The Christ Myth Theory

[Jarhyn]

If someone said that Crazy Horse is a myth, that he is not even a Sioux myth, but some kind of white settler myth, I would say, yeah, that's pretty fucking racist.

Except, of course, that no one is saying that. If, however, I took Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, Bigfoot (Spotted Elk), Pontiac, and dozens more (never mind their native names) and wove a fantastic tale about one great chief named Ghost Dancer I would have fiction. But by your rubric I would be anti-native american.

Not exactly. He's saying that, if a Native American made a tale about Ghost Dancer and some white-ass honkey 500 years later pointed out that Ghost Dancer is actually an amalgam, that THAT is anti-native-american.

It is still not anti-native to point that out though, unless its anti-native to be interested in real history over myths...

In which case I am entirely agnostic to that particular thing that is certainly inappropriately considered "anti-native".

You have stated that you have no interest in Judaism, so your opinions on what is possible within Jewish literature and culture can have no weight.

On "what is possible" within literature: literally anything is "possible within literature and culture".

I have no interest in the culture I have an interest in the truth of what happened and an interest in the truths that can be learned from a piece of text regardless of whether it is true or fiction.

In the former, we can recognize that the Jesus that you seem to worship is in fact two or more people with a liberal helping if ahistorical bullshit mixed in.

In the latter we can recognize that metaphors about unkillable ideas are useful and powerful things for reaching people with the idea of radical love and forgiveness.

Neither requires being misty-eyed over who wrote it or incensed over people recognizing that stories about unpowered flight and resurrection from the dead are fanciful fictions born of misunderstandings of reincarnation.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If you took it a step further, and said that Wovoka never existed and that Jack Wilson was a fraud who tried to attach himself to the myth after the fact? Defending your position with arguments that seemed logical to the public but like conspiracy theory to professional historians? Then yes, you'd be taking an anti-Native stance. Even if you genuinely believed you were being unbiased.

And of course if I claimed that Santiago was a fictional character in Old Man and the Sea it is because I am anti-Cuban or maybe hate something else.

You don't have to be "an anti-Cuban person" or "hateful" to make an argument that is, in its effect on the world, anti-Cuban. I've done so myself. I may think I'm being 100% rational and fair in my critiques of the Castro regime, but that doesn't change the fact that I have many times said things that could easily be defined as anti-Cuban as a result, such as supporting my nation's embargo of the country in the past and accepting less than critically the propagandistic portrayal of the Cuban revolution that I was taught in school. I didn't think I was being "hateful", nor do I think that was my motivation, but the end result is still a pattern of voting behavior and public discourse that shuts Cuba partially out of Caribbean trade and hurts the average Cuban on an almost daily basis. We're still at war with them, and yes, dueling constructions of "history" are weapons in that war, maybe even the primary weapons of that war at this present moment.

For the record I can honestly say that I never thought of Castro or anything at all about the present status with that country when reading Old Man and the Sea. That's obviously because I don't have an axe to grind and don't care to have an axe to grind and was only enjoying great literature. Obviously, however, others have such shortcomings when it comes to great literature and anything that threatens their preferred identity is worth disparaging. And so they project those inadequacies and insecurities onto others, perhaps even unknowingly.

I wonder if liking Old Man and the Sea makes me pro Cuban and anti-American. I should be grateful that my prefontal cortex completely matured and that I don't possess a preadolescent version in my "adult" years.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

You have stated that you have no interest in Judaism, so your opinions on what is possible within Jewish literature and culture can have no weight.

Again, where do you come up with this stuff? (rhetorical)

 

[No Robots]

You have stated that you have no interest in Judaism, so your opinions on what is possible within Jewish literature and culture can have no weight.

Again, where do you come up with this stuff? (rhetorical)

Jarhyn: I could care less about Judaism.

 

[No Robots]

If someone said that Crazy Horse is a myth, that he is not even a Sioux myth, but some kind of white settler myth, I would say, yeah, that's pretty fucking racist.

Except, of course, that no one is saying that. If, however, I took Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, Bigfoot (Spotted Elk), Pontiac, and dozens more (never mind their native names) and wove a fantastic tale about one great chief named Ghost Dancer I would have fiction. But by your rubric I would be anti-native american.

Not exactly. He's saying that, if a Native American made a tale about Ghost Dancer and some white-ass honkey 500 years later pointed out that Ghost Dancer is actually an amalgam, that THAT is anti-native-american.

