There’s not even any compelling reason to believe that a historical person akin to the New Testament’s Jesus – even assuming he existed (which is far more doubtful than even many critical scholars are inclined to publicly admit) – said or did any of the things claimed by the NT.
In any case, you can find all of the moral teachings attributed to Jesus, including any “moral imperative” that I’m aware of, in the words of plenty of other earlier moral teachers, religious and secular. For just one example, the wandering Cynic philosophers of the time and location of the alleged events of the NT’s Jesus taught much the same moral lessons and imperitives, and often in highly similar language. There’s ample reason to believe that the creators of the surmised “sayings” document “Q” simply collected the saying of these Cynics and numerous previous moral teachers, whereupon the evangelists used “Q” to help mythicalize a “Jesus” as the putative mouthpiece of these collected sayings.
I clicked on the www link in rjung’s post, and found links to atheist evangelism sites, among which an essay titled Should We Admire Jesus? can be found. This essay argues that claims of Jesus’s unsurpassed moral character are not supported by the evidence of the gospels.
amore’s link title reminded me of the classic Lolo thread - Jesus: I’m not impressed, so I just had to look it up and re-aquaint myself with our dearly departed friend…
grimpixie- there are other Torah laws however which mandate helping one’s personal enemy when in distress, and which urge Israelites not to oppress “strangers”, Egyptians & Edomites, the latter two of which Israelites has reasons to hold grudges against.
Ambushed, you apparently have more faith in the existence of Q rather than that of Jesus. As tenuous as the evidence for JC existing may or may not be. it definitely outranks the evidence for Q, which was a theoretical construct proposed by German higher critics of the Bible, not a actual document anyone had ever seen or heard of.
What direct evidence is there that this “Q” ever actually existed?
If one must reject the existence of Christ on the basis of insufficient direct evidence, then one should be even more inclined to reject the existence of “Q”.
The greatest man of all time is and was Jesus. The message of Jesus was and is the most divinely inspired notion ever to be realized by the mind of men. Divine, in-as-much as Jesus, through great material insight, came to understand that nothing in this world of being or non-being matters but love. Simple unadulterated love. The love of being rather than the love of non-being.
But that’s not what he’s saying. He didn’t conclusively say “there was no Christ”; he said that the evidence suggests that the Christ that is portrayed in the Bible is likely an amalgamation of various stories that were circulating at the time. Whether Christ was a real person or whether Q was a real source are both beside the point. The point is that it’s unlikely that one single person named Christ said and did all the things attributed to him.
Very much like Arthurian myth, a personal obsession of mine.
In fact, the similarities between Arthur and Christ, as figures, are remarkable. Obviously, one inspired a much more devoted following than the other, but both share many basic similarities. For example, though Arthur is seen as much more “human” than Christ is, both have many more acts attributed to them than any one person could accomplish.
I’ve often thought that Christ and Arthur have a similar lineage: both were real figures in history, inspirational in their lifetime but even moreso after they died. The histories of both have been embellished, by now, to the point that their original character is unrecognizable.
I just returned that book to the library, otherwise I would be able to cite several examples of Jesus’s words in the Gospels that were lifted directly from the Isis-Osiris mystery religion of Egypt.
Whoa, guys! I don’t hold anything even approaching a strong opinion defending the existence of “Q”! I consider it a fairly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s widely accepted by even critical biblical scholars, but I, too, have my doubts about it’s existence and never meant to suggest otherwise.
Jesus taught spiritual principles in His own knowledge of them. Nothing He taught was “new” in concept, but He probably worded the principles different than others. Master teachers of these principles have always been around since recorded history. Most of the major religions had their beginning from the words of these teachers.
