120 Reasons to Reject Christianity

[Atheos]

You can cite virtually nothing from earlier pagan sources showing a causal connection to anything in the "Jesus myth" (except some silly nonsense like the date of December 25, etc., which no time should be wasted on). Again, you derive this notion mainly from modern Jesus-debunker promoters, not from a comparison of the gospel accounts to earlier pagan accounts. To make this comparison, you must do what you have not done yet: dig out those pagan accounts and quote the earlier text (not modern-day Jesus-debunkers paraphrasing or spinning the text for you) to show the similarity between these and the gospel accounts of the Jesus miracles acts.

I've presented this information in-thread at least twice now and it has gone ignored. I'm not going to waste my time going back and figuring out where I posted it, but suffice it to say that the Theogeny of Hesiod is a well-known ancient manuscript (8 centuries earlier than the first mentionings of the Jesus myth) which talks about many of the doings of the various Greek gods.

Taking Promethus as but one example, we have the following:

• A god-man who was born of a woman (Clymene) impregnated by a god (Iapetus).
• Said god-man brought a gift to humans they could never otherwise get for themselves (fire)
• Said god-man suffered for giving this gift to humans (Chained to a mountain where an eagle would eat his liver every day. Every night his liver would regenerate.)
• Said god-man suffered this agony for many years
• Said god-man was delivered from this agony by Hercules, who killed the eagle and destroyed the chains

The motif of a god-man being a suffering benefactor for humankind is a common one in Greek literature. It is no surprise that as the Jewish monotheist tradition became immersed in the Greek (and later Roman) cultures that such a tale would emerge.

So when I appeal to Justin Martyr's quote I do so with good evidence to back it up.

When you appeal to Texas Sharpshooter fallacies to present an argument you do so with absolutely nothing to back it up.

Go ahead. Bluff again.

 

[Harry Bosch]

(continued)



There are virtually no parts of the "Jesus myth" that existed earlier. The gospel writers did not need to have any familiarity with pagan myths in order for them to write their account of Jesus.

Any similarity to earlier myths is so superficial that the real explanation, if we assume myth-making is at work, would be that people in different periods or cultures sometimes come up with similar myths. (Like the many different flood myths, which are so widespread that it's more reasonable to explain them as a result of similar experiences happening in different parts of the world, rather than as having been invented at only one place and then traveling as oral tradition to other places.)

A similar event, real or fictional, occurring at different times is not evidence that the later event was borrowed from the earlier, or dependent on the earlier. In either case we judge if the event is true by the respective evidence for it, not by any similarity to something similar to it from a different time or place.

You can cite virtually nothing from earlier pagan sources showing a causal connection to anything in the "Jesus myth" (except some silly nonsense like the date of December 25, etc., which no time should be wasted on). Again, you derive this notion mainly from modern Jesus-debunker promoters, not from a comparison of the gospel accounts to earlier pagan accounts. To make this comparison, you must do what you have not done yet: dig out those pagan accounts and quote the earlier text (not modern-day Jesus-debunkers paraphrasing or spinning the text for you) to show the similarity between these and the gospel accounts of the Jesus miracles acts.

And your continued reliance on your distortion of the 2nd-century Justin Martyr quote shows your inability to find the real evidence for this theory and indicates that there is no such evidence.

There's plenty of sources, available now, in the early literature before Christ, from which you should be able to find something to show the connection of the "Jesus myth" to the pagan myths. If you continue to not show any such source, then the only conclusion to draw is that they do not exist and that you're basing this entirely on the popular modern Jesus-debunker sensationalist mythicism fad.

. . . for hundreds of years before the Jesus myth started getting traction it's no surprise that the written versions of the story could "quickly" appropriate all those details . . .

"written versions" meaning the gospel accounts? What "details" did they appropriate? "earlier stories" for which there is no evidence? How do you know these stories had existed for "hundreds of years" and yet there's no evidence that they existed at all? So you take it on faith that these early pagan myths existed and which the "Jesus myth" appropriated but for which there is no written evidence?

You're demanding that this be accepted on faith, while you're ignoring the reality of a huge body of earlier sources which should contain something of these "written versions" -- there's no excuse for not producing these earlier written accounts to show the pagan myths from which the gospel writers were able to "appropriate" their "Jesus myth" details.

There has to be something from the period before the "Jesus myth" began in order for a reasonable person to believe these stories, the pagan origins, existed. There are stories in Ovid and Homer and Hesiod and others which provide us with much of the pagan myths. Where is the "Jesus myth" to be found in sources such as these?

Why doesn't anyone ever provide those original or early sources? Why do the mythicists keep drawing these parallels and saying that Jesus is found in earlier figures like Horus and Perseus but they never provide quotes from any early sources to show the parallels?


Earlier pagan god-men living similar lives to Jesus?

Forgeries: Some have suggested that ancient evidence of Pagan god-men living similar lives to Jesus prior to the first century CE is a gigantic hoax. Anti-Christian religious historians and archaeologists have simply created fictional sets of religious beliefs, promoted them as accurate representations of ancient religions, and have perpetrated a massive hoax. This also is unlikely. The original source material is still available for academics to check. Someone by now would have written a book exposing the hoax; it would have become a best-seller.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa1.htm

What is this saying?

"The original source material is still available for academics to check." ? ? ?

What "original source material"? Is this saying that only "academics" have access to this "source material"?

Ordinary people are not allowed to see the evidence? I e-mailed the above publication to ask them directions to the "source material." Here is the response:

from Bruce Robinson: The original source material would come from ancient times. A surprising amount has been recovered from ancient garbage dumps. Other material from ancient graves, and ancient manuscripts which somehow survived. You would need LOTS of money and LOTS of time to tour the major museums in the world to see this material.

Some theologians have used the original material directly or indirectly to write books for general use by the public. Links to two books are shown at the bottom of the essay that you cite.

Kersey Graves, "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors," Adventures Unlimited Press, Chapter 32, Page 279. (1875; Reprinted 2001)

Tom Harpur, "The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light," Walker Books; (2005)

You may be interested in a new essay that I have just finished writing at www.religioustolerance.org/why-is-christmas-on-december-25.htm It contains VERY brief descriptions of 15 Pagan deities whose birthdays were celebrated on DEC-25. It also explains why Jesus could not have been born on Christmas, and the probable Jewish lunar month during Autumn when he was born.

It talks about why the birth date of so many Pagan gods were believed to have been on December 25, and why Jesus' birthday is celebrated also on this day.

There is also an older essay comparing the lives of Jesus and Horus, an Egyptian God. www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa5.htm

To this I inquired further:

So then, are you saying there is nothing published of the original sources, in English translation, available to common folk, to provide the accounts of the earlier Jesus-like pagan heroes?

Do you mean, e.g., that there is nothing in the Loeb Classical Library providing evidence of such pagan hero figures? Nothing from any documents that are published for the general public?

I.e., nothing from Plato or Pythagoras or Herodotus or Homer or Latin authors like Ovid or Cicero or Virgil and so on?

So all the original sources for the Jesus pagan parallels are documents not available?

(no response to the above so far)

Here's another excerpt from this website:

Authors Freke & Gandy have concluded that the original, main Christian movement was Gnostic Christianity. They kept their inner mysteries secret, revealing them only to those who have been initiated into their branch of the Christian faith. Some early non-Gnostic, "literalist" Christians were unaware of the inner mysteries of Gnosticism. They came to accept the Gnostic outer, public, mysteries and their myth of a god-man savior as an actual description of the historical Jesus. The literalist Christians, being ignorant of the inner mysteries, did not realize that the god-man story was only a legend about a mythical being. Decades later, literalist Christianity became the dominant movement. They oppressed and exterminated the Gnostics, their rituals, and their knowledge. A few Gnostics survived to the present day. The movement is currently experiencing rapid growth.

Where is the evidence for any of this, from any original sources? Where is there any document before 1000 AD suggesting suppression of gnostic writings by early Christian zealots? Where is this paranoia coming from? This coverup story is entirely a 20th-century fabrication. We are expected to blindly believe certain alleged experts who supposedly have access to the alleged evidence which is not available to ordinary people?

Again:

The original source material is still available for academics to check. Someone by now would have written a book exposing the hoax; it would have become a best-seller.

So we are supposed to believe this massive Christian conspiracy coverup story, without any real evidence, because those who have access to it can be trusted to expose the truth if it were not so, as they have assured us that this Christian coverup did happen. So if this evidence did not exist, someone would have written a book "exposing the hoax" about the coverup, and that book would have become a best-seller. And that's the proof that there was a massive coverup by Christians to suppress the gnostic beliefs? Other than this, there is no evidence of any such coverup.

So there are two conspiracy coverups that have happened: 1) The suppression of all the pre-Christian Jesus-like pagan heroes, who were the inspiration for the "Jesus myth" of the 1st century AD, and 2) The campaign of early Christians to suppress the gnostics and their mystical non-historical version of the Christ.

We're supposed to believe that both of these Christian coverups happened, though there is no evidence of either coverup having ever happened, because all the evidence proving the coverup is available only to some select mythicist scholars, and these must be telling the truth, about the pagan Jesus-like heroes and about the earliest Christians being gnostics, because if all this was not so, someone would have got rich publishing a book exposing all this as a hoax being perpetrated by these mythicists.

This is similar to the elephant joke: How come we're unable to ever see an elephant hiding in a cherry tree? answer: because elephants paint their toenails red when they hide in a cherry tree. The proof? You've never seen an elephant hiding in a cheery tree, have you? So it must be working.

Likewise, the Christian coverup of the origins of the "Jesus myth" must be working, right? See how they've erased all the evidence of it? No evidence -- that proves how effective the Christian coverup has been!

That's a great argument for a belief for which there is no evidence: the lack of evidence is caused by those on the other side who erased all the evidence. We have no evidence -- which just proves how effective the other side is at shredding the documents and suppressing the evidence!

And so we just have to believe certain wise scholars today who assure us that those pagan Jesus-like god-heroes did exist. They've provided us with some sanitized accounts, for popular consumption today, for the vulgar masses, but only they have access to the real evidence.


The original early source vs. commentary of 21st-century pundits

The unwashed masses cannot have access to the original sources?

How can these not be available in translation? If we can have Homer etc. today in modern translations, why can't we have the documents about the pagan Jesus-like heroes? (or the earliest Christ-believers who were really gnostics?) Is there not anything about those pagan heroes in the thousands of writings that have already been published in several modern languages? Were Plato and Homer and others also part of the massive coverup?

Why is the information about those pre-Jesus miracle god-men not found in any of the literature already available? why only in some inaccessible documents available only to certain select experts?

"Something stinks here!" --Detective Thorn, from the film "Soylent Green"

These claims about Jesus being a derivation from earlier pagan mythology are never accompanied by any quotes from the ancient sources. Until the promoters of these theories provide the original sources for this, the only reasonable conclusion is that they are distorting those original pagan symbols/beliefs to make them fit the Jesus figure in the gospel accounts.

Why do they never give the original accounts of the pagan myths from which Jesus emerged? You can't say the original sources do not exist. We do have accounts about the various gods. At the end of Ovid's Metamorphoses there is a story about Asclepius, the healing god, who is often compared to Jesus, and yet there's no similarity at all between this and Jesus the healer in the gospels.

Asclepius does not heal the sick who are brought to him. And he is already an enshrined god from 1000+ years earlier which is widely worshiped, or whose statue is worshiped, as a healing god.

Where is the healer who comes abruptly on the scene -- not a lifeless statue being carried in a parade -- as Jesus did sometime around 30 AD, out of the blue, with no prior status, no wide reputation, and starts healing people, and soon multitudes are coming to him, or being brought, to be healed? Where is the pagan hero who did something similar and upon which the "Jesus myth" healing miracles are based? The Jesus healings are not about worshipers praying at statues and shrines, which is all the Asclepius stories are about.

Where are those pagan myths/stories that produced Jesus in the 1st century AD? Let's see the text. There's plenty of real text, not just oral tradition. We have Homer -- is that where the evidence is?

Stop pussyfooting around and GIVE THE SOURCE!

(even though 30+ years is plenty of time for legend-building to run amok).

No, there's no known case where a miracle-worker legend developed in 30 years. Not from an original figure who had no already-established repute or status as an important celebrity.

The closest example of a short time gap between the reputed miracle event and the written report of it might be Vespasian, who is credited with a couple healing miracles. This legend was not written until about 50-60 years after the alleged event. However, even if the story was circulating earlier, it can be easily explained as the response to a very powerful emperor with popular appeal and vast reputation. This could lead to early mythologizing of the celebrity figure.

But you cannot name any case of such mythologizing of someone who was a non-celebrity of no recognized status, such as Jesus in 30 AD (unless he really did perform those miracle acts, in which case he might have become recognized that early).

Others have pointed out the extreme amount of disagreement over what (if anything) Jesus did as a human being, and the decision was made by the council of Nicea (circa 325 AD) to summarily pronounce all versions of the Jesus myth that didn't include an actual earthly life as heretical.

This is false. It was only Arianism that was condemned by the Council of Nicea. Arianism's teaching was of an earthly Jesus who was a physical person in history such as is presented in the 4 canonical gospels. There was no condemnation of the gnostic sects or their books by the Council of Nicea.

Books were burned, heretics were persecuted, competing religions were outlawed . . .

Not gnostics or any version of Christianity which taught a non-physical or non-historical Jesus. The only ones condemned were those who taught the same "gospel" of the historical physical Christ person who lived as a real human in Galilee-Judea at around 30 AD. They were condemned because of some hair-splitting doctrinal differences with the "orthodox" teaching but not for any teaching about a non-physical or non-historical Jesus. Ideas about a Christ with no body and only a spiritual existence were not a topic at the Council. There is nothing about such ideas addressed by the Council or the Nicene Creed.

The idea that Jesus was non-physical or non-historical is not an idea that existed in this early church period, except for the gnostic movement which pre-dates Christ and did not come from him. These were Platonist ideas already popular among various cults, and when Christ appeared in about 30 AD and suddenly aroused much attention, these cultists found a need to fit him into their mystical ontology of disembodied spirits or Platonic abstractions or purely spiritual beings with no bodily form.

Some theories had him to be an illusion of some kind, with only an apparent body, not a real or physical one. Many theories popped up, coming from different directions, not necessarily consistent with each other.

The important question to ask is: WHY did these various gnostics try to adopt Christ? What compelled them to do something so unnecessary to their philosophy, even contradictory to it?