It is still not anti-native to point that out though, unless its anti-native to be interested in real history over myths...

In which case I am entirely agnostic to that particular thing that is certainly inappropriately considered "anti-native".

You have stated that you have no interest in Judaism, so your opinions on what is possible within Jewish literature and culture can have no weight.

On "what is possible" within literature: literally anything is "possible within literature and culture".

I have no interest in the culture I have an interest in the truth of what happened and an interest in the truths that can be learned from a piece of text regardless of whether it is true or fiction.

In the former, we can recognize that the Jesus that you seem to worship is in fact two or more people with a liberal helping if ahistorical bullshit mixed in.

In the latter we can recognize that metaphors about unkillable ideas are useful and powerful things for reaching people with the idea of radical love and forgiveness.

Neither requires being misty-eyed over who wrote it or incensed over people recognizing that stories about unpowered flight and resurrection from the dead are fanciful fictions born of misunderstandings of reincarnation.

Your understanding is limited by your own culture and its literature. Your dualism requires you to divide any and all things. Thus, the compulsion to postulate two of everything. This is in contrast with the monist culture of Judaism wherein everything is united and whole. The dualism of Greco-Roman culture led it to sever the New Testament from its Jewish roots, and to make of its central figure a man-god hybrid. Your amalgamism is a variant of this dualist tendency, nothing more.

 

[Jarhyn]

You have stated that you have no interest in Judaism, so your opinions on what is possible within Jewish literature and culture can have no weight.

Again, where do you come up with this stuff? (rhetorical)

Jarhyn: I could care less about Judaism.

That I do not care about what Jews believe about the universe, does not follow into the idea that my opinions on what is possible in literature versus real life nor history are weightless.

Rather, my ambivalence towards those beliefs allows me a much clearer view of such things, as I am not biased so to reject the truth in favor of a cultural belief. I have progressively shed off all such cultural elements as I find ways to do so. This is in fact part of enlightenment, and part of what is taught in the Gospels: to live apart from the world. Not to set oneself above it or to not live in it, but to be your own person despite it.

This means I am anti-false-history, not anti-jewish. I am only anti-jewish I sofar as being pro-jewish necessitates believing lies about history.

Thankfully, all of the messages in the Bible can be understood, with work and effort and a liberal helping of understanding the nature of fiction in general, without actually demanding like a petulant child that it actually must have happened.

 

[Politesse]

I wonder if liking Old Man and the Sea makes me pro Cuban and anti-American.

It speaks volumes about your perspective, if you truly believe that is a simple either/or proposition.

To say nothing of your continued inability to distinguish between "being an x kind of person" and "holding an x position on a particular issue".

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I wonder if liking Old Man and the Sea makes me pro Cuban and anti-American.

It speaks volumes about your perspective, if you truly believe that is a simple either/or proposition.

To say nothing of your continued inability to distinguish between "being an x kind of person" and "holding an x position on a particular issue".

I neither require not desire all that loyalist baggage. My brain operates forensically, but not perfectly. Perfection, as we all know, is just another myth.

 

[Politesse]

I neither require not desire all that baggage.

You were praising the virtues of post-adolescent thinking, just a few posts ago. But to the adult mind, isn't the "baggage" rather where the real discussion is? Any child of three or four years - whenever they reach the pre-operational stage in Piaget's famous rubric - can form some uncritical opinion like "I like that book!" or "I don't like that one!". It takes an adult mind - Piaget's formal operational stage -to ask more critical questions like "Why do I like this and not that?" or "To what extent are common aesthetics a matter of arbitrary preference, and when can we tell that they are being used to promote certain sociopolitical agendas over others?" I see you using formal operational logic on the forum all the time, so I am not accusing you of being incapable of it. But I do think you should take more pride in that capacity than is implied by describing critical assessment of aesthetics as unnecessary baggage. Indeed, your concluding clause, "perfection... is another myth" is a very complex conclusion to arrive at in and of itself; if you think you reached that station without your luggage, you are minsinformed! That is not pre-operational thinking.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I neither require not desire all that baggage.

