The Christ Myth Theory

[No Robots]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

 

[Jarhyn]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. If you have an issue you have it in your power to make whatever edits you like to the text. It's right there in the "Jesus in the Talmud" article.

 

[dbz]

I started the draft-article, "Jesus in any light at all" @RationalWiki, for the "everything (only extra-biblical?) that discusses Jesus in any light at all." project.

 

[No Robots]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. If you have an issue you have it in your power to make whatever edits you like to the text. It's right there in the "Jesus in the Talmud" article.

Thank you for providing your source. The Wikipedia article makes clear that many of these passages have been censored. You have chosen to use censored versions. Why is that?

 

[Jarhyn]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. If you have an issue you have it in your power to make whatever edits you like to the text. It's right there in the "Jesus in the Talmud" article.

Thank you for providing your source. The Wikipedia article makes clear that many of these passages have been censored. You have chosen to use censored versions. Why is that?

Because they were the ones that were published in the big available blocks to copy the whole text. Again, if you dislike this format, it's wikipedia. I'm sure they won't mind adding the blocks you wish to see in equal prominence to the text you feel is unfairly censored.

 

[Swammerdami]

Thank you much, Jarhyn. I find it helpful to focus on one SPECIFIC likely scenario (rather than various inconsistent "maybes"). Your answers certainly helped me to understand the mythicist position.

It might be useful for another mythicist in the thread to weigh in, either agreeing that your scenario is a likely possibility, or proposing an alternative of his or her own choice. I hope that dbz, or some other volunteer, will be able to use your excellent example as a template to understand the sort of SPECIFIC DETAILED example that is useful to me.

One final question, if I may. In your scenario, was Chestus (probably) crucified?

 

[dbz]

This is everything I am aware of that discusses Jesus in any light at all.

You can check:

• Zindler, Frank R. (2003). The Jesus the Jews never knew : Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the quest of the historical Jesus in Jewish sources. Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press. ISBN 9781578849161.

"Review - Zindler - The Jesus the Jews Never Knew by Robert M. Price". www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com.

I find myself not quite convinced, with Zindler, that “Jesus ben Pandera” is not even supposed to be Jesus. He’s got me persuaded that Ben Stada is more likely Simon Magus, certainly not Jesus, and that Balaam is simply the Old Testament prophet, not a cipher for Jesus, but the Pandera business is so early a piece of anti-Christian lore that, when we find what sounds like the same thing in somewhat later Jewish writings, it is likely we are dealing with the same tradition.

 

[dbz]

I acknowledge that Chrestus is quite close to being "Historical Jesus" but the point of Amalgamism is that he's not the only historical Jesus.

Also add Simon Magus and any number of similar lost historical personages.

Justin Martyr (in his Apologies, and in a lost work against heresies, which Irenaeus used as his main source) and Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses) record that after being cast out by the Apostles, Simon Magus came to Rome where, having joined to himself a profligate woman of the name of Helen, he gave out that it was he who appeared among the Jews as the Son, in Samaria as the Father and among other nations as the Holy Spirit.

"Did Jesus Exist? Religions & Scriptures Essays by Frank Zindler". FRANK R ZINDLER.

II. Certain Jews probably were ready for the Magi when they came to visit.

During the last two centuries B.C.E., the Jews were awaiting a messiah, and were making checklists of passages from the Old Testament which they fancied described the who, where, why, and how of the person who would be their messiah. The actual texts from the Old Testament were often taken completely out of context, distorted, and misquoted, and there was little respect for the tenses of verbs. (A particularly egregious example of such scripture· twisting methodology can be seen in the Gospel of Matthew.)

The messianic checklists that different groups had been keeping would have been reinterpreted after the visit of the Magi: instead of telling what the messiah would do, I think they came to be interpreted as a record of what he had done. News that the messiah had already come would spread rapidly. The fact that no one had noticed the first coming was the reason the myth of the second coming had to be invented. Nothing actually had been accomplished by the first coming—except on parchment and papyrus!

