jakejonesiv

Joan E. Taylor demonstrated there exists no archeological evidence of Jewish-Christians in Judea in the first century CE. See _Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins_, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.
The holy places and the phenomenon of Christian pilgrimage can be traced to only the fourth century.

Does anyone find it strange that all the allegedly historical events recorded in the New Testament texts all take place before about 70 CE? It is as if the origins of Christianity were retrojected into a past safely shrouded by the destruction of Jerusalem during the Roman-Jewish war.

Jake Jones IV

aa5874

We all know that perhaps billions of people think Jesus existed but it is known that they do so without a shred of corroborative evidence.

I am really interested in the evidence from antiquity, the witnesses from antiquity, that Jesus show was a real messianic claimant.

In the earliest recovered Canon, Jesus was NOT a Messianic claimant when he was supposedly in Galilee.

I repeat, Jesus in gMark was NOT a Messianic claiment when he in Galilee.

Jesus ordered his disciples NOT to tell any one he was Christ.

Mark In gMark, Jesus was NOT known by the public as a Messianic ruler or claimant.

Effectively, not even the story support what you think of Jesus.

You need to present a story from antiquity not from your imagination.

Jesus was a Myth character. We have the stories. They have been recovered.

In the recovered and dated manuscripts Jesus was the Son of a Ghost, the Creator or a Transfiguring Sea Water Walker who resurrected.

PhilosopherJay

Hi jakejonesiv,

The question is, "why do they place all this material showing the Christ opposing Jewish leadership before the war?"

The effect of placing all this material before the war is to absolve the Christians for any blame for the war or the Jewish defeat in the war. The Christians can say that they opposed the Jews that fought the war against Roman authority. The position of the NT writers is that true Jews support their Roman masters, or at least, do not care about their rule over the Jews. In fact, the true Jews (Christians) both their leader and their followers, suffered fierce prosecution from the Jewish leadership for opposing the Jewish leadership.

The one glaring fact that contradicts this position in the New Testament is the crucifixion of Jesus by Pilate. This suggests that the execution of the Christian founder/Christ by Pilate or some other Roman official was accepted as a fact by them. The entire passion narrative is designed to negate/undermine this fact and show the Jewish leadership as responsible and not the Romans.

The opposition of the Jews to Roman rule is an historical fact indicated by the fierce Jewish wars against Rome. Any group of Jews who opposed these wars would certainly have been considered betrayers of Judaism. This is true especially if they had been zealots in favor of the wars before the wars and had decided that war was a bad idea after the defeats. This would be the reason that the Christians portray the Jews as the betrayers in their NT ideology.

A contemporary example of this is the claims of supporters of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein and his representatives said consistently in hundreds of interviews before the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations investigation group said repeatedly that there was no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was the Bush administration that claimed against all evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now the supporters of the Bush administration claim it was Saddam Hussein who lied about having weapons of mass destruction. Instead of admitting that the Bush administration lied and Saddam Hussein told the truth, they lie again about Hussein lying.

In the same way the it is probable that the Christians were the zealots who attacked the Jewish leadership for betraying the the Jewish people by not fighting the Romans. After the wars, they attack the Jewish leadership for fighting the wars, thus shifting the responsibility for the wars from themselves onto those who actually opposed the wars.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

aa5874

Actually, you presented a perfect example of propaganda.

It was the Roman Emperor who eventually authorised the propagation of the Lies that the Jews killed Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God.

There was no Messianic ruler called Jesus in Judea in the time of Pilate just as there was no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the War with Saddam.

Once it was claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction then the invasion of Iraq was completely acceptable by people in the USA.

Once it was claimed that the Jews killed the Son of God then it was completely accepted to massacre and persecute the Jews by Romans.

mountainman

Contrary to popular opinion, Flavia Iulia Helena,
Constantine's mother, was not the first christian pilgrim.
Someone beat her to this most prestigous of claims.
There was an earlier pilgrim, in fact,
Constantine's mother-in-law, Eutropia.

"Among the places visited by Eutropia was Mamre (near Hebron),
a holy place to Jews and Christians because here, according to
Genesis 18, Abraham had hospitably entertained three divine
messengers in the shade of an oak tree or terebinth.

The lady found that this holy place was defiled by pagan rites
as well as by secular activities. She reported to Constantine,
who at once ordered the place to be purified and a church
to be built there.

The church was completed by 333. Remnants of the outer walls
exist to this day, and we know that the atrium contained
Abraham's altar, the well and the tree. Remnants of that
tree were still seen by St. Jerome.

Constantine's building activities in Palestine gave to that
country a central place in Christian sentiments which it had
never had before; they in fact made it the "Holy Land."

--- H. Pohlsander, The Emperor Constantine, 1996

Yes, it's very convenient isn't it.







εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

gurugeorge

I'd be inclined to say they just fizzled out. Even in the credo, you can see that some have "fallen asleep" - i.e. died. In the Pauline letters, there's possible evidence of conflict between the proselytizing of several figures - Cephas, Jesus, Apollos. It looks like Paul probably seeded more churches outside Jerusalem than the Jerusalem church did. And those churches mostly eventually became what we now think of as "Gnostic" (i.e. a fair variety of views).

