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The Christ Myth Theory

Swammer, I think you just showed that Paul Bunyan is actually a very good comparison.
A real man (Fournier) about whom a supernatural powers myth was soon constructed.
 
Rhea said:
Swammer,
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My friends call me Swammi.
Rhea said:
I think you just showed that Paul Bunyan is actually a very good comparison.
A real man (Fournier) about whom a supernatural powers myth was soon constructed.
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IF Fabian Fournier founded a religion (Bunyanism) with 2 billion adherents today, THEN the comparison would be apt.

But did Fournier conduct a 1 to 3-year ministry? Was he famously crucified? All the alleged miracles EXCEPT the Resurrection itself are almost irrelevant to Christianity. (And Resurrection was mainly to give a pleasant reincarnation aspect to the new cult.)

Was Mohammed an important person? Most would say Yes. If we learn that he allegedly moved trees and provided food and water supernaturally do we then demote him, and regard him as Bunyan-like?

Similarly, I don't think the historicity of the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) has ever been challenged. But the Buddhists I ask mostly tell me they believe he could already walk when born, and lotus blossoms bloomed wherever he set his feet. Does this belief mean that we should demote the historic Siddhartha to be just a "Bunyan-like myth"?
 
Swammerdami said:
Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified circa 30-33 AD...
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  • Greek pathós (παθός) —someone who experienced or underwent something, e.g. an agony (a word originally meaning: competition, battle, etc.—i.e. a hero's journey).
Paul says that Jesus, in obedience (FAITH) to first-god, relinquished the perfection of he heavenly realm and humbled himself. The message is that Jesus suffered and that for those with FAITH—the dead do not die per se.

But only 🍭 types read "Jesus of Nazareth was crucified circa 30-33 AD" in agony (in the modern sense of the word) from Paul. Who never claims Jesus felt pain, mental dread, etc..

  • Passion: to carry or bear a burden​

Cognate with patience.

GPT AI opines, "The Gospels depict Jesus expressing emotions like grief, anger, and compassion, indicating a range of human experiences."

But the question is what emotions does Paul attribute to Jesus!

Should one read into Paul's death of Jesus—the literary "teerz and feelz" that gMark imparts.
 
🍭 types read "Jesus of Nazareth was crucified circa 30-33 AD" in agony (in the modern sense of the word) from Paul. Who never claims Jesus felt pain, mental dread, James Deanian teenage-angst , etc..

🍭 types are blind and think Carrier's Bayesian framework is soft and mushy. View attachment 40055
 
Interesting.

AI is being taken as 'the gospel truth'.

The original ST was prophetic. Morality defined by a machine intelligence.

Is something good or bad, or right and wrong? Ask the AI.

I can see it coming. An AI that learns the bible and decides moral issues.

How people turn to and quote AI demonstrates how Christmas came to quote the bible as an authority
 
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steve_bank said:
Is something good or bad, or right and wrong? Ask the AI.
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Chomsky’s model of the human language faculty—the part of the mind responsible for the acquisition and use of language—has evolved from a complex system of rules for generating sentences to a more computationally elegant system that consists essentially of just constrained recursion (the ability of a function to apply itself repeatedly to its own output).
"Noam Chomsky". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 17 December 2023.
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  • Given: Humans (on a bell curve) have a hardwired (innate): morality engine and a language engine.
If the input data to our hardwired morality engine is selected/filtered. Then there is not much difference between AI, Big Brother, or religious dogma. But AI has the potential to be much worse, much like the simplified version of English ("Newspeak") that was created to fit with the ideas of Ingsoc.

I am not sure that anything is "authentic" per se when it comes to religion and morality. It is possible that we selectively supply "input data" to the next generation's hardwired morality engine via selective "proper" literature and history; "dogmatic" facts; folktales; mythology; memes; etc..

As far as evolutionary psychology is concerned, all that matters is inferior and superior optimizations for survival and reproduction at different granularity levels viz. species/in-out groups/kinship/individual-idiosyncrasy, etc. which are all susceptible to Nash equilibrium and other game theory rules that alter optimization factors in the short/long term survival and reproduction of the human species.
 
What is morality is a philosophy thread.

