mountainman

YES. It looks like a Greek Ghost story.

The pseudo-history of the Jesus Ghost character was copy/pasted from the books of the GREEK LXX (not the HEBREW bible text) to the books of the Greek new testament canon.








εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

maryhelena

I found this online:

Duvduv

And of course there is no evidence of the phenomenon of "Jewish Christians" in any ancient traditional Jewish literature, i.e. either set of Talmuds, midrashim, etc. in Judea or anywhere else.

aa5874

Even Apologetic writers showed no evidence that there were Jews of the Jesus cult.

It is extremely significant when so-called Christians writers admit the Jews did not accept the teachings of the Jesus cult.

Up to the 4th century the Jews were not known to believe or to accept the Godless, Lawless, and Unholy doctrines of the Jesus cult.

Justin's Dialogue with Trypho The Apologetic writer, Hippolytus, would also claim the Jews BOASTED they condemned Jesus to death.

Hippolytus Treatise Against the Jews This is Tertullian no earlier than the 3rd century. The Jews did accept that the Christ had come.

Tertullian's Answer to the Jews No earlier than the 4th century Eusebius also demonstrated that the Jews did NOT accept the teachings of the Jesus cult of Christians.

Eusebius' Preparation of the Gospel The Godless, Lawless and UnHoly doctrines of the Jesus story and cult did NOT originate with Jews.

outhouse

Ya the gospels would never be considered evidence of a movement away from Judaism by Hellenistic Proselytes of Judaism

TedM

It is minimally significant to the question of whether Christianity began among the Jews. No one claims the Jews ALL converted to Christianity, aa.

What we do have is plenty of evidence supporting the idea that the earliest Christians were Jews. Evidence that you dismiss.

If the story of Jesus was made up, as you claim, by Romans in order to have an explanation for the Jewish temple falling, but the Jews weren't among the first to convert, why would such a story start? Why would the Romans care to explain the reason for the temple destruction in terms of a Savior coming from among the Jews? Wouldn't the Romans much have preferred a Roman Savior?

aa5874

There is no evidence at all from antiquity that a single Jew was a member of the Jesus cult of Christians.

We have the Dead Sea Scrolls and Non-Apologetic writings and we have no documented evidence of any Jew outside the Canon who worshiped a man called Jesus Christ as a God.

Please, present your evidence from antiquity that can corroborate a single Jewish writer and member of the Jesus cult outside the NT.

May I remind you that the Jesus character was born of a Ghost and that virtually all accounts of Jesus are either fiction or implausible in the NT and was not known to have been accepted by Jews up to at least the 4th century.

J-D

A description of things done by Christians does not explain how Christianity got started, since there were no Christians doing anything until after Christianity had got started.

Iskander

Rabbi Cook is not a Christian.
http://huc.edu/faculty/faculty/cook.shtml

Christianity began as Jewish sect which was at the beginning very different from the Christianity of the Catholic Catechism of the contemporary Catholic Church and which was then known to their Jewish peers as one of them.


The success of Judaism in converting gentiles to God-fearing second class persons is what created Christians. God-fearers became, eventually, Christianity when dietary laws and circumcision were abrogated and a personal God was added , a giver of eternal life—a loving God whose Presence was to be found in the Eucharist instead of hiding away behind veils in the holy of holies.


Judaism was the father of Christianity; the mother was a theological revolution that transformed Judaism into a universal religion. It also transformed the Judaic “world to come” into the heavenly property of the unclean...

Robert Tulip

Hello J-D, thank you for your reply. Politics is a process of winning trust, to rule by consent rather than coercion alone. To create community trust, rulers must tell a story that instills social confidence. The oppressive tyranny of rule by the sword alone is too expensive and difficult, as an empire needs its local supporters who can represent it and buy into the imperial vision. Britain could never have ruled India without consent.

In the ancient world, the Pax Romana, the imperial peace established by Roman victory of arms, required a story that could justify its existence to enable rule by consent. This popular story had to serve the purpose of explaining the moral legitimacy of Roman rule to the general public. This is why VIrgil wrote the Aeneid, to construct a narrative of moral legitimacy for the Roman Empire. Livy's Histories also served this purpose. The Aeneid assumed the Roman mythos of the Olympian pantheon, Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Pluto, Neptune etc. Belief in these Gods was central to the imperial identity, and to the claim that Roman rule was morally justified by divine right.

One of Augustine's most telling comments in The City of God was his assertion that the Roman Gods did not exist, and that the fall of Rome was associated with its belief in false Gods. The cultural sense of integrity, cohesion, loyalty and identity is grounded in the assumption that the mythic stories that bind the society together have some ultimate value. Christianity challenged this sense of imperial legitimacy by rejecting its origins in pagan belief. Constantine sought to rebase the empire on the new faith, but such a desperate effort to switch horses in mid stream was destined to fail.

The imperial theme of moral legitimacy through divine right continues into modern times, for example with the British slogan "God and my right arm" and the Nazi slogan "God With Us". The Confucian story of Chinese dynastic cycle sees the Mandate of Heaven as revealed in moral legitimacy, with a strong and dynamic moral character seen in the foundation stage of each dynasty, gradually weakening into the corrupt rule of effete eunuchs who are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and who are replaced by a new vigorous dynasty who hold the mandate of heaven.

For the Jews, the catastrophe of the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem demonstrated that military resistance was futile. Therefore, a different form of resistance was required. Enter Christianity, a new religion that sought to present an acceptable public face of imperial loyalty while containing an essential core message that the alleged divine right of Rome, the moral legitimacy of Empire, was fraudulent. This message combined tactical and strategic goals to enable Christian expansion in a way that would steadily and gradually erode the moral legitimacy of the Roman mythos and remove the popular sense that Rome governed by virtue of a mandate from heaven. Religion is all about political moral legitimacy.