So did Jesus live or what?

[geni]

So when the majority of humanity thought earth flat, you think it is pretty unlikely they where wrong?

When was that? Pretty much every civerlisation has left records showing they know it was round.

 

[jjramsey]

Wow, you're definitely skipping some big ones there.

No, just pointing out that what is lacking is a dying and rising motif that is being recycled, rather than a force-fitting of myth into a preconceived pattern inspired by Christianity.

Let's see--Osiris died, was resurrected. Had women attending his death and crying over him and everything.

In one legend of the conception of Horus, Osiris is briefly resurrected long enough to have sex with Isis, and then goes back to being dead and becomes lord of the underworld.

Dionysus died, was resurrected. Also attended by women. (And was a virgin birth, too!)

Dionysus was killed by the Titans as a baby by being stabbed to death, and then he was cooked and eaten. He never dies as an adult. His mother was Zeus' lover, so saying it was a virgin birth was a stretch. He did go to the underworld to rescue his dead mother, but he entered the underworld by way of the lake of Lerna, rather than by being killed, so he was as alive as Hades or Persephone in the underworld.

Persian Mithras was not only super popular in Rome at the time, he was buried in a tomb and rose from there.

This is actually simply wrong. Mithras never died.

(By the way, it is probably a mistake to assume continuity between the Persian Mithra and the Roman Mithras. Franz Cumont, who, IIRC, was a groundbreaker in Mithraic studies, had understandably thought that there was continuity, but later scholars found that it didn't pan out. See Manfred Clauss' book The Roman Cult of Mithras.)

Tammuz, Akkadian, and Damuzi, Sumerian, were two versions of a vegetation deity who dies during summer, and is rescued from the underworld by Ishtar, who brings him back to life.

Tammuz, though, still gets stuck in the underworld for half a year, and for the other half, he is replaced by Ishtar's (or Inanna's) sister, Geshtinanna. This is actually reminiscent of a real motif in pagan myth, bilocation, the most famous example of which is the story of Hades, Demeter, and Persephone.

Atys, Phrygian deity, (a religion well-known in Rome at the time, as Atys's lover, Cybele, was biiig in Rome) had a lot of the resurrection motifs going on, being a deity associated with grain, harvest, sowing, etc.

The evidence for this is actually pretty thin. Some of it comes from a questionable interpretation of the five-day festival of Cybele. Scholars thought that if there was mourning for Attis on the festival's Day of Blood, then the celebration on the subsequent day, the Day of Joy, must have been for Attis' resurrection. The connection of the Day of Joy, according to J. Z. Smith, is based on "a fifth-century biography of Isidore the Dialectician by the Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius, who reports that Isidore once had a dream in which he was Attis and the Day of Joy was celebrated in his honor!" ("Dying and Rising Gods," Encyclopedia of Religion) Smith also notes a reference to the work De errore profanarum religionum, which dates from about the fourth century, by Firmicus Maternus (verse 22.3), but according to him the passage does not name Attis and is probably about a late Osirian ritual. BTW, I have not been able to track down copies of these works of Damascius and Firmicus Maternus.

We can argue all you want about how much influence any of the local myths might have had on the myths of Jesus, but there were definitely a LOT of them in the area at the time, many of them well entrenched and establish long before Christianity.

There are far fewer than are claimed, and of the real ones left, there aren't much in the way of commonalities except for the bare points of dying and rising, which is what you'd expect if one was not dealing with a true motif, but a pattern imposed on the text.

And as a professor I had, in a class on the conflict between Romans and Christians, pointed out--in the climate at the time, this sort of myth was commonplace.

That's not too surprising, since the "dying and rising god" category has been taken seriously for quite a while, even when it hasn't been used in anti-apologetics. It is starting, though, to show its problems.

 

[davefoc]

It seems like this thread has been moving away from the topic for awhile. Although, it is completely hypocritical of me to ask this (given my own penchant for digression), could we stay a little closer to the topic. If we start a discussion of when and where ideas about the shape of the earth were developed I am afraid this thread is gone.

