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The Christ Myth Theory

Let's imagine I find myself at the intersection of 5th and Nicolette, walking with someone.
Lemme know when you grow up enough to log in to a global discussion forum without complaining about people saying things that you prefer not to know about.

I won't hold my breath.

Honestly, you strike me as the problem with modern Western society. You can't take hearing opinions that you don't like, so you want to make the Internet into an ideological bubble. You are not very different from the Maga people. You have your information bubble and they have theirs.
Tom
And jarhyn responds with swiz's favorite response.
Rolling eyes emoji.

Jarhyn, you are very much like @TSwizzle.

Have a nice day.
Tom
 
Let's imagine I find myself at the intersection of 5th and Nicolette, walking with someone.
Lemme know when you grow up enough to log in to a global discussion forum without complaining about people saying things that you prefer not to know about.

I won't hold my breath.

Honestly, you strike me as the problem with modern Western society. You can't take hearing opinions that you don't like, so you want to make the Internet into an ideological bubble. You are not very different from the Maga people. You have your information bubble and they have theirs.
Tom
And jarhyn responds with swiz's favorite response.
Rolling eyes emoji.

Jarhyn, you are very much like @TSwizzle.

Have a nice day.
Tom
And jarhyn proves me right with his rolling eyes emoji.
 
Screenshot 2025-02-23 The Demiurge Marcion and the Corpus Hermeticum - Conversation w @m.david...png
"Most people are looking for a good translation of Marcion's Evangelion and, so, I always point them to Jason BeDuhn's translation, The First New Testament. I think that that's still the gold standard even though now it's 11 years old ... he's [now] done a Greek text and, so, we're waiting on his update of the English because he's changed things.

"There is available now a separate translation of Matthias Klinghardt's, ‘Oldest Gospel,’ but one of the things that's important to recognize there is that that's not really a translation of Marcion's text: that's Matthias Klinghardt really trying to get to what he considers to be the oldest gospel which he thinks that Marcion uses ... his methods are fundamentally different than BeDuhn.

"So, whereas BeDuhn is going into, you know, we have 15 to 20 people who quote from Marcion's text and, so, the way that we reconstruct it is we just string together all the quotes, right(?) And, so, Beduhn is looking primarily for quotes; but what Klinghardt is doing, and what people like Mark Bilby are doing, is they're also going into the manuscripts of Luke and they're trying to say what was the oldest Gospel-, ... which then secondarily Marcion used, right(?)

"And, so, if you're looking for a translation of Marcion’s Evangelion ... don't go to Klinghardt whose methods of reconstruction aren't really aiming to get at Marcion. And, you know, they are speculating based on the surviving manuscripts of Luke as to what could be in Marcion's text. And they're filling in gaps in a way that not everyone agrees with.

"The most conservative text and the most rigorous reconstruction is by Dieter Roth. Unfortunately he hasn't produced any English translation. And it would be impossible anyway: because his text is so bare bones, it's not a connected narrative anymore.

"So, that's where we are. And, so, I say for that middle ground always go to BeDuhn.

"I've got a forthcoming book on Marcion ... I'm trying to replace Harnack ... in the beginning of my book I go through, you know, what reconstructions are reliable. So, I'm hoping that when that comes out, that can serve as useful guide, so that you'll understand a bit more about the principles that go into the reconstruction …"

--"The Demiurge, Marcion and the Corpus Hermeticum - Conversation w @m.davidlitwa". YouTube. @TheEsotericaChannel. 27 September 2024.
 
When a Christian says scholar it usually means someone who is looking to find ways to historically justify a belief in Jesus.

No amount of 'scholarship' is going to find evidence of an historical Jesus if there ever was one.
 
When a Christian says scholar it usually means someone who is looking to find ways to historically justify a belief in Jesus.

No amount of 'scholarship' is going to find evidence of an historical Jesus if there ever was one.
The gospel of Marcion priority is a kryptonite silver bullet to the rabid historicity lunatic fanatic , It predates all historicising Jesus narratives & Pauline texts to the second century 130+CE.
:eek:🧠
 
Some months ago I watched a YouTube by a professional historian who gave some common-sense advice. For example "It is the job of the historian to determine what is likely." This of course is the opposite of a religious fanatic who already knows the Truth: It's his job to twist the evidence to support that Truth!