The best answer is that they were impacted by the miracle acts of Jesus and felt compelled to adopt him as some kind of god. They recognized a good thing and wanted to get in on it. They wanted to attract the Christ believers to their ideas, and so they used Jesus as a mouthpiece to promote their mystical teachings. It's obvious that these gnostic ideas did not originate from the Christ person but were placed into his mouth, in the gnostic "gospels."

And no gnostic literature was destroyed by Christians trying to wipe out these ideas. No evidence of such a coverup exists.

. . . and the victors wrote the history books to hide their guilt.

And so the Gospels weren't really written until 325 AD? and they were really written by Constantine?

Sure they were, and the nose of the sphinx was really shot off by Napoleon with a cannonball. ( http://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html ) You can make up all the silly stories you want and pretend it was covered up because those in power "shredded the documents" and rewrote the history books to hide their guilt. What nonsensical story could not be proved with this kind of argument? You could rewrite any part of history with such conspiracy theories.

We might just as well toss out all of recorded history and each of us fabricate our own "history" -- which must be true because all the evidence showing something different was just planted by a conspiracy of those in power, "the victors," who covered up the truth and cooked the books!

Say it all you want to. Scream it if it makes you feel better. But there is no evidence Jesus ever existed that is any better than the evidence that Santa Claus exists.

But St. Nicholas DID exist. He was a real person in history. And over 1000+ years he became mythologized into something much greater than the original historical figure. He was a bishop for 26 years:

Obeying Jesus' words to "sell what you own and give the money to the poor," Nicholas used his whole inheritance to assist the needy, the sick, and the suffering. He dedicated his life to serving God and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. Bishop Nicholas became known throughout the land for his generosity to those in need, his love for children, and his concern for sailors and ships.
http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/who-is-st-nicholas/

Obviously he was distinguished by his generosity, having been born into wealth and making the choice to give it all away to the poor. And some of the early stories about him which were probably true led to later practices of hanging out stockings and gift-giving. So we can identify how this noteworthy real person became mythologized, over many centuries, into something superhuman.

And we have similar evidence that Jesus really existed and must have done something unusual or noteworthy. He could not have been an ordinary person anymore than the original St. Nicholas could have been ordinary. So, what was unordinary about the original Jesus Christ figure of about 30 AD?

Of course later legends emerged, but what did the original Jesus person himself do that was noteworthy? So far there's only one answer offered that distinguishes him from all the other prophets and teachers and messiahs: He performed the miracle acts we see in the gospel accounts, which were too early to be a result of mythologizing, unlike the Santa Claus crossing the sky which evolved out of centuries of story-telling but began from a real human who did something noteworthy.

The existence of people telling stories is not evidence of the truth of the stories.

Virtually all the historical record is based on "people telling stories" in the written documents that have come down. If you eliminate all these "stories" as not valid evidence, then there is virtually no history left.

It is interesting that all your arguments to disprove the gospel accounts of Jesus are also arguments for tossing out all historical accounts and eliminating all that we know of historical events.

Agenda-filled testimony is the worst evidence imaginable.

And generally it's the ONLY evidence.

All or most of the historical record for 1000 years ago and earlier is agenda-filled testimony. We rely on the ancient historians and epic poets for most of it, and all of them had their agenda: Herodotus, Livy, Cicero, Homer, Virgil, Polybius, Tacitus, Caesar, etc. -- each had an agenda, and yet we believe them generally and use their accounts to determine the truth of what happened.

And we never have 100% certainty, often only 51%.

Your demand for only the BEST evidence -- a time machine that can take us back and let us see and hear exactly what happened -- is not yet available. But even so, it's good for us to rely on the evidence we have, from witnesses who were tainted, from which we can figure out the truth.

Are you saying that all historical books should be taken as truth? My ancestors believed that the world resided on a giant upside-down turtle. There is written "evidence" of this on a cave wall as well as oral tradition. That's good enough evidence for you?

 

[atrib]

Blah blah blah

Are you saying that all historical books should be taken as truth? My ancestors believed that the world resided on a giant upside-down turtle. There is written "evidence" of this on a cave wall as well as oral tradition. That's good enough evidence for you?

No. He is saying that only the stories of supernatural acts performed by his preferred imaginary friend, Jesus should be taken as truth. All other stories describing similarly implausible supernatural acts performed by the imaginary friends of other people are, or are very likely to be, untrue.

So, stories of Jesus rising from the dead and floating up into the sky = true, because an anonymous person far removed in space and time from alleged events heard the story from some other unknown person who was not a witness to the event either.

But, stories of Ganesha riding around on a mouse after a head replacement surgery necessitated by an unfortunate accident that beheaded him= untrue, even though there are multiple written and oral sources for this story and a billion people of Indian origin can vouch that they have heard this story from people they know and trust.

Why this is the case is unclear, as Lumpy cannot be bothered to go into the details, even though he spends a considerable amount of time conjuring up walls of text that either say nothing, or are outright fabrications.

 

[atrib]

Are you saying that all historical books should be taken as truth? My ancestors believed that the world resided on a giant upside-down turtle. There is written "evidence" of this on a cave wall as well as oral tradition. That's good enough evidence for you?

Wanted to add the following:

Lumpy also fails to make a distinction between historical records describing events that are physically permissible under the laws of our universe (Caesar invaded Gaul), and stories describing events that are prohibited by said laws (Jesus rose up from the dead and floated up into the sky). He alleges, or very strongly implies, that historians routinely consider stories of supernatural events to be credible, but (unfairly) break from this tradition when they dismiss the stories of Jesus performing supernatural acts as lacking a foundation in reality. Or, as Lumpy sometimes argues: if historians accept the (plentiful) evidence supporting the story of Caesar invading Gaul, they must also accept the evidence (single anonymous source who heard gossip on a street) that Jesus rose up from the dead and floated up into the sky.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Apotheosis. A mortal becoming a divine being, a god. Like Ceasar

A comet interpreted as Caesar's soul in heaven was named the "Julian star" (sidus Iulium) and in 42 BC, with the "full consent of the Senate and people of Rome", Caesar's young heir, his great-nephew Octavian, held ceremonial apotheosis for his adoptive father.^[45] In 40 BC Antony took up his appointment as flamen of the divus Julius. Provincial cult centres (caesarea) to the divus Julius were founded in Caesarian colonies such as Corinth.[

The idea of a mere mortal being related to the gods by birth (again Julius Caesar) and ascending upon death to heaven is a pagan idea. Tacitus claims Vespasian had the power to cure diseases. The Jesus tale is not totally new or any more believable than the tales of Caesar becoming a God.

With a bit of luck, we could have been worshipping Julius Caesar today rather than Jesus.

 

[bilby]

Apotheosis. A mortal becoming a divine being, a god. Like Ceasar

A comet interpreted as Caesar's soul in heaven was named the "Julian star" (sidus Iulium) and in 42 BC, with the "full consent of the Senate and people of Rome", Caesar's young heir, his great-nephew Octavian, held ceremonial apotheosis for his adoptive father.^[45] In 40 BC Antony took up his appointment as flamen of the divus Julius. Provincial cult centres (caesarea) to the divus Julius were founded in Caesarian colonies such as Corinth.[

The idea of a mere mortal being related to the gods by birth (again Julius Caesar) and ascending upon death to heaven is a pagan idea. Tacitus claims Vespasian had the power to cure diseases. The Jesus tale is not totally new or any more believable than the tales of Caesar becoming a God.

With a bit of luck, we could have been worshipping Julius Caesar today rather than Jesus.

Julius Caesar... Jesus Christ... both known to their drinking buddies as 'JC'; Both notorious sandal wearers; I for one have never seen them in a room together - And I don't know anyone who has. Just sayin'.

 

[Atheos]

Based on repeated precedent, Lumpenproletariat will argue that it is more likely that an actual person named Jesus performed miracles than that people made up stories about such an individual performing miracles and later thought of him as a god-man.

I would further expect him to continue to use circular reasoning, claiming that the mythological details that included a 3 year ministry makes it impossible for the same myth to develop later into one whose main protagonist performed miracles. He will excuse his Jesus myth from other similar (and well-known) examples such as Joseph Smith because "Joseph Smith spent much more time building reputation than the three years Jesus did," all the while ignoring the fact that Luke 2 claims Jesus was building reputation pretty much his whole life. He is very selective about the evidence he is willing to consider in his haste to draw a bulls-eye around his favorite myth and try to extricate it from the context of the thousands upon thousands of myths humanity has invented and convinced others to believe over the centuries.

 

[bilby]

Basically, Jesus Christ is just Julius Caesar wearing spectacles. I am amazed that the people of Metropolis don't see through his pathetic disguise.

Actually, scratch that, I think I may be getting my myths a bit confused. It's hard to keep track, because they are basically all the same.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Apotheosis. A mortal becoming a divine being, a god. Like Ceasar

A comet interpreted as Caesar's soul in heaven was named the "Julian star" (sidus Iulium) and in 42 BC, with the "full consent of the Senate and people of Rome", Caesar's young heir, his great-nephew Octavian, held ceremonial apotheosis for his adoptive father.^[45] In 40 BC Antony took up his appointment as flamen of the divus Julius. Provincial cult centres (caesarea) to the divus Julius were founded in Caesarian colonies such as Corinth.[

The idea of a mere mortal being related to the gods by birth (again Julius Caesar) and ascending upon death to heaven is a pagan idea. Tacitus claims Vespasian had the power to cure diseases. The Jesus tale is not totally new or any more believable than the tales of Caesar becoming a God.

With a bit of luck, we could have been worshipping Julius Caesar today rather than Jesus.

Julius Caesar... Jesus Christ... both known to their drinking buddies as 'JC'; Both notorious sandal wearers; I for one have never seen them in a room together - And I don't know anyone who has. Just sayin'.

Jesus is the one with the wounds in his hands and feet. Julius Ceasar is the one with the stab wounds in his back.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

What do all mythic heroes, except Jesus Christ, have in common? -- There's NO EVIDENCE for their alleged miracles.

What made Jesus stand out? Why aren't there several other similar messiah figures?

The question to answer is: Why does Jesus stand out among all the many possible preaching messiah prophet figures during this period of history?

If he does not stand out, then there should be other similar messiah figures or hero figures who were made into gods during this time. Who would they be? Not just the 1st century -- how about from 500 BC to 1500 AD. Who is a comparable reported historical figure who displayed superhuman power and who was worshiped as a god?

That's just the point: Jesus was not a "reported historical figure."

Of course he was. But first, let me amend my question above -- it should be: Who is a comparable reported historical figure who reportedly displayed superhuman power and who was worshiped as a god?

He's reported in documents from the 1st century that we have, just as we have Cicero and Tacitus and Homer and Herodotus etc. All events and persons reported in documents of the period are reported historical events and historical figures (i.e., in documents claiming to tell us the events of the time).

You cannot arbitrarily single out the gospel documents only, or N.T. documents only, out of all the thousands of documents, or millions, and say that only these N.T. writings are not sources for what happened.

Just as the Vedas are sources for the events in India, and Homer is a source for the Trojan War, and the Gilgamesh Epic is a source for the early pre-Babylonian history, so also the N.T. writings are a source for the events of Judea/Galilee in the 1st century AD.

Just because credibility or accuracy issues are raised with these documents doesn't change the fact that the events and persons reported in them are "reported historical events" and "reported historical figures." Something can be reported even if its existence is doubted or may be partly fictional.

So even if Jesus never existed, he is still a "reported historical figure" -- So the question is about all the "reported" persons, whether they really existed or not and what they really did, and whether there are other "reported" persons who resemble the Jesus figure, i.e., other alleged miracle-workers who were made into a god.

So he IS a "reported historical figure" just like all the others are, being written about in documents from the time, just like all the historical figures we assume existed, plus any who may not really have existed. E.g., maybe King Arthur did not really exist, but still he is a "reported historical figure."

The vast majority of historians consider Jesus a real "historical figure" even though they doubt much that's in the documents. The documents report him as an historical person, and most historians believe he was historical.

The Public Broadcasting System has treated him as a real historical person, in documentaries, and also the History Channel. This doesn't mean they believe everything in the accounts. The details can be debated. But he is a "reported historical figure" despite any doubts about his existence.

Jesus was a myth from the get-go.

There's no such thing as "a myth from the get-go." A myth requires generations or centuries to evolve. A myth is not created instantaneously anymore than God created Adam instantaneously by snapping his fingers.

There is no historical evidence necessitating that Jesus had to exist or the evidence would be different.

You could probably say this about half of all the historical persons we assume existed. You could make the case; but probably they did exist, and probably Jesus existed, based on the evidence we have. There are many historical figures who probably existed but about whom we don't have certainty or there's "no historical evidence necessitating" that they existed.

Not one letter home talking about the great miracle worker, . . .

There are virtually no "letters from home" for this period talking about anything. 99.99999% of all the events that happened are not reported in any "letter from home" or any other document.

It all happened in 3 years or less, and virtually all the witnesses were illiterate. Every historical person we have writings about was active publicly for much longer than 3 years, even longer than 10 years for the vast majority. It is amazing that we have as much as we do about this person whose public life was so short.

The only "letters from home" are from a tiny minority of elitist rich people like Cicero and Pliny, etc., not from average folks.

. . . not a single pot-shard depicting the acts this person did, . . .

There are hardly any pot-shards depicting singular events.

But there are some 3rd-century depictions of Jesus:

One is of the miracle healing of the woman with the issue of blood (Mt. 9:20-22):



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus...bleeding_women_Marcellinus-Peter-Catacomb.jpg

This is identified as "From a Roman catacomb, end of the 3rd century A.D." in David Flusser, Jesus p. 116, where this picture is shown.

Another early depiction of Jesus is of the healing of the paralytic who is told to take up his bed and and walk:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dura-Europos_church#/media/File:Dura-europos-paralytic.jpg


Another early depiction of Jesus, of pagan origin and intended as mockery of the Christians, is the "Alexamenos graffito" showing Jesus on the cross but with the head of a donkey:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito#/media/File:Alexorig.jpg

This carving is dated to 200 AD, even less than 200 years after the depicted event.

Is 200 years after the alleged event too long? Do you insist that any interesting event that really happened must have been depicted in carvings or paintings or on pot-shards etc. at the time of the event? or within 20 years and no later? or 50 years?

OK, then destroy all your history books and defund all the history departments at our universities -- they are teaching lies. They are teaching events that never really happened, because there are no art works depicting the historical events within 50 years or even 100 years after the events.

