Amos

OK I understand you now. You are thinking American or Disneyfied myth and have been misled into believing that myth is not real. Mythology (myth) is real and is actually more real than the world you live in now (if eternal life is real your life must be an illusion).

The reason why I hold that Jesus was real is because the transfiguration is the first evidence of physical change and later the whole body was transformed.

Did I ever say that the apostels had a corporeal existence? I don't think so yet they were the key factors that led to the comedy in the end.

It may not mean much to you but in those days it was important to secure for yourself a long happy and healthy life (which is what the bible is all about). Today, with our hospital industry booming as it is we really don't have much to worry about.

Thanks for the clarification.

SmashingIdols

Originally posted by CX:
Still, it seems like most religious systems have a human founder of one kind or another.
------ (I don't know how to pull quotes yet)

I don't think there is any doubt that Christianity had an historical human founder - the author of the letters of Paul (well, most of them anyway).

These are the earliest Christian documents, and the person who was writing them was clearly engaged in converting people to this new religion.

Furthermore, he believed that he was appointed by "God" to do this task, having God's divine plan in Jesus Christ revealed to him in the spirit.

Also, giving further credence to this argument is the point that he makes no mention of an historical Jesus; he only refers to this mystical being revealed to him by God. In other words, nobody else preached this to him, and (as far as he knew) there was no historical tradition of Jesus.

In fact, if one reads Pauls letters realizing they were the first written Christian documents (find any Christian or Non-Christian scholar who debates that point), one is lead to believe that Paul is the emissary of God, the human elected to carry forth "God's" purpose on earth.

The historical founder is not missing at all. It appears to be none other than Paul.

CX

Hmmm...I find I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time. That Xianity as it stands in orthodoxy is better termed Paulinism seems reasonable to me. Clearly Paul is the main influence on othrodox belief. His writing (or the writing of his "school") accounts for 12 or 13 of the 27 books of the NT. On the other hand it seems like a stretch to say he never mentions an earthly Jesus. Pauls talks about Jesus' death and burial, Jesus' "human ancestry" and other things. That he doesn't emphasize, and in fact understates, Jesus earthly mission and ministry seems perfectly logical to me since it is has absence from that ministry that poses problems for Paul against his critics. Paul is running around saying "I'm an apostle...really...I saw Jesus in a vision," while his critics are saying, "You never even knew Jesus and you're talking about all this 'forget the law' business." Paul needed to emphasize the spiritual Jesus to draw attention away from the fact that He had never met Jesus while these guys in Jerusalem, who seemed to have a different theology, claimed to be related to Jesus and have actually known him when he was alive. Does this prove the existence of an historical Jesus? Certainly not, but I think arguments for Jesus nonexistence on the basis of Paul's failure to talk about the earthly Jesus are a stretch (not to mention an argument from silence).

SmashingIdols

Actually, in the letters that most scholars attribute to Paul (the ones not believed to originate from later Christians trying to give credence to some doctrine - but differing greatly in style and choice of words, that which is the hallmark of Paul's writing) there is no mention of a corporeal Jesus. If these letters are read with the realization that the gospels, acts, revelation, and no other part of the NT yet existed, it becomes quite clear what he believed.

Paul presents Jesus as a mystical being, and himself as the coporeal being selected by God to reveal this divine plan. If this (combined with his being the earliest writer/endorser of Christianity, which he claims was revealed specifically to himself) does not qualify him as "founding father" of Christianity, what else does?

I am assuming everyone here has read Paul's letters in depth, so am not yet posting the exact references, nor the list of actual vs. counterfeit letters, etc.

faded_Glory

Amos,

Dat is een verrassing! Ik had nooit vermoed dat je van oorsprong Nederlands bent! Woon je al lange tijd in Canada?

Ik moet je bekennen dat ik ook altijd veel moeite heb je idee-en te volgen. Zou je de bovenstaande post eens voor mij in het Nederland willen opschrijven? Misschien dat ik het dan beter begrijp.

Bedankt en de groetjes,

fG

Amos

Natuurlijk kan ik dat maar het zal wel niet meevallen want ik spreek hier nooit Nederlands. Bovendien heb ik hier de woorden geleerd om het ermee te zeggen want wijsbegeerte bestond voor mij in Holland niet.

Tis toch wel leuk om even Nederlands te scrijven want dat heb ik al in geen 30 jaar meer gedaan.

Volgens mij is jouw probleem that je niet gelooft that wij, als "behouden mensen" God zijn and dat we als God ook het verstand van God hebben. Als dat zo is zijn onze handelingen tenminste beinvloed bij ons onbewust verstand en daarom een uitreksel van ons onbewust verstand (natuulijk is onze praktijk voornaam maar the oorsprong, het idea, de "ahaa," is by verlichting). Als we dan het verstand van God hebben bestaat voor ons geen unbewust verstand meer (no soul, no sea, and no Atlantis either because it merged with the sea/ soul). Dit is gewoon wijsbegeerte maar dan moet ik er wel even bijzeggen dat ik daar een ander begrip van heb dan meeste mensen.

