MortalWombat

I am sort of in this view, with leanings more toward the mythicist side. I think <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html" target="_blank">Robert Price</a> sums it up pretty good when he says:

While not a religious figure, it is pretty well established that William Tell is a mythical creation, whose existence was not questioned until fairly recently.

David Bowden

This seems fair, given what MortalWombat quoted from Price, and from the lack of recorded eyewitness testimony saying, "Nope, I don't recall anybody like that Jesus character..."

I'm assuming that by "founder" you mean "alleged founder," since all religions were founded/organized/systematized by somebody real. &lt;/probably unnecessary pedantic digression&gt;

Lao-Tze, of Taoism, and possibly Moses the lawgiver of the Jews, are two still-debated characters. What later was organized as Taoism and Judaism certainly credit those individuals, but not all scholars agree that they were historical persons.

And while not a religion-founder per se, Hippocrates' biography is only known anecdotally through Plato (I think) and his reputation soon became, like Jesus', quite extraordinary. Hippocrates was an Asclepiad - thought to be descended from the god of healing; perhaps Asclepius is another mythical founder?

The Jesus tradition originated somewhere, somehow; so did the Homeric writings - but that doesn't mean an individual named Homer can be shown to have existed.

I think I can accept, based on the lack of convincing evidence to the contrary, that Jesus was entirely mythical or so mythicized as to be unknowable to anybody who cannot find justification for taking the gospel accounts at face value any more than he'd take all the accounts of Buddha at face value. I am still interested in any serious case that can be made for his existence, but it seems that:

1) if you (or I) are at all skeptical regarding the gospel narratives;
2) if you are not convinced that Josephus really wrote anything about Jesus;
3) if you don't take for granted that a religion's founding figure must have actually existed,

...there's not anything left to persuade you (or me) that Jesus ever lived.

So I'm left feeling most at home as a historical-Jesus agnostic, with skeptical tendencies given the apparently strong mythical origins of most of his official biography.

Thanks for all the input and suggested reading! Please add more if something's not being adequately addressed.
-Wanderer

[ April 16, 2002: Message edited by: wide-eyed wanderer ]</p>

spin

CX:
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Still, it seems like most religious systems have a human founder of one kind or another. Are you, or is anyone else, aware of a major religious system with a demonstrably mythical founder?
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We're a little too used to religious founders, Marcion, Mani, Mohammed.

There are numerous religions from the ancient world whose founders have preceded their religions into obscurity. Who was the founder the Mithras religion that was popular in Rome at the beginning of the era? Who was responsible for the cult of Sol Invictus to which Constantine was addicted before he got hooked on christianity?

Maybe christianity was founded by Jesus, maybe not. I see no necessities either way.

I can see the possibility that that which we refer to as Jesus is the end result of a long chain of development, which involves a hybrid Jewish/Greek creation, unlikely to have sprung up in Judea.

I would be surprised though that a native Palestinian development should show so few signs of Palestinian underpinnings.

I think lots of hands gave existence to the early tenets of Christianity. From there on, past decisions guided later developments and such ideas as the trinity were born.

Earthly messianism was trumpeted from the time of Daniel. Blend that with the suffering servant of Isaiah, the personified wisdom of Proverbs (and other wisdom literature) which jumped language into Greek before the time of Philo, mix in the Platonism of Philo and his forebearers, the dying gods of the mystery cults... There are so many flavours involved that it is very hard to pick out a unique flavour of a single religious founder.

David Bowden

Regarding this, Amos, I recall something C. S. Lewis apparently believed: one can become a Christian without a firm belief in the historical life of Jesus. From The Letters of C.S. Lewis, written about a month *after* his conversion experience:

"At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened..." (The italics around "nearly" are Lewis' from the original text, not added by me.)

(How Lewis came to his conclusion continues to intrigue me, but that's another matter.)

It sort of tickles me that there can be some Christians who don't believe in an historical Jesus, and some skeptics who do.

-Wanderer

[ April 16, 2002: Message edited by: wide-eyed wanderer ]</p>

Amos

Thanks for the compliment and please know that I write very careful and do my best to be clear (sometimes I throw in a jump-shift to befuddle the argument for my owm pleasure). You might not believe this but I am a perfectionist in many ways.

With regard to the above, Jesus was real in the same way as Adam IS real in "everyman." The mythical Jesus WAS real but not as in "Adam is everyman" because not all Adams become the second Adam (Christ was the second Adam). Note here that in my view every Christian should be a Christ (second Adam) if he followed in the footsteps of Jesus instead of just learning about Jesus. So in this sense Jesus was the name given to the man named Joseph to whom the second Adam was born. His life (the life of Joseph) in particular was a near perfect example of metamorphosis and the mythmakers made hay with this for their own benefit . . . which in the end is equal to the benefit of mankind at large.

Myth is real and not just in the metaphysical sense because the transformation of the body follows the transformation of the mind. The problem most people have is to think of myth as either not real or real in the historic or physical interpretation of the myth (yet they preach Christ liveth in me).

Amos

Sorry I forgot, Dutch (Netherlands) is my native language.

Iasion

Greetings all,

I have made a chronological list of early writers and references to JC :

<a href="http://members.iinet.net.au/~quentinj/Christianity/No-History.html" target="_blank">http://members.iinet.net.au/~quentinj/Christianity/No-History.html</a>

regards,
QuentinJ

Nihlo

That's a very nice page you have there.

free12thinker

Just my two cents

I personally believe there was a Jesus, but that he was a common man, but a Robin Hood like figure to the peasants (who were the majority). I think his heart was so big and his counseling efforts so gracious, that he became a terrific morale booster for people to tlak about when times were hard (which was always). And so the legend grew form there. I believe that when the big wigs got wind of this Jesus, they exploited his "legend" by adding in bylaws that benefitted them without alienating man itself. This explains a lot of what Jesus tolerates and does not tolerates. In retrospect, it helped the big wigs then, and it helps them now. It belittle women. It maximized machoism. And conservatives love it.

There's my little rendition of the bible.

MortalWombat

One thing to keep in mind is that many of the Jews were expecting a Messiah who would be a Joshua-like figure, a conquering hero. In essence, many were expecting a "Joshua Messiah", which translates into Greek as Jesus Christ. In many cases in the epistles, which are generally regarded as among the earliest Christian documents, Paul refers to him as "Christ Jesus", which basically translates into "Annointed Savior". Now, there may have well been a guy named Jesus with Messianic aspirations, but the Jesus Christ depicted in the New Testament has all the earmarks of a mythical figure in my book.