One event depicted early is the Alexander Mosaic, showing Alexander the Great battling Darius III. The mosaic is dated about 100 BC, so more than 200 years later than the event depicted.

The earliest depictions of the Trojan Horse are around 700 BC, several centuries after the reputed event:

There are three known surviving classical depictions of the Trojan Horse. The earliest is on a fibula brooch dated about 700 BC. The other two are on relief pithos vases from the adjoining Grecian islands Mykonos and Tinos, both usually dated between 675 and 650 BC, the one from Mykonos being known as the Mykonos Vase. Historian Michael Wood, however, dates the Mykonos Vase to the 8th century BC, some 500 years after the supposed time of the war, but before the written accounts attributed by tradition to Homer. Wood concludes from that evidence that the story of the Trojan Horse was in existence prior to the writing of those accounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse

If Homer invented the Trojan Horse story (in the Odyssey), then could there be depictions of it at almost the same time or only a few decades later? No, the story must have already been circulating before Homer's mention of it.

Are there any depictions of a singular event in history, from before 1000 AD or so, which are dated less than 100 years after the alleged event happened? 200 years? Or even depictions of a fictional event produced in such a short time after the story was invented?

The gap of 200+ years from the time of Jesus to the first depictions of him in particular events, such as those above, is a very short time by comparison to other events. Virtually all other depictions of particular events are dated several centuries after the event.

There is a bust of Caesar dated from the same time as Caesar, but no depiction of any event, like the assassination. The latter are virtually all later than 1000 AD. The Caesar assassination is clearly one of the most sensationalist events in ancient times, and yet it is not depicted in carvings or engravings etc. for over 1000 years. So why should we assume that the events of Jesus would have to appear in artwork within only 100 years or so?

There is probably no archaeological find of any depiction of a singular event, like an engraving or carving of any kind, which is dated this close to the event depicted.

All the depictions of Achilles dragging Hector's body behind a chariot are dated later than 1000 AD. There are very few depictions of a singular event like this. So it's quite unusual that we have a few depictions of Jesus miracle acts even before 300 AD.

It makes no sense to insist that if the Jesus events really happened we must have art works depicting them dated less than 500 years after the alleged events happened. Even 1000 years later would be a rare case. We have virtually no depictions of any other particular events in history which meet this requirement.

. . . not a single record of what would have been significant disturbances had thousands of people flocked to him.

We have at least 4 records of it. There are very few events so long ago for which we have this many sources within 100 years from the time of the alleged event. Most events we know of, prior to 1000 AD, are not this well documented.

That you arbitrarily exclude these documents from qualifying as sources, even though you exclude absolutely no other documents, but just these only, is your own personal idiosyncratic flaw that you must deal with -- you cannot bind everyone else to observe this arbitrary censorship. The gospel accounts are sources for historical events, just like ALL documents from the period are sources.

You don't get to have it both ways. You can argue that he was such an obscure figure that he managed to live his whole life without making a blip on the historical record, . . .

He made more than a "blip" -- in addition to the N.T. writings which are a part of the "historical record" despite your arbitrary censorship of them, there are also the mentions of him in Tacitus and Josephus and Suetonius. There is a vast number of recognized historical figures who made a smaller "blip" in the historical record than this.

. . . but then the magnitude of people who believed he did all the miracles later would be far better explained by the lying skill of a few (or only 1) people making such bold claims decades later . . .

No it would not be better explained by such lying skill, because if it were that easy to win believers -- i.e., just someone lying -- we would have a great many more Jesus-like miracle-workers popping up in the literature/documents of the period, because there was no shortage of liars and charlatans and fraudsters running around making similar bold claims. Each of them was rejected by virtually everyone because there was no proof or evidence to convince them. Or, the number who followed any such hoaxer were a tiny tiny few.

Only if there are hundreds of followers, and these keep increasing in number to thousands in a few years, does the myth-hero become important enough that educated persons start writing down an account of him.

The only way to explain why we don't have hundreds of Jesus-like miracle hero hoax cults throughout those centuries, recorded in documents, is that people simply didn't automatically fall for them but withheld their belief until they saw some evidence. But in the case of Jesus there was evidence, from a variety of witnesses, and writers began recording it.

That someone lied cannot explain it, even if they were skilled. Unless you believe that only in this one case in history were there skilled liars. Is that the explanation? The only skilled liars in history were a few in the first century who chose to launch the "Jesus myth" or Jesus cult(s), and otherwise no skilled liars have existed?

Why did all the skilled liars get together and agree to promote this one legend only and no others? And why did no skilled liars ever exist except at this one time in history only?

. . . than an abundance of witnesses.

No, witnesses carry more weight than a few liars. Those who hear the reports ask questions, and when the liars cannot give credible answers, they are rejected by almost everyone. If they believed the liars as easily as you imagine, then we would have hundreds of other reported Jesus-like miracle-workers, instead of only one, in documents from the time.

Or you can argue that he was this well-known figure who made a big impression on his generation to explain the acceptance of these tales later, . . .

But what happened to all the OTHER well-known figures who made such an impression? There were no others? He's the only one? Why? What enabled only him to make an impression?

For this we need some indication of what he was "well-known" for, or what caused the "big impression" on them, and also how he gained this recognition though having such a short public career. What's another example of a "well-known figure who made a big impression" so that they mythologized him into a deity and yet whose public life was only 3 years?

. . . but then you run afoul of the very real fact that not one piece of evidence apart from these tales places him there.

Again, both Tacitus and Josephus place him in Judea in the 1st century, and Tacitus places him there during the period of Tiberius and Pontius Pilate.

And again, the "tales" are all we ever have for placing ANY historical figure or event into the record. All we have for ANY event or historical figure are the "tales" about it/him that are in the documents that have come down. We don't know anything about Julius Caesar, such as whether he was a Roman, except from the "tales" told about him in the documents.

Using the tales as evidence that the tales are true is so absurd as to be laughable.

Fine, then laugh at ALL the known historical record, toss it all out. Fire all the historians and teachers of history in the schools. What they're teaching is nothing but "tales" that are told in the documents we have. There is no other evidence for any of history outside these "tales" from the documents. Name any historical event that is known other than through the "tales" written in the documents.


(to be continued)

 

[Juma]

What made Jesus stand out? Why aren't there several other similar messiah figures?

The question to answer is: Why does Jesus stand out among all the many possible preaching messiah prophet figures during this period of history?

If he does not stand out, then there should be other similar messiah figures or hero figures who were made into gods during this time. Who would they be? Not just the 1st century -- how about from 500 BC to 1500 AD. Who is a comparable reported historical figure who displayed superhuman power and who was worshiped as a god?

That's just the point: Jesus was not a "reported historical figure."

Of course he was. But first, let me amend my question above -- it should be: Who is a comparable reported historical figure who reportedly displayed superhuman power and who was worshiped as a god?

He's reported in documents from the 1st century that we have, just as we have Cicero and Tacitus and Homer and Herodotus etc. All events and persons reported in documents of the period are reported historical events and historical figures (i.e., in documents claiming to tell us the events of the time).

You cannot arbitrarily single out the gospel documents only, or N.T. documents only, out of all the thousands of documents, or millions, and say that only these N.T. writings are not sources for what happened.

Just as the Vedas are sources for the events in India, and Homer is a source for the Trojan War, and the Gilgamesh Epic is a source for the early pre-Babylonian history, so also the N.T. writings are a source for the events of Judea/Galilee in the 1st century AD.

Just because credibility or accuracy issues are raised with these documents doesn't change the fact that the events and persons reported in them are "reported historical events" and "reported historical figures." Something can be reported even if its existence is doubted or may be partly fictional.

So even if Jesus never existed, he is still a "reported historical figure" -- So the question is about all the "reported" persons, whether they really existed or not and what they really did, and whether there are other "reported" persons who resemble the Jesus figure, i.e., other alleged miracle-workers who were made into a god.

So he IS a "reported historical figure" just like all the others are, being written about in documents from the time, just like all the historical figures we assume existed, plus any who may not really have existed. E.g., maybe King Arthur did not really exist, but still he is a "reported historical figure."

The vast majority of historians consider Jesus a real "historical figure" even though they doubt much that's in the documents. The documents report him as an historical person, and most historians believe he was historical.

The Public Broadcasting System has treated him as a real historical person, in documentaries, and also the History Channel. This doesn't mean they believe everything in the accounts. The details can be debated. But he is a "reported historical figure" despite any doubts about his existence.

Jesus was a myth from the get-go.

There's no such thing as "a myth from the get-go." A myth requires generations or centuries to evolve. A myth is not created instantaneously anymore than God created Adam instantaneously by snapping his fingers.

There is no historical evidence necessitating that Jesus had to exist or the evidence would be different.

You could probably say this about half of all the historical persons we assume existed. You could make the case; but probably they did exist, and probably Jesus existed, based on the evidence we have. There are many historical figures who probably existed but about whom we don't have certainty or there's "no historical evidence necessitating" that they existed.

Not one letter home talking about the great miracle worker, . . .

There are virtually no "letters from home" for this period talking about anything. 99.99999% of all the events that happened are not reported in any "letter from home" or any other document.

It all happened in 3 years or less, and virtually all the witnesses were illiterate. Every historical person we have writings about was active publicly for much longer than 3 years, even longer than 10 years for the vast majority. It is amazing that we have as much as we do about this person whose public life was so short.

The only "letters from home" are from a tiny minority of elitist rich people like Cicero and Pliny, etc., not from average folks.

. . . not a single pot-shard depicting the acts this person did, . . .

There are hardly any pot-shards depicting singular events.

But there are some 3rd-century depictions of Jesus:

One is of the miracle healing of the woman with the issue of blood (Mt. 9:20-22):

View attachment 5193

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus...bleeding_women_Marcellinus-Peter-Catacomb.jpg

This is identified as "From a Roman catacomb, end of the 3rd century A.D." in David Flusser, Jesus p. 116, where this picture is shown.

Another early depiction of Jesus is of the healing of the paralytic who is told to take up his bed and and walk:

View attachment 5195

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dura-Europos_church#/media/File:Dura-europos-paralytic.jpg


Another early depiction of Jesus, of pagan origin and intended as mockery of the Christians, is the "Alexamenos graffito" showing Jesus on the cross but with the head of a donkey:

View attachment 5197

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito#/media/File:Alexorig.jpg

This carving is dated to 200 AD, even less than 200 years after the depicted event.

Is 200 years after the alleged event too long? Do you insist that any interesting event that really happened must have been depicted in carvings or paintings or on pot-shards etc. at the time of the event? or within 20 years and no later? or 50 years?

OK, then destroy all your history books and defund all the history departments at our universities -- they are teaching lies. They are teaching events that never really happened, because there are no art works depicting the historical events within 50 years or even 100 years after the events.

One event depicted early is the Alexander Mosaic, showing Alexander the Great battling Darius III. The mosaic is dated about 100 BC, so more than 200 years later than the event depicted.

The earliest depictions of the Trojan Horse are around 700 BC, several centuries after the reputed event:

There are three known surviving classical depictions of the Trojan Horse. The earliest is on a fibula brooch dated about 700 BC. The other two are on relief pithos vases from the adjoining Grecian islands Mykonos and Tinos, both usually dated between 675 and 650 BC, the one from Mykonos being known as the Mykonos Vase. Historian Michael Wood, however, dates the Mykonos Vase to the 8th century BC, some 500 years after the supposed time of the war, but before the written accounts attributed by tradition to Homer. Wood concludes from that evidence that the story of the Trojan Horse was in existence prior to the writing of those accounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse

If Homer invented the Trojan Horse story (in the Odyssey), then could there be depictions of it at almost the same time or only a few decades later? No, the story must have already been circulating before Homer's mention of it.

Are there any depictions of a singular event in history, from before 1000 AD or so, which are dated less than 100 years after the alleged event happened? 200 years? Or even depictions of a fictional event produced in such a short time after the story was invented?

The gap of 200+ years from the time of Jesus to the first depictions of him in particular events, such as those above, is a very short time by comparison to other events. Virtually all other depictions of particular events are dated several centuries after the event.

There is a bust of Caesar dated from the same time as Caesar, but no depiction of any event, like the assassination. The latter are virtually all later than 1000 AD. The Caesar assassination is clearly one of the most sensationalist events in ancient times, and yet it is not depicted in carvings or engravings etc. for over 1000 years. So why should we assume that the events of Jesus would have to appear in artwork within only 100 years or so?

There is probably no archaeological find of any depiction of a singular event, like an engraving or carving of any kind, which is dated this close to the event depicted.

All the depictions of Achilles dragging Hector's body behind a chariot are dated later than 1000 AD. There are very few depictions of a singular event like this. So it's quite unusual that we have a few depictions of Jesus miracle acts even before 300 AD.

It makes no sense to insist that if the Jesus events really happened we must have art works depicting them dated less than 500 years after the alleged events happened. Even 1000 years later would be a rare case. We have virtually no depictions of any other particular events in history which meet this requirement.

. . . not a single record of what would have been significant disturbances had thousands of people flocked to him.

We have at least 4 records of it. There are very few events so long ago for which we have this many sources within 100 years from the time of the alleged event. Most events we know of, prior to 1000 AD, are not this well documented.

That you arbitrarily exclude these documents from qualifying as sources, even though you exclude absolutely no other documents, but just these only, is your own personal idiosyncratic flaw that you must deal with -- you cannot bind everyone else to observe this arbitrary censorship. The gospel accounts are sources for historical events, just like ALL documents from the period are sources.

You don't get to have it both ways. You can argue that he was such an obscure figure that he managed to live his whole life without making a blip on the historical record, . . .

He made more than a "blip" -- in addition to the N.T. writings which are a part of the "historical record" despite your arbitrary censorship of them, there are also the mentions of him in Tacitus and Josephus and Suetonius. There is a vast number of recognized historical figures who made a smaller "blip" in the historical record than this.

. . . but then the magnitude of people who believed he did all the miracles later would be far better explained by the lying skill of a few (or only 1) people making such bold claims decades later . . .

No it would not be better explained by such lying skill, because if it were that easy to win believers -- i.e., just someone lying -- we would have a great many more Jesus-like miracle-workers popping up in the literature/documents of the period, because there was no shortage of liars and charlatans and fraudsters running around making similar bold claims. Each of them was rejected by virtually everyone because there was no proof or evidence to convince them. Or, the number who followed any such hoaxer were a tiny tiny few.