The discussions about the philosophical differences between atheists and believers also, IMHO, don't have much to do with the topic.

 

[jjramsey]

It seems like this thread has been moving away from the topic for awhile. Although, it is completely hypocritical of me to ask this (given my own penchant for digression), could we stay a little closer to the topic.

Ok, davefoc, here you go. . . .

You are confusing the fact that today (and at a time after the establishment of the religion) we 'recognized' there was a supposed person named Yeshua attributed to exist (mainly by way of the gospels interestingly) and that at that earlier time, there was not such a clear recognition (not one clearly documented).

No, I'm pointing out that of all the possible persons that may have been referred to as "Christus," only one of them works as a possible candidate in the Tacitus passage:

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. (emphasis added)

How many of those called "Christus" were the purported namesake of a religious group called Christians that became known in the Gentile world? Answer: One.

This is tantamount to saying that since the New Testament is unreliable, it can be treated as if it did not exist.

Yes, the NT is totally unreliable. It was written by people with motives and good imaginations, some not very admirable. The gospels are not historical documentation. They are a fanciful elaboration sprinkled with historical (sometimes very inaccurate or unsubstantiated) places and people as a means to illustrate and affix the doctrine, beliefs, and other philosophies associated with the religion as it stood at the time of the writings.

No kidding. And you've just shown that you have missed the point, which is that any proposed explanation of what Jesus was about has to explain why the New Testament has the content that it has, warts and all.

 

[UrsulaV]

No, just pointing out that what is lacking is a dying and rising motif that is being recycled, rather than a force-fitting of myth into a preconceived pattern inspired by Christianity.

I'm think I'm confused by your argument. We agree that at least a couple of those listed died, and returned to life in one form or another, then returned to the Underworld, right?

Jesus supposedly died, returned to life briefly in a somewhat altered form, and then returned to Heaven. He certainly didn't hang out, alive, bein' a normal guy for a lengthy period. Jesus post-resurrection has like a coupla encounters and vamooses from the scene.

So I guess I don't see why Osiris being briefly alive and then going to an afterlife is different from Jesus being briefly alive and going to an afterlife. I mean, that actually seems a lot more similiar to me than somebody like Odin who comes alive and STAYS alive.

How do you see it as different?

 

[davefoc]

jjramsey has put forth this quote from Tacitus as evidence of the existence of a historical Jesus.

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. (emphasis added)

This site claims that the term Christian was not used at the time of Nero and as such the validity of this quote from Tacitus is suspect:
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/josephus-etal.html

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

As we have seen, the term 'Christian' was not in use during the reign of Nero and there would not have been 'a great crowd' unless we are speaking of Jews, not Christians. 'Jewish/Christians' – being perceived by Roman authorities (and the populace at large) simply as Jews meant that early Christ-followers also gotcaught up in general attacks upon the Jews.

ETA:
The writer of this site contests in more detail and somewhat differently the validity of the Tacitus quote:
http://courses.drew.edu/FA2001/bibst-720s-001/tacitus.html

[/FONT]

 

[Huntster]

jjramsey has put forth this quote from Tacitus as evidence of the existence of a historical Jesus.


This site claims that the term Christian was not used at the time of Nero and as such the validity of this quote from Tacitus is suspect:
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/josephus-etal.html

That appears to be an attempt to simply re-write the interpretation of history, or claim that somebody else actually re-wrote the very words of history.

The lengths some folks will go............................

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/josephus-etal.html

...1.How could Josephus claim that Jesus had been the answer to his messianic hopes yet remain an orthodox Jew?
The absurdity forces some apologists to make the ridiculous claim that Josephus was a closet Christian!

Jesus was a Jew. He did not challenge the Jewish faith, he simplified it (challenged the "slick-tongued lawyers", like the author of this site). It was entirely possible at that time, and even likely, to remain an orthodox Jew and believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. Indeed, some of the Pharisees at the time of Christ's crucifixion were his followers:

...So some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God, because he does not keep the sabbath." (But) others said, "How can a sinful man do such signs?" And there was a division among them....