I'm posting to congratulate @dbz on his record-setting performance. About three days after I called attention to his prodigious performance at watching YouTube's to demonstrate (or question?) his Faith, he posts links to yet another Ten hours-plus of YouTubes. I don't know who's paying him for this work, but based on what we see here I hope he's claiming his overtime.

He accidentally(?) posted the same 48-minute YouTube twice, but I only counted those 48 minutes once.

The Jesus historicity "puzzle" no longer intrigues me:
  • Been there.
  • Did that.
  • Learned the answer.
  • Didn't bother to buy the T-shirt.

What intrigues me now are the HUGE similarities between fanatical Christians and fanatical Carrierists.

"Was James the Just really the same as Damneus?" One might as well ask a fanatical Christian whether Jonah really swallowed the whale! 8-)
"Did Paul really copy his Epistles from a man who was born when Paul was already dead?" The supernatural theories of the Prophet Richard are not to be questioned.

...
And jarhyn proves me right with his rolling eyes emoji.

@Jarhyn -- How many hours of dbz's YouTubes have you watched? Did you watch the one I watched, which refutes the claims dbz thought it supported?

Do YOU think James 'the Just' was the son of Damneus?
 
"Bar" means "son" and "Abba" means "father". For example, Jesus Barabbas's name means "son of the father".

Possible sperm donors for a historical preggo Mary:
  1. Jesus son of Joseph
  2. Jesus son of Pantera
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The King Bar, Elon made Trump his 14th!
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Some months ago I watched a YouTube by a professional historian who gave some common-sense advice. For example "It is the job of the historian to determine what is likely." This of course is the opposite of a religious fanatic who already knows the Truth: It's his job to twist the evidence to support that Truth!

I'm posting to congratulate @dbz on his record-setting performance. About three days after I called attention to his prodigious performance at watching YouTube's to demonstrate (or question?) his Faith, he posts links to yet another Ten hours-plus of YouTubes. I don't know who's paying him for this work, but based on what we see here I hope he's claiming his overtime.

He accidentally(?) posted the same 48-minute YouTube twice, but I only counted those 48 minutes once.

The Jesus historicity "puzzle" no longer intrigues me:
  • Been there.
  • Did that.
  • Learned the answer.
  • Didn't bother to buy the T-shirt.

What intrigues me now are the HUGE similarities between fanatical Christians and fanatical Carrierists.

"Was James the Just really the same as Damneus?" One might as well ask a fanatical Christian whether Jonah really swallowed the whale! 8-)
"Did Paul really copy his Epistles from a man who was born when Paul was already dead?" The supernatural theories of the Prophet Richard are not to be questioned.

...
And jarhyn proves me right with his rolling eyes emoji.

@Jarhyn -- How many hours of dbz's YouTubes have you watched? Did you watch the one I watched, which refutes the claims dbz thought it supported?

Do YOU think James 'the Just' was the son of Damneus?
No, I don't watch videos online. And as I said, I'm not strictly a mythicist. At best I'm an amalgamist: I think the JtB cult merged with and transformed into the Jesus cult, and it's unclear which individuals map to which parts, other than the temple tantrum/execution arc and the likelihood of claiming to be a god at a trial and originating/mutating trinitarian doctrines relating to memetics.

Still, someone interested in mythicism is going to have better information about people offering controversy on the origination of such doctrines than NR. The Gnostics and kabbalists are not reliable narrators about what happened when.

That said, I would love to see more information on traditions "like" the Trinity and when they originated from a perspective of the actual historical evidence rather than twisting a belief that God would come to Israel somehow into such a claim
 
It makes sense.

Mary: Honey I'm pregnant. I was not unfaithful, god did it.
Joseph: I believe you honey. Really I do.....
 
