Review finds no mention of Christ in ancient texts

[Sage_Rat]

@Peter_Morris

I’d certainly complain if you stated without evidence that Joseph Smith’s mother was a prostitute.

I stated what we knew about the time and place. You decided that she was a prostitute, based on that information.

[Sage_Rat]

@tomndebb

Defending it and your snide closing remark, while pretending that you are fighting ignorance, is just silly.

I presented the information and said what that leads me to find the most likely.

The Bible suggests that she was pregnant when she was married, that Joseph wasn’t the father of Jesus, and that Jesus’ father is effectively unknowable. The Bible isn’t really consistent enough to take any of those as being true, but assuming that any of them are founded in anything and removing magic and fantasy from the tale, we’re looking at a woman who lived on her own in Nazareth and/or had a sex life beyond the one with Joseph.

Whatever town there might have been was so slight as to leave no record of its existence, but it was very near to a major city that was being reconstructed and Jesus’ father was a tekton (builder), and Jesus learned to be one as well.

Jesus left Nazareth and spent the rest of his life living among tax collectors, prostitutes, and lepers for the rest of his days, fighting on the behalf of the poor, uneducated, and loathed, trying to gain acceptance for them. Based on his teachings, one wouldn’t expect his followers to think poorly of Mary, if she had been a prostitute.

[tomndebb]

@Sage_Rat

I presented the information and said what that leads me to find the most likely.

Along with some speculation and innuendo.

@Sage_Rat

The Bible suggests that she was pregnant when she was married, that Joseph wasn’t the father of Jesus, and that Jesus’ father is effectively unknowable. The Bible isn’t really consistent enough to take any of those as being true, but assuming that any of them are founded in anything and removing magic and fantasy from the tale, we’re looking at a woman who lived on her own in Nazareth and/or had a sex life beyond the one with Joseph.

Whatever town there might have been was so slight as to leave no record of its existence, but it was very near to a major city that was being reconstructed and Jesus’ father was a tekton (builder), and Jesus learned to be one as well.

Jesus left Nazareth and spent the rest of his life living among tax collectors, prostitutes, and lepers for the rest of his days, fighting on the behalf of the poor, uneducated, and loathed, trying to gain acceptance for them. Based on his teachings, one wouldn’t expect his followers to think poorly of Mary, if she had been a prostitute.

You say that the bible is not sufficiently consistent to know what happened, then you draw a conclusion after your own desires. For example, your unsupported claim that most citizens of Nazareth were male seems to have disappeared. Making Mary a prostitute is not even a new insult, by the way. Anti-Christian writers were throwing that around in the late second century.

I have no idea how much of any of the Gospel stories have any facts in them. Your disingenuous claims that you were just trying to fight ignorance still lack any persuasive element.
You can pursue this line of speculation. It would just be more seemly if you were honest about your intent.

[monavis]

@Hector_St_Clare

Catholics, Orthodox, and many Anglicans (myself included) share the belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity. We don’t think the term is ‘figurative’, per se, rather we think it’s being used to indicate some other kind of familial relationship. The Eastern Orthodox tend to think of the so-called ‘brothers’ of Jesus as being sons of Joseph from a previous marriage (i.e. stepbrothers), Catholics tend to interpret them as cousins.

For what it’s worth, Aramaic lacks a term for ‘cousin’, and commonly refers to first cousins as brothers or sisters. It’s quite probable that the evangelists adopted the same idiom when they were writing in Greek, even though Greek has a word for ‘cousin’: even if they were writing in Greek, they were presumably thinking in Aramaic. In the same way, my family’s mother tongue lacks a word for ‘cousin’, and we refer to cousins as brothers or sisters (unless we use circumlocutions like ‘son of my uncle’): so when my mother, for example, is referring to her first cousins when speaking English, she calls them her brothers or sisters.

Didn’t Mary after learning of her being with child (Jesus) visit her" Cousin" Elizabeth; hence the quote that Elizabeth said to Mary at her greeting?

[Kobal2]

@Dr.Drake

I’m pretty sure that Muhammad’s book is pretty solid contemporary evidence of his existence. Again, you may doubt what the author says about himself, and about his religion, but that’s a separate matter.

Actually the book itself is posthumous - it was put to paper by caliph Abu Bakr a few years after the Prophet had joined the choir invisible.

Of course, Abu’d been in the wars with the guy and was in fact Muhammad’s father-in-law, so I suspect he had access to legit first-hand evidence pointing to the existence of Muhammad :D.

Fake ETA : fuck, ninja’d