The 10 Commandments IMO without the god aspect were tribal rules to maintain order and minimize violence.

We see the social loss of civility manifest the chaos in congress and the consequences of Trump.

Or China refusing to abide by rues of international order on the seas,

Drug addiction and mental in perspiration to the mew relaxing of social order. Anything goes.
 
Linssen plumps for the hypothesis that later cultus members—not the original devotees of the ΙS ΧS cult—invented Paul and attributed to Marcion the collection of the Pauline epistles.
The various uses of Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ and Christ Jesus raise the question of the exact context in which each is used, and which one(s) came prior to the other(s). A close study of the earliest Christian manuscripts, however, shows that they don't contain a Jesus or Christ at all, only the short forms ΙΣ and ΧΣ (and as such, also ΙΣ ΧΣ as well as ΧΣ ΙΣ). Neither is explained what these mean, and when they are assumed to be an abbreviation, there is more than merely one possibility; while there is one word assumed to be the word of choice, there is also another one that is almost identical. A thorough and extensive statistical analysis of all the books of the Bible will answer the question: what does that mysterious ΧΣ stand for, χριστός or χρηστός? The first word means 'anointed' in Greek, the second means 'good', and it is widely assumed that Jesus Christ is the Anointed - yet even that word does not appear anywhere in the New Testament, neither in the Epistles nor in the Gospels. Most surprisingly however, the word exists in great abundance in the Old Testament. While it is unanimously assumed, by laymen as well as scholars, that the chronological order of writings consists of the Old Testament, followed by the New Testament, such would certainly suggest that the order is the exact opposite. The same statistical analysis also reveals most surprising finds in the Epistles, which in turn initiate an entirely new search, that evolves and unfolds entirely in Egypt - where the true origins of this mysterious ΧΣ are found: a largely spiritual movement that was about a Good Jesus, a χρηστός ΙΣ. Not only is the Christian Bible subjected to close scrutiny, but the findings are also compared with and verified against the oldest and earliest manuscripts such as Codex Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and Vaticanus, as well as individual and fragmentary papyri. The earliest Patristics are called to the stand, e.g. Justin Martyr, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, and also less subjective witnesses such as the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius. Last and most certainly not least, all of the Nag Hammadi Library is unearthed - again - and deeply buried secrets are brought to light. This all-embracing book upsets many centuries of Bible studies: on the basis of concisely summarized research results that are presented in a transparent manner, possible solutions are offered for the repeatedly surprising and unexpected facts, the most plausible conclusion of which consistently points in a direction that is strongly at odds with the dogma of the Church. The Christian source texts themselves, the so-called Church Fathers and the so-called apocryphal writings all confirm the shocking conclusion: Jesus Christ, the Anointed, the Messiah, has no original existence whatsoever, and that carefully fabricated concept dates from centuries later. All of Christianity started out as a counter reaction to Chrestianity, and it was an organised move, orchestrated by Roman rulers. The entire trajectory from beginning to end is laid out, from the very first source text to the very last Christian texts, including dating, motivating why one text was created in response to another,
--Linssen, Martijn (December 24, 2023). "Gospels, Epistles, Old Testament - The order of books according to Jesus Christ". Academia.edu.
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From the Oxford bible commentary in the day it was common for those in a group to write in the name of the top guy.
 
steve_bank said:
From the Oxford bible commentary in the day it was common for those in a group to write in the name of the top guy.
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Which tells us that a "composite" Jesus is a composition of not only alleged events and characters but also writers, including scribes. Our modern concept of plagiarism is an anachronism. It was normal and acceptable to use other writings and ideas to create one's own.

The more I consider how discussion of a "historical" Jesus has come about the more I am convinced that the emotional Jesus and the "historical" Jesus are the same thing. If that isn't true then there should be many mainstream Jesus historians making the statement that the biblical, gospel Jesus is fiction. Those scholars should then proceed to tell us how the fiction arrived from actual evidence, not unlike the same entertaining reading and moviegoing we do today. But they do not because that is absolutely taboo.
 
Look at how russia, or any country, skews the story. Russia is the savior of Europe. Then that leads us to a godlike figure as heading the storyline. Poof ... Allah be praised. Peace upon him and death to the rest of us.
 
