Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

[zugzwang]

You could argue that ancient Jews (and modern Jews) would not worship a dead Jew, for the reason that Jews are strict monotheists, so that the Trinity is for them both absurd and abhorrent.

But this forms part of an argument for HJ - that very early Christianity was a Jewish sect, in which worship of Jesus did not form a part; but that as this sect turned outwards to the gentile world, the notion of a man/god, or however you describe that, was possible and digestible.

So I suppose the anti-HJ arguments must argue that this very early Jewish sect did not exist, and that Jesus was always seen as divine (and non-human).

Some of the HJ arguments of course propose a trajectory from human Jesus to Christ of faith. I suppose the deniers of HJ must deny any such trajectory.

 

[Foster Zygote]

You could argue that ancient Jews (and modern Jews) would not worship a dead Jew, for the reason that Jews are strict monotheists, so that the Trinity is for them both absurd and abhorrent.

And that's exactly what we see happened. The Jesus movement started off as a Jewish messianic cult, but the more Jews simply failed to recognize this claimed messiah as legitimate, the more the rift grew between the two groups to the point that Christianity ended up becoming a very anti-Jewish religion.

 

[Craig B]

... There is nothing “nasty” there at all, nor anything remotely like that. You are far too easily offended when anyone takes issue with your stated belief in Jesus and your appeal to both the bible as evidence and bible scholars in particular as authority.

Absolutely. Not many people know this, but I'm really the Pope writing under a pseudonym. Watch out it I'll put you under anathema and you'll waken up in Hell.

 

[zugzwang]

And that's exactly what we see happened. The Jesus movement started off as a Jewish messianic cult, but the more Jews simply failed to recognize this claimed messiah as legitimate, the more the rift grew between the two groups to the point that Christianity ended up becoming a very anti-Jewish religion.

Plus the fact that the messiah for Jews cannot be divine, then and now. In fact, I know Jews who use the word 'mashiach', such is their abhorrence of the Christian idea of messiah.

But this is one of those terms, such as son of God and son of man, which for Jews denote humans.

We are having to remove the Christian engineering which has changed those terms.

 

[Craig B]

Delete dup post.

 

[Belz...]

Absolutely. Not many people know this, but I'm really the Pope writing under a pseudonym. Watch out it I'll put you under anathema and you'll waken up in Hell.

Poisoning the well at its best. If you're really an atheist you must reject the very existence of even a human Jesus. Dejudge's an IanS' mantra.

 

[Craig B]

... those terms, such as son of God and son of man, which for Jews denote humans.

We are having to remove the Christian engineering which has changed those terms.

I wish everyone had performed this task, and then we wouldn't have to waste so much time pointing out that the gospels, in using such terms, are preaching a human Jesus - whatever their writers may have believed him to possess in terms of supernatural powers.

 

[zugzwang]

I wish everyone had performed this task, and then we wouldn't have to waste so much time pointing out that the gospels, in using such terms, are preaching a human Jesus - whatever their writers may have believed him to possess in terms of supernatural powers.

And for people like IanS and dejudge, it seems important to preserve the Christian engineering. Then they make their argument that since the Bible describes a supernatural man/god, there is no evidence for HJ. However, that accepts the premises of evangelical Christianity, I think.

And also, bizarrely, Christianity largely deJudaized Jesus, and so do some of the anti-HJ people! This is presumably because a Jewish Jesus begins to look awfully human, whereas a Christian one doesn't.

 

[dejudge]

Plus the fact that the messiah for Jews cannot be divine, then and now. In fact, I know Jews who use the word 'mashiach', such is their abhorrence of the Christian idea of messiah.

But this is one of those terms, such as son of God and son of man, which for Jews denote humans.

We are having to remove the Christian engineering which has changed those terms.

Your post is completely erroneous.

You must have forgotten the book of Genesis in Hebrew Scripture.

In Jewish mythology God has the image of man.

You show a lack of knowledge of Jewish, Greek and Roman mythology.

You show a lack of knowledge of Apologetic writers who used the NT and the Septuagint.

Genesis 1:26-27 KJV

And God said , Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.


27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

In gJohn, it is specifically claimed that Jesus was the Logos, God Creator. See John 1.1.

An obscure dead Jewish criminal makes no sense if Pauline writings are authentic.

 

[IanS]

IOW - if you say there is credible reliable evidence for a living person named Jesus who was actually the person upon whom the mistaken and untrue biblical writing was later based, then fine, absolutely no problem with that. But in that case, where is this reliable credible evidence? Please don’t go round the same impossible circle again and tell me that evidence is the hopelessly unreliable and completely non-credible stories of a non-HJ in the bible, because that is NOT admissible as reliable source of evidence of a messiah which it repeatedly described as impossible and not by any means a HJ.

Your question is in the beginning of the vicious circle. We shall begin over again if I answer. So I will be silent and wait and see if you are capable of formulate another more original question.

Well you are right that my “my question is in the beginning”, because that is most definitely the question that has to be answered at the very beginning when anyone claims that a HJ existed, namely that beginning question is -

- what then is the claimed evidence of anyone ever saying they had met a human HJ ??

