No Robots

I'll have to enter that in my hall of fame.

What I don't get is why mythicists try to lump the human Christ of rational analysis in with the god-man of traditional religion.

Go forward with that. But if you are spewing nonsense in public on a subject of vital cultural interest, I think you can expect some opposition.

Toto

When a thread deteriorates into an exchange of insults, it may be time to close it.

No matter how creative the insults.

Your thoughts?

No Robots

I don't mind if the thread is closed, but only because it has become so diffuse and unwieldy.

aa5874

You are not making any sense. You are the one who claimed the cartoon character, you call Jesus, lived in the days of Tiberius.

Only you can tell me about the cartoon, the NT and the church writers claimed he was the son of God that rose from the dead.

Cartoons can resurrect.

patcleaver

What is the "human Christ of rational analysis"?

Where can I find him? What did he say? How do you know that he said it? What rational analysis?

How is he different then the rational analysis of Dr. Who?

Elijah

Yea but you're not even presenting in your theory who the authors were, what they were writing, where, when, and how it got confused. It's not enough to say this looks like fiction to me you have to show it started out that way and not from a historical core. Your theory is too ambiguous to be critiqued/considered.

Elijah

I see that. I will try this one more time. If it is fiction you should still consider what the author is trying to say rationally with a political/philosophical mindset. You are taking philosophical/spiritual concepts and turning them into cartoons with no basis in reality. You are taking visual representations found in art literally and ignoring reality.

bacht

I don't think that the gospels are the place to start. The earliest material we have may be the "authentic" epistles, some bits possibly pre-70. The gospels are later and are not eyewitness reports.

If you're using the canonical gospels you'll have to work through the harmonization problems in Jesus' movements and teachings. Did JC show up out of the blue one day at the Jordan as per Mark? Or was he eternally co-existent with the Father as per John? What exactly is the Kingdom? This is an old game.

bacht

Here's one way to reconstruct the sequence:

- Jewish believers "discover" the Christ in scripture and visions, and believe the end of things is near
- gentile believers are accepted into the group by apostles like Paul
- Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, and early Judean believers are killed or scattered
- second generation Christians begin to develop an historical version of Jesus
- Judea is completely annihilated again, removing the last vestiges of Jewish messianism
- gentiles like Marcion produce popular Christian teachings which are "heretical" in the eyes of pre-Catholic believers
- NT texts are created or edited to reflect the developing orthodox doctrines of the proto-Catholics, including anti-docetic and anti-gnostic points

there are other ways to assemble this puzzle, but this sort of scenario explains the origins in an historically coherent way - it may not be possible to identify the who/what/where/when/why of the texts which became canonical, there isn't enough data extant

No Robots

All I'm saying is that there is a difference between the hypothesis that Christ is both god and man, and the hypothesis that he is just a man. I am wondering why it is that mythicists do not like to acknowledge that these are two distinct hypotheses.