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Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

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Brainache said:
What are you talking about?

Earl Doherty?

You know G A Wells changed his mind on this, right? He doesn't believe the MJ idea any more.

What else have you got?
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You need to do some research on this topic before you can pretend to any opinions worth reading.

Maybe you should start with recent books on methodology and the historicity question.

No one is stopping you from educating yourself. No one but you.
 
dejudge said:
Again, where is the actual evidence that any letter in the Pauline Corpus was written before c 70 CE?

The Pauline writers themselves do not state anywhere that their letters were composed in the time of Nero.

The author of Acts does NOT even acknowledge that Paul wrote letters to Churches before he went to Rome in the time of Felix.

If Jesus did exist then the Gospel of Jesus did PREDATE the Pauline Revealed Gospel.

If Paul Persecuted those who believed the Jesus story then the story of Jesus PREDATED Paul.

It should be obvious that either Gospel of Jesus himself or the story of Jesus
was known before Paul.

It is virtually impossible to show that any Pauline letter was composed before stories of Jesus were written.

Apologetic writers have stated that Paul knew gLuke and wrote his Epistles after the the Apocalypse of John.

We can easily understand why the Gospels, Acts, the non-Pauline Epistles and the Apocalypse of John wrote NOTHING of the Pauline letters.

The Pauline Corpus has no real influence at all on the other authors of the Canon.

If all the letters under the name of Paul are removed from the NT it would be virtually impossible to identify any Pauline teachings of his revealed Gospel.

On the other hand, if gMark is removed, virtually the entire teachings of the supposed Jesus are still found in gMatthew and large parts in gLuke.

Essentially, almost 100% of the teachings of Jesus gMark are found in other NT writings, but, less than 1% of the Pauline Revealed Gospel.

The Pauline Revealed Gospel, remission of sins by the resurrection, is the very LAST Gospel.


Even Jesus in the Gospels did NOT know the Pauline Revealed Gospel.
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AFAICT none of the literature appears before the 2nd century.

It is apparent the gospels Jesus and the epistolary Jesus are two different cults. Which would explain why they have so little in common.
 
proudfootz said:
You need to do some research on this topic before you can pretend to any opinions worth reading.

Maybe you should start with recent books on methodology and the historicity question.

No one is stopping you from educating yourself. No one but you.
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I have read quite a few books on the subject of the HJ. I try to steer away from books written by crackpots and people working outside their field of expertise though, so I tend to leave the MJ stuff alone.

How is your research of 2nd Temple Judaism coming along?

Learned any History yet?
 
proudfootz said:
AFAICT none of the literature appears before the 2nd century.

It is apparent the gospels Jesus and the epistolary Jesus are two different cults. Which would explain why they have so little in common.
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The Jesus of gMark has very little in common with the Jesus of gJohn and the Pauline resurrected Jesus.

gMatthew and gLuke have a lot in common with the earliest version of gMark's Jesus

The Synoptic Jesus is the earliest version of Jesus in the Canon.

The Pauline Corpus have a lot in common with the Later gJohn.

In gMark, there is hardly a word about the LOVE of God. In fact, Jesus in gMark claimed it was better that his betrayer had NOT been born.


Mark 14:21 NIV
The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born."
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That the crucifixion of Jesus was an act of Love by God and his Son was a LATER invention in gJohn and the Pauline Epistles.


In gJohn and the Pauline Corpus all of a sudden we hear of the LOVE of God and that the crucifixion was the GREATEST ACT of LOVE.


John 3:16 NIV
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
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John 15:13 NIV
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
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Galatians 2:20 NIV
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
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2 Corinthians 5:14 NIV
For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.
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The Crucifixion of Jesus was a most Evil act in gMark and the Synoptics.

In gJohn and the Pauline Corpus it was the Greates Love story.

The Pauline Corpus and gJohn contain the LAST VERSION of the Jesus story in the Canon.

There is NO claim in gMark that GOD LOVED the world by Sacrificing his Son.
 
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dejudge said:
The Jesus of gMark has very little in common with the Jesus of gJohn and the Pauline resurrected Jesus.

gMatthew and gLuke have a lot in common with the earliest version of gMark's Jesus

The Synoptic Jesus is the earliest version of Jesus in the Canon.

