The one thing that sticks in my mind is not that Jesus was not a real person ,but why didn’t his close friends, or family believe him when he said he would come back to life in 3 days. They were surprised that they heard he was alive, also the women went to anoint a dead body.
Because the disciples were inept.
In the face of miracles they still asked Jesus who he was and found it hard to accept him at every turn.
No great surprise that they didn’t think he would rise from the dead and were sceptical about it when they saw him - hence him having to eat fish and let Thomas poke his wounds to prove it. It continued the theme of him not being accepted.
As for anointing the dead body, is it not thought that was to finish the process properly because he hadn’t had his proper death rites as he got buried on the Sabbath??
You asked, in your OP, Was Jesus Real or a Myth?
I answered that question.
Somehow you are intent on bending this into an argument regarding whether Christianity is in decline, while stating you don’t want to discuss whether Christianity is in decline. This makes your posts seem rather insincere to me. Therefore, have a nice thread, I’m out.
I don’t see anything necessarily contradictory at all about these two statements. Maybe it’s as simple as understanding the difference between correlation and causation: the first statement claims that works don’t cause salvation, the second that works correlate with salvation.
One the reasons why I think the Jesus myths have at least a basis on one or maybe more than one historical people, are the nativity narratives. Why would the writers go to such lengths (making up a census, making up the slaughter of innocents) to put a mythological Jesus in Bethlehem? Why not just have him be born there, period?
He was probably known to have come from Nazareth and they needed a narrative to make him fit the prophecies.
As are Moses and Noah if you’re going to put much credence into asking adherents of those belief systems.
It makes for a better story.
That’s a pretty succinct and accurate portrait of how things would have been in Jesus’ time before the destruction in 70 AD. Which is why the story in all four gospels of Jesus going into the temple square and making a whip of cords and overturning the moneychangers’ tables and scourging them is so delightfully dramatic and makes for a good read but is wildly impossible to pull off. The outer court of the temple was about six football fields large and would have been littered with Roman guards to keep peace. Now imagine Jesus bursting in and causing the havoc and the guards not doing a thing to stop Jesus. :eek:
Now I want you to imagine a scene somewhere in Greece or elsewhere outside Israel. It is 80-100 AD and the temple has been destroyed. A literate educated Greek scholar has heard stories of some rabbi named Jeshua and wants to write a Greek tragedy about him. He knows of an OT passage “Zeal for Thine house hath eaten me up”. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to him but he figures constructing a dramatic scene of someone bursting into the temple and causing havoc would make for good drama so he invents this story and wraps the verse, Psalm 69:9 around it to make it look like a prophecy has been fulfilled, "Then his disciples remembered the psalm, “Zeal yada yada and thus was fulfilled the prophecy”. :smack:
So who’s going to contradict you? It’s like you have a free license to create a character like James Bond and write of all these exploits and claim it’s all based on the life of a real person. In reality, it is a “License not to Kill, but to Fabricate”. :dubious: And that’s what all the writers of these 50 or so gospels and probably 100’s of others that are lost did with impunity.
It boils down to going either with Paul, “You are saved by faith alone” or Jesus and James, “You are saved by faith and good works”. They are not compatible. It’s one or the other. If I had to sort through the kitty litter and pick one I’d go with Jesus and James.
Which I will also back with a question: if Moses actually led 3 millions Hebrews through the Sinai for 40 years don’t you think archeologists would have uncovered at least some evidence they were out there? But no archeologists has uncovered the slightest shred of evidence any number of Hebrews were ever in the Sinai at any time.
Now just that alone should invalidate the Bible as the inerrant word of God. And for most logical-thinking people it would. But somehow over a billion Christians swear on their lives that every word found in it is God’s Spirit-inspired Word.
I just don’t get it. :smack:
I mean I was one of these fundamentalists at one time but I used the Internet to educate myself and started to realize what a crock it all was. And more and more of the 18-30 college-educated crowd are coming to the same conclusion. But what about the other billion people who can’t see the evidence? :eek:
Delusion is one of the most powerful forces n the universe.
David was born in Bethlehem (the reason his successor the Messiah was supposed to be) and his story was pretty good.
I accept the existence of Jesus because I’m not aware of many instances of people back then making up characters from whole cloth, as opposed to elaborating on characters from myths and legends. However making up heroic deeds and background for real people was very common.
Shouldn’t the onus really should be on proving Jesus did exist? We have this fantastic story with very little written evidence, and no physical evidence at all.
The only evidence for Jesus being a real person aside from the Gospels themselves are Paul’s letters and a couple questionable references from Josephus and Tacitus, both of which were written decades letter. It seems to me like Paul made up Jesus as a mouthpiece for his own beliefs.
People might retort that we should use Occam’s Razor and that characters like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great are just as hard to prove as Jesus but I completely disagree. Coins were made with those men’s faces on them during their own lifetimes and we have an enormous amount of evidence about the ancient Roman emperors. They also built structures in the city of Rome that still exist if I’m not mistaken. We don’t have any kind of firm evidence like that for Jesus. Even Socrates who wrote nothing is far more “proven” to exist than Christ.
