Iasion

Greetings,

So,
you claim only two entities ever wrote anything?
Paul, and God.

No-one but God or Paul could have written those books?


Iasion

Shanefield

Psst--- don't tell anybody, because I'm keeping it pretty much a secret --- but you folks seem trustworthy --- actually, I wrote those books, during my last couple of reincarnations.

(Now let's see you prove that I actually didn't!)

Abraham Ceasar Napoleon Shanefield, The First (And Last)

Simon Ewins

I think it is likely, yes. Most likely a political or religious revolutionary.

Of course not! Wow, quite an amazing leap there.

Simon Ewins

I don't know that it is.

The only sure bet is that it is not a Christian insertion. Not very flattering to Christian propaganda.

Iasion

Greetings,

Firstly,
that's not what the JM theory claims at all.
The Jesus story seems to be derived largely from the Tanakh, as well as including elements of popular novels and other myths and books and themes of the period. The whole thrust of the JM argument is that the Jesus story was based on OTHER stories and ideas and books.

Secondly,
human imagination has come up with many rich and complex stories, some of which I mentioned. There is no reason why the Jesus story could not have been crafted by a human mind, based on other books and stories also crafted by human minds. Why do you consider it unlikely?

Do you also consider the story of, say, Krishna, unlikely to have been created by a human mind?

Thirdly,
writers such as Tacitus etc. have been discussed here at length - they do not represent contemporary evidence for Jesus, but merely later reports of Christian beliefs, or passages corrupted or mis-understood by later Christians.


Why is the Jesus story different from all the other myths and legends and stories, which are crafted by human imagination (and partly based on previous ideas) ?

Is the story of Osiris and Isis also unlikely to have been crafted by human imagination?


Iasion

haight

This is invalid as an argument,by your reasoning we can conclude the grinch existed....because there are stories about him.
DR.sues,easter bunny and the tooth fairy also.Jesus is just another story,he may or may not have existed,there is no evidence that suggests he did or did not.

Gundulf

OK - one thing that needs to be clarified in such discussions - they left no such writings THAT HAVE SURVIVED UNTIL THE PRESENT DAY.

They probably wrote a whole lot about lots of people. Some of the writings exist today out of luck - although most of those that do there was a motivation to keep. Letters and speeches of Roman emporers, for instance, are more likely to survive by being kept safe / copied than, say, a prison record of some guy who got in a drunken brawl.

This doesn't prove anything though - at best it would be an argument from silence (which I'm not arguing). But at least realize that it wouldn't be strange not to have such writings. There are few external writings about Jesus, at least in part, because no one but his followers cared squat about him - one common criminal executed among tens of thousands - and it is not like he had a huge following during his life and had started a huge rebellion against Rome or something. What the Romans and others probably cared about are all his followers creating all sorts of havoc. Which we do in fact have records of.

What did he do during his life that was so significant to historians of the time. He was born in a barn, worked as a Rabbi (among many), and was executed at age 33 or thereabouts. This, in and of itself, is historically noteworthy why?

Now, if he'd raised from the dead and showed himself to me - THAT would have been worth writing down. But from a strictly secular perspective, for people that would have considered resurrection stuff nonsense...?

Secondly, what is wrong with records from his followers - I would concur that these might be, historically considered, unreliable sources of exact details, since his followers would be considerably biased - but they were following someone, right? Or did they just make up the whole thing from absolute nothingness?

Gundulf

Why are people who are reincarnated always someone famous? No one has yet told me that they were a serf in the middle ages who died of the plague at age 19.

Simon Ewins

What reasoning are you referring to? I don't remember presenting any reasoning at all. I certainly made no statement that "because there are stories about someone/thing, it must be true".

Bizarre.

Simon Ewins

Many other gods played a major role in the development of the Jesus story as well. Attis, Adonis, Mithra, Osiris, Baal-Taraz and other popular gods and mystic cults were rampant at the time and all seem to have contributed something to the Jesus myths. Jesus (as adopted by Christianity) is very much a composite of many beliefs and ideas of the time, some probably not religious at all but political. There are a number of Jesus stories that are much more political than spiritual (like the Abiathar blunder for example).

However, to leap from all of that to a claim that there was no historical character upon which these influences and myths were heaped is not justified. In fact that is almost as faulty a conjecture as the Christian claims.

For example, there really was a King Midas. Did everything he touched turn to gold? Of course not... The fact that there are fantastic stories about someone/thing does not mean that the character they are hung upon did not exist.