SIB said:
Look at how russia, or any country, skews the story. Russia is the savior of Europe. Then that leads us to a godlike figure as heading the storyline. Poof ... Allah be praised. Peace upon him and death to the rest of us.
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We have our own myths.

Biden recites the 'US is the st powerful in history' myth, ignoring Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

And we are at it again tyring to bomb our way out of the shipping crisisby bombing Yemen.
 
T.G.G. Moogly said:
steve_bank said:
From the Oxford bible commentary in the day it was common for those in a group to write in the name of the top guy.
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Which tells us that a "composite" Jesus is a composition of not only alleged events and characters but also writers, including scribes. Our modern concept of plagiarism is an anachronism. It was normal and acceptable to use other writings and ideas to create one's own.

The more I consider how discussion of a "historical" Jesus has come about the more I am convinced that the emotional Jesus and the "historical" Jesus are the same thing. If that isn't true then there should be many mainstream Jesus historians making the statement that the biblical, gospel Jesus is fiction. Those scholars should then proceed to tell us how the fiction arrived from actual evidence, not unlike the same entertaining reading and moviegoing we do today. But they do not because that is absolutely taboo.
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I agree. Scribes who copied writings over for a living would have inevitably added or shaded things.

The more modern New Revised Standard Version bible softened the misogyny and raised the ire of some Christians. The King James version suited the royal politics.

Christians the thees and thous for some reason.

After all the long debates on the forum and from what I read my view is we have no idea who an HJ may have been.


I have been watching some of the old western I grew up watching n the 50s on TV. May actors played Wyatt arap and Billy The kid. What you get is fictional dialogue and who he actor is. Errol Flynn played Custer.

I recently watched the old movie Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and Richard Burton as Marc Anthony. I giggled through the whole thing. What you get is Taylor showing skin, hot stuff in the day, and Burton flirting. Yet people in my generation formed a view based on the movie. Same with 10 Commandants. Completely fictional yet an image to Christians. A stoic wooden Moses.
 
steve_bank said:
I agree. Scribes who copied writings over for a living would have inevitably added or shaded things.

The more modern New Revised Standard Version bible softened the misogyny and raised the ire of some Christians. The King James version suited the royal politics.
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The KJV is a pretty good analog. Came about just like the original, lots of input from many diverse sources all working to come up with something that garnered royal acceptance. With regards to what became the bible, what happened in Constantinian Rome is the same thing that happened in Jacobean England.
 
I am not an expert on the Bible, nor do I play one on TikTok. BUT my understanding is that the New Testament's text has undergone relatively few major changes during translations and edits over the many centuries. Am I wrong? If so, would someone please point to the specific major changes the text has undergone? Few of us can read Greek, but large hordes of scholars who do read Greeks have studied the earliest surviving texts and written thousands of papers on the topic. The conclusion IIUC is that major changes did NOT and COULD not occur.

Wikipedia has a huge list of  Textual variants in the New Testament.
It also has a  List_of_New_Testament_verses_not_included_in_modern_English_translations#The_sixteen_omitted_verses

This question was discussed recently in another thread
Swammerdami said:
The argument quoted in the previous post is very interesting -- that because there were no central scriptorums, it would have been difficult to erase all evidence of alternate texts.

Josephus allegedly wrote "Jesus ... was the Messiah," a very unlikely thing for a non-Christian to write. It is widely agreed that this was an interpolation by a Christian copyist. Perhaps this was after Constantine, and the copyist updated the master copy in Rome. Papyrus is so fragile that only copies made after the pro-Christian interpolation have survived. Christian literature, on the other hand, was "subversive" and no central authority or scriptorum was possible. A major change, like the "was the Messiah" addition to Josephus, wouldn't be possible.

Papyrus is VERY fragile. Almost all the most ancient papyri (including afore-mentioned Gospel fragments) were found in arid desert, specifically in Egypt.

The quantity of early Christian literature which has turned up, despite papyrus' fragility, is testimony to how fast Christianity spread.
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What am I missing? What are the major changes to the New Testament introduced by, e.g., the KJV?

NOTE: I am NOT asking whether the Gospels are fact or fiction. I'm just curious about any major changes introduced to New Testament text over the centuries.
 
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