The Pauline Corpus have a lot in common with the Later gJohn.

In gMark, there is hardly a word about the LOVE of God. In fact, Jesus in gMark claimed it was better that his betrayer had NOT been born.


Mark 14:21 NIV

That the crucifixion of Jesus was an act of Love by God and his Son was a LATER invention in gJohn and the Pauline Epistles.


In gJohn and the Pauline Corpus all of a sudden we hear of the LOVE of God and that the crucifixion was the GREATEST ACT of LOVE.


John 3:16 NIV


John 15:13 NIV


Galatians 2:20 NIV



2 Corinthians 5:14 NIV



The Crucifixion of Jesus was a most Evil act in gMark and the Synoptics.

In gJohn and the Pauline Corpus it was the Greates Love story.

The Pauline Corpus and gJohn contain the LAST VERSION of the Jesus story in the Canon.

There is NO claim in gMark that GOD LOVED the world by Sacrificing his Son.
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I agree, there appears to be quite a lot of divergence among christian and proto-christian literature.

Trying to construct a consistent story out of materials that were never intended to harmonize has been a source of jobs for apologists for many centuries - and now for persons marketing a new gospel of an historical Jesus.
 
To return to the topic:

Another false claim often made by defenders of the HJ notion (or perhaps they are simply enemies of a literary hypothesis for the origins of christianity) is that critical scholars conveniently invent their arguments out of thin air:

Tim O’Neill (TO) rightly says of some of the evidence for the historical existence of Jesus:

"After all, no-one except a fundamentalist apologist would pretend that the evidence about Jesus is not ambiguous and often difficult to interpret with any certainty, and that includes the evidence for his existence." (O’Neill, 2011)

Yet curiously not a single aspect of evidence addressed by either David Fitzgerald (DF) or himself in his reviews of DF’s work has hit on anything that he finds ambiguous or difficult to interpret. In every point of disagreement TO suggests DF is nothing but a liar or a fool.

The first unambiguous retort TO makes to DF’s treatment of Josephus is the dogmatic assertion that Josephus mentions Jesus twice. No argument. No ambiguity. No uncertainty.

"Josephus does mention Jesus – twice. So any Myther book or article [arguing the Christ Myth thesis] has to spill a lot of ink trying to explain these highly inconvenient mentions away."

Then again,

"[T]he passage has Josephus saying things about Jesus that no Jewish non-Christian would say, such as “He was the Messiah” and “he appeared to them alive on the third day”. So, not surprisingly, Fitzgerald takes the usual Myther [Christ Myth] tack and rejects the whole passage as a later addition and rejects the idea that Josephus mentioned Jesus here at all."

Interpolation a “mythicist” argument?

This is most curious. The actual fact is that most mainstream scholars until after the Second World War generally agreed that the entire passage was an interpolation. Or if not entirely an interpolation, the fact that it had been tampered with at all rendered it useless as historical evidence. I have quoted the evidence for the prevalence of these views in my post, What they used to say about Josephus as evidence for Jesus.

Today, however, it seems that “the majority of scholars” accept the contrary view, that Josephus did indeed say something about Jesus beneath the obvious Christian overlay. Given that most New Testament scholars are ideologically predisposed to belief in Jesus, and that Josephus’s testimony is the only non-biblical evidence we have from the first century for Jesus, I would not be surprised if a majority did think this. But so what? If a significant minority still leans towards the view that the entire Josephan passages is a forgery or useless as evidence, then it hardly seems reasonable to dismiss this view as the preserve of Christ Myth supporters.

<full article linked below>

http://vridar.org/2014/02/03/oneill...idence-the-arabic-version-of-the-testimonium/
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This underscores the point that in bible studies it won't do to simply assert that 'the consensus' believes this or that as if that were a compelling argument of any kind.

Given that any consensus in the field is but a temporary state of affairs building one's house on sand.
 
proudfootz said:
This underscores the point that in bible studies it won't do to simply assert that 'the consensus' believes this or that as if that were a compelling argument of any kind.