...The passage is out of context. Book 18 starts with the Roman taxation under Cyrenius in 6 AD, talks about various Jewish sects at the time, including the Essenes, and a sect of Judas the Galilean. He discusses Herod's building of various cities, the succession of priests and procurators, and so on.
Chapter 3 starts with a sedition against Pilate who planned to slaughter all the Jews but changed his mind. Pilate then used sacred money to supply water to Jerusalem, and the Jews protested. Pilate sent spies among the Jews with concealed weapons, and there was a great massacre.
Then comes the paragraph about Jesus, and immediately after it, Josephus continues:
'And about the same time another terrible misfortune confounded the Jews ...'
Josephus, an orthodox Jew, would not have thought the Christian story to be 'another terrible misfortune.' It is only a Christian who would have considered this to be a Jewish tragedy....

And this is the evidence offered to establish that later Christians inserted words into the Josephus historical account?

Oh, come now!

...The phrase 'to this day' confirms that this is a later interpolation. There was no 'tribe of Christians' during Josephus's time. Christianity did not get off the ground until the second century....

Huh? "Off the ground"?

How about "underground"? A "tribe", hiding out so that they, too, didn't get wiped out.

The murders started with Christ and went on from there.

Why does the word "tribe" (instead of a word more to the critic's liking?) in a 1900 year old historical account indicate falsehood?

Wow!

...Bishop Eusebius, that great Church propagandist and self-confessed liar-for-god, was the first person known to have quoted this paragraph of Josephus, about the year 340 AD. This was after the Christians had become the custodians of religious correctness......

.....Whole libraries of antiquity were torched by the Christians.....

Evidence, please.

...They planted evidence on Josephus, turning the leading Jewish historian of his day into a witness for Jesus Christ ! Finding no references to Jesus anywhere in Josephus's genuine work, they interpolated a brief but all-embracing reference based purely on Christian belief....

!

Weak. Desperate. Almost funny.

...This is the stuff of Christian propaganda....

Lots of propaganda out there, huh?

http://courses.drew.edu/FA2001/bibst...1/tacitus.html

...When I consider a question such as this, the first question to ask is whether it conceivable or perhaps even probable that later Christians might have modified ancient historical sources; and the answer to this question certainly must be yes!...

Agenda noted............

...he nevertheless makes no reference to the "multitude" of believers who supposedly suffered martyrdom under Nero at the time of the burning of Rome. The silence in early Christian sources concerning this event is deafening....

The writer is obviously accustommed to writing such propaganda in the good ole' U.S. of A.

Other places can be damned dangerous.

The silence can get very deafening.

 

[jjramsey]

I'm think I'm confused by your argument. We agree that at least a couple of those listed died, and returned to life in one form or another, then returned to the Underworld, right?

No, just one, Osiris.

Jesus supposedly died, returned to life briefly in a somewhat altered form, and then returned to Heaven. He certainly didn't hang out, alive, bein' a normal guy for a lengthy period. Jesus post-resurrection has like a coupla encounters and vamooses from the scene.

So I guess I don't see why Osiris being briefly alive and then going to an afterlife is different from Jesus being briefly alive and going to an afterlife. I mean, that actually seems a lot more similiar to me than somebody like Odin who comes alive and STAYS alive.

How do you see it as different?

For one, saying that both Osiris and Jesus go into an afterlife is glossing over a lot of details. Osiris is a dead god. He has a pretty good life in the underworld but he's stuck there. His resurrection is basically a brief respite before he dies again. By contrast, there's no hint in the Gospels that Jesus ascending to heaven meant that he died again after his resurrection (as opposed to Osiris) or that he is trapped in either an underworld or heaven. He is taken to be alive, period.