Nobody wrote anything about Jesus during his lifetime. We have no written evidence he existed until well after he died, and zero physical evidence he existed at all. Not to mention a lot of the things in the Gospels don’t make sense like the fact Jesus is said to have been born during 6 AD yet also during Herod’s time, who couldn’t have died any later than 1 BC. Nazareth also didn’t exist as a city until a few generations after Jesus.
And no the existence of Pilate and John the Baptist doesn’t prove Jesus wasn’t a historical fiction any more than Gone With The Wind’s Civil War setting proving Scarlett O’Hara was a real person.
The quotes by Josephus and Tacitus don’t prove Jesus was real, all they prove is that they were aware that certain people believed he was real. The fact martyrs were willing to die for Christianity so early on doesn’t prove Jesus any more than the Heaven’s Gate suicides prove that belief system.
While I can certainly understand disagreeing with the Christ myth theory (I’m not totally sold on it myself) I don’t get why academia treats it as a flat earth theory, I don’t think it’s fair to put Richard Carrier etc in the same category as people who deny the Holocaust or think AIDS is made up. Until we find Jesus’s grave or a contemporary account of his life written by someone who actually knew him personally I don’t think we can say the Christ myth theory is ridiculous or impossible even if we lean more towards a historical Jesus. Unless more evidence of Christ’s historical existence surfaces in the future.
Lastly, I don’t feel like the criterion of embarrassment is a big deal either. In fact the drama of the crucifixion if anything makes me lean more towards thinking the Gospels are a fiction.
“The question is abusive and flagrantly leading.”–E. G. Marshall
I wonder why no-one has addressed these questions before.
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A mythological Jesus is one of the few ways to explain why all the events portrayed in his life via the gospels can be found in Old Testament stories e.g. slaughter of the innocents and fleeing to Egypt being a retelling of the Moses legend
[/quote]
You say all the events portrayed in Christ’s life can be found in Old Testament stories. You are, I presume, aware that there are more events in Christ’s life than merely the slaughter of the innocents and the flight to Egypt. What’s your source for the claim that all the events in Christ’s life can be found in the Old Testament? Can his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well be found in the Old Testament? Or the wedding at Cana? The cursing of the fig tree? Identifying Zecchaeus?
In plain fact no event Jesus’s life can be found in the Old Testament. Some New Testament stories are similar to Old Testament stories, such as the slaughter of the innocents and Pharaoh’s slaughter of the Hebrew children. That’s obviously quite different from saying that the New Testament stories can be found in the Old Testament.
Where in the Odyssey would I find this story?
Exactly what mythological source should I read to find Osiris/Horus dying/rising, having a virgin birth, having 12 disciples, turning water into wine, and appearing to disciples after a resurrection? What about Mithras? Or Dionysus, Romulus, Hercules, Krishna, and the dozen others? Can you actually tell me where I would find such things in the mythological texts?
Frankly what you’re saying here is just a bunch of internet crap that you apparently fell for hook, line, and sinker.
Can you name the theologians who said this and give the titles of the works in which they did so?
The long history of religion, the million religions mankind has invented, shows that nothing about religion is rational including the discussion of religion. Why are you insisting on rational behavior about questions of belief and self-investment? Why isn’t the onus on you to show that there can be a rational discussion? Why will the mods move this from GQ when I already gave a factual answer? Why is there air?
First of all, why discount the gospels as sources?
Second, you’re omitting some pieces of evidence, like the Alexamenos graffito and the James Ossuary.
Third, just how much evidence would you expect to exist? Yes, we have more evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar, but how many other people from that era are better-attested than Jesus?
Nonsense! We’ve been building mangers to document the life of Jesus for 2000 years now. Therefore, Jesus existed. 
OP stay away from the Zeitgeist stuff. It’s shamefully dishonest, to the point of mere fabrication.
There is a legitimate debate over the historicity of Jesus, but parallels to Horus and ISIS and all that are simply not historically defensible. The most intriguing parallels are to the pagan god Mithras, whose followers were contemporaneous with the early Christians.
The generally-accepted secular view of Jesus is that he was a real man who was killed, and that the supernatural or otherwise prophetic incidents were later added or embellished to make Christianity more appealing as it spread throughout Rome.
Don’t know how long this will stay in GQ, but…
I’m not religious, but I don’t think Christianity as a religion is a bad thing. In light of recent times I think it’s one of the few major religious belief that will realistically fit into modern times.
Anyway, I think it’s only the resurrection part of the story that comes into question. There not being any physical proof for a man who lived a not too lengthy life 2000 years ago doesn’t seem difficult to accept. In fact, the idea that such a tremendously influential belief system came to pass without, at the very least, the man actually existing seems harder to believe to me. I know you don’t normally start out with an assumption and then try to prove a negative, but this isn’t a scientific theory, it’s a social one. Cecil wrote a column regarding why Christianity caught on so well. Now on one hand you could say that this alone was the reason, and the ‘Christ the man’ part was simply invented & believed because people wanted the rest of it to work.
But if you’ve ever seen Python’s Life of Brian you’ll know that lots of people were proselytizing things back then. So again, I think that *actually existing *would be a minimum requirement for a ‘grassroots campaign’ (if you will) to take hold.
Sorry if my reply is more IMHO material…