MortalWombat

Well, I can at least tell you she's a goddess.

Jayhawker Soule

Agnostic leaning towards abstaining.

Ted Hoffman

Gee, I always thought mortal wombat was a woman. I thought it was a garbling of mortalCombat. Reminds me of that scene in The Matrix:

reeves: You are x?
thatbeautiful woman: Yeah.
reeves: I thought you were a guy
thatbeautifilwoman: Most guys do.

That was very funny ConsequentAtheist. Now enuff of the fun. Back to the polls!

butswana

myth

Psycho Economist

I doubt humanity can ever go back in time to investigate the incident, so agnostic.

But there is a state of nature that does exist, though we cannot confirm it, so agnostic or not, the choice of Jesus Myth or Historical Jesus is not dulled.

There were so many nutty messiah wannabes in the Galillee and Jerusalem, it's not crazy to add one more named Joshua who had a dozen hangers-on. On the other hand, many of the mythical traits ascribed to Jesus seem plagerised from Mithras, who I doubt existed.

We have this nutty folk preacher, and this mythical Persian demigod, and they were morphed into one character by various wings of the early church. Sounds like both are true to me... if what you say above is how you want to define the Mythical Jesus position.

But if you define the Mythical Jesus position to mean that the tales of the exploits of Jesus bear nothing in common with any one man who led the cult that would become the Christian church (as opposed to all the other messiah wannabes who never came into contact with "the Way"), then you have mutually exclusive positions, and that puts me on the Historic Jesus side.

Ted Hoffman

This is a HJ.
Because its precisely those layers of myth that we want to take off. They are considered superfluous and unreal with respect to the actual person.

Psycho Economist

In principle, I agree. But it's also because I hold to the stricter definition of a Mythical Jesus.

But we have a preacher who was lionized (Yeshua ben Yusuf) and we have a mythical figure who was historicized (Mithras). They became the same character (Jesus Christ) over the first three hundred years of church history.

The existence of one does not, as you have defined your terms, preclude the existence of the other. Intuatively, the terms are mutually exclusive, but the way you've phrased them for this debate HJ and JM don't test their individual validity against the same fact. If this discussion were a program, HJ would win by default because a computer would skip over evaluating the truth of the JM expression having found HJ to be true. But I'm not a Java VM.

I don't think anyone is going to mind if you revise your definitions a little to make them mutually exclusive. Except maybe Peter Kirby.

Marduk

leaning toward HJ, a real person in there someplace. The Gospel of Thomas is full of ...Jesus says this, Jesus says that.

Toto

Please! You misquote me. I said "But now that we know there was no Jesus " ironically.

I do not think that we will ever know if there was a HJ at the beginning of Christianity, so in that sense I am an agnostic. I don't think that you need a HJ to explain the origins of Christianity, so there just as well might not have been one. And the theories of the origins of Christianity based on a MJ make a lot more sense that the theories based on a HJ. On the other hand, there are hints here and there of an actual person, very different from the gospels. Probably one who was not crucified by the Romans or the Jews.

I was (at 2 am again) trying to explain why Paul got such a bad rep. Enlightenment figures and Protestant reformers looked at the words of Jesus in the gospels and the sorry, corrupt state of Christianity in their day, and figured that there must have been an original pure Jesus who uttered words of wisdom which were later corrupted by his followers, primarily by Paul. Paul has been demonized all these years for ruining Jesus' message, and creating a hierarchical, misogynist church that supports the prevailing authorities and stifles human. But if there was no Jesus, it might be time to look at Paul again without demonizing him. That was my only point.

mike_decock

I'm agnostic leaning towards Historical Jesus, somewhere underneath all the mythical miracles and resurrection.

-Mike...