mountainman

Isn't the official story precisely such nonsense - that the gospel authors were used as authorial instruments of the Ghost of JC?

See for example see the claims made in
THE PROBLEM OF ANONYMITY AND PSEUDONYMITY IN CHRISTIAN LITERATURE OF THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES by Kurt Aland.


The question "What stated Christianity" might be answered by some, as "The Holy Spirit".




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Davka

:hysterical:

You have exposed nothing but your own ass. Let's take a look at some context, shall we? You wrote:

. . . which you followed with a bunch of scripture from the KJV, such as:


(BTW, the first two references are completely wrong, chapter and verse - but I digress)

. . . these EXACT sentiments - that the religious leaders killed the prophets, are of the devil, and even worse - are expressed time and time again in the OT. I gave you examples. Your absurd dodge by way of pretending that 'exact sentiments' equals 'exact same words in the same exact order' is pathetic, foolish, and, frankly, stupid.

You then followed up your supposed evidence of anti-jewish sentiments with a real gem:

Then you quoted a shitload of places in the NT where Jesus is quoted as saying "woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"

This seems to imply that you believe that "woe unto you" is the same as "you are going to hell." Either that, or you're the most incoherent writer I've encountered in a long, long time. So, which is it?

Davka

It might be answered by others as "Cozmic teapots from Tralfamador," and make every bit as much sense. :huh:

Robert Tulip

Yes, and before readers such as AA jump to the conclusion that the ransom theology is absurd, they should have a look at the sources on it linked in the post where I first mentioned it. The literal absurdity does not mean we should just ignore its role in Christian faith.

One reason why this ransom idea is relevant here is because it helps to illustrate that superficial assumptions about Christian origins - such as the assumption that Christianity was originally anti-Semitic - need to be examined quite carefully. If the Jews gave Christ as a ransom to Rome to protect the temple, as indicated in John 11, and Rome nonetheless went ahead and destroyed the temple anyway, the subtext is that the Romans wickedly accepted the death of the King of the Jews as a ransom payment, but then reneged on their side of the ransom bargain by failing to provide ongoing protection.

We do not blame families who pay a ransom to kidnappers if the criminals then kill the victim, and nor should we blame the Jews for handing Jesus over to Pilate in the protection racket described in the Gospel story. (Nice temple ya got there, shame if anything happened to it.)

The criticism of the Pharisees by Jesus is essentially that they do not live up to their own stated high standards. It is not fair to say the Gospels demonised the Jews, because the real message is that the Jews need very high standards in order to stand up to the real demons, the Romans.

Even the blood guilt clause at Matt 27:25 is quite strange, transferring guilt from Rome, which was the final cause of the death of Christ, to the Jews as merely the efficient cause. True guilt for a crime rests with the power that finally caused it to happen. But here we see the ongoing power of kidnappers and blackmailers, able to extort submission in the form of a text that pins the blame for their crime on some one else.

outhouse

Not one part of this follows how it is even written, let alone biblical criticism.


You really seem to be taking many things way out of context to reach these conclusions.

Robert Tulip

Thank you. Allow me to expand on the comments you quote, as a way of exploring how the real origin of Christianity with a mythical cosmic Christ is so very different from the usual literal historical view.
Oikoumene is Greek for the whole inhabited earth. Matthew 24 says the Gospel will be preached to the oikoumene before the second coming. There was a lot more cross-cultural communication in the ancient world than is recorded in surviving texts, especially among itinerant religious travellers. For example, the Buddhist Emperor of India in the 3rd century BC, Ashoka, sent missionaries called theraputta to Alexandria, who took with them both the spiritual doctrines of Buddhism and the institutional practices of monasticism. The influence of the Buddhist Theraputta on the Therapeuts in the West was bigger than is generally acknowledge by the Christian tradition with its hostility to paganism.

Another indicator of the cross-fertilization between religious groups across Asia is seen in the linguistic linkages between the Indo-European languages. For example the etymological connection between the names of the Sky Father - Dyaus Pita, Zeus Patera, Jupiter and Deus Pater - shows how basic religious concepts emerged from cross-cultural dialogue.

The question of memory of an imagined golden age is obviously more complicated and speculative. My approach to this question is to map the Biblical myth of the fall from grace on to the actual scientific knowledge of cultural evolution from the Neolithic. Hunter-gatherer bands at the dawn of the Holocene around 10,000 BC lived for thousands of years in peaceful stable simple communities. Even if they may have had high levels of local violence, they did not have organised armies, and there is a plausible case for greater equality between the sexes than became the case under later patriarchal civilizations. Only the rise of settled agriculture produced the surplus value which enabled larger communities with the rise of military kings. Agriculture was the fall.

My view is that the fall from grace and the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is a mythical telling of the change in human culture from an Edenic paradise of hunter-gatherer simplicity to the increased stress and organised violence of agricultural societies who earned their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, as the story has it. This myth of the fall maps on to the vision of the Golden Age as the dawn of the Holocene, and the Iron Age as the spiritual ignorance prevailing in the Roman Empire. This is not to suggest a lost civilization, but rather just that early society was more in tune with nature, as a scientific rather than supernatural interpretation of the Genesis story of the fall.I am using the term “seers” here to mean “those who see”. What they see is what is visible. We know that precession of the equinox was definitely seen as the slow star clock of history from the time of Hipparchus in 130 BC. It is very likely that precession was seen long before then, as seen in the Biblical hints regarding a transition from the Age of Taurus from ~4300-2150 BC, when the spring equinox occurred with the sun in the stars of the bull, to the Age of Aries in 2150BC-0, with the sun in the sign of the Ram.

