Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

[The Norseman]

You really don't need to be constantly antagonistic, Dejudge. If you didn't understand what Zygote meant, you can simply ask for clarification.

If you could, please, take a bit of time to read the following, and understand it: We all understand and agree that the bibble is full of nonsense, supernatural claptrap, and is, as you are so fond of reminding us, terrible evidence, by standards of modern history and science. However, these facts, as much as they make the quest for the history behind the story very difficult, do not mean that there is no history behind the story at all. Please note that in this paragraph I am not claiming that Jesus existed as a real guy, nor am I providing evidence for that claim. What I am saying is that we cannot discount it as a possibility based solely on the fact that the story contains liberal amounts of nonsense.

Now, is it possible that there was a preacher-guy somewhere at the source of the story ? I hope you admit at least the possibility. Is it possible there was not ? Sure. It's very possible, and if we were to find out, through new evidence, that there wasn't, that'd be very, very interesting (if only to see the mental gymnastics that the believers would pull in order to ignore the evidence.)

You keep asking me for evidence that Jesus existed, and I'll repeat my answer here, as a layman: 1) despite the amount of crap in the bibble, we know that the story had to start somewhere. In my understanding, most religions are started by people, more specifically a single preacher making extraordinary claims, and whom people believe in. Now, it's entirely possible that Paul made up this person, though he seems to claim that this religion existed before he converted, to which one has to ask: why would he make up a religion and then not take the credit ? It's not impossible, but it raises a few questions that the alternative, HJ, doesn't. This brings us to 2) I don't buy the criterion of embarassment fully, but one has to admit that several of the gospels and stories go through hoops to justify things that existed in previous versions of the stories. Is it possible that those are elements simply invented by previous authors ? Again, sure. But it again raises fewer questions if one assumes (yes, there's that word) that they weren't added layers of conspiracy or fraud.

Again, it all depends on your threshold of acceptance for such weak evidence. I said before, I'm leaning towards HJ, if only because it raises fewer questions, lends itself better to the story as we know it, and matches similar cults. But it's very possible that MJ is correct, instead. However, your attitude, namely that the former is simply ridiculous and impossible, and declaring the latter the victor, is premature and unsupported.

Still waiting for you to address this post, Dejudge.

As to the red: The fact that the stories contain a liberal amount of nonsense calls into question everything else the person(s) had said. I think on this point we do agree. So, in order to test the mundane stuff historians look for evidence which tends to support one way or the other regarding Jesus' corporeal presence. There really isn't any. But again, we're dealing with religious texts which some are known forgeries and some have been tampered with. There's no other-than-the-bible evidence that can bear scrutiny. It seems logical to me to say "I don't know for sure" but I find that a non-corporeal Jesus theory is still just as likely as a corporeal Jesus.

As to the green: It doesn't have to be conspiracy or fraud to explain what could have happened with the MJ theory. They all seemed to believe all sorts of things that are untrue; why wouldn't a mythical Jesus also be a legitimate view of the past?

 

[zugzwang]

Okay. What you said isn't accurate at all. There. Happy?

Yes, thank you, I usually am.

Well, you have omitted to say that it was a comment about dejudge - do you think he thinks HJ is a possiblility?

 

[zugzwang]

This is generally an accurate summation of the most recent scholarly research on the development of the various texts. However, the most recent professional research does separate out certain very early suggestive remarks by Jesus the rabbi at the outset of the oral tradition that, while not reflective of the "high Christology" of the later textual strata, does hint at certain very vague claims by Jesus that might account for later posthumous accretions.

I already summarized these odd remarks and how they may have played into the hands of future hagiographers here --

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9261094&highlight=GThomas#post9261094

-- Briefly put, these remarks cited in the above post seem to indicate that Jesus may have already viewed himself as _a_ Son of God (not _the_ Son) in -- perhaps? -- a spiritual way, but not much more. He may also have deemed himself capable of bequeathing a "godly" inheritance -- of a sort -- among other things. Read the cited post above if you're interested in the actual textual details. I know the board frowns on repeating extended detailed posts. I think the cited post, though, may at least be useful in addressing Zugzwang's remarks.

Thoughts?

Stone

Cheers, Stone. Very interesting stuff. I have come across the analysis of colloquial and more formal Greek - it's rather specialized stuff of course. And also the idea of the underlying Aramaic in some texts.