Given that any consensus in the field is but a temporary state of affairs building one's house on sand.
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Again, the supposed 'consensus' is propaganda [modern Chinese Whispers] because there is no period in the Quest for an HJ where Scholars ever conceded that there was an HJ.

It was the complete opposite. NO HJ has ever been found after at least 200 years.

In fact, the history of the Quest for an HJ shows Multiple failures.

Examine a Lecture of L Michael White at Harvard in 1998.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/symposium/historical.html

No one is any longer in the position to write a life of Jesus.

This is the scarcely questioned and scarcely surprising result today [in 1954] of an inquiry which for almost 200 years has devoted prodigious and by no means fruitless effort to regain and expound the life of the historical Jesus, freed from all embellishments by dogma and doctrine.

At the end of this research on the life of Jesus stands the recognition of its own failure.

These are the opening lines of Gunther Bornkamm's 1956 book, Jesus of Nazareth....
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Up to 1956 it was without question that NO-ONE was in a position to write of the Life of HJ.

Please, let us stop the propaganda put out by HJers.

The history of the Quest is a documented FAILURE.
 
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proudfootz said:
Your 'Paul the Herodian' thread shows us otherwise.

;)
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I disagree:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-eisenman/
Robert Eisenman is the author of James the Brother of Jesus ( 1998 ) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians ( 1996 ) and co-editor of The Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls ( 1989 ) and The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered ( 1992 ). He is Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach and Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford.

He holds a B.A. from Cornell University in Philosophy and Engineering Physics, an M. A. from N. Y. U. in Near Eastern Studies, and a Ph. D. from Columbia University in Middle East Languages and Cultures.. He was a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and an American Endowment for the Humanities Fellow-in-Residence at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, where the Dead Sea Scrolls first came in.

His first book was Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel from E. J. Brill in Leiden, Holland in 1978 and this was followed by two other books from E. J. Brill In Leiden: Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran: A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins ( 1982 ) and James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher ( 1984 ).

He was the leader of the worldwide campaign from 1987-1992 to break the academic and scholarly monopoly over the Dead Sea Scrolls, freeing them for research by all interested persons regardless of affiliation or credentials. As a consequence of this, he was the Consultant to the Huntington Library on its decision to open its archives and allow free access to the Scrolls. In 2002-3 he was the first to publicly announce that the ‘James Ossuary’, which so suddenly and ‘miraculously’ appeared, was fraudulent; and he did thison the basis of the actual inscription itself and what it said without any ‘scientific’ or ‘pseudo-scientific’ aids on the very same day it was first made public .

His is the author of The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ, ( Sterling/Barnes and Noble, October, 2006 ).
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Brainache said:
Then who was Jesus talking to about the rules for divorce? Who was he breaking bread and drinking wine with on the night he was "delivered up"?

How could Paul's audience think that he was describing an incorporeal spirit doing these things?
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How could Marcion's followers think that the Son of God was an incorporeal spirit?

Marcion's Son of God came down from heaven without birth into Capernaum according to Tertullian in "Against Marcion".

It is clear to me that you have no idea of the vast amount of Mythology in antiquity.
 
dejudge said:
How could Marcion's followers think that the Son of God was an incorporeal spirit?

Marcion's Son of God came down from heaven without birth into Capernaum according to Tertullian in "Against Marcion".

It is clear to me that you have no idea of the vast amount of Mythology in antiquity.
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And it is pretty clear to me that your arguments are irrelevant for this discussion.

What has any of that got to do with whether or not there was an HJ?

I know the Ancients added mythological elements to just about everything. You appear to think that means Jesus didn't exist. I have no idea why you think that, it makes absolutely no sense.
 
dejudge said:
Again, the supposed 'consensus' is propaganda [modern Chinese Whispers] because there is no period in the Quest for an HJ where Scholars ever conceded that there was an HJ.

It was the complete opposite. NO HJ has ever been found after at least 200 years.

In fact, the history of the Quest for an HJ shows Multiple failures.

Examine a Lecture of L Michael White at Harvard in 1998.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/symposium/historical.html

"No one is any longer in the position to write a life of Jesus.

