No Robots

How do we know that Hamlet asked, "To be or not to be?" Because it's in the text!

The point is that there is nothing but the purest Judaism in Christ's words.

Huon

I love this comparison between Hamlet and the Christ. It is a great honor for Hamlet, but Shakespeare would not be very happy to be set at the level of the writers of the gospels.

No Robots

Quite so. One of Brunner's arguments against mythicism is that, if Shakespeare could not create a character to rival Christ, then how can we attribute the invention of the character of Christ to common folk?

[E]very one of Shakespeare's characters is put into the shade by this character who is supposed to have been invented in passing by these plebeians.--here

Clivedurdle

This essential pure Judaism is really worrying me.

This is a myth. Syncretism, co-evolution is everywhere. Mixnmatch gods.

The gospels actually describe various forms of Judaism, but not very authentically which makes me wonder.

Why is there no comment that Jesus and the disciples went into the gymnasium? This whole area was primarily Greek, the Romans were newcomers who actually left alone Greek infrastructure. Herod's Temple is in fact Greek thinking par excellence.

The festival of lights is critically important. This was a civil war between hardline taliban like Jews and pragmatic Jews who wanted to give up on the old superstitions of circumcision. Paul in fact is in this Greek tradition.

The other new factor is evangelism - previously everyone had their own gods, at some point it became enforced that people must believe in one god - in a similar way that we queue in Britain because in the first world war there were armed soldiers at bus stops who forced my ancestors to queue.

But the relation to the OP?

Looking at this area as a melting pot of beliefs, the invention of the Christ as a unifying idea, the idea of forcing yer god down another's throat are definitely worth exploring, and this is far too complex a picture for a person to have started, who does look like a predictable psychological outcome of the transplanting of a godman into a heavily Greek Judaism.

No Robots

Yeah, I understand that the Vatican is quite worried about Brunner, too.