The information about 'son of God' is interesting; one problem is the wide interpretation of this phrase, from the standard Jewish sense of a pious Jew, right through to the Christian sense. Here is the big problem of the Christian retro-fitting of some Jewish ideas - causing them to lose their original sense - which seems to contaminate some parts of the text. Fortunately, a number of scholars such as Vermes and Fredriksen, have retrieved some of these Jewish ideas. Thus, Vermes writing on the charismatic hasid of that period, is an eye-opener really, although it deChristianizes Jesus, not to the delight of many Christians.

 

[David Mo]

Below I have summarised the highlighted lines from my two earlier posts.

What you can see there is that those OT passages (and I expect many more), very clearly do prophesise a future messiah who will die in an act which will symbolises the vital religious/theological message of salvation of the faithful - the very first quote from the book of Daniel, for example.

What is also undeniable from these quotes , inc. Paul’s own letter to the Galatians, is that Paul thought (rightly or wrongly) that the OT scriptures, which he repeatedly emphasised as his entire earthly source of all he knew about Jesus, that various passages in that OT scripture confirmed his belief that the messiah would be “hung on a tree” in a symbolic act which in Paul's mind/theology lifted the faith above the “accursed” law of man and delivered the faithful in the ways of the very different and vital laws of God.

(…)

Daniel 9:24-27
Prophecy of Seventy Weeks
And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself

I am a bit confused. Fundamentalist Christians find references to Christ everywhere in the Old Testament and claim these are fulfilled prophecies. I am surprised that you accept this easily, be it as an inverted relation -I mean a prophecy post evento-. I do not see any connection between Psalm 16 and Jesus' story and only a circumstantial one in the rest. No one of them speaks about a Messiah, except Daniel. And even Daniel is speaking of a "Prince" Messiah, it is to say, a King with earthly powers in the context of earthly wars. But this is not the important point.

Even if a proto-Christian group had used (easily or not) the Daniel's prophecy to invent Jesus himself, they never would have invented a crucified Messiah by the reasons I have commented previously ( #1156) . No one of the passages you have presented here contradict my main point. A "cut off" Messiah is very different of a "crucified Messiah". And this is a specially strong argument against the idea that the "invented Jesus" came from a Pauline circle. Or any other judeo-Christian circle.

 

[Belz...]

<snip> I find that a non-corporeal Jesus theory is still just as likely as a corporeal Jesus.

As to the green: It doesn't have to be conspiracy or fraud to explain what could have happened with the MJ theory. They all seemed to believe all sorts of things that are untrue; why wouldn't a mythical Jesus also be a legitimate view of the past?

Well let's try this again: Do you agree that the HJ scenario raises no questions ? Do you agree that this isn't true for the MJ one ?

 

[tsig]

Well let's try this again: Do you agree that the HJ scenario raises no questions ? Do you agree that this isn't true for the MJ one ?

It raises the question as to why you are accepting the words of a known forgery as true.

 

[Brainache]

It raises the question as to why you are accepting the words of a known forgery as true.

What on earth are you talking about?

 

[Craig B]

What on earth are you talking about?

Tsig is talking about, or rather talking from the unexamined but unchallengeable standpoint that:

1. The Bible is a single, uniform, undifferentiated work
2. It contains at least one lie - indeed many, as can be shown
3. From 1 and 2, it is therefore a single, uniform, undifferentiated pack of lies.
4. You have said something in it may be true.
5. But you know that it contains at least one - indeed many - lies.
6. Therefore you know that it is a pack of lies.
7. Despite knowing this you proclaim it to be true.
8. How can you do this without being dishonest to the point of utter depravity?!?
9. That makes tsig very cross!

 

[Brainache]

Tsig is talking about, or rather talking from the unexamined but unchallengeable standpoint that:

1. The Bible is a single, uniform, undifferentiated work
2. It contains at least one lie - indeed many, as can be shown
3. From 1 and 2, it is therefore a single, uniform, undifferentiated pack of lies.
4. You have said something in it may be true.
5. But you know that it contains at least one - indeed many - lies.
6. Therefore you know that it is a pack of lies.
7. Despite knowing this you proclaim it to be true.
8. How can you do this without being dishonest to the point of utter depravity?!?
9. That makes tsig very cross!

Seems that way.

Bizarre.

 

[IanS]

Because I was told that "all of Paul's information about Jesus comes from the OT"

I have shown that that statement is not true. It has been shown to not be true many times in these threads, but it keeps coming up.


Why is that?