Also, my point about the lack of a dying and rising motif is that we don't see a pattern arising organically from the myths. Contrast this with the motif of bilocation, seen in

• the myth where Persephone spends half the year in the underworld with her husband and half in the realm of the living with her mother.
• the myth where after Aphrodite and Persephone fight for the affections of the infant Adonis, a deal is struck where Adonis half the year in the underworld with Persephone and half in the realm of the living with Aphrodite
• the myth where Tammuz/Dumuzi spends half the year in the underworld and half in the realm of the living

The bilocation motif is straightforward and specific: someone is shuttled to and from the underworld on a semiannual schedule. We are probably dealing here with an honest-to-goodness recycled motif.

The mere presense of a dying and rising pattern, by contrast, is too vague to imply a common relationship. Dying is very common in myths, and it doesn't take a genius to think up the idea of someone dying and then "un-dying". Your examples of Odin, the two Mayan gods playing ball, and the Coyote show that point. These myths can hardly be said to be historically related, yet they share these common elements of dying and rising. That suggests that it isn't too difficult for dying and rising myths to arise independently. Now if there were dying and rising myths all over the place, then it would be rather odd to attribute all or even most of them to independent invention. Yet they aren't all over the place. There are a few myths with substantial differences scattered sparsely over history, which is what we should expect if such myths arose independently, rather than borrowing from one another.

 

[davefoc]

Hunster, is it your view that the Josephus passages referring to Jesus do not vary significantly from what Josepus wrote?

This is a quote from one of the sites I linked to previously:

In my own reading of thirteen books since 1980 that touch upon the passage, ten out of thirteen argue the Testimonium to be partly genuine, while the other three maintain it to be entirely spurious. Coincidentally, the same three books also argue that Jesus did not exist. In one book, by Freke and Gandy, the authors go so far as to state that no "serious scholar" believes that the passage has authenticity (p. 137), which is a serious misrepresentation indeed. It is impossible that this passage is entirely genuine. It is highly unlikely that Josephus, a believing Jew working under Romans, would have written, "He was the Messiah." This would make him suspect of treason, but nowhere else is there an indication that he was a Christian. Indeed, in Wars of the Jews, Josephus declares that Vespasian fulfilled the messianic oracles. Furthermore, Origen, writing about a century before Eusebius, says twice that Josephus "did not believe in Jesus as the Christ."

source:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/testimonium.html

Of course, this guy doesn't necessarily have any more authority on this question than anybody else, but the site does explain why he believes that there must be at least some Christian oriented changes to what Josephus wrote. Among that evidence is the existence of an Arabic translation by a tenth century Christian, Agapius, that doesn't contain the portion of the text which is rejected by all secular scholars that I have seen referenced on this question.

A brief discussion of the Josephus writings in Arabic that refer to Jesus from the site linked to above:

Some scholars, notably Charlesworth, have been quick to receive this passage as being an important textual witness, as much or even moreso than the earlier Greek quoted by Eusebius. Charlesworth declares: "What is immediately obvious -- when one compares the Arabic and the Greek recensions -- is that the blatantly Christian phrases are conspicuously absent in the Arabic version." (p. 95) Of course, it must be acknowledged by everyone there is some redaction in the Arabic recension: "The possibility that anyone, including Jesus, was the Messiah, was not a proposition that could be taken lightly by any Jew, especially one with the experiences and credentials of Josephus. But it is even more apparent that no Christian could have originated such words as 'he was perhaps the Messiah...' It is best to assume that what Josephus wrote is not accurately preserved in any extant recension (Greek, Slavic, or Arabic); it has been at least slightly altered by Christian scribes." (p. 95) Further, Charlesworth says:

 

[UrsulaV]

The mere presense of a dying and rising pattern, by contrast, is too vague to imply a common relationship. Dying is very common in myths, and it doesn't take a genius to think up the idea of someone dying and then "un-dying".

Well, certainly if one is a comparative mythology student, one can say that there are substantial themative differences. And I will agree--there are substantial differences. No argument.

