Sven

You know how some quacks work? They invent a non-existent disease and are then ready to provide the cure for it.

Oh yes, Gos was angry with us and the only way out for this omnipotent being was to sacrifice himself to himself so save us from his own wrath.

Didn't you ever think that this sounds a bit silly?

Wads4

No, I'm with you all the way. Apart from lack of direct evidence, except anecdotal via old texts, it is a priori impossible; the world does not work that way,--it violates causality and is unprecedented inductively, and is obviously politically and sociologically motivated.

Wads4

All of them referencing each other and "borrowing" freely. Didn't anyone else outside of this little circle of copyists notice that the laws of nature had suddenly been reversed so that now dead corpses could suddenly wake up again? And if Jesus allegedly conquered death, why did all corpses everywhere from that moment on, not all come back to life?
All those expensive trained gladiators dying in the arena could have been recycled and re-packaged saving everyone a lot of money. Really useful people could have been revived instead of dying uselessly, and so contributed to the wellfare of society,--or did omniscient God not think of that?

Wads4

It was not accepted without question, there were plenty of questions which produced all those heresies,-eg Docetism,-which denied that Jesus was God because how could God be killed by humans? Christians are still questioning and fighting over which heresy is "true"

Wads4

Good, then let's not accept it.

Gracchus

There were no newpapers in the 1st century CE. Most people were illiterate. News traveled by word of mouth and the farther it traveled and the longer repeated, the more it was garbled. Stories were improved and amended and given political spin, just as they are today. Sometimes they were just misunderstood.

(Remember that scene in "The Life of Brian" where Brian and his mother and some friends are listening to Jesus preaching the "Sermon on the Mount"?
They are far out on the edge of the crowd and what Jesus is saying is being relayed by those almost close enough to hear: "Blessed are the cheese-makers.")

Thousands of miles, and thousands of repetitions and translations, and thousands of years away from Roman Palestine, how well do we hear, I wonder.

I think it entirely possible that the Jesus of the gospels was a conflation of two or more persons, one a wannabe king, Jesus Son of Man (bar abbas), an insurgent against the Roman occupation, and one a teacher of the Pharasaic tradition, Jesus the Nazarene, preaching against the legal formalism of the Zadokites (Sadducees). The Zadokites, the priestly party would have been against both, but the Pharisees would have supported one of their own. One got crucified and the other was later seen after the death was reported to be his.

Later, Paul became disenchanted with all Jews after he quarreled with the apostles of the Nazarene, and made the Pharisees villains, starting a long horrible history of antisemitism that persists to this day.

To the conflation accreted stories. For instance, centuries before the time of Jesus, three wise men (magi, astrologers) bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh attended the birth of Zoroaster, and a frightend king tried to kill him. Various heroes of the acient world were reputedly fathered by deities on human women. Tammuz and Osiris rose from the dead, and were themselves later conflated.


:wave:

Malachi151

Actually that is not true, which is part of the point.

In Rome there were publications, though not daily news papers per se, and most Romans could read.

Which of course begs the question, why did Jesus go to Rome??

Of course the anwser to this has to be that the Jews REALLY WERE the chosen people, or else why didn't God come to earth in Rome where he could have had a bigger impact and met with the emperor, and messages sent throughout the Roman Empire, composed a manuscript, etc.

So, in order to be a Christian you have to believe that the Jews were initially the chosen people, meaning that God had a chosen people, and that God was illiterate at a time when there were millions of literate people on the planet, and that God was born in lived in, and died in, a backwater small town as a homeless person during the height of the greatest civilization that had ever existed on the face of the planet up to that time.

hatsoff

Not that can be identified, no.

hatsoff

You seem to have misunderstood me.

hatsoff

I understand perfectly.

Eusebius is the most obvious, but Prof. Arthur Patzia also comes to mind.

That's a pretty bold assumption, since their resources are largely unknown.