I'll stop here because time is not on my side.

Het beste ermee (ik koom van Tiburg).

SmashingIdols

Amos may have given the final word on religion. His argument is seemingly irrefutable:

If you choose to believe eternal life is real then the world you live in now must [by necessity] be an illusion

I agree wholeheartedly - because both of them cannot coexist as reality; they are conflicting cosmologies.

The_Gorgonzola

But isn't this traveling down the road of solipsism?

Gorgo

Amos

Thanks, and according to Amos eternal life is real. Temporal life is extracted from eternal life through the coexistence of the conscious mind with the subconscious mind. We have eternal life in our subconscious mind and temporal life in our conscious mind. The consolidation of life is found in the convergence of both minds and we find permanent identity with the subconscious mind (know thyself). In this we place reason subordinate to intuition.

RyanS2

Some good discussions. In the debate on the historical existence of Jesus, I am reminded of what Richard Carrier said on his article about proving a negative existential proposition. He said that one way to find if something is not true, (i.e. disprove to me that I'm God), is to look carefully at it. That is to say, you find non-sequitors, or things that don't follow. Does it make sense that if Jesus was really greeted in Jerusalem, a major city, by throngs of people proclaiming him to be the Messaih, that no historian would have recorded this event? You keep going through and through, and eventually, you find out that most of the story "does not follow".

Now, concerning the ideas on Christ, most secular scholars take the approach of the great secular scholar Joseph McCabe in the early part of the last century. McCabe denied any historical evidence of Jesus, (Josephus, etc.), but still believed there was a historical core to Jesus. Most recently, Michael Magee's books over <a href="http://www.askwhy.co.uk" target="_blank">http://www.askwhy.co.uk</a> remind me of this approach. Incidentally, for the non-scholar, his books are a good read, though many will disagree with his ideas that Judaism was so heavily influenced by Persia.

One of the interesting points of Michael's books is that he discusses the founder of the Bah'ai faith. Originally, the first biographies of the founder was just about that of a very pious and devoted man to his faith. No miracles or anything extraordinairre about him. Not very long after these biographies coming out, we suddenly learn about a man who can perform miracles, including escaping his own death. Michael compares that and the story of Jesus. In the earliest gospel, Mark, Jesus was fairly human, and with each subsequent book leading up to John, Jesus becomes barely even human.

The person who revitalized the Christ-myth was G.A. Wells, who's written several books on it. He went through and demolished the evidence for Christ, then concluded that no Christ ever existed. Recently, he has taken a more McCabe stance himself, believing there's a historical Jesus at the core, but whom he is we'll never know. The closest Christ-myther to him I can think of is Robert Price, to me at least, the two are very similar in style and thought.

Next are Freke and Gandy, and Acharya S. F & G are definitely the better of this class, as they use more up-to-date sources. Acharya is interesting from a historical perspective because she finds ancient arguments against Jesus. The only problem is, most of them are just that. Very ancient, and have been rebuttled. For instance, she quotes Barbara Walker as saying we have no evidence earlier than the fourth century for the Bible, (as in extant papyrus), but that's false. I know of at least 8 pieces which predate the 4th century, and I think there's recently been another piece found, which shows that Matthew was the favorite gospel. Irregardless, that's fairly common knowledge now, and could easily be confirmed by almost any modern work on the gospels.

Likewise, her argument on the dating of the Gospel's is based upon Cassell, but as far as I know, he was rebutted by J.B. Lightfoot, so unless Acharya can rebuttle him, along with Mack and others in the field, it's a somewhat hard position for her to take.

The supreme victor of the Christ-myth is Earl Doherty. The reason is that Doherty did one thing which no other Christ-myther before him has ever done. He went out and showed that early Christians believed in an ethereal Jesus, by looking at the earliest portions of the Bible, and by looking at apologists from Christians early-years which obviously did not believe in an Earthly Christ. However, in Earl Doherty's rebuttle to Lee Strobel, he seems to agree with Acharya on a very late dating of the gospels, though he only pushed the dating of Mark's original presentation to 90 CE in his first book. At least from what I gathered, he seemed to be implying that rather than being a literary tradition, the gospels developed from oral "sayings" of Jesus, which were grafted onto a person at a late time.

Ohter noteable points of interest in the "jesus Myth" are that Jesus scores exceptionally high on the Mythic Archetype, as developed by Lord Raglan and other mythologists, and even a somewhat more conservative mythologist like David Adam Leemings in his newest book, "Myth: A biography", seems to believe that Jesus has too many mythical layers to ignore.