Only if there are hundreds of followers, and these keep increasing in number to thousands in a few years, does the myth-hero become important enough that educated persons start writing down an account of him.

The only way to explain why we don't have hundreds of Jesus-like miracle hero hoax cults throughout those centuries, recorded in documents, is that people simply didn't automatically fall for them but withheld their belief until they saw some evidence. But in the case of Jesus there was evidence, from a variety of witnesses, and writers began recording it.

That someone lied cannot explain it, even if they were skilled. Unless you believe that only in this one case in history were there skilled liars. Is that the explanation? The only skilled liars in history were a few in the first century who chose to launch the "Jesus myth" or Jesus cult(s), and otherwise no skilled liars have existed?

Why did all the skilled liars get together and agree to promote this one legend only and no others? And why did no skilled liars ever exist except at this one time in history only?

. . . than an abundance of witnesses.

No, witnesses carry more weight than a few liars. Those who hear the reports ask questions, and when the liars cannot give credible answers, they are rejected by almost everyone. If they believed the liars as easily as you imagine, then we would have hundreds of other reported Jesus-like miracle-workers, instead of only one, in documents from the time.

Or you can argue that he was this well-known figure who made a big impression on his generation to explain the acceptance of these tales later, . . .

But what happened to all the OTHER well-known figures who made such an impression? There were no others? He's the only one? Why? What enabled only him to make an impression?

For this we need some indication of what he was "well-known" for, or what caused the "big impression" on them, and also how he gained this recognition though having such a short public career. What's another example of a "well-known figure who made a big impression" so that they mythologized him into a deity and yet whose public life was only 3 years?

. . . but then you run afoul of the very real fact that not one piece of evidence apart from these tales places him there.

Again, both Tacitus and Josephus place him in Judea in the 1st century, and Tacitus places him there during the period of Tiberius and Pontius Pilate.

And again, the "tales" are all we ever have for placing ANY historical figure or event into the record. All we have for ANY event or historical figure are the "tales" about it/him that are in the documents that have come down. We don't know anything about Julius Caesar, such as whether he was a Roman, except from the "tales" told about him in the documents.

Using the tales as evidence that the tales are true is so absurd as to be laughable.

Fine, then laugh at ALL the known historical record, toss it all out. Fire all the historians and teachers of history in the schools. What they're teaching is nothing but "tales" that are told in the documents we have. There is no other evidence for any of history outside these "tales" from the documents. Name any historical event that is known other than through the "tales" written in the documents.


(to be continued)

This is utterly silly:
None of these images can be shown to be be about jesus. They are depicting similar stories but identifying it as jesus is just wishful thinking.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

What do all mythic heroes, except Jesus Christ, have in common? -- There's NO EVIDENCE for their alleged miracles.

(continued)

How did such a singular figure arise out from everyone else if he had no unusual power? What distinguished him to cause so many to make him into a god?

We've been over this before, and will continue to do so for as long as you make this ridiculous implication. Jesus is not a singular figure. His story is very similar to the stories of Perseus, Horus, Hercules, Osiris, Mithras and dozens of other epic hero legends.

You have not shown any real similarity.

But more important, we have no evidence for these pagan myths from documents anywhere near to the actual reported events. The sources for Jesus are within 100 years, and mostly within 30-60 years from the events, whereas for the pagan myths there is no source until many centuries later, if the character did exist. This does make a difference, despite your inability to register this principle, i.e., that the accounts are much more credible if they are written close to the reported events.

Also, we have at least 4 sources that are this close, i.e., extra sources which increase the credibility, in contrast to Apollonius of Tyana, e.g., for whom there is only 1 or 2 and which is/are more than 100 years after the reported events.

But further, you repeatedly fail to offer any sources whatever for any of the above epic hero legends. Until you give at least one example and provide the text source for that hero legend, and show the comparison to the Jesus figure, your claim that he is "similar" to Jesus is not to be taken seriously. Of course there were some beliefs or "tales" about these hero figures, but you have not shown any significant similarity to the Jesus figure.

It's not sufficient to say they were "gods" who performed miracles. You must give an example and show the similarity. Give whatever example you think is the closest or most similar to the Jesus figure. Give the text from the earliest document about the mythic figure, and not just some paraphrase from a modern source spoon-feeding their interpretation to you .

Who was present to see the miracle act? Who benefited from the act? Where and when did it happen -- What region? What century? And, of course, when was the account of it written, approximately, and how many accounts are there?

This is not asking too much.

Heck, his story is so similar to the story of Moses that it's ridiculous that christians don't recognize how warmed-over the story is. Menaced by a powerful ruler as an infant, survived the menace by some extraordinary stroke of fortune, did something significant as a youth, lived for awhile in a far away land, came back to the land of his birth, performed many wonders but the bad old skeptics just wouldn't believe, triumphed in the end.

There's virtually no similarity here between Moses and Jesus, and you exaggerate it:

"Menaced by a powerful ruler as an infant" -- Only in the Matthew account, nowhere else. There are 4 accounts of his life, and only one has the menacing "powerful ruler" idea. Two of them have no infancy story at all. If this one detail had not been included, we would still have the same "gospel" of Christ. It is not anything essential to the story. Only Matthew thought this was important.

survived the menace by some extraordinary stroke of fortune -- No, this doesn't fit. The Moses survival can be called a "stroke of fortune," but not the Jesus survival, which was due to the warning in a dream to the "magi from the east" to not return to Herod, and also a warning to Joseph telling him to take the child away to Egypt to avoid Herod's soldiers coming. So a divine intervention is what foiled the powerful ruler in this case, whereas it was a pure stroke of luck in the Moses story.

An intentional planned action and intervention is something much different than a "stroke of fortune."

"did something significant as a youth" -- No, what Moses did was not "as a youth" but as a grown adult. Right after the scene when Moses was rescued from the water, the next verse says: "On one occasion, after Moses had grown up, when he visited his kinsmen and witnessed the forced labor, . . ." etc., and it proceeds to tell the story of Moses slaying the Egyptian. Thus, Moses was a grown adult, not a "youth."

Further, the only gospel that reports anything about Jesus as a youth is Luke. The other 3 gospels say nothing of Jesus as a youth and apparently consider such a story as unnecessary.

So there's very little or no similarity on this point between the Jesus story and the Moses story.


"lived for awhile in a far away land" -- sort of, but there's a difference: how long is "for awhile"? In the case of Moses it was until he had grown to adulthood, whereas for Jesus it was until the death of Herod, so only 2 or 3 or 4 years. Obviously Jesus would have to have been a young child when they left Egypt.

And again, only in Matthew, not the other 3 gospels. So there's virtually no similarity.


"came back to the land of his birth" -- No, not really. Jesus went to Galilee, not Judea where he was born (according to the story), so he did not "come back to the land of his birth" if he was born in Bethlehem. The two provinces were under different regional governments, having no common political identity other than being Roman, and there was antagonism between Galileans and Judeans, not a sense of common nationality. So here too your "similarity" is mostly imaginary.

The "flight to Egypt" in Matthew has virtually no similarity to the "flight" of Moses into the wilderness. There's virtually no parallel between the Mt story and the Moses story or any dependency of one on the other.


"performed many wonders" -- slight similarity, but you can't claim from this that the "Jesus myth" is in any way derived from the "Moses myth" because there's no similarity between the kind of miracles by Moses and those by Jesus. There are many alleged miracle-workers, performing different kinds of miracles, and to show a connection between miracle-worker A and miracle-worker B you need to show some similarity between the kind of miracle they performed. Not just that they both "performed many wonders" -- this is saying nothing to indicate any dependency of the "Jesus myth" on the earlier Moses story.

In this regard, there's more similarity between Obi Wan Kenobi and Peter Pan than there is between Jesus and Moses. Do you claim the Obi Wan Kenobi legend is somehow dependent on the earlier Peter Pan story? Just to say they both did "wonders" shows virtually no similarity at all. All mythic heroes perform "wonders" of some kind.


"but the bad old skeptics just wouldn't believe" -- What "bad old skeptics"? And what is it that they "wouldn't believe"?

There's very little resemblance between Moses and Jesus on this point. The unbeliever in the Moses story is the Pharoah who rejected the warnings from Yahweh/Moses. This was a kind of doomsday warning of bad consequences to befall the powerful ruler if he did not relent. It was a very specific identifiable threat demanding a specific act by him.

But the Jesus mission is not similar to this, assuming we can identify it. There's no clear-cut threat or demand made of someone. There are many interpretations what his mission was.

A good clue to the Jesus mission is the word "euangelion" or "gospel" or "good news." This word is so common in the N.T. and so prominent in Christianity that it must be intrinsically connected to whatever his basic mission was.

Although there are threats of hell fire and damnation in the N.T., which you could say resemble the threats to the Pharoah by Moses, it is easy to see how this kind of language is borrowed from earlier literature and did not originate from Jesus. (Even if he spoke such language, this was taken from the popular ideas then current.)

But the idea of "euangelion" is not borrowed from earlier sources. This word is not an important word of religion or philosophy prior to Christianity. This indicates that it is truly part of the basic unique Christ belief or Christ mission, as opposed to the hell fire and doomsday warning theme.

So the message Christ came to give to someone was not a warning-doomsday-threat kind of message, like the message of Moses to the Pharoah, but a "good news" message, and so there is really no comparison to Moses. So when you say the "skeptics wouldn't believe" you're not showing any similarity of Moses to Jesus.


triumphed in the end -- OK, a "happy ending" to the story -- the Jews freed by Yahweh/Moses, and the triumph of Jesus over death, the resurrection. However, most stories have a happy ending, so this again is a similarity which exists between virtually any story you choose and any other story. No similarity here worthy of note. You could just as well say that the two stories are about people. Humans are in story A and humans are also in story B. Such a similarity is trivial and hardly proves any real similarity or any kind of dependence of the later story on the earlier story.

So you get a D- for your list of "similarities" between Moses and Jesus. You could randomly pick any two heroes from all of history and literature and show "similarities" as good as these or better.


(to be continued)

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

What do all mythic heroes other than Jesus Christ have in common? -- There's NO EVIDENCE for their alleged miracles.

(continued)

If ... and that's a big if ... Jesus actually existed and the original version of the Jesus legend presented by Paul (which only includes the crucifixion/resurrection/promotion to god's right hand) was based on this historical nugget of an itinerant preacher, there is no reason to believe he performed any miracles at all. He could have simply been a charismatic preacher who developed a tiny but intense cult following (a-la Jim Jones, Brigham Young, . . .

No, these had a career of preaching and recruiting followers for 20+ years. With enough charisma and an effective radical message of some kind, this amount of time is sufficient to gain a following of several hundred, or maybe a thousand or so. Brigham Young had the additional advantage of picking up after the founder Joseph Smith and taking over an already-established crusade.

So Jesus could not have acquired any cult following comparable to Jim Jones or Brigham Young in such a short time if his only asset was charisma and a fancy message. The upstart charismatic/prophet needs longer than only 3 years, even longer than 10, to attract a sizable following. Also, Jesus did not have the advantage of the publishing media to help spread his reputation.

. . . Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh. The marketing prowess of Paul is all that is necessary to explain why this cult grew and others petered out.

No, this can't explain anything for at least 2 reasons:

1) It makes no sense for Paul, if he had amazing marketing talent, to waste it on people of this calibre. He would have enough sense to realize that this kind of following could never grow to any size, probably not even to 100. How could someone so educated waste his talent on something so inferior?

One of these "messiahs" was fixing to take away his disciples to Heaven on a comet.

And the other was the reincarnation of Cyrus the Great who assumed leadership by seducing and raping under-age girls and by shooting it out with other rivals in the cult who had earlier seized power by violence, including murder, against other rival gurus. So with a "congregation" like this, "pastored" by the strongest thug, you think the educated and skilled St. Paul organized the fast-growing Christian church movement into Asia Minor and Greece?

2) You have to assume Paul was the ONLY person who had any marketing prowess, because if there were others with similar skill, they too would have found some nutty cult to promote and we would have dozens or hundreds of Jesus-like cults, which would have been written about and had their own "gospels" published, like the Christ cult(s) did. However, they would have done much better than Paul, if his was an Applewhite- or Koresh-type cult following.

So for both the above reasons it is nonsensical to suggest that Paul's talent alone could explain the success of the early Jesus cult(s). That the miracle stories are true would explain it much better. It is easier to believe this than to believe Paul was a wacko who threw himself away on a Koresh- Applewhite-like cult or that he was the ONLY person in history who had marketing ability.

The miracle stories came later.

But they would have to come much later than they actually did come.

It would be the ONLY time in history that miracle stories were invented for an unknown in such a short time after the events reportedly happened, and then recorded in multiple sources. You haven't explained how they got started or how the new belief spread and why someone recorded it. There is no previous case of miracle stories being invented for a hero figure who did nothing noteworthy. If they are fiction, they require centuries to evolve, or at least a charismatic or popular public celebrity figure with a long colorful career.

You pretend to have explained how the "Jesus myth" got started without the miracle acts having happened, but your pretense is not sufficient. You have to give a real explanation. You could just give up and say you don't know how something so unusual happened -- you assume it happened somehow, but you simply rule out actual miracle acts, because of your ideological premise. This is OK -- you don't know how it happened, but your impulse is that it just could not have been the miracle acts which explain it.

You should let it go at that and stop conjuring up ludicrous scenarios that make no sense and are contrary to human nature and history. There's no shame in saying you just can't explain it but you still rule out the miracles.

They are not evidence of witnesses, only believers.

No, they are evidence of something that was believable. Something must have happened to cause them to believe, and to cause educated persons to record the claims. Otherwise, whatever prevented all those other miracle-hero cults from sprouting up and spreading would also have prevented the Jesus cults from popping up out of nowhere and spreading.

The myth/legend grew with the telling and repeating of a story.

What story? What was the myth at the beginning? Why aren't there other similar myths about other god/hero/savior figures? Why couldn't other myths/legends also grow from being repeated? Why only this one?

You've got to be shitting me. I've said this numerous times now. The myth at the beginning was the one presented in the authentic Pauline epistles. That's where we read about a Jesus who was nebulous.

OK, but this nebulous non-physical Jesus was only one of many nebulous and meaningless god-hero legends floating around. Why did ONLY THIS hero figure become deified into a miracle-worker and not the dozens or hundreds of other such mythic figures which were just as attractive? Why did people flock to this one only and make him into a god? How was Paul the ONLY person in history who was able to manipulate people into such a mass hallucination, to the point that they turned his non-physical Jesus into a physical historical person doing miracles and who then was recorded into documents?