An example of such a checklist has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls scholar Theodor Gaster tells us about

a catena of five Scriptural passages attesting the advent of the Future Prophet and the Anointed King and the final discomfiture of the impious. The first four are taken from the Pentateuch, and include an excerpt from the oracles of Balaam. The fifth is an interpretation of a verse from the Book of Joshua. An interesting feature of this document ... is that precisely the same passages of the Pentateuch are used by the Samaritans as the stock testimonial to the coming of the Taheb, or future 'Restorer.' They evidently constituted a standard set of such quotations, of the type that scholars have long supposed to have been in the hands of New Testament writers when they cited passages of the Hebrew Bible supposedly confirmed by incidents in the life and career of Jesus.*

* Theodore H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures, 3rd rev. and enlarged ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1976),p.363.

"The Samaritan Prophet - Livius". www.livius.org.

Comment: The Samaritan prophet may be called a Messiah, because he announced the restoration of the cult in the Samarian temple, which was on Mount Gerizim. But he was not a Messiah in its original sense, because that is a Jewish concept. The Samaritan equivalent is the Taheb, the Restorer-prophet "like Moses" announced in Deuteronomy 18.15-18. The two concepts were related, however, and were used as synonyms in the Gospel of John, where a Samaritan woman says:

I know that the Messiah is coming. When he will come, he will show us all things.

note: This comes close to the Jewish idea that the Messiah will show the true meaning of the Law of Moses.

Samaritanism's primary religious text is the Samaritan Pentateuch (or Samaritan Torah).

The religion also has an apocalyptic element, with a belief in a messiah (the Taheb) who may be Moses or a similar prophet who will return for the "the day of vengeance" and resurrection of the dead.[5]

 

[No Robots]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. If you have an issue you have it in your power to make whatever edits you like to the text. It's right there in the "Jesus in the Talmud" article.

Thank you for providing your source. The Wikipedia article makes clear that many of these passages have been censored. You have chosen to use censored versions. Why is that?

Because they were the ones that were published in the big available blocks to copy the whole text. Again, if you dislike this format, it's wikipedia. I'm sure they won't mind adding the blocks you wish to see in equal prominence to the text you feel is unfairly censored.

Seems more like sleight-of-hand than wizardry. Perhaps the ethics involved are merely theoretic?

 

[Jarhyn]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. If you have an issue you have it in your power to make whatever edits you like to the text. It's right there in the "Jesus in the Talmud" article.

Thank you for providing your source. The Wikipedia article makes clear that many of these passages have been censored. You have chosen to use censored versions. Why is that?

Because they were the ones that were published in the big available blocks to copy the whole text. Again, if you dislike this format, it's wikipedia. I'm sure they won't mind adding the blocks you wish to see in equal prominence to the text you feel is unfairly censored.

Seems more like sleight-of-hand than wizardry. Perhaps the ethics involved are merely theoretic?

If you have a problem, take it up with your God, or with Wikipedia. As I said, the power is yours to make those big blocks of text on the right hand side represent the most appropriate text for your purposes, or both versions, and see such well demarcated, and to make the blocks of "full text" contain what you feel are appropriately uncensored text.

I took the text exactly as offered as the whole text in the appropriate articles.

 

[No Robots]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. If you have an issue you have it in your power to make whatever edits you like to the text. It's right there in the "Jesus in the Talmud" article.

Thank you for providing your source. The Wikipedia article makes clear that many of these passages have been censored. You have chosen to use censored versions. Why is that?

Because they were the ones that were published in the big available blocks to copy the whole text. Again, if you dislike this format, it's wikipedia. I'm sure they won't mind adding the blocks you wish to see in equal prominence to the text you feel is unfairly censored.

Seems more like sleight-of-hand than wizardry. Perhaps the ethics involved are merely theoretic?

If you have a problem, take it up with your God, or with Wikipedia. As I said, the power is yours to make those big blocks of text on the right hand side represent the most appropriate text for your purposes, or both versions, and see such well demarcated, and to make the blocks of "full text" contain what you feel are appropriately uncensored text.

