Historical Jesus
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abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Meh. play it the way it lays/
MJ side does not suppose it was one guy who fabricated the non-historical Jesus. The Jesus character was manufactured by many guys under the fictitious names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James and Jude.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Funny.
It is like you think you are revealing something new or novel and expecting applause, when everyone know that the gospels are entirely anonymous.
Well bravo for telling everyone what they knew already. You must be so proud.
What I mean when I say “the foundational character” is not the starter of the religion, it is the supernatural entity that is said by the religion’s creator to be at the heart of the religion. So for Smith and the LDS it would be Moroni and the two bods who visited him. And indeed Smith provides a good example of something else, the ownership of the claimed foundational character is his Jesus at all linked to the same “possible historical” Jesus? Or did he latch onto an already mythical Jesus?
Nope.
People claim a god called Jesus lived 2000 years ago. Those people have no evidence for this.
Do you have any evidence?
Oh, well sure, I guess I was talking at cross purposes there. The two seem to me to be similar as far as being a figure that’s more assumed than shown to be historical, is all I was getting at.
The position I’m aiming for is that someone (or rather a few someones) took an existing, expected, overdue prophet whose character was partially sketched out in the OT (and who was already being successfully impersonated by a lot of fellas), sketched it out the rest of the way and went ‘you just missed him!’ to a lot of people who liked the sound of this guy.
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Ulf Nereng
Muse
Keep in mind that for the typical atheist HJ'er you find on this forum JC is not supernatural, so for them the supernatural (foundational character) entity would be God. It is only believing christians who think of JC as supernatural. To a HJ'er JC is seen as any other Messiah claimant; he's a fake, a scam artist. Paul is the guy who promoted his version of Christianity, so he is similar to Smith in that regard. He claims to have met JC in visions for very obvious motives: His teachings comes directly from the divine, therefore everybody must listen to him. Paul had visions like Smith had his "Magic Stone".
MJ'ers often seem to conflate the HJ theory with the CJ theory. (CJ as in Christianity's Jesus.)
It is known how the Jesus character was manufactured so it is futile to imagine how it was done.
The NT authors simply took passages out of context from all over Hebrew Scripture under the pretense of prophecies for their invented Jesus character.
The NT authors actually quoted the passages and even at times identified the books of Hebrew Scripture from which they manufactured their Son of a Ghost character.
For example, the author of gMatthew stated his Jesus was born of a Ghost and a Virgin because it was the prophesied word of the Lord God in Hebrew Scripture found in Isaiah 7.14.
Jews believed that Isaiah 7.14 was already fulfilled hundreds of years earlier and referred to King Hezekiah.
The NT Jesus is just a blatant fiction character manufactured by non-Jews sometime in the 2nd century.
Tassman
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It is assumed to be known by some, not all scholars.
Why would they bother to do this? It seems not to have occurred to you that the NT authors may have actually believed in the character they were writing about. And sure, they were selectively quoting Hebrew Scripture to support their beliefs. People do this sort of thing all the time.
Sigh.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
It is known? By whom? Please provide cites.
Your example sucks.
List of messiah claimants
No mention of 'Son of a Ghost' or 'born of a virgin', because the Jewish messiah was expected to be a human, not a god. You are right that Christians invented those attributes, but they attached them to a character who (if he existed) was in reality just a man. And we still see this happening today,
Evangelicals told Trump he was "chosen" by God. Now he says it himself
These claims about Trump being "the chosen one", "a vessel for God's will" and "the second coming of God" are obviously manufactured. Therefore Trump doesn't exist, right?
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
Nope. We have a lot more evidence that Trump exists.
For Jesus we have no historical evidence. The earliest historical evidence is that some people claimed a god called Jesus existed.
There is not a single piece of evidence that someone called Jesus existed that can be tied into the claim of a god called Jesus existed.
Whichever way we slice it there is simply no actual evidence that someone called Jesus was out and about preaching and claiming to be god that ties that person into the later claims of those that believed a god called Jesus was out and about.
Yeah, really the point as far as I’m concerned is just that MJ is perfectly plausible.
It’s certainly not the left field whackadoo idea it looks like if your culture has lead you to assume that evidence exists for HJ.
It starts looking even more reasonable when you point to contemporary figures who wrote a few words about Christianity/adjacent subjects and didn’t mention the guy.
Of course that’s as close as you can get to evidence of absence so it’s not as though it’s a slam dunk, but as I said my point is more that HJ is hardly a slam dunk either.
It’s certainly not the left field whackadoo idea it looks like if your culture has lead you to assume that evidence exists for HJ.
It starts looking even more reasonable when you point to contemporary figures who wrote a few words about Christianity/adjacent subjects and didn’t mention the guy.