Paul never talks about Joseph, Mary, the manger scene, the wise men, the threat from Herod, the confounding of the temple rulers at age 12. Paul never mentions John the Baptist, Jesus's temptation in the wilderness, any of the miracles, . . .

Wrong, he mentions the most important of the miracles, the resurrection. And it's clear that he meant someone who existed in history and must have been the same Jesus described in the gospel accounts, despite his omission of the biographical matter.

. . . any of the people or places Jesus visited. Paul never mentions anything that would place Jesus in recent history or put him at any specific location.

Yes he does mention such things -- he describes a Jesus who had to be at a particular time and place. He says Jesus was "handed over" and that he distributed the wine and bread and said "This is my body, this is my blood." How could this not have been someone at a particular time and location? And if Paul did not mean the same Jesus who is presented in the gospel accounts, then what person was he talking about?

He also refers to Jesus as the "brother" of James, who is identifiable as an early church leader. How could this be if Jesus was not in recent history or never existed at specific locations? The two might not really have been brothers, but it was believed by some that they were. Josephus also thought this. How can this not place Jesus in recent history and at certain locations?

The fact that he mentions virtually nothing biographical shows that his audience already knows those details. And yet he does say Jesus spoke certain words to those present and that he was "handed over." Unless you can explain how a non-physical Jesus can be "handed over" and speak those words, we can only assume Paul meant the same Jesus described in the gospels who spoke those words and was betrayed.

There's no reason to insist that Paul had to give the biographical information. None of the other N.T. writings, outside the gospels and Acts, says anything biographical about Jesus.

The epistle to the Hebrews, e.g., says nothing biographical about Jesus, even less than Paul, and yet it's clear that Hebrews is speaking about someone who was a physical person who recently did something in history, on earth. It says (in chs. 1 and 2):

In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days he spoke to us through a son, . . .

This clearly says that someone spoke recently, "in these last days," like the prophets earlier had spoken. This implies that a normal physical voice was heard, and this happened in recent times, like a few months or years or decades earlier, i.e., in "recent history."

Announced originally through the Lord, it was confirmed for us by those who had heard. God added his testimony by signs, wonders, various acts of power, . . .

This clearly says that certain ones "had heard" what was spoken, it was Jesus ("the Lord") who spoke it, and there were "signs" etc. that were also witnessed along with it. This all must have happened at a particular place and at some recent time. Just because the particular date and location are not named does not mean there was no date and time when this happened.

It later refers to the "suffering" and "death" of this person. It says: "Now since the children share in blood and flesh, he likewise shared in them, . . ." Doesn't this have to mean that the Christ spoken of here lived as a human with flesh and blood?

You have to answer what this Christ was supposed to be if not a physical person with a body living at a particular place. If you can't explain how he "shared in" blood and flesh without having a physical body, then we can only assume this refers to a real human with a body and who suffered and died like humans do.

Failure to mention the exact time and location does not mean there was no physical person or location or time for the event described here.

Even though Hebrews uses extreme spiritual and mystical and flowery cosmic language, avoiding mundane descriptions, still this has to be an earthly human person being described here. All the abstract language and minimum of down-to-earth descriptions does not mean that the one described did not have an earthly historical existence.

So this Jesus Christ in Hebrews, like Paul's Jesus, had to be a physical person who was "handed over" and spoke words that people heard. They spiritualized him into something grander than this earthly human, but they had the earthly person as their initial object, who was seen and heard and had some kind of earthly life.

Paul's Jesus is a nebulous god-myth who performed a sacrifice by dying and being resurrected to save humanity from their sins. Paul's Jesus communicated with Paul via visions and revelations.

But none of that means Jesus was not also a physical person who lived in history. It only means that his existence goes beyond this earthly life. It includes the earthly, which is our starting point and cannot be negated, but then goes farther to something beyond it. Unless you explain how he could be "handed over" and speak the words "This is my body" etc., and what is meant when it says he shared in "blood and flesh," we can only assume this is all about a physical person who lived in a normal human body, despite also being transformed further into something beyond this world.

It's perfectly normal for them to start with a real person to whom they then added spiritual or "heavenly" qualities and describe as having ascended to "the right hand of God" etc., while at the same time having in mind the earthly person who was seen and heard. Nothing prevents that earthly physical person from also having those non-physical or other-worldly features. There is not any contradiction between the two worlds. Both are conceivable and can exist together in the same total universe or total reality.

Paul's Jesus was no different from the epic hero sacrifices on behalf of others made by Prometheus, Horus, Perseus, Hercules, or Mithras.

This is meaningless until you quote from the original text sources for these epic heroes (or at least one of them). Again, you are just quoting by rote some rhetoric being spoon-fed to you by your favorite 21st-century mythicist Bible-basher debunker. You have never read any of these hero epic tales directly to know what similarity they have to Jesus. Until you quote such a text telling of their exploits, there is no reason to believe there is any serious similarity.

A 21st-century pundit is not a source for what Horus did thousands of years ago.

All these are hero/savior god figures.

You're just parroting back the rhetoric your Jesus-debunker crusader programmed into you. You've not checked into any of this but are just believing whatever your 21st-century pundit told you. You must go back to the original written sources about these god figures to show that you're not just repeating this by rote.

All of their stories bear remarkable similarities to the Jesus myth.

How do you know? You've never read the stories and have no idea what the similarities are, if there are any. You're just repeating back some 21st-century talking points.

For all we know these legends did grow from being repeated.

Well of course repetition over centuries helps the legends to grow. All of them required centuries of being repeated and expanded upon. But the Jesus "legend" developed in only a few decades, which makes it totally different than the pagan myths. It could not have emerged from fictional accounts invented only 10 or 20 or 30 years from the events. Miracle legends that are only fiction require the centuries of repetition to become adopted into the culture. You can't name any exception to this rule.

Whatever kernel of truth lies at the heart of it, the existence of the man, the character of the man, etc, is hard to determine.

Why is it so easy to determine in the case of Gautama and Simon Magus and others, but hard to determine in this case? One reasonable answer is that he actually did perform the miracle acts attributed to him in the legends.

The existence of Simon Magus is every bit as difficult to verify as the existence of Jesus.

His existence is not the issue. What we know is that the MYTH of him exists, and also that of Gautama. We can explain how these myths exist, i.e., the miracle stories, even though they are fiction. But we cannot explain this in the case of Jesus.

For Simon Magus the miracle stories don't appear until about 150 years after the reported time of the events, in only 1 or 2 sources. But the Jesus miracle stories appear in only 40-70 years, in 4 (5) sources, and Jesus had no long public career like all the other miracle heroes did.

All we have about him starts with "Acts," where he could very well be little else besides a plot device cooked up by the author to convince the already-convinced reader that somehow the magic tricks Peter did were so far superior to those done by Pharoah's magicians . . . that even Simon was convinced.

The real question is: How do we know that the Simon Magus miracle stories are fictional -- allowing that he might have existed -- whereas those of Jesus are probably true (i.e., much more likely to be true)?

And the answer is: All the miracle stories about Simon Magus date from at least 150 years later, after he lived (if he did live). Even though there's more than one source for them, they are all so much later, far removed from the original events, that we can assume they are a result of mythologizing.

The Book of Acts presents none of these miracles of Simon. It says:

But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, “This man is the great power (Gr. Dynamis Megale) of God.” And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. --Acts 8:9-11

It credits him with "sorcery" and having "bewitched" people. This does not identify what he actually did. The real miracle stories about him are mainly from Irenaeus some time near to 200 AD. Which of course is not reliable as a source for something happening in 30-60 AD.

Everything else written about Simon Magus was sourced from later christian writers and it includes evidence of legend building, such as the claim that Simon was God himself, descended to rescue his Ennoa (first thought, the source of creation). There are claims that Simon could levitate himself at will and fly.

And the reason these are not credible is that they originate from sources far too late in order to be believed as sources for the mid-first century.

Whereas, by contrast, the sources for the Jesus miracles are from 40-70 years after the events, and we have at least 4 sources, and for the resurrection we can add Paul, within only 30 years of the event, making 5 sources for the resurrection of Christ. This is a clear contrast in terms of the credibility of the sources, making the miracles of Jesus far more believable than those of Simon Magus, or any other reputed miracle-worker.

Simon Magus need not have lived in order for these legends to grow or for someone to concoct the Simonean cult from Simon's infamy.

It's highly probable that he really lived and was not originally a fiction.

We don't know if there has ever been a miracle legend which began from a totally fictional character. We know many have originated from a real historical person, like the St. Nicholas/Santa Claus legend. In most cases -- probably more than 90% -- there was an original historical person, who was unusual, and around whom later legend evolved, bringing in the miracle element.

We don't know if Simon Magus was a real person, but it's much easier to explain how a REAL historical figure got transformed into a miracle god/hero that caught on, than how the story might have begun with a totally fictional character who had no historical existence at all.

It is not true that a writer can simply invent a fictitious character who is then believed to be real, in a short time, by hundreds or thousands of gullible followers. Such a thing is very hard to explain, and there's no case where we know it happened. Of course it's easy to pretend that other dumb idiots out there believe in anything no matter how silly, but there are no actual known cases of this, where the believers increase to a significant number in a short time.

Of course in modern times you can cite some charlatans who are promoted in the media, but in ancient times it was not possible.

When miracle legends develop, usually there is something real that happened which gets distorted over time, and then it gets expanded gradually, over generations, to more and more believers as only small elements get added little by little to the original story. To prove your "dumb idiots everywhere" theory, you have to give examples of large cults which sprang up suddenly, with those believing the miracle stories suddenly exploding to large numbers in only 5 or 10 years.

Yet such a cult grew for centuries, ironically dying out not long after it was outlawed by the christian power brokers of the Nicean Council.

This itself is fiction invented by 20th-century Bible-basher debunkers. The Nicean Council did no such thing. It was only Arianism that was outlawed, nothing from earlier times like a Simon Magus cult.

Further, we don't know that any Simon Magus cult "grew for centuries." Whatever cult there was produced no literature or documentation of their beliefs, or nothing worth preserving by making copies of it, which was done for any important events. Virtually everyone recognized that this was a wacko group, originating from a charlatan or trickster, with no credibility and nothing worth preserving in writing.

To summarize, Simon was a god-man who performed miracles and other works in a heroic effort to rescue the source of all creation from a horrid fate. Far from providing a counter-point to your Jesus myth, the myth of Simon Magus demonstrates yet again how common that sort of myth building was, . . .

Yes, there were many such cults or myth-making efforts, but they obviously had no evidence for their beliefs and were not taken seriously by people generally, and no one wasted their time writing down the legends or beliefs of such cults because there was nothing credible in them worth preserving, and so we have no written accounts of them. But where we have written accounts, near to the time of the events, we have something worth taking seriously.

. . . and is a perfect parallel to your Jesus myth which succeeded at the tip of a sword . . .

No, the "Jesus myth" had already succeeded long before being adopted by Rome, having been documented in multiple written sources from the 1st century, unlike any other cults or myths/legends being promoted but having no credibility. You can't name one other that left written documentation, or explain why there is this one only. Your paranoid delusions that the others were exterminated by crusading sword-wielding Christ zealots is pure fantasy and hysteria, unsupported by any evidence.

. . . and the Simonians who yielded to the power of that sword.

No evidence for any of this. Your delusionist ravings, or those of your 21st-century mythicist debunker guru leading you by the nose, don't make it so.


(to be continued)

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

What do all mythic heroes other than Jesus Christ have in common? -- There's NO EVIDENCE for their alleged miracles.

(continued)

You mean apart from the literally hundreds of hero god saviors that existed before the Jesus myth was invented? Perseus, Hercules, Osiris, Horus, etc.

If these figures are real historical persons, they lived at least 1000 years earlier than any written source we have about them. And the legends about them accumulated over a period of 500 years or more.

So they are not comparable to the Jesus person whose reputation became established in less than 50 years after his death and for whom we have sources within that time frame. The earliest sources are even as little as 20 years later.

And by the same token Joseph Smith lived within the same decade as the written documentation we have about him.

Still no one produces the written documentation of his reported miracles. There's probably something, but until we see the text and read what happened, we can't judge what significance it has.

The Mormons themselves seem to not take these miracle accounts seriously. You have to produce these accounts and determine that there is something in them to be taken seriously. All posters here who bring this up have failed to produce anything serious. You have to do more than quote from a modern Wikipedia article -- you have to provide the original text, just as we can read the early text of the gospel accounts relating the Jesus miracles.

He was a heavily-witnessed miracle worker and a prophet.

Fine, then let's have the documents, the text, and read what the witnesses said. A 21st-century paraphrase of it is not sufficient, which is all anyone has come up with so far.

Do you give him the same respect you give your Jesus?

Yes, if the accounts of his miracles are presented. Not just a modern interpretation of it. So far it seems that Mormons do not give him much "respect" (as a miracle-worker), because they don't seem to want to present the case.

Do you believe he actually performed miracles of healing, such as healing lameness, deadly diseases, curing deafness / mutism and casting out demons?

Not without the real evidence. However, Jesus is probably not the ONLY person ever to perform such miracle cures.

I believe that Rasputin, the mad monk, did perform cures to the son of the Russian Czar, in the period 1905-15. And I confess that I did not read the particular accounts of this, from the original source. However, there is a difference between this case and that of Joseph Smith: All the witnesses to the Rasputin "miracles" were people who were hostile to him (except the mother of the child), and some of them were doctors who had every motive to debunk him, and yet all accounts of this episode say that Rasputin appeared to have done these healing miracles. The only doubt is how he did it.

Whereas the only miracles of Joseph Smith are reported by a few of his disciples. It's not clear how many there were -- it seems it might have been only 1 or 2.

I believe the Wikipedia article about it, but this article is not clear. It seems to identify only one clear-cut legitimate witness. (Joseph Smith himself is not acceptable as a witness.)

So, let's see the documents, the original text. Anything more specific and nearer to the time than the Wikipedia article would help. 19th century. If there's real evidence, especially from non-disciple witnesses, other than Joseph Smith followers who were influenced by his charisma over many years, then it might be credible.


It's not the DISCIPLES of Jesus we rely on for the miracle stories.

The writers of the gospel accounts, telling the miracles of Jesus, were not persons who had been influenced by his charisma. They got this from reports they received, and there were enough of these reports that they became convinced.