However, I would say that there might be a connection between the Roman/Alexandrinian church (which later became the twin centre of orthodoxy) and those early Christians, in the figure of Polycarp. Polycarp I view as a post-Diaspora Jewish con-artist (sorta) who represented himself as having met some of the earliest (pre-Diaspora) generation of Christians. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but it's after Polycarp that we see this strain in Christian thinking that's very concerned with lineage, which later develops into proto-orthodoxy, then Catholicism.

later note: in all this, I think it's best to take the overview that Christianity was the Jewish version of a general movement of ideas, a sort of "New Age" of the time.

aa5874

The Pauline wrirtings are compeletely useless as credible sources. The claims made by the Pauline writers about the chronology of the Pauline writer are not corroborated.

There is no corroboration at all in the Pauline letters that Paul, a Hebrew of Hebrews of the tribe of Benjamin, a former Pharisee, started a single Church in the 1st century.

The Jesus cult could not have fizzled out in the 1st century when it most likely started after the works of Josephus, Suetonius and Tacitus or after c 115 CE.

gurugeorge

There is no corroboration of "churches" in the sense we understand them now, but clearly the Pauline letters are talking about something like study groups or symposia. The picture is that he's travelled around the ancient world (as a businessman of sorts), and at a few places here and there he has been listened to sympathetically and has some followers, some of whom he addresses in the letters. That, to me, is the image I get directly from the letters (maugre some typical occultist's boasting). Had the writings been later as you propose, surely the image of "churches" would have been more in keeping with what churches later were (with the heirarchical ecclesiastical structure we find from the 1st century)?

As to who this "Paul" writer really was, we mustn't be misled by Acts, nor even by things in the letters that look like they support the Acts story (e.g. "whom I once persecuted", etc.) He may not even have been a Jew.

In effect, the place you are assigning to the Paul letters, I would assign to Acts, as a relatively late and highly orthodox bit of writing about a "Paul" character. And where you say the Christian movement started in the 1st century, what you are identifying there is the start of orthodoxy, which I view as an offshoot of an earlier, sketchier pre-Diaspora phenomenon, mostly seeded by this "Paul" fellow, the remnants of which eventually became Gnosticism, Syrian non-dual mysticism (as per GThomas), the philosophical Christianity of some of the early apologists, etc.

Again, from my point of view, I cannot help coming back to this: the Pauline letters were obviously thought to be important to those who compiled the Canon, they are in there for a reason. You seem to see them as supportive of orthodoxy, I do not see that, I see them as problematic for orthodoxy, since they contain strong hints of a kind of proto-Gnosticism, problematic at the time of the formation of the Canon; yet the fact that they are included means they had to be included for some reason.

That reason is legitimation. You are close to this when you talk about "witness to the risen Christ", but I think your problem here is that you are looking at it through the eyes of orthodoxy - you are falling for precisely the raison d'etre they had for including Paul in the Canon, to make it look like Paul was a precursor to orthodoxy.

But the real reason for legitimation is that proto-orthodoxy was a con-job (probably by "Polycarp" and whoever coined "Ignatius", another made-up character whose letters were perhaps based on material actually by Lucian's Peregrinus).

There was no human Jesus, therefore there were no human disciples of his (that was GMark's innocent euhemerisation of the myth), therefore there was no "Peter" qua founder of the Church. That earliest manifestation in Jerusalem of a cult which has continuity with all this later Christianity stuff is precisely what fizzled out.

In fact the few Pauline study groups/symposia scattered around WERE the only form of anything resembling Christianity prior to the 1st century. And Paul as a founder of those "churches" was sufficiently in the memory of people in the 1st century that any upstart had to connect their lineage with him, no matter what other spurious lineage they had concocted (the "Peter" lineage, utilizing "Mark"'s euhemerization).

But I don't want to get into another Paul wrangle with you, there's enough of that already on BC&H. I'm just flagging this up as an alternative possibility.

aa5874

You are merely regurgitating the very same unsubstantiated claims you have been making for years.

Please, we can go through the NT word by word and no author of the Jesus cult Canon was influenced by the so-called revealed Gospel of the Pauline letters.

The earliest story of Jesus show that there was no Jesus cult--No Jesus cult Churches--Nothing at all of a Messianic ruler called Jesus, the Son of God, BEFORE the Fall of the Temple c 70 CE.

The Pauline letters were composed well after the writings of Justin Martyr and Celsus "True Discourse" based on "Origen's "Against Celsus".

Origen's "Against Celsus 1.63 You cannot ignore the abundance of evidence of antiquity.

All the Pauline letters were planted in the Jesus cult Canon to give a false history of the Jesus cult.

The very first source to mention all the Pauline letters to Churches, "Against Heresies" also claimed Jesus was crucified when he was about 50 years old after being 30 years old in the 15th year of Tiberius.

"Against Heresies" 2.22 has contradicted the Pauline chronology.

The first writing to mention that Paul wrote to the Corinthians, the so-called Epistle of Clement, was unknown up to the 5th century by the very writers of the Jesus cult.

Letters to place place Paul in the 1st century has been deduced to be forgeries. See the Paul/Seneca letters.

The Pauline letters themselves have been deduced to have multiple authors.

The writers of the Jesus cult do NOT really know when Paul lived. They claimed he was executed under Nero but simultaneously claim that he was also alive AFTER gLuke was composed.

I simply cannot understand why and for what reason you continue to make claims about the Pauline writer that are not found anywhere in or out the Canon.

The Pauline letters do NOT even represent the Jesus cult of the 2nd century because the writings of Justin show that the Jesus cult developed WITHOUT any Pauline teachings but was developed from the Memoirs of the Apostles and words of the Prophets in Hebrew Scripture.

First Apology The Pauline writings were unknown up to the mid 2nd century.

There were no Jesus cult Christians in the 1st century.

gurugeorge

/facepalm

Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.