I think the JtB cult merged with and transformed into the Jesus cult, and it's unclear which individuals map to which parts, other than the temple tantrum/execution arc..
The temple tantrum/execution arc is a refutation of the temple cultus and temple sacrifice requirements.

The speech of Stephen in Acts: the first part is from a purely Judean POV on why a stationary temple was not needed, just an ark and its moveable sanctuary.

In the 1st century, FACT:
  • counter-culture sectarian Jews and additional elements of the Torah population rejected the temple cultus and temple sacrifice requirements
    1. Samaritans, a sizeable chunk of the "Torah population."
    2. Qumran community, a part of the "Torah population."
    3. Lord IS XS devotees, a part of the "Torah population."
 
The Virgin birth makes Jesus the recipient of only female human chromosomes. So, which bathroom should Jesus use, on a visit to your church?
And, was Nazareth Consol. High School okay with him playing defense for the Nazareth Buccaneers?
 
The Virgin birth makes Jesus the recipient of only female human chromosomes. So, which bathroom should Jesus use, on a visit to your church?
And, was Nazareth Consol. High School okay with him playing defense for the Nazareth Buccaneers?
Screenshot 2025-02-23.png
 
  • Allen, Nicholas Peter Legh (2020). Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher. ISBN 978-1527555273.
9781527555273.jpg


"Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted | Dr. Nicholas Peter Legh Allen". YouTube. @History-Valley. [02:48:58] Streamed Jul 24, 2024
Table of Contents
..Acknowledgements and Disclaimers
..Figures and Tables
..Abbreviations

..CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
.....1.1Raisons d’Ȇtre
.....1.2 The Span of Credulity
.....1.3 The Lack of Critical Discernment
.....1.4 The Edification of Naïveté
.....1.5 The Exploitation of Ignorance
.....1.6 The Scope of This Book

..CHAPTER TWO: The Christian Creed
.....2.1 Disclaimer
.....2.2 The Nature of the Christian Deity
.....2.3 The Revealed Knowledge of the Supreme Deity
.....2.4 The Christian Confession of Faith

..CHAPTER THREE: Towards Rationality
.....3.1 The Problem of Bias
.....3.2 Deconstructing the Christian Deity
.....3.3 Scientific Inquiry
.....3.4 Irrationality
.....3.5 Towards Rationality

..CHAPTER FOUR: Christian Dogma in its Proper Context
.....4.1 Passé Christianity
.....4.2 Zoroastrianism (c.600 BCE – present)
.....4.3 Zurvanism (c. 400 BCE – c.950 CE)
.....4.4 Egyptian Belief Systems (c.3200 BCE – c.600 CE)
.....4.5 Greek Religious Belief Systems (c.600 BCE – c.100 CE)
.....4.6 Influential Ancient Greek Philosophies
.....4.7 Roman Religious Practices (c. 50 BCE – c. 200 CE)
.....4.8 Influences on Nascent Christianity (c.70 – c.400 CE)
.....4.9 The Impact of Gnosticism

..CHAPTER FIVE: The Evolution of Judaism
.....5.1 Introduction
.....5.2 In the Beginning
.....5.3 Judaism Comes of Age
.....5.4 The Compilation of the Hebrew Bible
.....5.5 The Theological Rationalisation of Oppression
.....5.6 Literalist Judaism
.....5.7 The Advent of Apocalypticism
.....5.8 The Rabbinical Period and the Talmud

..CHAPTER SIX: The Evolution of Christian Dogma
.....6.1 Jewish Foundations
.....6.2 Nascent Christianity
.....6.3 Nascent Christianity as a Foreign Cult
.....6.4 The Hegemony of Catholic Christian Orthodoxy
.....6.5 The Suppression of Non-Christian Faiths