You were praising the virtues of post-adolescent thinking, just a few posts ago. But to the adult mind, isn't the "baggage" rather where the real discussion is? Any child of three or four years - whenever they reach the pre-operational stage in Piaget's famous rubric - can form some uncritical opinion like "I like that book!" or "I don't like that one!". It takes an adult mind - Piaget's formal operational stage -to ask more critical questions like "Why do I like this and not that?" or "To what extent are common aesthetics a matter of arbitrary preference, and when can we tell that they are being used to promote certain sociopolitical agendas over others?" I see you using formal operational logic on the forum all the time, so I am not accusing you of being incapable of it. But I do think you should take more pride in that capacity than is implied by describing critical assessment of aesthetics as unnecessary baggage.

My journey into the workings of the human brain have never been philosophical or metaphysical or spiritual. That personal journey was necessitated by life's "slings and arrows" and an unbiased desire to understand a particular behavior that manifests in my family history. Not unlike something as simple as juvenile diabetes did I discover the answer, thanks to the ready availability of knowledge. Without even investigating "Piaget's formal operational stage" I am curious if it corresponds to a particular level of neural development or is correlated only with age and behavior. Do we even do a lot of scans of young developing brains that do not have a pathology? I don't know.

I think there is plenty of baggage to rearrange but I am convinced that much agnosia and anosognosia occurs among humans. We want control, control is survival. That alone makes sense.

 

[Copernicus]

...
So what did Jesus do to get himself crucified like the ones in the rebellion that Varus had crucified? As I said, crucifixion was usually done to make a point--to terrorize violent rebels, for example. If Jesus was such a minor figure--a vagabond preacher with a small following--what merited that extreme form of punishment?

YOU claimed that crucifixion was rare. Do you acknowledge that this claim was false? If thousands were crucified, why would a single one merit special attention?

Your "case" in this digression is based on an alleged rarity of crucifixion. Josephus among others insists it was the opposite of rare. Who's right? Until you acknowledge or refute that crucifixions were common in 1st century Judaea, this discussion is useless.

I don't recall saying anything of the sort. I tried going back to find where I said any such thing and couldn't find it. Can you at least give me the number of a post where you think I said anything like that?

I did say that it was usually reserved for more serious crimes, such as rebellion. Some minor leader of a relatively innocuous religious cult, of which there were quite a few in the eastern Roman Empire, doesn't seem to call out for crucifixion. Jesus didn't lead a major rebellion. And ordinary thieves weren't normally crucified, either. That was all I said.

I don't know how frequent crucifixions actually were, but they were certainly a popular subject of discussion when they happened. They were designed to be cruel in order to make a point. It's possible that some of the details in these religious narratives were inserted to impress congregations of followers, isn't it? Preachers are often caught lying to congregations about stuff even in modern times, so why do you find these ancient narratives so trustworthy?

Claiming to be King in land belonging to Caesar is almost the definition of insurrection.

A doubtful claim, especially since the gospels do not all agree on the details or even timing of the crucifixion. . . . Two thieves were allegedly crucified alongside Jesus, but theft was not normally punished by crucifixion, which was reserved for more serious crimes.

I thought YOU were the mythicist, but I recognize that the Gospels are mostly fiction, and here you ask them to be treated seriously!

I am not a mythicist, and I have made that clear in the past. I am a mythologist who is completely agnostic about whether there was a historical Jesus. I tend to lean towards the mythicist position, because I would expect there to be some corroborating historical evidence beyond traditional Christian sources. Reread the above quote and tell me where I asked you to treat anything in them seriously. You attribute strawman positions to me, and then you argue strenuously against them as if I were trying to defend them.

Which parts of the story are true? Jesus causing a disturbance in the temple is likely true because it doesn't fit with the — as you admit — pacifist persona implied elsewhere. Whether this act was "minor" or not misses the point. It was insurrection. The penalty for insurrection was crucifixion.

We are discussing the content of a narrative. I have never tried to defend it as an accurate depiction of any historical events. Aren't you the one arguing that Jesus was likely based on a real person? Why are you now arguing for the position that I've been taking all along? The whole thing should be taken with a huge grain of salt, given the lack of any archaeological or corroborating textual evidence from non-Christian sources to support it.

I have repeatedly asked for a detailed explanation — in mythicists' view — of the "James brother of the Lord" mentions by Paul and Josephus, and of the Chrestians/Christians in Nero's Rome. If anyone can come up with a scenario that strikes me as plausible, I will revise my estimate of historicity's probability.

Do you want to try, Copernicus? I am looking for BREVITY and clarity. I am NOT asking for argumentation etc.; I just want simple plausible answers to simple questions.