- where is there any evidence at all of anyone in all of history reliably making a credible to claim to have ever met any Jesus except for one they described as supernatural (repeatedly described as supernatural on every page of everything they ever said about that particular Jesus)??

- where is the claimed reliable credible evidence of any HJ? Not evidence merely of people’s beliefs in a 1st century Jesus they never knew. But actually evidence of Jesus that any of them credibly claimed to know as a non-supernatural figure?

So yes, that most certainly is the question that must be asked first, and it’s the question that must be answered first by anyone who claims to believe that a notional HJ can be created from biblical writing which was adamantly and specifically only ever describing a supernatural HJ.

So what is the evidence?

And before anyone says it’s not fair to ask for reliable and credible evidence, perhaps because they say we don’t have reliable evidence of say Thermopylae or Pythagoras or other relatively zero importance events (relative to the vast importance of Jesus), do bear in mind the inescapable fact that we do have unassailable evidence to show that the gospels and Paul’s letters are not merely highly unreliable as any sort of “evidence” of their authors knowing anything at all about any living Jesus, but more than that those gospels and letters were undeniably claiming to believe what we now know was certainly untrue fiction on virtually every page the authors ever wrote about Jesus. So there is abundant and undeniable evidence to show why the gospels and epistles are most definitely unreliable in the extreme and not remotely credible as a source of their anonymous authors hearsay beliefs in a messiah that none of them had ever known in any way at all …

… afaik, that is not remotely the case with events like Thermopylae or figures like Pythagoras. In those cases they were not written about by anonymous unnamed people expressing devotional religious belief in impossible supernatural battles or impossible supernatural philosophers, were they!

So yes - that very definitely is the fist question that must be answered convincingly with reliable and credible evidence if anyone claims to believe a HJ actually existed.

 

[Elagabalus]

“While the New Testament offers the most extensive evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus…” This is the beginning of the Joseph Hoffmann’s article you recommended (http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.co...ocess-a-consultation-on-the-historical-jesus/). I absolutely disagree. I don’t know the “most extensive evidence of the existence” of Jesus. I know just some mere circumstancial evidence. Can you tell us some of the “extensive evidence" mentioned by Hoffmann? I’m sorry but the article is too long and I have not time to read it.

You nailed it! How did you know what IanS was going to say before he even said it?

 

[Elagabalus]

...And for people like IanS and dejudge, it seems important to preserve the Christian engineering. Then they make their argument that since the Bible describes a supernatural man/god, there is no evidence for HJ. However, that accepts the premises of evangelical Christianity, I think...

Yes, and I am also reminded of that now ancient text RatSkep 395:7886 "Dialogus cum Angelo" by Tim O'neill:

angelo:Oh, it seems that again the gospels are been used to defend the blasted things.

Most. Idiotic. Non-argument. Ever.

angelo: The gospels are full of details that that based on the OT. Therefore they are wholesale constructions with no historical elements at all.
Us: What about the bits in the gospels that clearly don’t fit with the OT at all or which the gospel writers are clearly struggling to fit with OT-based expectations about the Messiah? That indicates that there are historical, non-OT based elements in play here.
angelo: Ummm … “You’re using the gospels to prove the gospels!”
Us: What *********** ********. YOU made an argument that refers to the nature of the material in the gospels. How the **** can we present a counter argument without referring to the nature of the same material?
angelo: Ummm … “You’re using the gospels to prove the gospels!”

 

[deaman]

I sense this thread will not be pleasing to my Lord.

O....M....G!

 

[dejudge]

You could argue that ancient Jews (and modern Jews) would not worship a dead Jew, for the reason that Jews are strict monotheists, so that the Trinity is for them both absurd and abhorrent.

But this forms part of an argument for HJ - that very early Christianity was a Jewish sect, in which worship of Jesus did not form a part; but that as this sect turned outwards to the gentile world, the notion of a man/god, or however you describe that, was possible and digestible.

So I suppose the anti-HJ arguments must argue that this very early Jewish sect did not exist, and that Jesus was always seen as divine (and non-human).

Some of the HJ arguments of course propose a trajectory from human Jesus to Christ of faith. I suppose the deniers of HJ must deny any such trajectory.

You have the "cart before the horse".

May I remind you that there is an ON-GOING Search for an HJ.

This is the Third Attempt because the others have failed.

Please review the history of the Quest for HJ because you are obviously under the false impression that an HJ has been found or are attempting to mis-lead.

No HJ has ever been found and no evidence for HJ has ever been recovered except the "shroud of Turin"[ an article of FAKE].

The assumed obscure criminal called HJ is not plausible.

There is no history known to mankind where Jews or Romans worshiped known criminals as Gods.

HJers assumed an obscure HJ created a disturbance at the Temple and that he was crucified for the crime.

No story of such a character is found in or out the Bible.

 

[David Mo]

David

It is not at all clear of Paul or Mark. Of the two, Paul is repeatedly insistent about his Jewishness. "A dual condition: human and divine" doesn't even parse as a coherent idea in Jewish thinking. One might as well be discussing a quadrilateral pentagon.