I took the text exactly as offered as the whole text in the appropriate articles.

You are representing yourself as a Talmudic scholar, yet relying on dodgy Wikipedia articles for your theory?

 

[Jarhyn]

Avodah zarah 17a, Avodah Zarah, 27b, Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 107, Sanhedrin 103, Sanhedrin 43a, Gittin 57a and Berakhot 17b explicitly say Jeshu ha-Notzri (Jesus of Nazareth). I'm not sure why you omitted "Nazareth". Is it because your amalgamist project needs to exclude it?

I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. If you have an issue you have it in your power to make whatever edits you like to the text. It's right there in the "Jesus in the Talmud" article.

Thank you for providing your source. The Wikipedia article makes clear that many of these passages have been censored. You have chosen to use censored versions. Why is that?

Because they were the ones that were published in the big available blocks to copy the whole text. Again, if you dislike this format, it's wikipedia. I'm sure they won't mind adding the blocks you wish to see in equal prominence to the text you feel is unfairly censored.

Seems more like sleight-of-hand than wizardry. Perhaps the ethics involved are merely theoretic?

If you have a problem, take it up with your God, or with Wikipedia. As I said, the power is yours to make those big blocks of text on the right hand side represent the most appropriate text for your purposes, or both versions, and see such well demarcated, and to make the blocks of "full text" contain what you feel are appropriately uncensored text.

I took the text exactly as offered as the whole text in the appropriate articles.

You are representing yourself as a Talmudic scholar, yet relying on dodgy Wikipedia articles for your theory?

I'm NOT presenting myself as a Talmudic scholar. I'm asking for help from various people who have over time become scholars in the topics who are not me (principally DBZ), to lay out aspects and arguments on, of, and around the Talmudic verses. I was just putting them all in a nice, convenient list so that actual Talmudic scholasticism may take place. If you would like to edit in what you believe to be the correct translated in the quoted sections, this is exactly the reason I posted it: so we can do an exchange of markup on the texts.

You are complaining about things you care about and which I can recognize are unimportant to the pursuit, apparently because I don't think that Ged needs to have ever lived, nor Earthsea to have ever existed for to find a powerful and important message buried in A Wizard of Earthsea, a discussion about the shadows that live within us.

I do not need Bilbo to have ever destroyed The One Ring to have had the conversation about building one's power over oneself. Nobody needs to have ever lived that life for it to have power for my life.

You, the Kabbalist, fails to recognize the power of Creation, Decision, and Authority within you to solve your problems with your own hands. Oh the irony.

Maybe when you go searching for your Decision, Creation, and Authority, you can find your "Something does not need to be true for it to contain truth"

 

[ramoss]

I am starting to see the gospels as a conflation of different events and differnt people. That is making sese to me.

It explains the differnt Jesus personalities and lack of coherence. In modern terms it woud be a movie with a disclamer. The story is based on real events, the characters are fictional composites.

There may not have been a single 'Jesus', it could have just been a loose term used by many.

Now that I think about it there is no reason to think the Jesus Paul refers to is the gospel Jesus. I think Paul makes reference to other groups awhat he considered false representatives of Jesus.

I personally suspect that one inspiration for the Jesus stories was the execution of the Samaritan Prophet. I will note that Luke had Jesus being born in 6 c.e (the date of the census when Judah become a providence of Syria), and this execution was in 36 c.e. Luke also said Jesus was about 30 when he started his ministry. So, 6 CE. (date of when the census was taken), + 30 is 36.. and the date of the executrion of the Smaratian Prophet was 36 c.e.

The Samaritan Prophet - Livius

www.livius.org

 

[No Robots]

If you would like to edit in what you believe to be the correct translated in the quoted sections, this is exactly the reason I posted it: so we can do an exchange of markup on the texts.

Just put "ha-Notzri" after "Jeshu" in the passages that I have listed.

 

[dbz]

[. . .]

Just put "ha-Notzri" after "Jeshu" in the passages that I have listed.

