Cesc

Then it is you who have misunderstood this thread, I believe.

I'm just keeping with the topic of this thread, of the OP, which is how we today might relate to the HJ and the fact that strong emotions seems to be involved.

Perhaps then this is the wrong forum for this thread, but then you should be directing your objection to its author, Toto.

spin

I'm impressed that you work so hard to find misunderstanding.

That could be true, but I think that a connection with the past was intended in posting it here. Modern christians are the inheritors of that normative christianity that won survival rights and control of the christian narrative, but that tells us only of the status quo.

To non-believers the existence or non-existence of Jesus in 1st c. Palestine is irrelevant, especially because of the historical lack of tenable data on the subject... and that is looking at the material that is the content of this forum.

It may be that the o.p.'s intention was to shed light on the perennial stupid conflicts between HJ & MJ acolytes, conflicts that have been seen here on this forum. The two aas, ApostateAbe and aa5874, don't open their mouths except to assert (ApAb) or deny (5874) the existence of Jesus. As this sort of thing drones on, the beacon of light that that existence is irrelevant is worth shining.

The context is the thing. We should be doing BC&H here.

mountainman

A professional or amateur in the field of history is obliged to care because it is part of the territory of doing history.


The political perspective of Jesus becomes strong at Nicaea.

Whether he was mythical or historical in any earlier century, his Kingdom came with Bullneck.



I have asked for an objective analysis of this emotion.


1. _______________
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You did bring the subject up.

Over.








εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Cesc

Though I consider you a highly reasonable person, I take this remark as a derogatory comment and leave it at that....

Ok, now we're back in with the topic.
From my point of view I would argue that his existence or non-existence is very relevant when it comes to both the Christian faith and, more importantly, BC&H. The discussion about this assumed historicity, however, is perhaps irrelevant insofar that we can (most likely) never prove nor disprove the existence of a Jesus in history.
But if he did not exist, it has huge implications for how we should - or rather should not - view Christian origins. And also huge implications for any Christian believer, as I have argued. And the latter is perhaps part of the reason for all the hot emotions when it comes to the HJ/MJ discussion?

Robert Tulip

The question whether Jesus Christ existed as a historical individual is big. We do not know, to any scientific level of confidence, if the Gospels emerged from memories of an individual messiah figure or if the church constructed that figure as a fictional adumbration of a spiritual imagination. These are rival hypotheses.

Christianity has been through two big revolutions, of space and time. The first big revolution, of space, was the emergence of Protestantism with modern science and the discovery of America, growing with the Copernican Revolution, with its rejection of traditional spatial myths of heaven. The second big revolution, of time, was Darwin's rejection of creationist ideas of time, and the emergence of scientific biology and geology at the foundation of the evolutionary understanding of the real age and process of the world.

The third revolution, happening now, is a revolution of mind, a recognition that the Christian belief in the historical Jesus is a pervasive political and cultural delusion. To understand that this Big Lie has been so successful helps us to see the weakness of human psychology and our vulnerability to seductive messages. As the great modern theologian Paul Simon observed, 'a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.' The Historical Jesus story had a popular emotional resonance that served the interests of the orthodox church in its alliance with the Roman State and its rejection of the original enlightened gnostic vision of the Cosmic Christ.

Mythicism is a return to Gnosticism. Based on an accurate scientific understanding of time and space, we are now able to see how the human mind relates to our physical reality. Mining the Bible, a new heaven and new earth can now be seen by reading the story of Jesus as fiction. My view is that a key to this new vision is grounded in an exploration of the accurate scientific cosmology of precession of the equinox.

Chili

But it is not his kingdom. Catholicism has the Blessed BVM and the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and left Jesus just hanging there to walk away from.

From here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basiliq...C5%93ur,_Paris

And when you get there a small piece of paper is handed out to tourist and others to make the above request that also includes an apology to those who do not understand the difference here, and these are those who already walked away from it in John 6:66.

So when you blame Bullneck, the mire that you see is yours only to walk away from, and that is why historians must transcend history as merely their art (their telic vision) to understand, and that still leaves them two stages removed from the end wherein the final cause is seen via the efficient to arrive at what Plato called the 5th interpretation that is beyond the material man wherein only the name (onoma), account (logos), image (eidolon), knowledge (episteme) is seen as an end in itself, and where now the shine is yours and not just on the art as historian here.

This so is beyond the material Jesus and points at his Sacred Heart that is equal to the BVM that requires our own human transcendence to see.

We have an icon on that wherein these two are side-by side as equal for the believer to see and identify with. Remember that this is the dowry in betrothal come home to us.

Chili

delete please, duplicate post, thank you.

Zwaarddijk

Yes, mythicism will magically cure all that ails mankind! Hear, hear, all you blind and deaf!

spin

Was I not being reasonable?

I guess I haven't said anything in this thread.

Not really. If, as the evidence points, christianity is a development upon the efforts of Paul in the gentile lands, rather than anything from Judea, then it is irrelevant whether Jesus existed or not for the world got the religion that developed through a man who never met Jesus and proclaimed him because of--on his words--a god-given revelation regarding Jesus. The outcome is the same whether Jesus existed or not. We have no reports prior to Paul as to what happened. We simply don't have means of knowing and knowing wouldn't change the outcome.

Faith aids denial.

The notion of historicity helps those christians who have absorbed more of the basics of scientific understanding of the world, so they will reach to the semblance of science and rationality rather than retreat fully into unreason. The non-christian who touts HJ seems to me to be a victim of hegemony, while the one who touts MJ has probably succumbed to reactionism, driven by misplaced emotions of betrayal or self-righteous anger.

With the state of knowledge today there is no viable resolution to the HJ/MJ conflict and wasting time over it is like pouring one's blood in the sand. Those hot emotions are self-deprecating.

Chili

It HJ argument certainly is big, but all science can do, and can never do more even in our modern age, is test the components that make up the meal, but not the meal in itself as a whole.

Plato arrived at this conclusion in his Seventh Epistle 342 E:
(as cited from my "Contemplative Logic" on this, ISBN 0-9865092-0-7).

Note here that this is why the shepherds (who in real life where his telic visions earned in the school of 'hard knocks' that made him the man he was) only needed to "look in to see and understand."

This here so the first step of "seeing the seer see" in the same way as land can be seen from the crowsnest up high" that must be brought to the fore and that is where the Gospels begin in real life for the believer to see.

. . . and here again, that vision is missing in Matthew and Mark.