I'm sorry, but I have a dwindling number of heartbeats left in my body for such a major undertaking. I think that dbz, in particular, has done a very good job of answering many of your questions.

I cannot make sense of this without assuming you missed my posts explaining what I wanted: Answers (10 words or less each) to each of four trivial questions. NO argumentation; NO cites; NO discussion. Just four very simple answers. (dbz doesn't get it. Do you?)

If you wish, I'll be happy to link to one of the several posts where I explained what I was asking for,

Here, I'll make it even easier for you.

Among the MANY possible myth scenarios, select ONE which is plausible and/or easy to defend and/or easy to describe. If I decide it's a 10% possibility — whatever that means — you win! You don't need to outline the scenario. Just answer these yes/no questions:

1. Were there Chrestians in Rome ca 60 AD?

I don't know. It's a question for historians and classicists to debate. I'm no expert, but I've read that experts can't agree.

2. Were there Christians in Rome ca 60 AD?

I don't know. The evidence for it outside of Christian narratives doesn't seem very strong to me.

(3. Were the Chrestians and Christians the same people? Omit this question unless you answered Y/Y to 1/2.)

I don't know. It's at least plausible that they weren't.

Paul and Josephus each mention (a) James (b) brother of Jesus (c) who was called Christ.
4. Did James exist?

How would anyone know that? Paul was selling his credentials to a congregation of believers that he wanted to impress. Maybe he made the story up out of whole cloth.

5. Was his brother named Jesus?

No idea. According to Carrier, Paul could have been using "brother" as a common expression for a fellow cult member. For all I know, James and Peter were just scamming Paul, who never actually met Jesus. Where are the accounts from them that tell their side of the story? In any case, Paul could have been telling the truth that he actually met the real biological brother of Jesus. That's also possible.

I've broken the Josephus quote into three phrases, some of which might have been Christian propaganda from the 2nd century or later.
6. Was "James" present in the 1st-century Josephus book?
7. Was "brother of Jesus" present in the 1st-century Josephus book?
8. Was "who was called Christ" present in the 1st-century Josephus book?

Not being an expert in history or the classics, I could only point you to sources that I've read on the subject. I've explained why I think the evidence is weak. The texts are not corroborated by any source outside of the community of believers who maintained and copied those texts. If that is the basis for credibility, then pretty much any religious narrative with a huge following and an oral tradition is credible.

AGAIN: The answers to some of these questions are uncertain. HOWEVER, if there are valid myth models, THEN there is at least ONE valid myth model!! Choose it

To punctuate the simplicity of what I'm asking for, I will ignore all further posts in this thread until I see a post that consists ONLY of 8 (or 7) words, with each of the words being "Yes" or "No."

That's rather silly. What's wrong with the answer "I don't know" from someone who lacks the experience or expertise to do original research? People here have really answered your questions to the best of their ability, but you aren't exactly asking people who are likely to know a lot more than you can find out by reading the source materials yourself.

 

[Politesse]

My journey into the workings of the human brain have never been philosophical or metaphysical or spiritual. That personal journey was necessitated by life's "slings and arrows" and an unbiased desire to understand a particular behavior that manifests in my family history. Not unlike something as simple as juvenile diabetes did I discover the answer, thanks to the ready availability of knowledge. Without even investigating "Piaget's formal operational stage" I am curious if it corresponds to a particular level of neural development or is correlated only with age and behavior. Do we even do a lot of scans of young developing brains that do not have a pathology? I don't know.

A fascinating discussion but a derail; perhaps we should start a Piaget/Vygotsky thread if people are interested! The short answer is that from pre-operational on yes we have, but neuroscientists (to say nothing of psychologists, educators, curmudgeonly anthropologists, etc) heartily disagree with each other on the question you've posed.

 

[dbz]

Historicity in the Jesus case is actually a question of loyalty, not historicity. Otherwise we should be asking the same question of every similar tale, even those without miraculous claims, such as I did with Old Man and the Sea. Why should anyone feel compelled to prove a negative about a fantastic tale with miraculous claims if not only because of traditional interests? It was not so long ago that those questioning biblical creationism in a magic garden and trinity were similarly disparaged.

The main reason for holding to the historicity of the figure of Jesus, as his activities are narrated in the Gospels, resides not primarily in historical evidence but derives instead from a modern theological necessity. Had Jesus not lived among mortals and, more importantly, had he not died and been raised from the dead, the kernel of Christian theology would lose its essence.