Of course that’s as close as you can get to evidence of absence so it’s not as though it’s a slam dunk, but as I said my point is more that HJ is hardly a slam dunk either.
Before this topic came up here - literally over a decade ago - I had an “inbuilt” presumption that there would have been some historical guy called Jesus who all the remarkable tales were added onto. It was my cultural (and religious) upbringing, I was quite shocked when it was shown here that we have zero evidence* that any such bloke existed, and it took a few years for me to treat this Jesus god fellow like all the other gods people claim exists or have existed.
The more I learned about how other religions have been created the more it seemed to me to be less and less likely that the many religions that have a Jesus god are the exception and their central figure was based on an actual real person.
It’s no skin off my nose if Christianity was “based” on the delusions of a real bloke called Jesus or if it was started by some other delusional bloke called Paul whose delusion was that a god called Jesus existed, it doesn’t add any veracity to the claims of those that label themselves Christian.
*ETA: I mean outside of the claims of those that hold there is a god called Jesus.
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I have purchased some of the books recommended in this thread, and have read most posts. As I said earlier, like a few others, I always assumed there was a historical Jesus. I now definitely lean towards the likelihood that there was never such a person. Impossible to prove I think, but the total lack of any evidence of him is the clincher for me.
dejudge said:
It is not an assumption that NT authors admitted their Jesus was born of a Ghost and a Virgin using Isaiah 7.14.
dejudge said:
It seems not to have occurred to you that people in the Roman Empire and even today believe Ghost are real. You must have forgotten that Romulus, the founder of Rome, was born of Ghost and a Virgin.
NT authors had to use fake prophecies from Hebrew Scriptures written hundreds of years earlier and were believed to have been already fulfilled to manufacture their Jesus because they had no history.
Don't you know what is written in the NT about Jesus of Nazareth?
Everybody who has read the NT knows it is admitted Jesus was born of a Ghost and a Virgin to fulfill so-called prophecy in Isaiah 7.14.
Your example sucks bigly.
Donald Trump's father was Fred Trump but the father of Jesus was a Ghost.
Going by what’s been said here, the Jewish people considered the matter settled; the OT prophecies about a prophet (as in, a king) were already long since fulfilled.
Yet according to Justin Martyr, by 55 AD there had arisen a number of groups known as Christians, following various magicians and charlatans. A few other sources of antiquity seem to confirm the existence of Christians as an apocalyptic cult whose members tended towards the performatively righteous.
Then we have writings that ended up composing the NT that quote OT prophecies, and claim that’s just what happened with our guy JC (so obviously he’s the real deal and you should listen to us when we tell you what he said).
I find it plausible that the NT authors/inspirers/workshoppers were people who saw these popular charlatan figures and were familiar with OT prophecies, and thought they could get a real following by preaching as followers of a fictional prophet they cobbled together to appeal to folks who didn’t know or care that the Jewish people in general were already done with those OT prophecies.
Whether or not they themselves knew what the Jewish people thought about it. Whether or not they were doing it with cynical calculation or out of seizure-inspired sincerity.
As has been said here it’s practically splitting hairs whether there was a real first claimant who was the real HJ, or whether one step is removed and the real first claimant just said ‘JC said this.’ Either way the result is, obviously, the same. But it’s still pretty funny that of these two theories, it’s HJ that has the lesser amount of evidence. MJ literally has a founder going ‘I only ever heard of the guy in a divine revalation,’ and a story created by quote mining the OT, to the point of creating misreading-based absurdities like coming into town on two donkeys.
Yet according to Justin Martyr, by 55 AD there had arisen a number of groups known as Christians, following various magicians and charlatans. A few other sources of antiquity seem to confirm the existence of Christians as an apocalyptic cult whose members tended towards the performatively righteous.
Then we have writings that ended up composing the NT that quote OT prophecies, and claim that’s just what happened with our guy JC (so obviously he’s the real deal and you should listen to us when we tell you what he said).
I find it plausible that the NT authors/inspirers/workshoppers were people who saw these popular charlatan figures and were familiar with OT prophecies, and thought they could get a real following by preaching as followers of a fictional prophet they cobbled together to appeal to folks who didn’t know or care that the Jewish people in general were already done with those OT prophecies.
Whether or not they themselves knew what the Jewish people thought about it. Whether or not they were doing it with cynical calculation or out of seizure-inspired sincerity.
As has been said here it’s practically splitting hairs whether there was a real first claimant who was the real HJ, or whether one step is removed and the real first claimant just said ‘JC said this.’ Either way the result is, obviously, the same. But it’s still pretty funny that of these two theories, it’s HJ that has the lesser amount of evidence. MJ literally has a founder going ‘I only ever heard of the guy in a divine revalation,’ and a story created by quote mining the OT, to the point of creating misreading-based absurdities like coming into town on two donkeys.
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