(…)
It is the clarity and insistence with which the earliest survivng Christian literature focuses on a fully natural man leading a typical tzedek's life that creates a suspicion that one particular human being may stand at the the root of the Christian-Islamic innovations in Abrahamic religion. All those innovations, however, occur after and chiefly because of the "appearances."

Sometimes Paul speaks of Jesus as a heavenly entity and other times as a human being who was born, preached, suffered and died. The evangelists speak of Jesus as a man who has something of divine, but they don’t agree on what kind of divinity they are speaking or if the divine part of Jesus was pre-existent or not. Even in the same Gospel can be the diverse kinds of divinity mixed together. This is so because the Gospels are polyphonic texts. Not only we can find different hands in them, but the main writer frequently introduces different and contradictory voices without any interest in harmonizing them. This is the illogical logic of myth.

All this makes very difficult, if not impossible, to attribute some specific belief to some specific period of redaction. When Jesus was alive…? At the immediate dawn of Jesus’ death…? After ‘resurrection’…? Invented by Paul…? In the end of the first century…? Re-mastered in the second Century…? Who knows? The Modern and Contemporary “Quests” have juggled with these and similar questions. But all this is circus artifices. There is no way to put a secure date to the Gospels in general. Less is possible to date specific paragraphs.

Paul is sometimes Jew and sometimes anti-Jew. You can not conclude anything only from Paul’s Judaism. Paul’s language is often Hellenistic and the duality of spirit and body was a neoplatonic and orphic idea incorporated to common thinking. The Logos as firstborn and emanation from God is a Philo's idea. No wonder Paul speaks of Christ in a similar way and John finishes the task. But Paul and John speak also of Jesus as a man who did human things. This not necessarily implies the Nicene Creed of a double nature. But it implies some kind of heavenly soul-body (so to speak) relation in Christ. I think I have summarized all the possibilities in my previous comment.

 

[David Mo]

You nailed it! How did you know what IanS was going to say before he even said it?

I don't understand. My English is too primary or this is too synthetic. Can you develope the idea a little more, please?

 

[Brainache]

I don't understand. My English is too primary or this is too synthetic. Can you develope the idea a little more, please?

I think he is saying that you should spend the time to read the article, because it is worth it.

That saying it is too long, is the kind of thing that someone might say if they were trying to avoid the issue.

 

[eight bits]

David

The evangelists speak of Jesus as a man who has something of divine, but they don’t agree on what kind of divinity

Mark doesn't, unless of course you mean that every sentient being "has something of divine," which I sense is not what you mean.

This is so because the Gospels are polyphonic texts.

What a lovely phrase for that distinctive aroma. Thank you.

This is the illogical logic of myth.

No, more like continuity lapses in Conan the Barbarian.

The clear progression from routine ghost story with Biblical commentary (Paul) to Jesus as aspect of God (John) over two generations bespeaks a conscious calculation to reconcile fantasy with a deteriorating factual situation. The final product looks a little like myth (Baucis and Philemon in the case of John), but it's not a spontaneously developed cultural product.

You can not conclude anything only from Paul’s Judaism. Paul’s language is often Hellenistic ...

As was not so unusual among Jews of the time, especially Jews of the dispersion, which Paul identifies himself plainly as one. Also, whenever we see him, he is writing to Gentiles.

As to duality, Paul has the usual Pharisaic problem with the doctrine of the general resurrection: in what sense are the resurrected the "same people" as the dead used to be? The original bodies are gone. So, what connects the new body to the original? Star Trek still struggles with this in its transporter doctrine. Paul and Geordi La Forge manage the same level of clarity on this point. Pneuma body = Heisenberg compensators (= BS).

Just because Paul's problem is peculiar to the specific kind of Jew he was, a Pharisee, does not imply that his quasi-solution to it lacks authentic Jewishness.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Dejudge, do you still maintain that, "Nobody in antiquity is going to worship an obscure dead Jew instead of Zeus and Apollo and the God of the Jews"?

 

[pakeha]

You could argue that ancient Jews (and modern Jews) would not worship a dead Jew, for the reason that Jews are strict monotheists, so that the Trinity is for them both absurd and abhorrent.

But this forms part of an argument for HJ - that very early Christianity was a Jewish sect, in which worship of Jesus did not form a part; but that as this sect turned outwards to the gentile world, the notion of a man/god, or however you describe that, was possible and digestible.

So I suppose the anti-HJ arguments must argue that this very early Jewish sect did not exist, and that Jesus was always seen as divine (and non-human).

Some of the HJ arguments of course propose a trajectory from human Jesus to Christ of faith. I suppose the deniers of HJ must deny any such trajectory.

Don't forget the financial incentive for the early Christians to distance themselves from the Jews

"So I suppose the anti-HJ arguments must argue that this very early Jewish sect did not exist, and that Jesus was always seen as divine (and non-human).

Some of the HJ arguments of course propose a trajectory from human Jesus to Christ of faith. I suppose the deniers of HJ must deny any such trajectory."

I think question rather than deny is a better description, zugzwang.