN CULT LEADERS develop the FUNDAMENTAL doctrine of their Cult. Joseph SMITH did ESTABLISH the MORMON BIBLE.

What did the supposed human cult leader Jesus WRITE and DOCUMENT for his followers?

Jesus wrote NOTHING.

But, Joseph Smith and virtually all CULT leaders including Mohammed of Islam, Marcion with the Phantom, Valentinus, Basilides, Cerinthus, and many other actual human cult leaders established their doctrine.

The evidence suggests that Jesus was NO cult leader.

It must be those who established and wrote the DOCTRINE of Christianity that were the CULT leaders.

Jesus was MYTH. It was ESTABLISHED in the NT that Jesus was a RESURRECTED MYTH.

It must be noted that that Joseph Smith did NOT teach his followers that he would be KILLED in a SHOOT-OUT in the Mormon Bible.

aa5874

You are wasting your time. Your entire argument has been DEBUNKED.
Jesus was a GOOD NEWS preacher in the synoptic GOSPELS..

The NT CANON does NOT contain the HERESY that Jesus was a man unless you think those who compiled the NT CANON were COMPLETE IDIOTS.

Once you UNDERSTAND the teachings of the Church that Jesus was God Incarnate, the OFFSPRING of the Holy Ghost, the Creator of heaven and earth then you should EXPECT the CANON from the very same Church to REFLECT the very same teachings.

AposatateAbe, you need to talk to YOUR NEAREST HJ providers. They have given you BOGUS information that was NOT well- FLESHED out.

Tell them I say that you can't use the NT CANON to look for a man. The NT CANON IS A non-heretical writing about God Incarnate.


It was most likely the INVENTOR of the Jesus story who himself BELIEVED there would have been an Apocalypse.

spin

I don't know about "should", but we can get history from text. It naturally depends on whether the text can be related to real events or not. We get some history out of Josephus. We can even get history out of Daniel. There are texts with real people in them, such as Petronius's Satyricon, but that is insufficient to get real events.

So, what methodology/ies do you propose for finding history in text?

hjalti

Please elaborate.
What we would be talking about is a myth of a founder, and I don't think that is highly unusual (and neither is turning a god into a human being on earth, if mythicism is correct, then I think it has happened to Jesus before).

avi

Psalms 103:19

יהוה בשמים הכין כסאו ומלכותו בכל משלה׃

I don't observe adon or adonai. I do see yahweh.

On this forum, and in general, in the English speaking world, the word LORD, (and I would argue, that, when all capital letters are present, 100% of the time,) is associated with Jesus, not yahweh.

Do pronouns have content?

avi

Zenaphobe

I don't think I was clear in what I was getting at.

I don't mean to compare Joseph Smith to Jesus, I was thinking that Joseph Smith is to the Gospel authors as Moroni is to Jesus.

Joseph Smith put the words into Moroni's mouth as it were, and Mark put the words into Jesus'.

The authors were historical, the messiah's were not necessarily so.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you were getting at, but my impression is that you take the failed prophecies of Jesus to lend strength to his historicity, if that is so, then the false information that Moroni passed along to Joseph Smith would seem to argue for Moroni's historicity as well.

I just think Moroni is a great example of how a mythical figure can be created and a movement can spring up and grow like wildfire based on a fictional enterprise. Does that make sense? Sorry if I'm on the wrong track here. :redface:

ApostateAbe

Thanks. It seems like it wouldn't be impossible for you to get history from text, but the bar is especially high. At the least, you seem to have a priori prejudice against finding history in text. Maybe you find purely literature/fiction-based explanations as generally just as probable. Perhaps you think that there is a very good chance that John the Baptist was only myth?

The methodology I prefer is Argument to the Best Explanation. Basically, it involves having many explanations on the table and choosing the best of them depending on how well they meet five criteria (explanatory power, etc.). If the best explanation involves historical events as told in the text and nowhere else, then we conclude based on the text that there were historical events. If the best explanation needs no historical persons, places or things at all, then we conclude nothing more than that. Of course, it first requires a set of explanations to be on the table, created either by ourselves or someone else, and, like in so many other fields of investigative inquiry, we just need to use our imagination and intuition.

ApostateAbe

I think I understood you the first time, so don't worry. I was the one who wasn't clear. I would never claim that there can be no such thing as merely-mythical beings of some type from whom cults attribute their beliefs. In fact, it is very typical in doomsday cults for cult leaders to attribute their belief to some merely-imaginary being, be it God, angels, ghosts or aliens. We never ever see, on the other hand, doomsday cults deriving their knowledge from a merely-mythical human doomsday cult leader. If the Angel Moroni was reputed to be a human doomsday cult leader, then that would be an extremely good counterpoint. The Angel Moroni was not, however, and the pattern remains.

There is a very good explanation for this. Doomsday cult members want to know that the revelations are truthful. They want the information to come from a transcendent authority. If their own doomsday cult leader attributes the knowledge to yet another previous human doomsday cult leader, then that is complicating the trust and putting more links in the chain between the revelation and the cult leader. The problem is of course compounded if this previous proposed-human doomsday cult leader never actually existed and nobody knows about him but the immediate doomsday cult leader.

It was, in fact, a problem for Paul. The reputed-human Jesus had to be messily remodeled into a spiritual being so that Paul could claim direct revelations from Jesus (and Paul does make a few allusions to the human nature of Jesus, but of course the main focus for Paul is on the spiritual Jesus).

Maybe you have objections. "I find it plausible that..." whatever. Find a close historical comparison. Joseph Smith and the the Angel Moroni fit my proposed pattern, because there was only one reputed-human doomsday cult leader in that example--Joseph Smith. So, who would be the best analogy to Jesus?

Juststeve

As far as we can tell from the synoptic gospels, doesn't it appear that Jesus himself, in the manner of a modern doomsday cult leader, attributed his knowledge and power to the mythical God?

Steve

ApostateAbe

The synoptic gospels do portray Jesus as someone who has a direct connection to God (i.e. Mark 1:1, Mark 1:11, Mark 9:7), though I don't think Jesus ever explicitly states where his knowledge comes from.