Another important hint of this accurate cosmic knowledge is seen in the Mithraic God Aion (Time), combining four living creatures in a man-lion with eagle wings surrounded by six coils of a snake. This statue (for example seen in the frontispiece of Jung’s book Aion) does in fact provide an accurate scientific model of the structure of time, encoding the understanding of the 12,000 years from the Age of Leo the Lion to the Age of Aquarius the Man. This vision of the structure of time depicted as a man-lion is also seen in the stela between the paws of the Sphinx of Giza. The idea is that the Golden Age was when the Equinox was in Leo (at the dawn of the Holocene) and that the vision of God or nature will only be seen properly again when we reach the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, in about 2150 AD, as we make the long slow ascent to a next Golden Age in ten thousand years time.

The cosmic seers of the ancient world included the Watchers or Nazirites, like the Babylonian priests who stood on the top of ziggurats each night to record the positions of the planets, with such accuracy that in Babylon they worked out how to predict eclipses many hundreds of years before Christ. These cosmic seers saw that the equinox, the day the sun crosses the equator, would precess from Aries (the first sign) into Pisces (the last sign) in 21 AD. Sky map of the equator crossing into Pisces in 21 AD .

In imagining a myth of salvation, my view is that these cosmic watchers constructed the idea of Jesus Christ as representing the presence of the Golden Age in the depth of the Iron Age, with the resurrection of Christ symbolising the idea that the ignorance of the Iron Age could not destroy the wisdom of the Golden Age.

Interestingly, this eschatological cosmology maps precisely on to the real orbital cycle of light and dark driven by precession of the equinox. This roughly 20,000 year cosmic cycle was responsible for dumping two kilometres of ice on top of New York at the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago. The cycle of time reached its darkest point in 1246 AD when the June solstice was furthest from the sun. Perihelion is now at 5 January, on its ten thousand year march back to cosmic summer.
The rise of armies and metal technology produced material progress but spiritual decline and alienation. The secret cosmic mystery tradition was conveyed orally by Pythagoreans, Nazirites, Therapeuts and other holders of spiritual wisdom. The Roman Empire found that doctrinal unity was a politically advantageous strategic device, since disagreement was the first step to political schism. As a result, the high wisdom that produced the myth of Christ was crushed in the imperial blender, homogenised into a single lowest common denominator, known as the Christian orthodox creed. The hunting of heresy by Rome was systematic, ruthless and effective, a model for the Catholic, Nazi and Communist methods of modern times, smashing the vision into a distorted imitation of the original high eternal insight. As Winston Smith could have said in 1984, Rome had always been at war with Gnosticism. The line from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that the meek shall inherit the earth can be read as a vision of planetary ecological complexity as the goal of peace and justice. The meek are contrasted to the arrogant, who insist a partial vision is absolute. For the meek, humility and modesty and respect provide a basis for scientific method as the basis of dialogue about truth. I find this valuable as a vision of a real potential path of human transformation and liberation towards the construction of a new heaven and new earth, as the apocalypse puts it. For thousands of years before the rise of agriculture, human societies mostly lived in stable harmony with nature. Yes this harmony was not complete, as authors such as Tim Flannery explain. Flannery’s recent book Here on Earth is an excellent explanation of the potential for ecological harmony. For example the destruction of the megafauna led to a new interim stability, which in Australia’s case lasted for nearly 40,000 years.

The things that are least important to the powerful of the world include climate stability, productive soil, human happiness and biodiversity. If we read the Bible as promoting the presence of the divine within nature, as for example in the clear statement at Revelation 11:18 that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth, we have the basis for a scientific spirituality. As Bob Marley put it, there’s a natural mystic blowing through the air. If you listen carefully now you will hear.

J-D

Adding detail to your story is not equivalent to producing evidence for it: in fact, the more details in your story, the greater the need for evidence and the more glaring the lack of it.

Robert Tulip

I am presenting a scientific hypothesis for Christian origins, that Jesus Christ was a mythical hero based on observation of the stars, based on the the specific cosmic myth of the imagined historic reflection of the observed motion of precession of the equinox.

The explanation of the Christ Myth in precession is a direct and coherent claim. I know it is hard to understand for those who are predisposed to reject it out of hand or who are not familiar with the astronomy. The information I have provided does in fact explain the logical coherence and the fit with the available evidence, and there is a lot more evidence that I could add.

I am happy to respond on specifics if something I have said is a stumbling block that readers think needs explanation or revision. But a general comment makes it difficult to see what part of my argument you don't follow, or what alternative you see as superior. If you just say 'all of it' then I would be happy to compare my hypothesis against any rival view. The specific cosmic myth of the imagined historic reflection of the observed precession of the equinox is a more plausible scientific explanation of Christian origin than any other hypothesis.

J-D

If you don't grasp the methodological bankruptcy of detailing a hypothesis without ever attempting to present evidence to support it, then you aren't the only poster I've encountered here like that.

aa5874

Again, you present fallacies.

1. The OT mentions NOTHING about Jesus of Nazareth.

2. The OT mentions NOTHING of Pharisees.

3. The OT does NOT state that the Jews are of their FATHER the Devil who was a Mudrerer.

The Jesus story was fabricated by NON-JEWS by taking Jewish Scripture completely out of context.