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Old 05-20-2011, 02:55 PM   #381
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Shesh:

Never in antiquity was it argued that Jesus never existed as a person on earth. That's what we are talking about, not belief in the nonsense no one around here believes.

If you think I'm wrong, show me the ancient critic of Christianity who called bull shit by saying there never was a Jesus, Christians just made him up. You can't because there were none.

Steve
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Old 05-20-2011, 02:59 PM   #382
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True. but only because the Christians burned any such writings, and anyone they caught writing or even owning any such critical writings.
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:00 PM   #383
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Shesh:

Never in antiquity was it argued that Jesus never existed as a person on earth. That's what we are talking about, not belief in the nonsense no one around here believes.

If you think I'm wrong, show me the ancient critic of Christianity who called bull shit by saying there never was a Jesus, Christians just made him up. You can't because there were none.

Steve
We went through this all before.

There were ancient Christians who believed that Jesus was not fully human - that he was a spirit, or only appeared to be a man.

For the critics of Christianity, it was a much more powerfully anti-Christian polemic to say that Jesus was a mere human, born of a prostitute, who was stupid enough to get himself crucified.
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:12 PM   #384
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Toto:

I wonder what it means when you write "We went through this all before". Its as though you think that once Toto has spoken on an issue its resolved once and for all. Is that the rule around here, Toto resolves all disputes, the wise and magnificent Toto?

And while we are at it, how is it you claim to know what the more powerful argument for anti-Christian polemicists was? All we really know is that none of them made what would have been a final knockdown argument, its all fiction. The argument being championed by the mythers. Perhaps the reason they didn't was because the existence of the man Jesus was such a well known fact that to argue against it would make them appear stupid.

But then, we went through this all before.

Steve
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:14 PM   #385
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Toto:

I wonder what it means when you write "We went through this all before". Its as though you think that once Toto has spoken on an issue its resolved once and for all. Is that the rule around here, Toto resolves all disputes, the wise and magnificent Toto?

And while we are at it, how is it you claim to know what the more powerful argument for anti-Christian polemicists was? All we really know is that none of them made what would have been a final knockdown argument, its all fiction. The argument being championed by the mythers. Perhaps the reason they didn't was because the existence of the man Jesus was such a well known fact that to argue against it would make them appear stupid.

But then, we went through this all before.
You mean most at the time were Christian believers, that hardly anybody rejected it?

Another clearly false assumption from Juststeve.
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:17 PM   #386
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Shesh:

Right you are about Christian censorship but happily we can reconstruct a lot of what was being said against Christianity from the Christian responses, and to some extent from the Tlamud. I repeat, and Toto seems to agree, that the myther argument was never made in antiquity.

I'm confident that were there evidence of people denying the earthly existence of Jesus in antiquity the mythers would make it a center piece of their faith. Doherty would devote a chapter to it. But... there is no such evidence.

Steve
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:19 PM   #387
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blastula:

Its not up to me but you might work on your reading comprehension. What I wrote and what you responded to have nothing in common. Its up to you though.

Steve
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:23 PM   #388
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I know what you wrote. You're assuming anybody who rejected Christianity still believed Jesus was real. It's an unproven, probably unprovable, assumption, and it also ignores that we do know people were quite credulous about fantastical stories back then.

If it never crossed anybody's mind, why did the apologists even care about what Josephus said?
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:29 PM   #389
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Toto:

I wonder what it means when you write "We went through this all before". ...
It means that we had a long thread and hashed out the issues. It gets boring repeating the same things over again.

Quote:
And while we are at it, how is it you claim to know what the more powerful argument for anti-Christian polemicists was? All we really know is that none of them made what would have been a final knockdown argument, its all fiction. The argument being championed by the mythers. Perhaps the reason they didn't was because the existence of the man Jesus was such a well known fact that to argue against it would make them appear stupid.

But then, we went through this all before.

Steve
Yes we did. We know the arguments that Celsus made, and that Julian made. We know how people argued back then. They thought that arguing that Jesus was a bastard son of a prostitute was the final knockdown argument.

And you don't find the orthodox Christian arguing against the gnostics by showing that Jesus really existed because everyone knew that he was a man in Palestine. Instead, they argued based on the Hebrew Scriptures that Christ must have come in the flesh, therefore Jesus was a man on earth. Nobody seems to have remembered hanging out with him at the Lake Kinneret Bar and Grill.

It is only in modern times, with our post Enlightenment view that spirits don't exist, that Christians get upset at the idea that Jesus might not have existed.

I'm sorry you missed the argument the first time around, or that you can't take your opponents seriously enough to come up with anything intelligent to say on the matter.
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:33 PM   #390
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....

I'm confident that were there evidence of people denying the earthly existence of Jesus in antiquity the mythers would make it a center piece of their faith. Doherty would devote a chapter to it. But... there is no such evidence.

Steve
In fact, Freke and Gandy in their book The Jesus Mysteries (or via: amazon.co.uk) do claim the docetists as early mythicists.

The docetists were wiped out by orthodoxy, and we only know what they wrote from what the orthodox preserved.
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