Emanuel Pfoh — professor of history, National University of La Plata

 

[Jarhyn]

I would in fact argue that

[Quotes, and thus argues himself regardless]: Had Jesus not lived among mortals and, more importantly, had he not died and been raised from the dead, the kernel of Christian theology would lose its essence.

Is false.

They, Christians, want to cleave to a particular narrative: simulation admin plays the game, gets a perfect score, and then tells everyone the truth about everything.

Personally I see an equally important narrative that doesn't need to have happened to contain truth, regardless:

We ought love ourselves, and our neighbors just as much, even our enemies!

That much or all, and almost certainly that entire part about the love of understanding and knowledge and each other, of us, can live not necessarily in our flesh, but among all the flesh and the books and the stories of our fellows to be and exist again, more or less, and that this is what many people consider "being one with God and the universe".

And that interests of bad faith will hate this, pervert it, try to bury it as deeply as it may to prevent the rebirth of this idea in force.

These are all true things that I can accept ONLY because I have found them mostly on my own, and supported well through axiomatic logic.

But the hint that it was there certainly helped...

 

[Jarhyn]

In many respects I would rather a simulation administrator not make such an egregious mistake as to avatarize, violate causality, and give answers.

I can understand the frustration that would lead to such but it's still a huge fucking mistake.

It would also imply that the concept of forgiveness just wasn't understood and was perverted, or was only incompletely understood at the time by that person: that we need to be ready to forgive them for all of the fucked-up-ness of all of this, and make few assumptions about them and what comes next, or else we end up in archival storage forever.

The mistake is that they didn't need to die for that! We would have figured it out just about here in history no matter what, or perhaps much earlier, just as soon as we got to be literal gods of our own literal universes in a figurative bottle.

What pisses me off is that then any subsequent understanding of such effectively gets socially invalidated by their blundering "FIRST!"

It is much kinder perhaps even if one believes that all actually happened to just sort of ignore it and pretend they didn't fuck that up, and instead figure out why we ought radically love on our own.

 

[steve_bank]

steve_bank acknowledges "the Jewish prophet we call Jesus." This is something that mythicists refuse to do. This refusal leads to seeking the origin of Christianity outside Judaism. And it is for this reason that mythicism is inherently anti-Jewish.

In the words of Buggs Bunney 'What a maroon'.

I do not acknowledge anything. My position has long been there may have been an HJ on which the tale was spun. I belive Jews consdier Jesus as a prophet and there is a Jewish Christian group.

None of it says anything about who Jesus may have been.

To understand how the Christian myth based on the gospel developed look at Mormonism. A little literary creativity and invention was applied to adapting the Christian narrative to add new supernatural events and history.

The appearance of an angel and Mormons as a lost tribe of Israel. The same process the gospel writers employed. Ther samep rocess the OT writers used to embellish Jewish history.

Joseph Smith and the Mormon trek across the country was right out of the bible and Exodus.

The same process Tolkien used to write Lord Of The Rings. I read his bio. He was steeped in myths and stories. He loved to travel drinking and talking with local people about stories. LOT was undoubtedly in part a synthesis of his knowledge of myths and stories.

Look at how the Christian god has canged. The liberal Chritian god now loves gays. That is new.

As to anti semitism power structures generally need an enemy. To me it woud have been naturl as Chrtian ower blocks formed in the 1st and 2nd century they woud turn on Judaism. Jesus belonged to then not Jews. The Jews rejected the messiah and killed him.

It is human nature. Look at the Muslim Shi Sunni hatred. Turks vs Kurds. Hindus vs Muslims.

Christian anti semitism is not a mystery.

And what about the ncient Jews? WE ae the chosen people of the one god. Arrogant would be putting it mildly.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The religious narrative I was fed about the gospel protagonist has always been that he was a real person that lived and died and therefore the stories about him had to be true. As I mentioned earlier it isn't anything different from magic creation in a magic garden thousands of years ago or belief in a trinity. Obviously this is putting the cart before the horse and I think this clearly biased and circular argument that jesus was a singular real person still persists because of tradition. We've only recently, at least some of us have, pitched the miraculous aside but we've retained that loyalist dogma that the gospel protagonist is still a "real person." This is understandable given christian history and selection pressure against non-believers for almost a couple thousand years in western culture. Jesus is an identity to a person. Few people are comfortable having their identities questioned. It's an emotional thing.