No Robots, et al. please copy any revlevant text and annotate said text to the RationalWiki article:

• "Jesus in any light at all"

Copyedit as you please and/or it does not need to be formatted, just paste the text as-is and paste in the URL to the text source if possible, i.e. https://

Does the section "Rabbinical Literature" have the correct sub-headings? see attached image.

 

[ramoss]

If you would like to edit in what you believe to be the correct translated in the quoted sections, this is exactly the reason I posted it: so we can do an exchange of markup on the texts.

Just put "ha-Notzri" after "Jeshu" in the passages that I have listed.

One issue I have with that is that the Talmud was written down from oral sources between 200 C.E. and 600 C.E. The passages dealing that are alleged to be dealing with Jesus are very likely to be a response to the gospels accusations about the Trial of Jesus before the Sanhedre

In other words, the Talmud is not any where near contemporary with the alleged events.

 

[Jarhyn]

If you would like to edit in what you believe to be the correct translated in the quoted sections, this is exactly the reason I posted it: so we can do an exchange of markup on the texts.

Just put "ha-Notzri" after "Jeshu" in the passages that I have listed.

As I said, I'm not gonna do work for you when it's unimportant to what I am already noting are generally references to a Nazarene Yeshu. The reason I wish to discuss them is not their content of a particular character so much as to discuss  when they came from, generally. If the authors and timeline are unknown, date ranges of the first surfacing would even be useful.

This is more to understand all the people who may have fallen into such an amalgamation.

As I said, if you have contributions to make or changes that are important, just quote that post I made and do the markup or replacements with the preferred text. If you can contribute date ranges or more context, you are welcome to it.

All I'm getting from most of the Talmudic bits is that... Oh, Ramos posted it when I revisited this:

If you would like to edit in what you believe to be the correct translated in the quoted sections, this is exactly the reason I posted it: so we can do an exchange of markup on the texts.

Just put "ha-Notzri" after "Jeshu" in the passages that I have listed.

One issue I have with that is that the Talmud was written down from oral sources between 200 C.E. and 600 C.E. The passages dealing that are alleged to be dealing with Jesus are very likely to be a response to the gospels accusations about the Trial of Jesus before the Sanhedre

In other words, the Talmud is not any where near contemporary with the alleged events.

 

[No Robots]

I have no problem with what Ramoss has said. What I do not like is to see the "ha-Notzri" references taken out, especially where that would help bolster the case for amalgamation. If you want to make a case for amalgamation, it might be wise to avoid the appearance of prestidigitation.

 

[No Robots]

In other words, the Talmud is not any where near contemporary with the alleged events.

Quite true. And yet the passages provide evidence of some traditions involving the person in question. Here is Constantin Brunner:

The passage in Avodah zavah 16a deserves special attention: it is the most remarkable reference to Jeshua in the talmudic tractates, ascribing to him as it does a certain spiritual significance. It speaks of him as one who taught; things learned from him had come down, through his disciple Jacob of the village of Zechania, to Eliezer b. Hyrcanus, who adopted this tradition. In fact, Rabbi Eliezer b. Hyrcanus was one of the most distinguished Tannaim, the brother-in-law of the Patriarch Gamaliel II.; he was also called Eliezer the Great. And so this Rabbi Eliezer, who lived in the first Christian century, speaks of an opinion of Christ which had come down to him from a disciple of Christ (and some identified this Jacob with Christ's brother). This seems to me to be an important fact, particularly as it touches Christ's historical reality, and I find it astonishing that the critics have thus far paid no attention to it. Moreover, it is more than probable that important, really important sayings of Christ (not under his own name, of course) are contained in Talmud and Midrash. There are plenty of sayings and parables of great clarity, beauty and dignity which could have come from his mouth.

 

[dbz]

Per "The Lost History of Christianity and a New Quest for the Historical Jesus Through the Christ Myth". lost-history.com. see attached chart.

FYI: "John Gleason (Godless Engineer) on Jesus mythicism and online activism". YouTube. Centre for Inquiry Canada. 13 July 2022.