However, I'm guessing the average Roman on the street was NOT a comparative mythology student, and did not have Josephus Campbellus to tell him that Osiris and Jesus weren't the same thing at all.

So if the question is "are there differences in the motifs here?" then the answer is obviously "Yes." But we may be pursuing two different questions--I thought the question was "Did the myths shlumped onto the historical Jesus resemble others in the area at the time?" and I'd still say that yes, they would, to the average person who's in the area at the time--who are, after all, the ones the myths are meant to impress! I mean, if I was a Roman wandering around and somebody said "This Jesus guy the Christians worship came back from the dead. Y'know, sorta like Osiris," I suspect I'd say "Oh, right, yeah, I remember that," not "Actually, there are significant differences between the dying and rising god figure motifs as represented by Jesus and Osiris, such that I don't think they should be considered thematically similiar." I, Roman, am not an abstract analyzer of myths, all I know is god gets betrayed, god dies, god un-dies, god heads to afterlife. For me, that counts as "resemblance." You may have a significantly different understanding of what a myth resembling another myth entails.

Now, there are certainly substantial differences between all the stories of dying and rising gods, but I think in actual practice, for a person in a world full of stories about gods, who does not have a degree in analyzing and abstracting mythological motifs, a god who died and then isn't dead is pretty much a god who died and then isn't dead. So I still would say that for the average Roman on the street, Osiris and Jesus and a whole bunch of others would appear to have a lot in common on the whole "dead/not dead" bit.

 

[jjramsey]

The writer of this site contests in more detail and somewhat differently the validity of the Tacitus quote:
http://courses.drew.edu/FA2001/bibst-720s-001/tacitus.html

There are a few problems with the writer's argument. First, his justification of why a Christian interpolator would use terms like "most mischievous superstition" or "hideous and shameful" to describe his own faith is very weak. Whoever interpolated Josephus in the Testimonium Flavianum had no problem with describing Jesus in positive terms, even though it didn't quite fit with Josephus' text, yet the supposed interpolator of Tacitus is willing to disparage his own beliefs for the sake of "verisimiltude"? Second, he writes as if Tacitus was referring to "hatred for all humankind" as a formal charge against Christians as an excuse for their arrest. Third, his alternative scenario is strained. Nero distracts attention from reports of his own culpability in the fire of Rome, not by using an already hated minority as a scapegoat, but by ramping up the cruelty in the circuses? This is not a convincing argument for interpolation.

 

[UrsulaV]

This is actually simply wrong. Mithras never died.

Say, do you have any on-line sources on this? I'm diggin' around the 'net, and while I grant you Wikipedia is not exactly the most reliable source, I'm finding a number of places that list Mithras as indeed having died and been resurrected, and granted that, I'd like a coupla more sources before we just assume this about t'deity in question.

 

[clarsct]

Pssssht!

Jesus TOTALLY copied RE...erm Osiris.

 

[Huntster]

Hunster, is it your view that the Josephus passages referring to Jesus do not vary significantly from what Josepus wrote?...

In all honesty, I don't know. I am very suspect of interpretations from such a website, but I'm certainly willing to review it.

...In my own reading of thirteen books since 1980 that touch upon the passage, ten out of thirteen argue the Testimonium to be partly genuine, while the other three maintain it to be entirely spurious. Coincidentally, the same three books also argue that Jesus did not exist. In one book, by Freke and Gandy, the authors go so far as to state that no "serious scholar" believes that the passage has authenticity (p. 137), which is a serious misrepresentation indeed....

Clearly, there is controversy, but it appears that there is enough in the Testimonium without the questionable phrase to establish a Josephus statement regarding Christ.