Whoever they got the reports from, it was not likely someone who had been influenced by his charisma. The ones cured were mostly people who had not been among his disciples, and so their report of it was not caused by having been influenced by his charisma. If from onlookers other than the direct disciples, these too had not been influenced by his charisma, or not for any long period.

The accounts give the impression that the ones initiating the reports were the ones cured or those close to them, or onlookers other than the disciples, not closely connected to them. Although disciples also probably reported the events, it's mostly non-disciples who seem to be the originators of the stories, unlike the Joseph Smith case, where it's certain disciples under his spell for many years who originated the stories.

How do you explain what made this Christ person important that people started believing he was a god, especially later writers who got this INdirectly and thus were not impacted by his charisma?

By contrast, we can explain how Joseph Smith could be mythologized, by some of his disciples, as a charismatic preacher who influenced his followers over a period of 15+ years and became a recognized controversial public figure.

And we know what attracted so many people to him, beyond his charisma, which was his unusual message which we can easily identify as something appealing or popular among many Christians, i.e., the "revelation" that Christ had appeared in the Americas to preach the "Gospel" to the native American tribes. But we cannot identify any such unusual message which Jesus preached that would explain the unusual appeal he had which then might lead to his being mythologized.

Is it more likely that Joseph Smith actually did these things or is it more likely that his followers made them up?

It's more likely that a small number of his followers made it up. It was probably only 1 or 2 followers who reported such things and no one other than followers of his.

It would be more credible if someone who believes the Joseph Smith miracles would present the evidence, the original text of the miracle events, and show that they come from persons who were not influenced by his charisma. Years of being influenced by the guru's charisma can explain the origin of the miracle stories even if no miracle events really happened.

Don't bother with red herring arguments such as "but Joseph Smith was not considered a god" and simply answer that question first. Which is the more likely explanation?

If it was only 1 or 2 witnesses or sources for the claims, and they were followers who had been influenced by his charisma over many years, then clearly it's more likely that they made it up.



(to be continued)

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

What do all mythic heroes other than Jesus Christ have in common? -- There's NO EVIDENCE for their alleged miracles.

(continued)

If ... and that's a big if ... Jesus actually existed and the original version of the Jesus legend presented by Paul (which only includes the crucifixion/resurrection/promotion to god's right hand) was based on this historical nugget of an itinerant preacher, there is no reason to believe he performed any miracles at all. He could have simply been a charismatic preacher who developed a tiny but intense cult following (a-la Jim Jones, Brigham Young, . . .

It's pointless to draw parallels like this. And you misrepresent them. Brigham Young's following was not "tiny" by any relative standard. Not even Jim Jones. But also these are a false comparison to Jesus, because both of these had a career of preaching and recruiting followers for 10-20 years. This amount of time is necessary to gain a following of several hundred, or maybe a thousand or so, provided the recruiter has an identifiable radical message. Brigham Young had the additional advantage of picking up after the founder Joseph Smith and taking over an already-established crusade.

So Jesus could not have acquired any cult following comparable to Jim Jones or Brigham Young in such a short time unless he was something way beyond a routine charismatic preacher. It's not even clear whether he offered an identifiable message or tradition to enable him to make a connection with the hearers. The upstart charismatic/prophet needs an identifiable message or mission, plus longer than only 3 years, even longer than 10, to attract a sizable following. Also, Jesus did not have the advantage of the publishing media to help spread his reputation.

So the comparison to these two is ludicrous.

. . . Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh. The marketing prowess of Paul is all that is necessary to explain why this cult grew and others petered out.

When are you going to get serious?

A cult of this kind could never increase to anything other than a tiny group of nut cases.

And it makes no sense for Paul, if he had amazing marketing talent, to waste it on such misfits as this. He would have enough sense to realize that this kind of following could never grow to any size, probably not even to 100. We know Paul was educated, even if you dislike his writings, and it's unthinkable that he would try to change the world by recruiting "lost souls" of this caliber.


NO, St. Paul's cult was not a tiny band of wacko kooks.

One of these "messiahs" was fixing to take away his disciples to Heaven on a comet.

And the other was the reincarnation of Cyrus the Great who assumed leadership by seducing and raping under-age girls and by shooting it out with rival cult leaders who had previously seized power by violence, including murder, against earlier rivals. So with a "congregation" like this, "pastored" by the strongest thug, you think the educated and skilled St. Paul organized the fast-growing Christian church movements into Asia Minor and Greece?

How can you put Paul in the same league with such rubbish?


Was St. Paul the ONLY cult leader with marketing skill?

Plus, you have to assume Paul was the ONLY person who had any marketing prowess, because if there were others with similar skill, they too would have found some nutty cult to promote, or some low-life lost souls to recruit, and we would have dozens or hundreds of other Jesus-like cults, which would have been written about and had their own "gospels" published, like the Christ cults did.

So it's nonsensical to suggest that Paul's talent alone could explain the spread of the early Jesus cult(s). That the miracle stories are true would explain it much better. It's easier to believe this than to believe Paul was a wacko who threw himself away on a Koresh- or Applewhite-like cult or that he was the ONLY person in history who had marketing ability.

So there is no cult following ever that can serve as an example of what you're fantasizing here. Calling it "tiny but intense" explains nothing and doesn't separate it from the hundreds of other cults which should also have grown and published their own "gospels" or "scriptures" or "epistles" under the leadership of their own charismatic "St. Paul" guru leaders who were in abundant supply. Your fantasy that he was "one-of-a-kind" has no basis in fact.

And further, the early Christian cults were NOT a monolithic movement as you're imagining. No one marketer or promoter could gather them altogether into one group that sweeps across Greece and Italy. There was not one sweeping movement here, but a scatter of cults spreading erratically this way and that, under different charismatic preachers.


Neither St. Paul nor anyone else was the "THE FOUNDER" of Gentile Christianity.

Paul did not establish "the Roman church" and all the gentile Christian churches at this time, but only founded some communities here and there and communicated to many which had no connection to him originally and were in conflict with him and some of which he chastised for their false teachings or practices.

If you remove Paul entirely from the picture, there are still most of the same Gentile churches in Greece and Rome going their own way, some of them not even knowing of his existence. It's completely false to imagine that Paul "founded" Gentile Christianity at this time. He became prominent only later, long after his death, when his epistles became more widely circulated.

Near the west coast of Asia Minor there were "the seven churches" of Revelation 1-3, almost in the middle of Paul's evangelizing activity, and no mention is made of Paul nor anything quoted from him. The writer of Revelation may have had no knowledge whatever of Paul and his missionary activities which probably had taken place 20-30 years earlier than "John" writing this book from the island of Patmos. This writer condemned certain cults in these churches at Pergamum and Thyatira and other towns, and the cults he names are totally unknown to modern historians. Which indicates how many scattered oddball Christian cults there must have been all over the region, and likely most of them had no connection to Paul.

The vast majority of the new "churches" or Christian communities sprouting up here and there are totally forgotten and lost to history. There is no basis for saying that they depended upon Paul for their existence, or that he's the one who organized them. All the facts suggest the opposite -- that they were popping up all over, independently of each other, unregulated, uncontrolled, each following their own "charismatic" leaders, some of whom were condemning the others and being condemned by them, including some being denounced by Paul as not following the true path.

It is ludicrous to suggest that Paul somehow imposed a monolithic doctrine onto all these and is responsible for the spread of Christian communities during the 1st century.

To compare this scatter of new Christian cults to something monolithic like the 20th-century Jim Jones or Applewhite or Koresh cults shows a total disregard for the facts of the 1st-century spread of the Christ belief and the diverse writings and missionary movements being spawned by the original "gospel" reports that came out of the events from 30 AD.

The miracle stories came later.

But they existed by 60 or 70 AD, which is not later enough to conform to any pattern we see historically with the emergence of miracle stories and myth-making associated with an historical figure or any upstart "messiah" or "savior" or hero figure, real or fictional. Actually the resurrection story existed by 50 AD, at the latest, and the emergence of fiction miracle stories this soon after the date that they reportedly happened is not possible. You can name no other example in history of such a miracle story popping up in such a short time and being believed and recorded in documents.

It would be the ONLY time in history that fiction miracle stories were attached to an unknown character in such a short time after the events reportedly happened, and then recorded in multiple sources. You haven't explained how they got started or how the new belief spread in so many different directions and why someone recorded it. There is no previous case of miracle stories being invented for a hero figure who did nothing noteworthy. Fiction stories require centuries to evolve into myths that are believed as historical fact, or at least they require a charismatic or popular public celebrity figure with a long colorful career. They cannot pop up suddenly from someone of no status such as Jesus in 30 AD.

You pretend to have explained how the "Jesus myth" got started without the miracle acts having happened, but your pretense is not sufficient. You have to give a real explanation. You could just give up and say you don't know how something so unusual happened -- you assume it happened somehow, but you simply rule out actual miracle acts, because of your ideological premise. This is OK -- you don't know how it happened, but you reject the miracles as explaining it.

You should let it go at that and stop conjuring up ludicrous scenarios that make no sense and are contrary to human nature and history. There's no shame in saying you just can't explain it but you still rule out the miracles.

They are not evidence of witnesses, only believers.

No, they are evidence of something that was believable. Something must have happened to cause them to believe, and to cause educated persons to record the claims. Otherwise, whatever prevented all those other miracle-hero cults from sprouting up and spreading would also have prevented the Jesus cults from popping up out of nowhere and spreading.

The myth/legend grew with the telling and repeating of a story.

What story? What was the myth at the beginning? Why aren't there other similar myths about other god/hero/savior figures? Why couldn't other myths/legends also grow from being repeated? Why only this one?

You've got to be shitting me. I've said this numerous times now. The myth at the beginning was the one presented in the authentic Pauline epistles. That's where we read about a Jesus who was nebulous.

But this nebulous non-physical Jesus was only one of MANY nebulous and meaningless god-hero legends floating around. Why did ONLY THIS hero figure become deified into a miracle-worker and not the dozens or hundreds of other such hero figures which were just as attractive? Why did people flock to this one only and make him into a god? How was Paul the ONLY person in history who was able to manipulate people into such a mass hallucination, to the point that they turned his non-physical Jesus into a physical historical person doing miracles and who then was recorded into documents?

Paul never talks about Joseph, Mary, the manger scene, the wise men, the threat from Herod, the confounding of the temple rulers at age 12. Paul never mentions John the Baptist, Jesus's temptation in the wilderness, any of the miracles, . . .

Wrong, he mentions the most important of the miracles, the resurrection. And it's clear that he meant someone who existed in history and must have been the same Jesus described in the gospel accounts, despite his omission of the biographical matter.

. . . any of the people or places Jesus visited. Paul never mentions anything that would place Jesus in recent history or put him at any specific location.

Yes he does mention such things -- he describes a Jesus who had to be at a particular time and place. He says Jesus was "handed over" and that he distributed the wine and bread and said "This is my body, this is my blood." How could this not have been someone at a particular time and location? And if Paul did not mean the same Jesus who is presented in the gospel accounts, then what person was he talking about?

He also refers to Jesus as the "brother" of James, the early Jerusalem church leader. How could this be if Jesus was not in recent history or never existed at specific locations? The two might not really have been brothers, but it was believed by Paul and others that they were. Josephus also thought this. How can this not place Jesus in recent history and at certain locations?

The fact that he mentions virtually nothing biographical shows that his audience already knows those details. And yet he does say Jesus spoke certain words to those present and that he was "handed over." Unless you can explain how a non-physical Jesus can be "handed over" and speak those words, we can only assume Paul meant the same Jesus described in the gospels who spoke those words and was betrayed.

There's no reason to insist that Paul had to give the biographical information. None of the other N.T. writings, outside the gospels and Acts, says anything biographical about Jesus.

The epistle to the Hebrews, e.g., says nothing biographical about Jesus, even less than Paul, and yet it's clear that Hebrews is speaking about someone who was a physical person who recently did something in history, on earth. It says (in chs. 1 and 2):

In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days he spoke to us through a son, . . .

This clearly says that someone spoke recently, "in these last days," like the prophets earlier had spoken. This implies that a normal physical voice was heard, and this happened in recent times, like a few months or years or decades earlier, i.e., in "recent history."

Announced originally through the Lord, it was confirmed for us by those who had heard. God added his testimony by signs, wonders, various acts of power, . . .

This clearly says that certain ones "had heard" what was spoken, it was Jesus ("the Lord") who spoke it, and there were "signs" etc. that were also witnessed along with it. This all must have happened at a particular place and at some recent time. Just because the particular date and location are not named does not mean there was no date and time when this happened.

It later refers to the "suffering" and "death" of this person. It says: "Now since the children share in blood and flesh, he likewise shared in them, . . ." Doesn't this have to mean that the Christ spoken of here lived as a human with flesh and blood?

You have to answer what this Christ was supposed to be if not a physical person with a body living at a particular place. If you can't explain how he "shared in" blood and flesh without having a physical body, then we can only assume this refers to a real human with a body and who suffered and died like humans do.

Failure to mention the exact time and location does not mean there was no physical person or location or time for the event described here.

Even though Hebrews uses extreme spiritual and mystical and flowery cosmic language, avoiding mundane descriptions, still this has to be an earthly human person being described here. All the abstract language and minimum of down-to-earth descriptions does not mean that the one described did not have an earthly historical existence.

So this Jesus Christ in Hebrews, like Paul's Jesus, had to be a physical person who was "handed over" and spoke words that people heard. They spiritualized him into something grander than this earthly human, but they had the earthly person as their initial object, who was seen and heard and had some kind of earthly life.

Paul's Jesus is a nebulous god-myth who performed a sacrifice by dying and being resurrected to save humanity from their sins. Paul's Jesus communicated with Paul via visions and revelations.

But none of that means Jesus was not also a physical person who lived in history. It only means that his existence goes beyond this earthly life. It includes the earthly, which is our starting point and cannot be negated, but then goes farther to something beyond it. Unless you explain how he could be "handed over" and speak the words "This is my body" etc., and what is meant when it says he shared in "blood and flesh," we can only assume this is all about a physical person who lived in a normal human body, despite also being transformed further into something beyond this world.

It's perfectly normal for them to start with a real person to whom they then added spiritual or "heavenly" qualities and describe as having ascended to "the right hand of God" etc., while at the same time having in mind the earthly person who was seen and heard. Nothing prevents that earthly physical person from also having those non-physical or other-worldly features. There is not any contradiction between the two worlds. Both are conceivable and can exist together in the same total universe or total reality.

Paul's Jesus was no different from the epic hero sacrifices on behalf of others made by Prometheus, Horus, Perseus, Hercules, or Mithras.

