The metaphors may not have been presented as anything more than that originally, and later mistaken for factual accounts.
Using a time machine you go back to find the historical Jesus. What do you think you'll really find?
Sure, but it leads down a very slippery slope for people who want to claim at least some of the Bible is fact-based or actual fact.
We cannot possibly know which bits were supposed to be metaphor and which bits weren’t.
I wasn’t trying to dismiss inconvenient facts as metaphor, and I don’t think Paul was writing metaphorically.
I just threw it out there for completeness.
Another one, just for the sake of completeness: Jesus was not the risen son of God; he just never died. The soldiers crucified him, and a little while later they thought he was dead. They took him down (which was an exception to the rule, if it happened), his friends put him in a tomb, and he got better. Maybe he thought he was resurrected; maybe he realized they just misdiagnosed him. Anyway, he showed up to let close followers know he was ok, and took off because it was dangerous to be a supposedly dead guy in Jerusalem.
Later Paul met him, after the story of the guy that survived crucifixion grew out of control.
Why did Joseph Smith do it? He was persecuted, and, in fact, got lynched for it. Why did David Koresh do it?
There is no actual historical evidence that Paul was martyred.
Robert M. Price, a New Testament scholar and a member of the Jesus Seminar, thinks that Paul never really existed at all and is a fictive character based on Simon Magus.
I agree. It’s been my point here. We have no credible evidence of the existence of biblical events yet people seem to justify their belief with the idea that ‘so many people believe it, so it must be true’. That is not evidence of something existing. And like so much history there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. I don’t have a problem with people who believe these things based on faith. My problem comes with people who insist they are true based on the facts.
Well, Price is just whack. I bet he doesn’t even really believe that; he was just trying to impress some chick in a bar or something.
I haven’t seen that line of reasoning presented at all in this thread.
I don’t think he was referring to this thread…or at least I didn’t read it as such.
It is a common meme though.
I didn’t intend that to refer to anyone in this thread. It was a general statement. I apologize if anyone who posted here felt it was directed at them.
Well, he’s got two Doctorates (New testament and Theology), so if he’s a whack, he’s an educated whack.
They’re the most entertaining kind.
He believes in Cthulhu. :eek:
But not Jesus- until “someone discovers his diary or his skeleton”. :rolleyes:
Oh man, if only you are the first person to have thought of that. I give you John Allegro, the author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
Believes or writes stories?
There’s a difference.
No he doesn’t. He’s just a big Lovecraft fan. He’s also a Robert E Howard fan and comic book fan. If you saw him say anywhere he believed in Cthulhu, he was joking.
He’s written Conan stories too. He’s just a fanboy. He’s very clear in his serious books that he does not hold to any supernatural beliefs, and he’s very active in atheist/skeptic groups.
I see that Price’s wiki page says “he has written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos,” which is true, but he writes about it as literature, not as any kind of real belief system.
He writes a lot about the creation of myths and is fascinated by what he sees as modern mythmaking in pop culture.
Typology, as it pertains to Christian mythology, is one of the things he writes the most about. He uses superheroes, in particular, as an analogy to the “dying and rising gods” motifs in ancient mythology. He says Christian defenders employ a lot of special pleading when these parallels are brought out and that they they point to this or that feature which they say is unique. Price basically says that’s the same as saying a given supehero isn’t really part of the “superhero genre,” because he has some trait or back story that no other superhero does. “None of those other superheroes have spider powers, therefore Spider-Man isn’t a superhero but a unique creation.”
It’s not just Paul. It’s Paul and Peter and Matthew and Mark and Luke and John and James and Thomas and Andrew and Philip and Bartholomew and Thaddeus and the hundreds of other people who supposedly knew Jesus during his lifetime. Because when these guys were writing back and forth, nobody ever said, “Whoa, who’s this Jesus you’re talking about? I don’t remember there being anybody named Jesus hanging out with us.” This people all seemed to accept that Jesus was somebody they had known.
Is it really plausible that all of these hundreds of people suffered under the same delusion that they knew a person named Jesus? They were all just walking around as a crowd having conversations with somebody who wasn’t there?
Or did they all get together and decide to pretend they had known a guy named Jesus? As a prank or a conspiracy or a con job.
Or was Jesus just a real person that they actually had known? A normal human being who walked around in Judea, preached to some crowds, and then was arrested and executed by the Romans.
Did a bunch of magical myths later get attached to the name of Jesus? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus himself was a myth.
Compare Jesus to L. Ron Hubbard. There’s a bunch of people who think Hubbard had supernatural knowledge. Are those people deluded about the supernatural knowledge? Yes. Are they lying about the supernatural knowledge? Probably.
But when you dismiss the supernatural knowledge do you also dismiss any claims that L. Ron Hubbard existed? That if Hubbard wasn’t divinely inspired, he couldn’t have existed at all? If Scientologists are wrong about Xenu and thetans being real, they must be wrong about Hubbard being real as well.
Well, except these guys didn’t write. Hardly anybody did. Paper was a scarce commodity. That’s why I keep fixating on Paul. He didn’t meet Jesus himself, but he wrote a lot. And Mark Price be damned, his own writing is better evidence that he lived than all but maybe a dozen people from that time.
And the guys that wrote the gospels…were not among the twelve. They wrote long after Jesus died - “Mark” first, then “Matthew” and “Luke,” and then John, who I suspect was visiting with Jesus through the aid of mushrooms.
But “Luke” also wrote Acts, and switches to first-person narrative for sections where Paul is traveling by boat. Paul himself claims to be personally acquainted with Barnabas and Peter (Cephas, “the rock”) and James, brother of Jesus. Those guys *did *know Jesus. It wasn’t a ‘in the days of yore’ story. It was ‘yeah, he was my brother.’ ‘Yeah, he nicknamed me “the rock.”’ ‘Yeah, he…well, he didn’t make me one of the twelve, but I was real close to it. Like 14th, tops.’
We have no writings at all from any of these people, no idea what they believed about Jesus and no real evidence that most of them ever existed at all.
Many of the Apostles are only names on a list. I can make a list of names and say they were witnesses to something.
Plus, none of those guys were around wherever Paul was preaching. Paul himself says they didn’t believe the same things he did, and there is little likelihood of any written correspondence since Paul would have been the only one of them who was literate in Greek (or literate at all).
Most scholars say that the The Apostle John was the primary source for the Gospel of John. But yes, he didnt put stylus to parchment to write it himself. John was a very old man then, however.