mountainman

"Render unto Caesar all the things that belong to the Boss"

Big J. is a positive PR source for the Roman war machine. What belonged to Caesar? Anything he damn well wanted. The Moon, the stars and the deep blue sea. The fabrication of the new and strange testament was an imperial Roman PR exercise.

sotto voce

It's remarkable that formal archaism and casual modernity rub shoulders like that.

Steven Carr

So having explained the impossibility of a crucified Messiah being thought of, you claim it happened.

How?

Something that is 'completely unbelievable' doesn't happen, by definition?

outhouse

he was never thought of as a messiah while alive

this all happened after his death due to being a semi tax martyr standing up for the hardworking normal jews against a roman infected temple and banking system



there is nothing unbelieveble about how a teacher of judaism half zealot would be put to death on a cross. Many jews were put on a cross. This charactor just made a impression on behalf of the people and generated a movement away from a infected temple that gained momentum, enough so romans got a hold of it

Steven Carr

So Ehrman simply denies that a passage which contains the word 'Messiah' could be thought of by anybody, anywhere, anytime as ever referring to the Messiah.

When you consider that Christians could find the cross in the number of Abraham's servants, to declare that not one Jew in history could ever find a reference to the Messiah in a passage that actually includes the word 'Messiah' borders on bravado.

Steven Carr

You can picture the scene as the Twelve gathered around to discuss their recent visions of Jesus being alive.

'I saw Jesus. He must be really important to live on after death.'

'Perhaps he is Elijah returned, or Moses returned, or an angel of God'

'Perhaps he is a High Priest of the order of Melchizedek.'

'Perhaps he must have been the Son of God.'

'One thing we can be sure of. He was not the Messiah. Those expletive Romans are still here.'

'Yes, definitely not the Messiah. He might have been Jeremiah returned from the grave, but definitely not a Messiah.'

'Who has heard of a crucified Messiah?'

'A crucified what?'

'I thought you said crucified Messiah.'

'No, not me. No such thing as a crucified Messiah. Somebody else must have said it.'

'I'm sure it was you who said crucified Messiah.'

'Not me. I know what a Messiah is and they don't get crucified.'

Laughter all around.

'Well, who was Jesus?'

'He must have been the Messiah.'

'Of course. It all fits. The crucifixion, the lack of kicking Romans around, the whole not being Chuck Norris thing.'

'Brilliant. Jesus was the Messiah. Wish I'd thought of it.'

'Obviously the Messiah. What else could he have been?'

'Which idiot thought the Messiah was going to chuck out the Romans? They are God's agents, sent to punish wrongdoers.'

'We must have been blind. All those Bible passages. If you read them, you will see they are about how the Messiah must be crucified and suffer.'

'How come not one single person ever noticed those Bible passages before?'

'They are all about the Messiah. You just have to have proper understanding.'

'We were idiots. We'd even read the bit in Daniel about the Messiah being killed and never realised it was about the Messiah being killed.'

And so a crucified Messiah was born.

Diogenes the Cynic

No, I claim a crucifixion happened, not that it was really the Messiah.
It could happen if a presumptive Messiah was unexpectedly crucified, and if his believers came to reinterpret the meaning, then other secondary and tertiary followers kept adding accretions.

Here's a hypothetical model.

Yeshu preaches the apocalypse and the imminent coming of the Messiah.
Yeshu accrues some kind of following.
Yeshu Gets crucified.
Yeshu's followers decide that he will return from the sky in Glory as Daniel's "son of man."
Saul takes the message to the gentiles, and add his own idiosyncratic, universalist ideas.
70 CE.
Saul/Paul's satellite churches, with their creeping,Hellenistic syncretism become "Christianity," and do what the original Jewish believers would have never done, and deify Yeshu.
Yeshu doesn't return as the son of man.
The meaning and function of the crucifixion is massaged into a sacrificial, spiritual soteriology with the parousia pushed back to an vague, indeterminate abstract future.

Steven Carr

So your explanation totally omits the moment when somebody who never ticked any of the boxes for being Ehrman's blueprint of a Jewish Messiah was made by his followers into a crucified Messiah, something that you have explained is as likely as them thinking that he was actually the crucified Roman Emperor.

Something which Ehrman claims happened so early Jesus was barely cold in his grave before his followers invented the concept of 'crucified Messiah' which we are told was as likely a concept to occur to a first century Jew as the concept of Sarah Palin becoming Pope is likely to occur to Bible Belt Americans.

aa5874

Again, You INVENT your own story and then BELIEVE IT could have happened. You have NOTHING but hypotheticals.


Please, deal with the ACTUAL stories found in the Gospel and cease from inventing hypotheticals.

We have stories of a crucified Messiah--they were either invented or not.

Just PROVIDE the evidence and sources that can show "nobody would invent a crucified Messiah" and that the Jesus story of the Crucified Messiah was NOT an invention.

Hypotheticals are NOT evidence of anything.

Please, please, please do not forget that.

Bernard Muller

I do not agree. But only a few years later (or less), Hellenized Jews (Greek speaking) in Jerusalem held on Jesus as the future King, by declaring him not dead after all, but saved in heaven, with the help of the scriptures. They thought he would come back soon, at the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth (as a typical Messiah). "Crucified' was only a non-fatal accident for them, more like a shame, causing a pause and wait. Sacrifice for atonement of sins will come much later (~ 52-55) and was not universally adopted at first.
That's according to my studies.