There is more of Josephus that is applicable:

http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/ntparallels.htm

...Antiquities 20. 9.1 199-203
The younger Ananus, who had been appointed to the high priesthood, was rash in his temper and unusually daring. He followed the school of the Sadducees, who are indeed more heartless than any of the other Jews, as I have already explained, when they sit in judgment. Possessed of such a character, Ananus thought that he had a favorable opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinas was still on the way. And so he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, the one called Christ, whose name was James, and certain others, and accusing them of having transgressed the law delivered them up to be stoned. Those of the inhabits of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the law were offended at this. They therefore secretly sent to King Agrippa urging him, for Ananus had not even been correct in his first step, to order him to desist from any further such actions. Certain of them even went to meet Albinus, who was on his way from Alexandria, and informed him that Ananus had no authority to convene the Sanhedrin without his consent. Convinced by these words, Albinus angrily wrote to Ananus threatening to take vengeance upon him. King Agrippa, because of Ananus' action, deposed him from the high priesthood which he had held for three months and replaced him with Jesus the son of Damnaeus....

Comment

The death of James does not appear in the New Testament. The events described by Josephus occurred about 62 CE, which is just about when the latest writing of the New Testament, the Book of Acts, comes to a close, with Paul waiting in Rome for two years after arriving there in 60 CE.
James is depicted in Acts as the leader, with Peter, of the Jerusalem Christians after the death of Jesus, and shows James as adhering to the full Jewish law while ruling that non-Jewish Christians do not need to do the same.
Josephus' account is interesting in that it shows the Sadducees as enemies of James and the Christians, to the extent of resorting to summary execution to dispose of them. The accusation against James is that he transgressed the law of Moses. But he is defended by those "strict in the observance of the law," which is a way Josephus often refers to the Pharisees. The dispute here thus seems to be another of the Sadducee-Pharisee arguments, with James the victim in the middle; Acts depicts Paul as being in the same spot three years earlier (Acts 23:6-10).
Thus there was some question in the minds of both Jews as well as Christians as to whether James completed supported adherence to the law of Moses. It is interesting to see Pharisees defending James, as some Pharisees are also shown, in the Acts passage cited above, to belong to James' group of Christians. And in Acts 5:34, Rabbi Gamaliel of the Pharisees similarly defends Peter and John.
Some scholars have questioned the authenticity of this reference to Jesus, just as they have the Testimonium Flavianum passage. But the current consensus is that there is no indication this is a late interpolation; if it is, it is an unusually subtle and skillful one. In addition, the implied Sadducee-Pharisee factional battle and the vague accusation of transgression of the law support the idea that whoever was the subject of this passage played a role in the city similar to that of James; thus the context supports the name identification.
It appears that Josephus was not in Jerusalem at this time to witness the events. From his autobiography, he was most likely on his way to Rome....

There are literally dozens of Josephus recordings that support the gospels in other ways. Picking at the ones that specifically mention Jesus, or "Christ", to me, indicates the exact opposite that the pickers are alleging.

 

[Z]

Well, here's my perspective on the whole matter:

The Jews had a long-standing prophecy of a 'messaiah' who would come and free them from Roman oppression, and presumably restore Israel as a major world power. Obviously, that messaiah failed to materialize on any known occasion.

Enter the historical figure who we would come to know as Mary. Here is a woman of society, among the Jews: educated, witty, strong-willed, and clever. Yet she's looking at the Jewish people as being largely in decline. The main factions of Hebrew priests are essentially giving in to materialism and selling out faith for food; the people are losing faith in the whole Jewish schtick; and the Pagan Gods of Rome are starting to look mighty attractive.

So Mary makes a power-play, and with the help of her husband, arranges to try to have their child in the most prophecy-fulfilling matter possible. The scam works, at least partially, and for a time Mary enjoys a certain social elevation as the mother of the possible liberator of the Jewish people.

Now Mary isn't going to want to lose out on this newfound political and social clout, so she tries raising her son to be as strong-willed and independent as she is - but there's a snag. Yeshua gets exposed to more than just the Hebrew and Roman faiths surrounding him, and pieces together some very humanist concepts, mingled with more traditional beliefs common to most people of faith: that the Priests should be serving the public, rather than vice-versa; that the leaders of a Nation ought to be mastered by their people, rather than the other way around, etc. So Jesus, with help from Mary, comes up with a new, human-centered faith, and tries to spread it about the area. His followers, of course, stir up trouble, by not obeying the local priesthood, for example, and by being general pains to the local authorities. Of course, both priest and politician alike decide to take care of this trouble-maker, and his new personality cult, and have him executed.