Except that we have no evidence for any of these figures or their acts. If they really existed, there is no record of them from anywhere near the time they might have lived. Whereas we do have written evidence about the acts of Jesus from near the time the events happened.

And even if those pagan heroes did do something heroic, then so what? Does that prove that nothing heroic was ever done by anyone since these mythic heroes lived? because every later hero story about anyone must be a fiction copy based on these earlier hero figures?

And this is meaningless until you quote from the original text sources for these epic heroes (or at least one of them). You must go beyond just quoting by rote some rhetoric being spoon-fed to you by your favorite 21st-century mythicist Bible-basher pundit, who is not a source for what Horus did thousands of years ago.

All these are hero/savior god figures.

Then why don't you quote from the earliest source text about them instead of just parroting back the rhetoric your Jesus-debunker crusader programmed into you. You have read nothing about any of them but just believe whatever your 21st-century pundit told you. Repeating by rote the talking points of these modern ideologues is no substitute for citing the original sources about these pagan deities and showing the parallels to the Jesus events and how they cast any doubt on those events.

All of their stories bear remarkable similarities to the Jesus myth.

Then why can't you name those "similarities"? If they're so "remarkable" why don't you point them out, and quote the source text that tells those stories. Just repeating back some 21st-century talking points does not prove anything. There's nothing about those pagan myths which casts doubt on the Jesus events. So, Mithras was born on Dec. 25 and Wow! isn't that a coincidence! -- Really, and you think this is some grand shocking revelation! debunking Christianity once and for all!

Get serious. Cut out the horseplay and give us a real "remarkable similarity" between the "Jesus myth" and the pagan stories.

For all we know these legends did grow from being repeated.

Well of course repetition over centuries helps the legends to grow. Those pagan myths required centuries of being repeated and expanded upon. But the Jesus "legend" developed in only a few decades, in one generation, which makes it totally different than the pagan myths. It could not have emerged from fictional accounts invented only 10 or 20 or 30 years from the events. Miracle legends that are only fiction require generations and centuries of repetition to become adopted into the culture. You can't name any exception to this rule.

Whatever kernel of truth lies at the heart of it, the existence of the man, the character of the man, etc, is hard to determine.

Why is it so easy to determine in the case of Gautama and Simon Magus and others, but hard to determine in this case? One reasonable answer is that he actually did perform the miracle acts attributed to him in the legends.

The existence of Simon Magus is every bit as difficult to verify as the existence of Jesus.

His existence is not the issue. What we know is that the MYTH of him exists, and also that of Gautama and Zoroaster and Apollonius of Tyana. We can explain how these myths exist, i.e., the miracle stories, even though they are fiction. But we cannot explain this in the case of Jesus.

For Simon Magus the miracle stories don't appear until about 150 years after the reported time of the events, in only 1 or 2 sources. But the Jesus miracle stories appear in only 40-70 years, in 4 (5) sources, and Jesus had no long public career like all the other miracle heroes did.

All we have about him starts with "Acts," where he could very well be little else besides a plot device cooked up by the author to convince the already-convinced reader that somehow the magic tricks Peter did were so far superior to those done by Pharoah's magicians . . . that even Simon was convinced.

The point is that we have real evidence for the Jesus miracles, whereas we have virtually nothing about Simon Magus. All the miracle stories about Simon Magus date from at least 150 years later, after he lived (if he did live). Though there might be 2 or 3 sources for them, these sources are all so much later, far removed from the original events, that we can assume they are a result of mythologizing. Just like the miracle stories of Mohammed are much too late to be credible.

The Book of Acts presents none of these miracles of Simon. It says:

But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, “This man is the great power (Gr. Dynamis Megale) of God.” And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. --Acts 8:9-11

It credits him with "sorcery" and having "bewitched" people. This does not identify what he actually did. The real miracle stories about him are mainly from Irenaeus sometime near 200 AD. Which of course is not reliable as a source for something happening in 30-60 AD.

Everything else written about Simon Magus was sourced from later christian writers and it includes evidence of legend building, such as the claim that Simon was God himself, descended to rescue his Ennoa (first thought, the source of creation). There are claims that Simon could levitate himself at will and fly.

Why are you dwelling on such claims that have no credibility? They originate from sources far too late in order to be believed as sources for the mid-first century.

Whereas, by contrast, the sources for the Jesus miracles are from 40-70 years after the events, and we have at least 4 sources, and for the resurrection we can add Paul, within only 30 years of the event, making 5 sources for the resurrection of Christ. This is a clear contrast in terms of the credibility of the sources, making the miracles of Jesus far more believable than those of Simon Magus, or any other reputed miracle-worker.

Simon Magus need not have lived in order for these legends to grow or for someone to concoct the Simonean cult from Simon's infamy.

It's highly probable that he really lived and was not originally a fiction.

We don't know if there has ever been a miracle legend, believed as historical by large numbers, which began from a totally fictional character. We know many have originated from a real historical person, like the St. Nicholas/Santa Claus legend. In most cases -- probably more than 90% -- there was an original historical person, who was unusual, and around whom later legend evolved, bringing in the miracle element.

We don't know if Simon Magus was a real person, but it's much easier to explain how a REAL historical figure got transformed into a miracle god/hero, and found a place in the written record, than how the story might have begun with a totally fictional character with no historical existence at all.

It is not true that a writer can simply invent a fictitious character who is then believed to be real, in a short time, by hundreds or thousands of gullible followers. There's no known case of such a thing, nor does it make any sense how it could happen. It's easy to pretend that there's dumb idiots out there who believe anything no matter how silly, but there are no actual known cases of this, where the believers increase to a significant number in a short time. (Just because you can point to a couple wackos here or there proves nothing.)

Of course in modern times you can cite some charlatans who are promoted in the media, but in ancient times this was not possible.

When miracle legends develop, usually there is something real that happened which gets distorted over time, and then it gets expanded gradually, over generations, to more and more believers as only small elements get added little by little to the original story. To prove your "dumb idiots everywhere" theory, you have to give examples of large cults which sprang up suddenly, with those believing the miracle stories suddenly exploding to large numbers in less than a generation.

Yet such a cult grew for centuries, . . .

Simon Magus? The small cult continued and the myth expanded, but it probably began from a real historical person who was a trickster or an effective magician. Not likely a total fiction. And not taken seriously enough that anyone bothered to write down the events. Whereas for the "gospel" accounts of Jesus to be written down, it means that there was real evidence and educated people took it seriously, so that this was different than the many obvious fiction characters and tricksters or hoaxers etc.

. . . ironically dying out not long after it was outlawed by the christian power brokers of the Nicean Council.

No, the Nicean Council did no such thing. It was only Arianism that was outlawed, nothing from earlier times like a Simon Magus cult. If you want to cut through the false myths and legends, then stop fabricating your own, or stop promoting the lies from those debunker Bible-basher celebrities who make a living churning out those folk tales about the Nicean Council that you swallow uncritically rather than checking into it for yourself.

Further, we don't know that any Simon Magus cult "grew for centuries." Whatever cult there was produced no literature or documentation of their beliefs, or nothing worth preserving by making copies of it, which was done for any important events. Virtually everyone recognized that this was a wacko group, originating from a charlatan or trickster, with no credibility and nothing worth preserving in writing.

To summarize, Simon was a god-man who performed miracles . . .

No he wasn't. In the 1st century he had a reputation as a magician only. 100+ years later some miracle-type stories seem to appear in one source only, and then a few decades later a second source picks up on it. 100-150 years later and only 2 sources is not enough evidence to conclude that he had any miracle power.

. . . and other works in a heroic effort to rescue the source of all creation from a horrid fate. Far from providing a counter-point to your Jesus myth, the myth of Simon Magus demonstrates yet again how common that sort of myth building was, . . .

Yes, there were many such cults or myth-making efforts, but they obviously had no evidence for their beliefs and were not taken seriously by people generally, and no one wasted their time writing down the legends or beliefs of such cults because there was nothing credible in them worth preserving, and so we have no written accounts of them. But where we have written accounts, near to the time of the events, we have something worth taking seriously.

. . . and is a perfect parallel to your Jesus myth which succeeded at the tip of a sword . . .

No, again, stop fabricating your own legends. The "Jesus myth" had already succeeded long before being adopted by Rome, having been documented in multiple written sources from the 1st century, unlike any other cults or myths/legends being promoted but having no credibility. You can't name one other that left written documentation, or explain why there is this one only. Your paranoid delusions that the others were exterminated by crusading sword-wielding Christ zealots is pure fantasy and hysteria, unsupported by any evidence.

. . . and the Simonians who yielded to the power of that sword.

No evidence for any of this. Your delusionist ravings, or those of your 21st-century mythicist debunker guru leading you by the nose, don't make it so.


(to be continued)

 

[Atheos]

Cliff Notes

• Post 1: A bunch of 3rd century artifacts evidencing worship of a miracle worker. Easily explained by the fact that we freaking know there were pockets of Christians as early as 70-90 CE. These do not qualify as evidence of a historical miracle worker, but only as evidence of people who believed that a long time ago in a land far, far, away there was someone who worked miracles. And if you'll believe that story he'll give you a beachfront mansion after you die.
• Post 2: Inconceivable denial of the similarities between the "Jesus" story as presented in the canonical gospels and the "hero's epic" journey formula used in the story of Moses, many ancient myths, Star Wars and others.
• Post 3: Really odd use of logic suggesting that somehow "Paul" was more intelligent than Marshall Applewhite, J.Z. Knight, David Koresh, Joseph Smith, etc., because amongst all the thousands upon thousands of folks who have used their charisma to attract a following, he was the only one intelligent enough to realize it would be silly to waste his time with something that might not last beyond his own lifetime. Mixed with a generous helping of "Appeal to Popularity" this post offers absolutely nothing of substance.
• Post 4: Denial of the evidence that has already been presented regarding "documentation" of Joseph Smiths alleged miracles, including signed and dated witnesses, far better quality evidence than that he keeps presenting for the Jesus miracles, and yet which he not only denies proves anything, but also (and inexplicably) denies exists.
• Post 5: Repeated appeal to somehow Jesus having a "short time to make a reputation," completely ignoring posts that have been provided in this thread debunking that silly argument ad nauseam.

Lumpenproletariat's efforts are certainly genuine and he has gone to great lengths. What he doesn't seem to realize is just how bereft of substance his arguments are and how that by presenting them with such vigor he simply focuses attention on how silly the entire Jesus myth actually is. Yes, people believe it, but people believe really stupid things. Millions of people believe the stupid things Joseph Smith claimed. There's plenty of evidence for people making up stories and getting them believed. There is still not one shred of evidence a magic Jew cured blindness, walked on water, controlled weather, raised dead people back to life or levitated off into the sky never to be seen again. These are the things of myth which reasonable people dismiss as stories.

 

[Keith&Co.]

These are the things of myth which reasonable people dismiss as stories.

more to the point, here, I should think, these are things that actual historians do not present in their history books as historical events.
The amount of evidence that would be necessary for such people to present this sort of thing as 'something we know happened' is apparently beyond Lumpy's comprehension.

 

[Atheos]

Conveniently and tellingly every miracle Jesus is claimed to have performed left absolutely not one bit of evidence. Jesus didn't move a mountain into the sea, something that geologists could later examine and verify had actually happened. Every tale about these fantastic claims comes to us at least third-hand and even then the people making the claims that they heard someone say it are completely anonymous. And every one is an event that is much more likely to be fabricated than real. People levitating off into the sky to disappear in a cloud just doesn't happen. People making up stories about people levitating ... does.

How people continue to believe such fantastic claims with such awful evidence is the only miracle here.

On second thought that's not a miracle either. It's easily explained. Most believers think there's actual evidence that the stories are true and lack any motivation to look into it and see that it is all based on bluster.

 

[Atheos]

Here's how rational history and forensics works:

Example 1: You have a dead body and a murder weapon. You know someone was killed and you can see that the murder weapon was used to kill the victim. You also have several witnesses who saw the murder committed and can identify the murderer. The testimony of these witnesses is (absent exculpatory evidence, such as an airtight alibi) enough to convince reasonable people that the accused actually committed the crime. The witnesses still could be lying, but their claim is not extraordinary, and the physical evidence seems to support their claim.

Example 2: You have archaeological evidence of a large city that existed on a site that is now barren land. You know this area was once home to many people, because there are remnants of city walls, houses, furniture, vessels, tools, etc. There is an ancient story containing mythological elements such as dragons, cyclops, etc., but the story also references an ancient city that would have been located on the site of these ruins. Once again the story could be pure fiction, and the mythological elements are good reason to assume it is, but like "Gone With the Wind" it could be historical fiction, using some elements of the real world and combining them with entirely fabricated elements of the imagination.

Example 3: You have absolutely no physical evidence to support it, but you have several people swearing they were abducted by space aliens and subjected to probings and such. Investigators look carefully at the field in which the space craft was supposed to have landed, but are unable to find so much as a divot to indicate the presence of a large object. They find no evidence of turbulence, no support at all for the claim that a large craft landed in this place. Medical examiners are unable to find any evidence of physical trauma caused by the alleged probing that would in any way be consistent with the claim. Radar and other observations do not support the story that a craft landed and took off. Rational people dismiss claims such as these, but gullible people believe them.

Example 4: You have an entirely religious claim that a prophet performed miracles. There are no artifacts or physical evidence to examine. The miracle worker turned water to wine, but then the bystanders drank up all the evidence. The miracle worker raised some anonymous person from the dead, but the dude died again later anyway, and even if we knew who and where he was we'd just see a grave. The miracle worker walked on water. Too bad water doesn't leave footprints. The miracle worker cursed a fig tree and it died. Woooo. The miracle worker levitated off into the sky never to be seen again. Yeah.... riiiiiight. These stories are all anonymous and all relate to someone who existed dozens of years ago in a land thousands of miles away. Rational people know these extraordinary claims are of the same value as thousands of other claims of supernatural activities. Although there are certainly believers in woo of every stripe from palm readers to doomsday cults, rational people understand this is a facet of human nature. People are often inclined believe an extraordinary claim because the teller has charisma, not because the thing actually happened.

Example 5: Ten people swear they saw someone commit murder, but they can't tell us who was murdered and nobody can find a dead body. There is no physical evidence that a murder took place where the allegations claim. In this example, reasonable people would be skeptical these people saw a murder. The alleged murderer would never be convicted solely on this testimony. It is more likely that the ten accusers agreed to ruin the accused than that a murder was actually committed. This is in spite of the fact that murders do not violate any laws of physics, and are not extraordinary in any way. Even sworn testimony of known witnesses regarding relatively mundane claims is subject to skepticism by rational people.

