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Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

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lionking said:
What I find so amusing about this debate is that Christianity would be mortally wounded if it could be proven that Jesus Christ did not exist. Buddhists would shrug and laugh if Buddha never existed. What a fragile belief system Christianity is.
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Wouldn't matter to the Xtians either, they don't act like Him. They only use they have for Jesus is to find excuses to deride other people.
 
aggle-rithm said:
There is already plenty of solid evidence that proves evangelical churches wrong about many of their central beliefs, and they are thriving.
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Oh yeah, agreed. But if the resurrection was proven not to have happened (yeah I know, it can't be) then the church would surely collapse.

Anyway, my main point was that the central tenets of Christianity are very fragile, unlike other religions which do not depend on the reality of their founder.
 
lionking said:
Oh yeah, agreed. But if the resurrection was proven not to have happened (yeah I know, it can't be) then the church would surely collapse.

Anyway, my main point was that the central tenets of Christianity are very fragile, unlike other religions which do not depend on the reality of their founder.
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I think you are quite right Lionking, but the problem with trying to use this argument to "de-convert" Christians is never going to work. Ever. They won't accept the basic premise. Especially not while it is still only a fringe theory.

Richard Carrier is soon to publish a book. He is one of the FTB people and a legitimate Scholar who thinks he can show, by using Bayesian mathematics (?) that Jesus was never a flesh and blood human, only a story about a man.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/4733

But he also says this:
...I conclude that, using probability estimates as far against my conclusion as are at all reasonably possible (probabilities I believe are wildly too generous), there could be as much as a 1 in 3 chance that Jesus existed. When using what I think are more realistic estimates of the requisite probabilities (estimates I believe are closer to the truth), those chances drop to around 1 in 12,000.
Note that the first estimate leaves a respectable probability that Jesus existed–it’s merely more likely that he didn’t, not anywhere near certain. And that may well be correct, if my biases are strong and thus my a fortiori estimates (estimates against myself) more accurate. But even if we embrace the other end of my margin of error, we are still not looking at certainty. 1 in 12,000 sounds like certainty, but it’s actually nowhere near. Just ask yourself: would you get into a car that had a 1 in 12,000 chance of exploding right then? If your answer is yes, then you are bad at math...
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Most of this blog entry is aimed at people like the OP, who keep starting threads like this one all over the net.

Oh well. I tried.
 
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mstricky said:
I think he was Greek jewish and there was a large Greek community in Judea at that time........ I can't quote the verse where a woman approaches him and says "but you are a Greek it is said that the son of God comes from the Gallilea area"
I read that in the New International Version but not the copy I have here.
I think it was in Luke but I could be mistaken.
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The word "Greek" is not found in NIV Matthew or Luke. Once in Mark, and once in John. The word "Greeks" occurs in two verses in John, but not in the other gospels.

The online concordance "BibleGateway" is great for this sort of thing.
 
Kapyong said:
Gday all,

To dejudge -
you used to post as "aa5874",
then you started to use "dejuror",
now it's "dejudge".

Who promoted you to juror, then judge?
What next? "deGod"?

:-)

Kapyong
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I was tipping on deexecutioner, to have the trinity ;)

ETA: darn beaten by teh evilbiker
 
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myth one? really? kinda destroyed the whole Argument.
 
lionking said:
What I find so amusing about this debate is that Christianity would be mortally wounded if it could be proven that Jesus Christ did not exist. Buddhists would shrug and laugh if Buddha never existed. What a fragile belief system Christianity is.
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Christmas Humphries made that point. If it was proved that the Buddha never existed then it would not make a blind bit of difference to Buddhism.
 
Craig B said:
The word "Greek" is not found in NIV Matthew or Luke. Once in Mark, and once in John. The word "Greeks" occurs in two verses in John, but not in the other gospels.

The online concordance "BibleGateway" is great for this sort of thing.
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It is definitely in one of the publications. I will borrow my friends bible, it was in that. At the time I read it, I was so shocked I showed my husband who could not believe what it said either. ( that Jesus is Greek)
 
mstricky said:
It is definitely in one of the publications. I will borrow my friends bible, it was in that. At the time I read it, I was so shocked I showed my husband who could not believe what it said either. ( that Jesus is Greek)
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He is described in the gospels as using words from the Aramaic language, which was spoken by Jews rather than Greeks at that time. Words like these:
Talitha kum, Ephphatha, Abba, Raca, Mammon, Rabbuni, Maranatha, Eli Eli lema sabachthani.
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I am struggling a bit with some of these 'ten myths'. For example, take myth 5, the gospels give a consistent picture of Jesus.