 

[Jarhyn]

@No Robots , I would hope at this point you appreciate that I'm not some bizzaro Nazi trying to poo-poo your beliefs, but trying to show you that there's a stronger spine in them that cannot be broken by the Mythicist or Amalgamist narratives but rather is made stronger through Amalgamism, this immortal idea of rebirth through empathy and love and forgiveness, and that literal resurrection would insult rather than bolster this necessary truth, and  tainting the purity of the experiment were it to happen.

I'm just kind of pissed how badly it was fumbled as a concept by... Pretty much everyone?

I would say that this requires forgiveness of each other but not of self. We must remember who we have been and allow that goad to make us better, and to not be people who are awful, to not give in to our demons through understanding this idea, not a name, but radical love of self and others.

Here's another story, perhaps different from the ones presented in the gospels, and almost certainly a fiction but I will leave it to you to decide it's truth:

Once upon a time in Palestine a man named Jesus talked to someone who has killed several sheep and needed to find a way and a reason to not graduate to people. Jesus taught him the idea of radical love of self and others and he saw in this a reason to love and attempt empathy, so as to avoid living forever in infamy among the stories of his fellows.

The young budding sociopath sees truth in these words and Jesus convinced them that looked upon him with suspicion of having murdered a flock of sheep one night that upon hearing "the holy name", the gospel of radical love, the demons have been drowned in the flock of sheep the sociopath had already killed.

Whether or not he committed murders, Jesus saved his life, and gave him what may be his path towards stepping away from who he was.

 

[No Robots]

steve_bank acknowledges "the Jewish prophet we call Jesus." This is something that mythicists refuse to do. This refusal leads to seeking the origin of Christianity outside Judaism. And it is for this reason that mythicism is inherently anti-Jewish.

In the words of Buggs Bunney 'What a maroon'.

I do not acknowledge anything. My position has long been there may have been an HJ on which the tale was spun. I belive Jews consdier Jesus as a prophet and there is a Jewish Christian group.

Here is what you wrote: Gentiles co-opted Jewish scripture as their own and the Jewish prophet we call Jesus.

Do wish to modify this statement so that it reads something like "the mythical Jewish prophet?" If so, please be more careful in future so that your readers do not fall into the "maroon" category when they quote what you actually write.

 

[No Robots]

@No Robots , I would hope at this point you appreciate that I'm not some bizzaro Nazi trying to poo-poo your beliefs, but trying to show you that there's a stronger spine in them that cannot be broken by the Mythicist or Amalgamist narratives but rather is made stronger through Amalgamism, this immortal idea of rebirth through empathy and love and forgiveness, and that literal resurrection would insult rather than bolster this necessary truth, and  tainting the purity of the experiment were it to happen.

I'm just kind of pissed how badly it was fumbled as a concept by... Pretty much everyone?

I would say that this requires forgiveness of each other but not of self. We must remember who we have been and allow that goad to make us better, and to not be people who are awful, to not give in to our demons through understanding this idea, not a name, but radical love of self and others.

Here's another story, perhaps different from the ones presented in the gospels, and almost certainly a fiction but I will leave it to you to decide it's truth:

Once upon a time in Palestine a man named Jesus talked to someone who has killed several sheep and needed to find a way and a reason to not graduate to people. Jesus taught him the idea of radical love of self and others and he saw in this a reason to love and attempt empathy, so as to avoid living forever in infamy among the stories of his fellows.

The young budding sociopath sees truth in these words and Jesus convinced them that looked upon him with suspicion of having murdered a flock of sheep one night that upon hearing "the holy name", the gospel of radical love, the demons have been drowned in the flock of sheep the sociopath had already killed.

Whether or not he committed murders, Jesus saved his life, and gave him what may be his path towards stepping away from who he was.

You have a degree of humility and self-awareness that I find refreshing in these quarters. Your awareness of the over-riding spiritual message of the New Testament counts in your favour. The endless sterile speculation about the man, Christ, however, is an indication of weakness in your ethics and philosophy. Not that I blame you. This has been the favourite pseudo-intellectual sport of the scholastic pundits for millennia. It is now democratized: every yokel with a modem has a theory of Christian origins. The problem with it all is that it blinds those with a real capacity to see the great truth in all this, that it is a man who embodies the great truth of love, and that it is through his example that the whole of mankind is destined to embody this truth.