Well, this is a HUGE setback, of course, for Mary and her social and political standing, for the cult itself, and for the local Jews who were still hoping that he would turn out to be the liberator of Israel. Things die down for a bit, the Jews carry on as usual, the Romans snicker a lot and probably take a more pro-active stance against local cults, and that's that.

Skip ahead about a generation, and we see that the people who were enmeshed in this personality cult are still at odds with society, with their religious leaders, and with the local authorities; but the small cults that splintered from Yeshua's group are a vastly divergent set, with not one of them large enough to make a difference. Add to this some off-shoot Jews who believe that the Messaiah story refers to a spiritual salvation, rather than an actual one. This is the environment that we see just prior to the authorship of the earliest Gospels.

Along comes some very educated and intelligent members of one (or more) of these mini-cults, with a bright idea: unification. Of course, unification wouldn't work without a LOT of labor; so these gifted storytellers begin to retell the tale of Jesus, and each one embellishes a bit more, in an attempt to provide a central figure for these splinter groups to gather around. This process goes on for a rather long time, until finally most of these groups have united as the Christians, and a few caches (possibly dissenters?) are eradicated. Over the course of this time, the historical person who was meant to be a saviour and failed becomes the Son of God, who didn't fail after all, but was resurrected and freed Man from Original Sin. And now you have Christianity.

So in short: Yes, there probably was a personality-cult leader whose name was Jesus, and who was at one point being sold as the Saviour of Israel. This alone could explain why his story survived where other would-be messaiahs and cult leaders vanished in the dust of history. But the Gospels are creative embellishments, fantasy stories based on some factual person, and have no business being used to justify the mythic cult we see today.

 

[Meadmaker]

I haven't read every single one of the posts, but I'll throw in two cents worth of opinion, and one cent worth of information.

I think it very likely that a Jewish guy named Jesus (of course, that's a Hellenized version, but no one calles the guy "Joshua") was active in the first century AD in Palestine.

First, there is a cult of people who were active very shortly thereafter that thought he existed and was pretty darned important. Some of those people, like Peter, insisted that they had actually met the fellow.

Now, it's possible that Peter got together with some buds and said, "I have an idea. We'll start a new religion that is a lot like the Osiris cult, but the central character will be a Jewish guy." And then, they start preaching it in places where some of the people would have been old enough to remember the events. Imagine them going to Jerusalem saying, "Remember when Jesus came into your city, and was crucified?" And everyone said, "I don't remember that. Hey, Fredicus, you worked in the courts, did you ever remember some guy named Jesus?"

It's much more likely they would say, "Wasn't Jesus that loudmouth who caused all the trouble at the temple that day when he turned over the moneychanger tables. Good riddance." And then his cult wouldn't catch on much in Judea, but over in Alexandria it made a much better story, and the cult was born.

So, the existence of a cult seems like strong evidence by itself. But, there is other evidence. I think the most powerful evidence of his existence is that there are documents from several traditions that attest to it. Specifically:

1. The Gospels. We all know what those are, and their flaws, but they are there.

2. Josephus. While some have said it looks like forgery, it seems to me that the whole inclusion was probably not made up out of whole cloth.

3. Lots of evidence for Christians, very early.

And finally, there are two bits of evidence that I find rather interesting, if not compelling.

4. The existence and writings of the Mandaeans. Who are they, you ask? They are the survivors of the cult of John the Baptist. They live mostly in Southern Iraq today, although their numbers were severely diminished during Saddam Hussein's tenure. The existence of this group gives independent evidence of the existence of John the Baptist. While it doesn't prove, or even mention, anything about Jesus, verification of one element of the Gospel story would be relevant to deciding whether or not the rest is.