This is the scarcely questioned and scarcely surprising result today [in 1954] of an inquiry which for almost 200 years has devoted prodigious and by no means fruitless effort to regain and expound the life of the historical Jesus, freed from all embellishments by dogma and doctrine.

At the end of this research on the life of Jesus stands the recognition of its own failure.


These are the opening lines of Gunther Bornkamm's 1956 book, Jesus of Nazareth...."

Up to 1956 it was without question that NO-ONE was in a position to write of the Life of HJ.

Please, let us stop the propaganda put out by HJers.

The history of the Quest is a documented FAILURE.
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It does seem like a propaganda war!

In the video link from Dale Martin I found it interesting that he seemed very concerned that 'anti-christian atheists' might 'take advantage' of bible scholarship to promote their views - but he doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that lunatic woo-merchants take advantage of bible scholarship to promote their agenda.

A very interesting lecture by L Michael White.

Thanks for the link!
 
dejudge said:
How could Marcion's followers think that the Son of God was an incorporeal spirit?

Marcion's Son of God came down from heaven without birth into Capernaum according to Tertullian in "Against Marcion".

It is clear to me that you have no idea of the vast amount of Mythology in antiquity.
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Given the vast amounts of mythology in the christian literature it's clear that modern people are completely and hopelessly out of touch with what the ancients thought about spirits - hence we get all these naive rhetorical questions about 'how could a spirit talk to someone' or 'how could a spirit eat' etc.

It's as if we must conclude there was an historical Yahweh because he carved commandments into stone!
 
proudfootz said:
Given the vast amounts of mythology in the christian literature it's clear that modern people are completely and hopelessly out of touch with what the ancients thought about spirits - hence we get all these naive rhetorical questions about 'how could a spirit talk to someone' or 'how could a spirit eat' etc.

It's as if we must conclude there was an historical Yahweh because he carved commandments into stone!
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Yeah, right on!

Historians are always doing that...:rolleyes:
 
proudfootz said:
Exactly - which is odd that Fitzgerald meets so much resistance here.

Sometimes the truth hurts, I suppose...
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But amongst people who are familiar with the Scholarship ie: Historians of the Ancient Near East, the overwhelming majority of them say that there probably was a real person upon whom the stories were based.

Are they all ignorant of their own profession?

Or is more likely that most people just don't take the time to actually study the subject?

Ignorance is never clever.
 
Brainache said:
And it is pretty clear to me that your arguments are irrelevant for this discussion.

What has any of that got to do with whether or not there was an HJ?

I know the Ancients added mythological elements to just about everything. You appear to think that means Jesus didn't exist. I have no idea why you think that, it makes absolutely no sense.
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You don't know what you are talking about. You are NOT an historian and you have NO actual evidence of an historical Jesus.

You think the existence of Universities is the evidence for an historical Jesus.

Tell us what the Ancients added to Satan the Devil because he was with Jesus of Nazareth on top of the Jewish Temple during the Temptation.

Tell us what Ancient added to the Holy Ghost because it is the father of Jesus of Nazareth.

All we have are Ghost stories of Jesus from the 2nd century.

1. Ignatius claimed Jesus was God and born of a Ghost.

2. Aristides claimed Jesus was God from heaven.

3. Justin Martyr claimed Jesus was born of a Ghost.

4. Irenaeus claimed Jesus was born of a Ghost.

5. Tertullian claimed Jesus was born of a Ghost.

6. Origen claimed Jesus was born of a Ghost.

7. Hippolytus claimed Jesus was God Creator.

8. A Pauline writer claimed Jesus was the Last Adam--a Spirit.

9. The author of gMatthew claimed Jesus was born of a Ghost.

10. The author of gLuke claimed Jesus was born of a Ghost.

11. The author of gJohn claimed Jesus was GOD Creator.

12. The author of gMark claimed Jesus was with Satan in the wilderness, that he walked on the sea, transfigured and resurrected.

There is simply NO actual established evidence in the history of the Jesus cult for a KNOWN human Jesus.

The Jesus story in the NT Canon would NOT have been plausible if Jesus of Nazareth was historical.

The Mythological Jesus is the ONLY character needed for the Jesus cult of Christians.
 
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