I dunno. A poster or two doesn't have anything new to say?

What Brainache was told is that (apart from his visions) Paul himself says that all his information about Jesus came from “scripture“(he meant the OT).

Paul very specifically and repeatedly emphasises that he consulted no man about Jesus, and insists that he did not get any information about Jesus from any human man.

So that’s really not contestable by Brainache or anyone else here.

 

[tsig]

Tsig is talking about, or rather talking from the unexamined but unchallengeable standpoint that:

1. The Bible is a single, uniform, undifferentiated work
2. It contains at least one lie - indeed many, as can be shown
3. From 1 and 2, it is therefore a single, uniform, undifferentiated pack of lies.
4. You have said something in it may be true.
5. But you know that it contains at least one - indeed many - lies.
6. Therefore you know that it is a pack of lies.
7. Despite knowing this you proclaim it to be true.
8. How can you do this without being dishonest to the point of utter depravity?!?
9. That makes tsig very cross!

Well someone is cross.

It makes me curious not cross but you have a need to portray everyone who disagrees with you in the worst possible light.

Why do you believe you can discern truth from fiction in the bible?


ETA: I see that you, along with most Christians, assume that I haven't examined the bible, I guess admitting that someone could study the subject and come to a different idea than you do is too challenging to your ego so you just assume ignorance.

 

[Belz...]

It raises the question as to why you are accepting the words of a known forgery as true.

When have I done that ?

Yeah, I know you will never answer that.

 

[tsig]

When have I done that ?

Yeah, I know you will never answer that.

You're not claiming that the bible tells of an HJ?

 

[IanS]

Well let's try this again: Do you agree that the HJ scenario raises no questions ?

Do you agree that this isn't true for the MJ one ?

On the contrary, your HJ scenario raises a vast mountain of highly suspicious questions.

Firstly - what on earth is the justification for simply crossing out all of the numerous parts of the story that were, after 1800 years, finally proved to be untrue fiction?

It is absolutely not a justification to simply say “well all these parts must be untrue, so we crossed them out to leave only a few inconsequential things that are not physically impossible”. That is no justification at all.

Secondly - there is actually no evidence that any mention of Jesus, miracle or otherwise, is actually evidence of him being a living human of the time. There is at the very best, only evidence that superstitious uneducated 1st century religious fanatics believed in the supernatural messiah that they preached about as their gospel and who they all expected as matter of certainty from ancient divine prophecy in their OT theology (another biblical work apparently filled with religious fiction, by the way).

Thirdly - none of the people who ever wrote those gospels were ever anything else except totally anonymous, and they were at best only reporting what they had heard from other equally anonymous sources who in fact had never known Jesus either! None of them had ever seen, heard or otherwise had any connection with anyone named Jesus.

The stories tell of disciples who were said to accompany Jesus. But none of those disciples wrote the gospels. And none of the gospel authors ever say they met any such disciples or got any personal accounts of Jesus from any such disciples.

What those gospel writers do say, and what the earlier writing of Paul specifically insists upon, is that their beliefs and stories of Jesus came to them from what they believed to have been written in the scripture of the OT … as prophecies (so they believed) in a messiah which God himself had promised them as a matter of divine certainty.

As far as the gospel stories of Jesus are concerned, Randel Helms has produced an entire book specifically showing where the gospel authors took their Jesus stories from the OT. And as far as Paul’s letters are concerned, he specifically and repeatedly insists that all his knowledge of Jesus came to him from the scripture of his OT.



In contrast what you are calling the Mythical Jesus position, has vast evidence to support it-

First - the only original mention of Jesus by anyone comes from the biblical writers. But their stories have now been proved to be telling constant untrue fiction. So those parts of their own Jesus stories, which are all the essential parts of the Jesus story, are certainly mythical.

Second - apart from the fact that there is absolutely no genuine credible or independently confirmed evidence to support a single thing ever said in the bible about Jesus, there are countless claims in every religion of that time, to say that supernatural gods, demons, devils, spirits, angels etc. did all sort of things … but nobody in the right mind now believes that any of those other supernatural “gods” were really true (even though you could no doubt strip out all their supernatural elements and leave things that were at least physically possible). So there is vast precedent for ancient religious people inventing all manner of untrue superstitious stories of their supernatural gods.

