aa5874

What absurdities you post!! What started Christianity is found in books of antiquity. It is what is written in books of antiquity that must FIRST be examined.

We NEED the documented evidence in the books of antiquity to reconstruct the past.

We NEED the data in the books of antiquity.

Robert Tulip

aa, I think you missed J-D's point. This thread (and this forum more generally) is about the sociology of religion, trying to explain what actually happened in a way that makes scientific sense of all the evidence. To say that the Holy Ghost started Christianity is as much help as explaining the Big Bang by saying God said let there be light. People are mostly familiar with the traditional views, but the interesting problem is how we winkle out the truth behind the dogmas. The books of antiquity were heavily edited, so are not a reliable explanation of Christian origins.

J-D

What absurdities you post!! Just because we read what is written in books of antiquity doesn't mean we have to believe it's true.

aa5874

J-D has no point. The poster appears not to understand the significance of what is written in books of antiquity in order to reconstruct the past.

Again, it was the author of Acts who wrote that the Promised Holy Ghost came down from heaven and gave the disciples the POWER to preach the Gospel.

If the author of Acts is lying then he is a fiction writer. That is all.

Superman was born or originated in Krypton if it is NOT true then I cannot make up my own story.

Now, there are other books of antiquity which contain data that can be used to logically deduce WHAT STARTED the Jesus cult of Christians.

I have already stated that it was the Fall of the Temple and the Words of the Lord in the books of the prophets that started the Jesus cult of Christians.

I have already made references to the DATA in writings attributed to Aristides, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, Acts of the Apostles, gMark, gJohn, the Pauline Corpus, Josephus, Philo, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian, Eusebius, Julian the Emperor and others.

The earliest non-apologetic writing about Christians, Lucian of Samosata, did not even state that Christians were Jews .

A story was circulated that the Jews killed the Son of God and those who believed that story were called Christians.

Aristides' Apology I can only repeat what the Apologetic writers claimed. I can ONLY use the PRESENT AVAILABLE Data.

The start of the Jesus cult was when people BEGAN to believe the story that a Son of God came down from heaven and was KILLED by the Jews.

Now read Acts. The author of Acts appear to corroborate Aristides.

Acts of the Apostles 2 We know What started the Jesus cult of Christians. It is found in books of antiquity-----The teaching that the Jews had crucified and slain Jesus the son of a God.

J-D

What absurdities you post!! We are discussing how Christianity started, not stories about Superman! Stories about Superman have nothing to do with how Christianity started!

aa5874

Again you post more absurdities. One does not need to believe a story to show its contents.

If one wants to know from what location Superman originated we have to first read what was written by the author.

Superman originated in Krypton according to the author whether it is true or not.

If we want to know what started the Jesus cult in Acts then we MUST read what is written in the book.

It was the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pentecost that started the Jesus cult in Acts whether it is true or not.

Robert Tulip

Thank you J-D for these big questions. Sorry to be slow in response.

The cultural reaction among the great ancient civilizations of the near east to the growth of the Roman Empire has to be understood against the long gradual history of the rise of military power through the Holocene culminating in the empires of Babylon, Assyria, Greece and Rome.

The ancient world of the oikoumene had a loose network of spiritual people stretching from Greece and Egypt across to Babylon and India and beyond. These people held the memory of an earlier peaceful world before metal enabled national wars. One of their core views, which found its way into the Bible in Paul’s Letter to the Romans 6:14 and Galatians 5:4, was the distinction between the Edenic state of grace and the Roman state of corruption, between the spirit and the flesh.

Christianity arose among people with a deep faith that the pen is mightier than the sword. This Gnostic belief held that the rule of the spirit will eventually triumph over the rule of the flesh, through a return to lost earlier values of trust and community. This core belief in spiritual grace was in my view the key to the construction of the Christ Myth in the Gospels.

The slow rise of the corrupting power of the sword with the development of metal technology is reflected in the mythology of the fall from grace. The Vedic myth of successive worse ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron appears again in Daniel’s dream of the statue of the king with feet of clay and in Hesiod’s story of the lost golden age. This dream of successive ages is central to Christian eschatology, with its idea of an eventual consummation of history through the reign of Christ as word made flesh in a new golden age as described in the apocalypse.

My view is that the claim that early Christians expected a sudden arrival of the kingdom of God does not come from the original source. Instead, I suggest there was a deeper wisdom tradition, seen in the statement in Psalm 90 and the Epistle of Peter that a thousand years is as a day to God. By this tradition, the fall from grace culminating in the Roman conquest would not be miraculously ended, but rather a deep vision of cosmic reconciliation - a new heaven and new earth – would gradually grow until it reached a tipping point to replace military security as a basis of world peace.

In the Vedic Yuga framework, the cycle of time does not see a sudden shift from the Iron Age to the Golden Age, but rather a slow ascent through symbolic ages of Bronze and Silver.

In terms of visual cosmology, this cyclic understanding of time was available to the ancients through knowledge of the precession of the equinox as the clock of the ages. In terms of modern science, the myth of the cycle of ages between light and dark matches precisely to the orbital cycle of glaciation as the big structure of terrestrial time. The low point of the orbital cycle was in 1246 AD when the June solstice was farthest from the sun.

So the answer is that the original writers of the word of God were cosmic seers who had a deeply accurate intuition of history, and who established the Christ Myth in the expectation of the eventual victory of the word over the sword. The sword of Rome was able to capture and nearly destroy this sublime wisdom, such that its survival in the Bible today is only fragmentary, and can only be seen by a philosophical archaeology of the texts.A further part of the focus on the word was the idea that Christ is Lord. What this essentially means is that the Logos is the rational connection between history and the absolute, and this concept of Christ as cosmic reason or order is worshipped as the highest reality. This theology provides a faith framework of absolute certainty, against which Roman power can be seen as ephemeral and temporary. The recognition that Rome's reliance on the sword was evil led to an enlightened understanding that Roman imperial power lacked divine legitimacy.Originally, as I see it, the core ideas of Christianity were the Beatitudes and the Last Judgment, building on Isaiah’s messianic prophecy that the man of sorrows would be despised and rejected, and the teaching in Psalm 118 that the stone the builder refused would become the head of the corner. The idea is that eventually the meek will inherit the earth through the construction of a compelling understanding of the centrality of works of mercy and the moral failure of rule by the sword. As we now move into a globalised world, this prophecy is borne out by the decreasing relevance of military security and the growing need to find security in relationships of trust and interconnection. I think originally there was a reverence for the presence of the divine within nature, leading to a comprehension that the things that are of least importance to the powerful are actually most important in terms of any coherent vision of the sacred.

The rule of the word inverts the rule of the sword, placing the least as most important within an ethical vision of love and grace.

Clivedurdle

I do have sympathy with the idea that it was Seneca wot dun it! Nazarenus.

dog-on

That's fine. However, in this case, we seem to know exactly what the preexisting fundamentals were. The important bit regarding the question posed by the OP are those preexisting fundamentals. Two of which were the availability of Jewish Scripture to the wider world made possible by their translation into Greek and the fairly well established syncretism of Rome.

Looked at from this perspective, Christianity seems almost inevitable, or so it seems to me.

Sabine Grant

Any particular reason why you seem to favor the KJV in view of the repetitive mention of "Ghost" as in "Holy Ghost"? Just curious...