5. The most dubious piece of evidence I can think of, but still interesting, is a document called "The Hebrew Gospel of Matthew". Some time in the middle ages, a book, in Hebrew, was discovered that is very much like the Gospel of Matthew. It was found on a Jewish scroll, and had been preserved by Jews. It has been speculated that Matthew and Mark were both derivations of a work, dubbed Q by scholars. It has been further speculated that this work was Q. It is obviously related to the Gospels, but was preserved, independently, by Jews. The work itself is interesting, because it is like Matthew, but Jesus appears much less divine than he did in Matthew. Of course, because the only manuscript we have is from the middle ages, many insist that it is actually a Jewish document in which someone took the "real" Gospel of Matthew, and took away a lot of Jesus' divinity.

Google the phrase "Hebrew Gospel of Matthew" for more info.

Dubious as it might be, it is a small bit of evidence that the existence of Jesus was preserved through Jewish tradition.

 

[jjramsey]

However, I'm guessing the average Roman on the street was NOT a comparative mythology student, and did not have Josephus Campbellus to tell him that Osiris and Jesus weren't the same thing at all.
--snip--
mean, if I was a Roman wandering around and somebody said "This Jesus guy the Christians worship came back from the dead. Y'know, sorta like Osiris," I suspect I'd say "Oh, right, yeah, I remember that,"

It would have taken a Josephus Campbellus (or a Jamesus Frazierus) to make a connection between Osiris and Jesus in the first place. The vast differences in detail between the few stories involving the dying and rising of a god suggest that the ancients didn't think of "dying and rising gods" as a handy category to begin with, so there's no that they would make the snap association between Osiris and Jesus that you describe. It is our modern-day awareness of Christian beliefs that makes another god's resurrection, even a temporary one, jump out at us. Bear in mind that not all the myths of Horus' conception even involve this temporary resurrection. Another one has Isis and Osiris making love while still in the womb (!) and conceiving Horus there (source). That suggests that resurrection was hardly a central element of Osiris' mythology.

Say, do you have any on-line sources on this? I'm diggin' around the 'net, and while I grant you Wikipedia is not exactly the most reliable source, I'm finding a number of places that list Mithras as indeed having died and been resurrected, and granted that, I'd like a coupla more sources before we just assume this about t'deity in question.

The handiest one would be

http://www.ceisiwrserith.com/mith/whatmithisnt.htm

I would disagree with him on the conclusion that Mithraism postdates Christianity, but he is right in saying that the earliest artifact is from 90 C.E. The author of the page is a neo-Wiccan, for what that's worth. Really though, you are better off looking through the library and skimming the Mithraic scholars directly, or consulting the Encyclopedia of Religion.

Pssssht!

Jesus TOTALLY copied RE...erm Osiris.

I thought he copied John the Baptist.

 

[clarsct]

Well, I actually fall on neither side here. I mean, the rsearch into this is probably good from a historical context, but I don't think we'll ever really know if Jesus Christ, as per the New testament, ever existed or not.

I always wondered of he wasn't made up by some monk in about 2 CE....

 

[Huntster]

...verification of one element of the Gospel story would be relevant to deciding whether or not the rest is.....

http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/ntparallels.htm

There are lots of various parallels between Josephus and the Gospels.

 

[davefoc]

Comment on zaayrdragon's theory.

Doubt it greatly. One thing most secular scholars seem to agree on is that the birth stories are made up. Problems abound, but amongst them is that somebody had to take notice that Jesus was born and decide that this was important enough to commit the details of to memory or to write down the details at the time of the birth. This hypothetical chronicler had to decide that for the next 30 years nothing was all that important in the life of Jesus so he didn't record anything or for some reason all of his writings are lost to history. There is also that little matter of all the children that Herod supposedly killed but nobody else noticed. Plus the biblical passages that indicate that Mary thought Jesus was strange not divine.

So I think stories about Mary, Joseph, three wise men, mangers, etc. are pretty much fiction and theories based on these characters are pretty much just fiction added on top of fiction.