Thirdly - for 2000 years the vast and highly lucrative and powerful edifice of the Christian Church has had a massive vested interest in trying to maintain and insist on the truth of its founding figure Jesus. And until about the last 200 of those years, that same Church insisted that their biblical stories were absolutely certain literal truth, including all the supernatural and miracle events. Even now church leaders still have huge trouble denying that all the miracles are untrue (eg see the speeches and comments of the last Pope's and the Archbishop's of Canterbury). So there is abundant reason to be highly suspicious of the veracity, if not actually the mental/educational/impartial/objective capacity, of people like that who have spent 2000 years insisting, and still insist that a completely impossible Jesus really existed (and still does exist in place called “heaven”).

 

[Belz...]

You're not claiming that the bible tells of an HJ?

No. Whatever made you think I did ?

 

[Belz...]

On the contrary, your HJ scenario raises a vast mountain of highly suspicious questions.

Firstly - what on earth is the justification for simply crossing out all of the numerous parts of the story that were, after 1800 years, finally proved to be untrue fiction?

That's not what we usually mean by "raises questions", IanS, and I'm having trouble believing that you don't know that, given your previous behaviour.

But for the record, what we mean by that is that it doesn't beg questions about the scenario itself, not the intent of the people proposing the scenario. In other words, there is nothing hard to accept, evidence aside (can you even read that ?) about a Jewish preacher in 1st century Judaea who has a cult following and was possibly executed. There is Nothing about that scenario that is somehow incongruous with known history or physics. MJ, although probably, raises questions, as has been brought up countless times here. Please don't pretend to have missed them.

It is absolutely not a justification to simply say “well all these parts must be untrue, so we crossed them out to leave only a few inconsequential things that are not physically impossible”. That is no justification at all.

That strawman gets truer and truer every time you use it.

Secondly - there is actually no evidence that any mention of Jesus, miracle or otherwise, is actually evidence of him being a living human of the time.

I don't think you understood the questions that I asked you:

- Do you agree that the HJ scenario raises no questions ?
- Do you agree that this isn't true for the MJ one ?

 

[dejudge]

Now, that isn't 'proof' of HJ, obviously, but it seems parsimonious.

How in the world can HJ be parsimonious without evidence?

Parsimony requires data [evidence] of which there is none for HJ of Nazareth as a human being with a human father.

HJ does not explain the abundance of evidence from antiquity .

HJ does not explain the evidence in Matthew 1, Mark 6, Mark 9, Luke 24, Acts 1, John 1, Galatians 4, Ignatius' Ephesians, Aristides' Apology, Justin's First Apology, Tertullian's On the Flesh of Christ, Hippolytus' Against All Heresies, Origen's Against Celsus, Lactantius' "On How the Persecutors died", Optatus' Against the Donatist, Eusebius' Demonstration of the Gospel and others.


It is without any reasonable doubt that MJ, a mythological Jesus, a Jesus of faith, is the most parsimonious explanation for the abundance of evidence from antiquity.

 

[tsig]

No. Whatever made you think I did ?

Then what is your evidence for an HJ?

 

[tsig]

Key word, here: IF. No one is doing that. Stop beating up that strawman.



Great, then it has nothing to do with what I said. I named things that were mundane in the gospels, so that stands.

You're not claiming that the bible tells of an HJ?

No. Whatever made you think I did ?

The hilited sentence.

 

[Craig B]

Well someone is cross.

It makes me curious not cross but you have a need to portray everyone who disagrees with you in the worst possible light.

I have no such need and I don't. It's the MJ proponents who tend in that direction.

Why do you believe you can discern truth from fiction in the bible?

Same way I detect it anywhere else.

ETA: I see that you, along with most Christians, assume that I haven't examined the bible, I guess admitting that someone could study the subject and come to a different idea than you do is too challenging to your ego so you just assume ignorance.

I am not a Christan or any kind of theist, and I have never had any belief in gods or other supernatural beings. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens both accept an HJ. They too are (or were) atheists. It is a delusion of the minds of MJ people, to assume that their opponents are either Christians or liars. Not so.

The idea you come to about the Bible is so egregiously absurd that although I am happy to accept that you study it, you must be impeded in your understanding of its character by some indelible prejudices or preconceptions.

Since you don't want the HJ side to put their opponents in a bad light, you must be in total disagreement with IanS when he states this

So there is abundant reason to be highly suspicious of the veracity, if not actually the mental/educational/impartial/objective capacity, of people like that who have spent 2000 years insisting, and still insist that a completely impossible Jesus really existed.