..CHAPTER SEVEN: Pious Fraud and Self-Deception
.....7.1 Supposed Historical Sources
.....7.2 Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (c.62 – c.113 CE)
.....7.3 Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.69 – after 122 CE)
.....7.4 Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (c.56 – 117 CE)
.....7.5 Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis (c.95 – 120 CE)
.....7.6 Mara bar Serapion (fl. first to third centuries CE)
.....7.7 Thallos aka. Thallus (unknown dates)
.....7.8 Phlegon of Tralles (fl. c.80 CE)
.....7.9 Lucian of Samosata (c.125 – after 180 CE)
.....7.10 Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (c.160 – 225 CE)
.....7.11 Josephus Titus Flavius (37 – c.100 CE)
.....7.12 The Talmud Bavli and Tosefta (c.200 – 500 CE)

..CHAPTER EIGHT: Dissecting the New Testament
.....8.1 The Sole Source of Information
.....8.2 How Factual is the New Testament?
.....8.3 Confused Tales
.....8.4 Discrepancies in the New Testament
.....8.5 New Testament Rhetoric
.....8.6 The Nazareth Issue
.....8.7 NT Miracles from a Twenty-First Century Perspective
.....8.8 The Importance of Mythological and Theological Symbolism
.....8.9 An Attempt to Save Jesus

..CHAPTER NINE: Conclusions
.....9.1 Is Ratiocination Even Possible?
.....9.2 Two Possible Scenarios
.....9.3 Christianity as a Form of Syncretism
.....9.4 Quo Vadis?

..Bibliography
..About the Author


  1. "The Jesus Fallacy: The Greatest Lie Ever Told | Dr. N. Peter Legh Allen". YouTube. @History-Valley. [01:55:16] Aug 21, 2024
  2. "The Jesus Deception: The Greatest Lie Ever Told | Dr. N.P.L. Allen". YouTube. @History-Valley. [48:23] Streamed Sep 25, 2024
 
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In the present computer age, researchers have put forward the “human stylome hypothesis” (van Halteren, Baayen, Tweedie, Haverkort, & Nejit, 2005); this proposal suggests that authors are uniquely distinguishable from others by measuring (counting) particular features of their writings. For this concept to apply, some researchers suggest that it only has to work on a case-by-case basis, with controls for contextual and other information; in such cases, the differentiation only has to occur between an identified author (or author set with groups of authors) with a known stylometric signatures (which some call “writeprints”) and an unknown or contested text or text corpora (body of texts). This is understood as a “closed-world problem” because some of its variables are known. In this context, the situation already helps limit some of the potential noise in the data. Also, such a defined context sometimes enables the (in)validation of the results with other ways of knowing authorship, such as historical, documentary, and other means.

Others suggest that there have to be identifiable and invariant (not changing over time or contexts) and non-manipulable stylometric signatures for authors over time, and that apply across socio-cultural, historical, and other contexts. At this end of the requirements continuum, an author’s signature has to be a correct and unique identifier—even as his or her writing style changes over time (conceptualized by some as a somewhat predictable rectilinear trajectory) and sophistication. (For individual authors, a higher time gap between “old” and “new” writing by authors has been found to correlate with more obvious and distinct categorizing.) There is also the challenge of how people change their writing styles across different social contexts and genres. At this very high threshold, theoretically and practically, such signatures should apply across languages, too.

At a very basic level, computers are highly efficient at counting, computations, and (latent or hidden) pattern finding. Computational stylometry enables the measure of anything countable in texts, but most often, these include lexical features (terminology/vocabulary of particular domains or individuals), syntactic features (structural aspects of language, such as n-grams, parts of speech, punctuation, and non-context-sensitive function words), and semantic (meaning-based aspects of language) ones.

The preferred types of features are those which are difficult to consciously manipulate, so that it is impervious to human deception. An individual’s stylometric “print” (a writing equivalent of a “fingerprint” and “handwriting”) is conceptualized as comprising latent data which emerges from unconscious and habituated behaviors. Unique and unusual patterns, like obvious turns of phrases, may be used for matching, but these can be fairly easily emulated.

Insights may be gained about larger groups of authors as well. The gender of an author may be identified based on emotional expressivity in the writing. For example, female writing tends to be “more contextual, personal and emotional than male writing, in which the style is typically more impersonal, formal and judgmental” (Montero, Munezero, & Kakkonen, 2014, p. 98). Various documents may be classified to certain types based on extracted features (including “punctuation analysis, sentence length distribution, syntactic analysis, n-gram syntactic analysis, analysis of morphological categories, analysis of morphological tags, frequency of word classes, frequency of word-class bigrams, frequency of stop words, word repetition analysis, Simpson’s vocabulary richness, analysis of typographical errors, and frequency of emoticons” (Rygl, 2014, pp. 55 – 56).

--Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University. "A Light Stroll through Computational Stylometry and its Early Potential". C2C Digital Magazine (Fall 2015 / Winter 2016).



dabber said:
I'm siding with Paul existing as a real person.
[...]
[and] the gospels-acts well into the 2nd C.
[52:33] I see where you're coming from. But that argument still holds on to the assumption that this Paul is a Jewish person.
Authors of Christ Before Jesus.png

--"Meeting the Authors of Christ Before Jesus". YouTube. @godlessengineer. 31 August 2024.
Screenshot 2025-03-10 at 17-27-16 Was Jesus Created In The Second Century - YouTube.png

--"Was Jesus Created In The Second Century?". YouTube. @MythVisionPodcast. 6 February 2025.
 
Coming from people who pretend to believe in a "Bayesian approach," the paragraph just quoted from Neil Godfrey is utter gibberish.

Instead one should consider :poop: :cool:
Coming in at #7 — others have been urging me to do more about publicity

--Godfrey, Neil (3 March 2025). "30 Best Atheist Blogs and Websites in 2025". Vridar.
This post is a sequel to Not Finding the First Jesus, Look for the Last. What follows assumes one has read that post.

It is the orthodox view that Jesus came in order to fulfil the Jewish Scriptures, but he did so in a manner that defied the expectation that the messiah would conquer the enemies of the Judeans. I have suggested that this view of Jesus arose in a wider context of ideas whereby a Jesus or Saviour figure came to overthrow the works of the Old Testament creator and lawgiver god.

My view is built on Nina Livesey’s argument for Paul’s letters being produced by one of the several “Christian schools” that existed in Rome in the second century. As I pointed out in my previous post, I have found it difficult to understand how the kinds of teachings we associate with “gnosticism” — arguing that Jesus did not have a flesh and blood body, that the Jewish god was evil, that creation itself was evil — arose from what we know of our gospels and letters of Paul. But as per my previous post, I think that the relationship between those “gnostic” ideas and the ideas of orthodox Christianity makes sense if we set orthodoxy as the latecomer.

--Godfrey, Neil (18 February 2025). "Which One Came First? "Gnostic" ideas or "Orthodox" Christianity?". Vridar.

[Per L. G. Rylands, The Beginnings of Gnostic Christianity, Watts and Co. London, 1940.] Rylands’ view in short is that the Hellenic invasions brought foment in the religious world. Much syncretism and fusion took place especially due to Greek philosophy and Oriental theosophy impinging upon Judaism. Of the many Jewish sects that arose, Christianity was one. p. 22. Gnostic ideas arose in this foment, mostly from the philosophy and myths of the orient, which in turn gave rise to Christian ethics. Basically, the Christianity that first arose was deeply spiritual, i.e., Paul and John did not know of a human materialistic Christ. Catholic theologizing introduced the material aspect. The Gnostics really represented [the true] Pauline and Johannine thought. By 70 A.D. [proto-orthodox] people were worshiping a sacrificed Jesus; these people were a sect, not a church initially. But they gained [the] upperhand. The Gnostics declined [refused] to abandon the primitive [high] Pauline and Johannine Christology. p. 272 “The Gnostic Christology was original, it adored a heavenly Christ, it had no knowledge of a human Jesus.”

(p. 279)

--Groningen, Gerard van (1967). "Christianity". First Century Gnosticism: Its Origin and Motifs. Brill Archive. pp. 79–80, n. 3.
[Gerard Bolland] held that Christianity began variously among Hellenized Jewish settlements throughout the Diaspora, with allegorized Jewish elements being made almost unrecognizable by their intermingling with gnostic mythemes.

(p. 103, n. 5.)

--Robert M. Price (2010) Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
 
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