That's how history works. People make stuff up all the time.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

What do all mythic heroes other than Jesus Christ have in common? -- There's NO EVIDENCE for their alleged miracles.

(continued)

The Paul epistles attest to the resurrection of Jesus, and these are mostly from the 50s AD. Also there is the Q document, which both Matthew and Luke used, which is from about 50 AD, and it narrates two of the Jesus miracle events plus also has one passage which refers to a number of the events without narrating them.

I notice you dance around the fact that Paul never mentions any miracles Jesus performed.

You mean other than the resurrection (which is the most important miracle).

But he never mentions ANYTHING about Jesus prior to the night when he was "handed over" and spoke the words "This is my body" etc. It's not important that Paul omits mention of the healing miracles, because he omits mention of EVERYTHING prior to the night of the arrest. So those miracles do not stand out as something unique that Paul omits mention of, i.e., he omits mention of anything Jesus did prior to that night.

His resurrection doesn't count in this context because there is nothing in Paul's references to the resurrection that require it to have happened on this planet at all.

Yes there is, because Paul mentioned OTHER events about Jesus that could only have happened on this planet. Saying that Jesus was the "brother" of James means Jesus had to have been on this planet. And the night of the arrest had to have happened on this planet.

That Jesus was "handed over" and said "This is my body" etc. makes no sense unless it happened on this planet. Unless you can explain how the non-physical non-earthly Jesus was "handed over" and spoke those words, we have to assume everything Paul said about the one "handed over" was something that happened on this planet. If only one thing Paul said puts him on this planet, then everything else he says about the one "handed over" also must have happened on this planet.

Everything is explained by the simple fact that his audience already knew the biographical part of the story and thus it was not necessary for Paul to repeat those things. He wanted to dwell on the cosmic or spiritual truths.

Again, the epistle to the Hebrews does the same thing. This was normal, to omit the biographical and dwell only on the spiritual/cosmic. But even so, there is enough earthly element in the description in Hebrews that it had to have been an earthly physical person being described. E.g., what do the words, ". . . he who 'for a little while' was made lower than the angels . . ." (Heb. 2:9) refer to? What does "lower than the angels" mean and how was this "for a little while"?

What else can this mean but that Jesus, who pre-existed, was brought down to a lower (earthly) level, and this was for a brief time? What else can it mean? And what was this lower level other than an earthly life, which was "brief"? (The writer's meaning is what's important here, not whether the drama he describes is a true happening. I.e., his version of Jesus is of an earthly historical person.)

You have to explain what this means if it does not mean that Jesus was brought to an earthly life for this brief time. Just because the author writes in a cosmic/abstract language 99% of the time does not change the fact that he connects this cosmic figure to an earthly existence, i.e., to the earthly or historical person who was physical, for a time, as a normal human with a human body.

If that's not the meaning, then what does this text mean, about him being "made lower than the angels" for a short time? Again, this is Hebrews, which says NOTHING biographical about Jesus, i.e., nothing about the birth or about Galilee or the trial. Not even about Jesus being "handed over" as Paul does. Yet how could this Christ person described in Hebrews not have been an historical person who lived at a particular earth place and time? (I.e., how could this not be the meaning intended?)

And it's obvious that St. Paul also was speaking in the same way, making clear reference to the night when Jesus was "handed over" just as the gospel accounts say. And the Greek word Paul used for "handed over" is the same word used in the gospel accounts for the betrayal event. And Paul wrote this before the gospel accounts were written.

How was Jesus "handed over" in some spiritual sense, with no physical body?

For all purposes, Paul's Jesus died and was resurrected in a spiritual place from which Jesus communicated with Paul through visions and revelations.

But you could say the same for all the other N.T. writers, including writers much later. So, the writers of all the other epistles and of Revelation also intended only a spiritual Jesus with no body? What about Clement of Rome who wrote an epistle somewhere about 90-100 AD? His Jesus also was non-physical, spiritual only? He was Bishop of Rome and was called Pope Clement I. In his epistle he says nothing biographical about Jesus, other than mentioning the resurrection.

So did Clement believe Jesus was a non-physical entity with no body and no earthly existence? Isn't that a stretch? He was familiar with some elements in the gospels, probably the Gospel of Matthew, quoting 1 or 2 phrases from the Sermon on the Mount.

What about the author of 2 Peter, which might be the latest of the N.T. writings -- He also says nothing biographical about Jesus. Here is an epistle written somewhere around 120-140 AD which says nothing about Jesus that necessarily puts him in a physical body or earthly body. So this Christian writer also believed Jesus was non-physical? That's a strrrrrrrretch, isn't it?

Did these Christian writers not know their own meaning when they spoke of this Christ? they didn't know he was really non-earthly and non-physical? They thought they meant someone earthly and physical but they were wrong, because the someone they spoke of was NON-earthly and NON-physical?

How can you impose onto a writer what that writer meant? You can substitute YOUR Christ in place of Paul's Christ and say it's YOUR Christ that he was talking about and not the Christ he thought he was talking about?

Nothing Paul wrote required a Jesus who had recently lived and nothing he wrote puts Jesus in any particular location.

But you could say this about ALL the N.T. writings after Acts, and many or most of the early church writings. Long after the Gospel accounts were being circulated there were still Christian writers who said nothing about the earthly life of Jesus, or the time when he lived. They surely knew of the Gospel writings, and quoted from them. It's unthinkable that they did not know the story of Jesus in Galilee, of the trial before Pilate, and also the infancy narratives.

One early Christian writer, Ignatius of Antioch, wrote an epistle which mentions the Matthew infancy story. This Ignatius document was written somewhere from 100-110 AD. So Matthew must have been circulating at this time. And yet many later Christian writers, who certainly had this Gospel account, never mention anything biographical about Jesus.

The writer Polycarp, writing about 150 AD, never says anything biographical about Jesus, in his epistle.

So how can you make such a fuss over Paul's omission of anything biographical? This was the norm for many Christian writers throughout these early centuries. Can you seriously claim that early Christian writers, even beyond 200 and 300 AD, believed that Jesus had a spiritual body only and no physical body?


Church writers typically omitted biographical information on Jesus.

Even beyond the 2nd century there is a pattern of omitting mention of biographical information about Jesus. In fact, even up to modern times this is common. Most of them prefer to speak of "miracles" they personally witnessed rather than the ones recorded in the Gospel accounts.

The early Christian writers who do mention the biographical information were the prolific ones who wrote long dissertations, like Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, etc., but it was a small fraction of their total text, and thus insignificant. While some others continued the pattern of omitting biographical mention altogether.

Here is an essay by Methodius of Olympus on the resurrection, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf06/Page_364.html . It gives no biographical detail about Jesus. Arguably even less than St. Paul who at least told us that Jesus was "handed over" and spoke those words on the night he was arrested. This Methodius treatise is from the latter 3rd century and quotes extensively from St. Paul. It mentions the resurrection of Christ in a general way, but without any mention of the empty tomb or appearances.

The closest to anything biographical is his reference to Mt 22:23-33 where Jesus has an exchange with some Saducees who did not believe in any resurrection. This quote leaves no doubt that Methodius knew of Matthew's gospel and about Jesus being in Jerusalem, so he had biographical information. This short exchange with abstract Saducees could easily be interpreted as a "spiritual" event only, not happening really on earth. So there's nothing biographical, no mention of Jerusalem or Judea or Galilee or the trial and Pontius Pilate, and nothing about the crucifixion and resurrection, other than to mention the resurrection in the same manner as St. Paul mentions it.

If you assume that Paul's Jesus existed entirely in a spiritual realm only, with no physical body, because he omits anything biographical, then you must assume that this 3rd century Christian writer also had in mind only a spiritual Jesus with no body.

And yet there's no doubt that he meant Jesus as having an earthly physical life. This is made clear in a fragment of his, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf06/Page_399.html , where he writes, "What doth it profit us that the Son of God was crucified upon earth, and made man?"

So he omits anything biographical or showing Jesus having a physical existence in his major treatise on resurrection, while it's clear in the fragment that Jesus was physical and died "upon earth." This illustrates how it was typical for a Christian writer to omit entirely any mention of the biographical matter, like Paul did, and yet still be fully aware of it, like Methodius indicates here in a separate writing.

So the absence of any language about a physical body does not imply that the writer believed Jesus had no physical body or was spiritual only.

Another Christian writer, Alexander, Bishop of Lycopolis, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf06/Page_241.html , also gives no biographical information on Jesus, writing as late as the 5th century. There can't be any doubt that this church writer believed that Jesus was a physical human who lived an earthly life. Yet he says nothing about the life of Jesus prior to the resurrection, like St. Paul, so here again you'd have to conclude that this writer's version of Jesus was of a non-physical being with only a spiritual existence.

This Alexander and some others show a pattern of concentrating mainly on debunking the pagan gods. Some of them say virtually nothing at all about Christ and just list extensive refutations of the gods and denunciations of the rituals and sacrifices in the pagan ceremonies.

One Latin writer, Minucius Felix, possibly about 200 AD, did a dialogue/debate between a Christian apologist and a pagan critic of the Christians, titled Octavius, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/octavius.html , in which the only reference to Christ is actually from the pagan character who ridicules Christians for worshiping a crucified person. He says, "and he who explains their ceremonies by reference to a man punished by extreme suffering for his wickedness, and to the deadly wood of the cross, appropriates fitting altars for reprobate and wicked men, that they may worship what they deserve." Meanwhile the Christian debater doesn't mention Christ at all but only defends the Christians against some attacks made on them.

Such absence of anything about Christ per se, the historical Jesus figure OR the heavenly resurrected Christ, is common in many of the early church writings.

Nevertheless it becomes clear that likely ALL these writers knew of the historical Jesus in the gospel accounts even if they said nothing at all about him. Why they said little or nothing about him is debatable. But here's an example indicating that they did know of the historical Jesus, in detail, even if they omitted mention of him altogether:


Tatian and the Diatessaron

Tatian the Assyrian was a pupil of Justin Martyr who left two important works, the Diatessaron and Address to the Greeks. The latter is a tirade against the pagan gods which never mentions "Christ" or "Jesus" but refers to the "Logos" and seems to use this as the term for Christ. There's no biographical information on Christ or the Logos. So you'd think he's not even talking about the Jesus in the gospels?

And yet, in his other work, the Diatessaron, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/diatessaron.html , he provides the entire gospel account of Jesus, combining the 4 gospels into his own compressed version of the Jesus Gospel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatian
Tatian the Assyrian . . . (c. 120 – c. 180 AD) was an Assyrian early Christian writer and theologian of the 2nd century.

Tatian's most influential work is the Diatessaron, a Biblical paraphrase, or "harmony", of the four gospels that became the standard text of the four gospels in the Syriac-speaking churches until the 5th-century, after which it gave way to the four separate gospels in the Peshitta version.

Tatian's own "gospel" in his Address to the Greeks is virtually all a negative attack on the pagan gods with hardly anything recognizable as Christian or connected to the New Testament Christ. Here's just an example:

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/tatian.html
Why is he who trusts in the system of matter not willing to trust in God? For what reason do you not approach the more powerful Lord, but rather seek to cure yourself, like the dog with grass, or the stag with a viper, or the hog with river-crabs, or the lion with apes? Why you deify the objects of nature? And why, when you cure your neighbour, are you called a benefactor? Yield to the power of the Logos! The demons do not cure, but by their art make men their captives. And the most admirable Justin has rightly denounced them as robbers. For, as it is the practice of some to capture persons and then to restore them to their friends for a ransom, so those who are esteemed gods, invading the bodies of certain persons, and producing a sense of their presence by dreams, command them to come forth into public, and in the sight of all, when they have taken their fill of the things of this world, fly away from the sick, and, destroying the disease which they had produced, restore men to their former state.

The treatise is a long-drawn-out list of denunciations of paganism, similar to the above, with virtually nothing positive.

But in one place he describes his "conversion" from reading certain "barbaric writings" he examined and decided were the truth. Obviously it must be some of the Hebrew prophets he means, but probably also the Christ gospel writings as they existed at that time, which he used to compose his own combined or "harmonized" gospel account.

I sought how I might be able to discover the truth. And, while I was giving my most earnest attention to the matter, I happened to meet with certain barbaric writings, too old to be compared with the opinions of the Greeks, and too divine to be compared with their errors; and I was led to put faith in these by the unpretending east of the language, the inartificial character of the writers, the foreknowledge displayed of future events, the excellent quality of the precepts, and the declaration of the government of the universe as centred in one Being. And, my soul being taught of God, I discern that the former class of writings lead to condemnation, but that these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue us from a multiplicity of rulers and ten thousand tyrants, while they give us, not indeed what we had not before received, but what we had received but were prevented by error from retaining.

So the case of Tatian shows how a Christian writer knew of the Jesus of the gospels -- the whole story with the miracle healings, also the infancy narrative, John the Baptist, the disciples, and the trial with Pilate and the crucifixion and resurrection -- he knew all this, and yet wrote a lengthy treatise -- lengthier than anything Paul wrote -- on the false pagan beliefs vs. the Truth without ever mentioning anything biographical about Jesus. He even omits "Christ" and "Jesus" and instead uses only the term "Logos."

Without knowing of his other work, the Diatessaron, containing the Jesus events, you could easily argue that his "Christ" or "Logos" had nothing to do with any disciples or any miracles or trial or crucifixion or anything geographical, etc.

You could complain that Tatian "never talks about Joseph, Mary, the manger scene, the wise men, the threat from Herod, the confounding of the temple rulers at age 12. [Tatian] never mentions John the Baptist, Jesus's temptation in the wilderness, any of the miracles, any of the people or places Jesus visited. [Tatian] never mentions anything that would place Jesus in recent history or put him at any specific location." etc.

Yes, in his Address to the Greeks Tatian never mentions any of this. And yet he knew it all. Just as Paul knew most of it, as well as other Christian writers who didn't mention those things.

So most of the Christian writers, early and late, were very similar to Paul in avoiding discussion of the biographical matter. That Paul says nothing about it in no way means he did not know of it or that the whole biography and acts of Jesus must have emerged as fiction decades or generations after Paul.

The later writers, even centuries later, often said nothing biographical, and yet they obviously had that information, as many examples make clear.


(to be continued)