Does this mean that a consistent picture disproves the historicity of Jesus? Or the opposite? I would think that consistency would tend to disprove HJ, but then the picture of Jesus is not consistent, is it?

Thus, many historical figures are given wildly inconsistent pictures, aren't they? I've been reading a biography of Napoleon recently, and there are clearly very pro-Napoleon histories and fairly anti-Napoleon ones; the former, strangely enough, tend to be French!

Myth 10 is also rather weird - that Christianity was new. Eh? Since it is shown as emerging from Judaism, how could it be new? Jesus doesn't debate with Buddhists or Zoroastrians, but different kinds of Jews, e.g. Pharisees, but I don't see how that either helps HJ or hinders it really. Well, I suppose the HJ proponents could argue that the debates are rooted in genuine sectarian divisions of the time, for example, in relation to charismatic and apocalyptic Jewish thinking. But then again, you could invent such debates.
 
Kapyong said:
Sorry Brainache, the Jesus Myth's time has come - it will never stop :-)

Myth 1 -
Comparing Jesus resurrection to Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon - a popular internet meme lately - Fitzgerald says :

First, we have Caesar's own account (not directly we don't - Caesar's account does not specifically refer to the Rubicon - but at one stage in his account he is north of it, later he is south of it.) But we have nothing from Jesus's own hand, and we do not really know who wrote any of the Gospels.

Second, many of Caesar's enemies reported the crossing of the Rubicon, but we have no hostile or even neutral mentions of the resurrection until over a 100 years after the alleged event, when Christian beliefs were well known.

Third, there are numerous inscriptions, coins, mentions of battles, conscriptions and judgements, which form an alsmost continuous chain of evidence of Caesar's march. But there is no physical evidence of any kind for Jesus.

Fourth, almost every historian of the period mentions the crossing, often naming and quoting their sources and known to be reliable. But for Jesus we have no historians mentioning the resurrection till centuries later - and they are Christian historians.

Finally, the civil war could not have proceeded as it did if Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon with his army and captured Rome. By contrast the only thing necessary for Christianity is a belief.

Carrier says :
"In fact, when we compare all five points, we see that in four of the five proofs of an event's historicity, the resurrection has no evidence at all, and in the one proof that it does have, it has not the best, but the very worst kind of evidence - a handful of biased, uncritical, unscholarly, unknown, second-hand witnesses. Indeed you really have to look hard to find another event that is in a worse condition than [the resurrection] as far as evidence goes."
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Kapyong
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If you are arguing that the resurrection has no credible evidence at all, I agree. I think that all atheists would agree on this point. I don't think that is an argument that there was never a historical Jesus at all. I don't believe that Joseph Smith found golden plates either. But Joseph Smith was a real person.
 
Jesus can't have been a Greek myth. He wasn't done in by a jealous or vengeful woman.
 
GDon said:
...Each of the articles above are many thousands of words long, and make for interesting reading! The question is... are Fitzgerald's counter-arguments really "contrived"? Or is O'Neill's review wrong "in ways that actually prove the points Fitzgerald argues"? Anyone want to analyse their responses?
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This book and the reviews came out over a year ago.
Why post about them now?
 
Kapyong said:
The ten myths are :
  • Myth 1 - The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous
  • Myth 2 - Jesus was wildly famous - but ...
  • Myth 3 - Ancient Historian Josephus wrote about Jesus
  • Myth 4 - Eye-witnesses wrote the Gospels
  • Myth 5 - The Gospels give a consistent picture of Jesus
  • Myth 6 - History confirms the Gospels
  • Myth 7 - Archeology confirms the Gospels
  • Myth 8 - Paul and the epistles corroborate the Gospels
  • Myth 9 - Christianity began with Jesus and his apostles
  • Myth 10 - Christianity was totally new and different
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Who (other than Christian fundamentalists) makes anything like the above claims? They are not representative of the scholarly arguments that Jesus likely existed as an historical figure in the early 1st Century. In fact, every scholar I've read on the subject, who thinks that he probably did exist, would dispute every single one of those ten claims.
 
I rejected Catholocism many years ago, but as a young lad we were taught that Jesus was "fully human and fully devine", and as well that God the Father, Jesus (God the Son), and the Holy Spirit were all fully God and were yet somehow separate entitites.
When we little kids protested that this was irrational, we were told that this was a "mystery of faith".
In other words, if you were a Catholic, you were required to believe it, even if it didn't make sense.

I'd submit that all the points made by this author are pretty well-trodden and covered in great detail by others like Bart Ehrman.
 
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