dog-on

Well, since Christ didn't actually exist, I see nothing fanciful about stating that he wasn't a Jew, nor was he anything else for that matter.

rlogan

This seems nearly universal - the bait and switch.

It is a pretense that you can't use absence of evidence to reject some utterly fantastical Jesus - so absurd that of course the "absence of evidence" criteria is precisely what you need to reject him...

Followed by the immediate rejection of the gospel Jesus, (on by the way that criteria itself! ) and then the substitution of "some guy" named Jesus for the gospel Jesus.

Can't use "absence of evidence to reject that some guy named Jesus" existed.

Nobody - and I mean zero - does that. So why waste bandwidth?

As a mythicist I can give you plenty of people named Jesus, contemporaries to the time in question. They existed.


There is very little difference at all between the peope who claim a "historical Jesus" and mythicists.

Because the "historical Jesus" proponents begin by rejecting that there was a gospel Jesus. They are mythicists that do not admit to it.

Pare down the gospel Jesus to one there is no testiminial to whatsoever. Some completley hypothetical Jesus, and then without any other specifications than "some guy was crucified" they pretend a mythicist is rejecting that hypothetical.

Really, they are a kind of super-mythicist. Inventing their own mythical Jesus.

What else can you call a process where there is zero testimonial to it, and they make the whole thing up themselves? There are no gospels, no letters, nothing - no literature anywhere refers to such a Jesus. The only literature we have is to a myth.

charley63

I don't believe that Paul held to a high view of the incarnation, that came later, after the 4th Gospel in 90-200 AD, and later expanded by the patristic writers. Paul's main "gospel" was that Jesus was crucified for the sins of the world, like a lamb, and then raised from the dead by God.

Paul's strongest incarnation passage is from Colossians, considered by some to be pseudonymous. Even there Jesus is the "image of the Invisible God" not an complete union of God and Jesus.

Peace! Charley

No Robots

Well, yeah, the only way to make Christ out as non-Jewish is to say he never existed. Of course, this means denying that the NT is essentially Jewish literature, which is absurd.

dog-on

The NT is a rejection of the OT (Jewish literature).

Nothing absurd about it. It rejects their god and his laws.

Please show me why this is not, in fact, exactly what it does.

Toto

I just know that there is at least one argument that historicists should not use - that the evidence for Jesus is comparable to the evidence for Alexander, since this has been debunked here on various occasions.

And notice that No Robots' quote from Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Paul Cartledge concerns the difficulty of knowing the personality of Alexander, not his existence.

From a review

No Robots

There is a tremendous amount of material on this subject. Of particular importance is the work done by Jewish scholars. You might want to start with something like The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount by Gerald Friedlander. Friedlander doesn't particularly like Christ. He even shows some sympathy for mythicism. Yet even he maintains that "[f]our-fifths of the Sermon on the Mount is exclusively Jewish" (p. 266).

dog-on

I am not arguing that the gospel writers did not use materials like the LXX and Josephus, among other works.

I am arguing that the gospels and Christianity themselves are a rejection of Judaism.

I also see no reason to believe that Jews were responsible for this.

Besides, what better way to deal with the Jews than to usurp their stuff and twist it into something that not only takes care of them, but gives your shiny new and improved sky daddy a long and venerable history?

Genius, I tell you...

bacht

Both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were products of the post-70 period when the normative temple cult was eliminated. Both used the Hebrew scriptures to reinforce their authority. Judaism maintained a nationalistic/ethnic focus while Christianity adopted a universal inclusionary outlook.

Marcion and the gnostics certainly rejected the god of the OT, while the case with proto-catholicism is less clear-cut. I guess it depends on one's definitions of the God of Abraham and the Law of Moses.

No Robots

The point I was making was that the literary evidence regarding Alexander is indeed comparable to that regarding Christ. If the literary evidence for a great conqueror is relatively poor, how much more would we expect it to be so for an executed rebel?