Jesus is a Myth

[Ouroboros]

Thanks, Lokmer.  Your input here is very much appreciated.

 

Here is a question.  WHY?  Why did it take so long for someone to start writing Jesus' story down?  Do people have the mistaken impression that everyone was illiterate in those days?

 

I mean, think about it for a second.  Put yourself in the place of one of the disciples.  You have just spent three years with a guy who was walking on water, raising the dead, giving new eyes to guys, (hey, that rhymes) , feeding thousands of people with a basket of food, and all these other miracles.  You watched the dude get crucified.  You had a sit down dinner with him a couple of days later. 

 

 

And yet, whenever the "heat was on" these witnesses to god's miracles were "gone fishin!"

 

And don't forget the place where it happened. It was the center for traffic, travel and merchandice between North Africa and South Europe. Jerusalem was the one of the great cities for communication and trade for the world back then.

 

It probably was packed with people from 20+ countries at all time.

 

You had scribes, and linguistics, philosophers of every known kind, and historians, wouldn't just one single one of them be able to write down: "Hey That's cool, he healed 200 people today!"

 

We're talking about Chicago airport, or Heathrow in UK, or Hamburg, I mean, it's not like a dead little corner of the world. This was the heart of business back then, so you have people in and out from every known place. They would love to take the news to all the countries around, the rumor would've been spread to whole Rome within 5 years, and parallel mythologies would have been created, and we would have Jebus, Johas, Yiezas, Ubsus, and whatnot in documents all over the place.

 

But there's nothing.

[♦ ficino ♦]

AUB! You express yourself with amazing, one-two punch power.

 

AUB doesn't stand for American University of Beirut by any chance, does it? It's known by those letters.

[Guest marktaylor]

Why is it that these types of theists can only trust information from other fundy xtians, are they really that insecure, and scared of reality?

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MY fear is that a great number of fundies (some well placed) are acting on their paranoia.

[qadeshet]

Was there an historical Jesus? Lets look at the facts.

 

1. There are no contemporary historical referrences to Jesus. None

2. There are no eyewitness accounts of the NT Jesus.

3. The earliest known Christian writings are those of Paul, 40 to 50 AD.

4. The only Christ Paul knows of is the spiritual presence he met on the road to Damascus. Paul never mentions the childhood of Jesus, Mary or Joseph, or the miracles and teachings of Jesus.

5. The first time the Gospels are mentioned is by Bishop Irenæus in 180 AD.

 

There may have been an unimportant Essene rebel in 1st century Palestine. He may have started a rebellion and was executed for his trouble. But the Myths and Legends surrounding him are those of the ancient dying and resurrecting Sun God. Do a Google search on Astrotheology.

[Mythra]

Was there an historical Jesus?  Lets look at the facts.

 

1.  There are no contemporary historical referrences to Jesus.  None

2.  There are no eyewitness accounts of the NT Jesus.

3.  The earliest known Christian writings are those of Paul, 40 to 50 AD.

4.  The only Christ Paul knows of is the spiritual presence he met on the road to Damascus.  Paul never mentions the childhood of Jesus, Mary or Joseph, or the miracles and teachings of Jesus.

5.  The first time the Gospels are mentioned is by Bishop Irenæus in 180 AD.

 

There may have been an unimportant Essene rebel in 1st century Palestine.  He may have started a rebellion and was executed for his trouble.  But the Myths and Legends surrounding him are those of the ancient dying and resurrecting Sun God.  Do a Google search on Astrotheology.

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[Mythra]

You know, I'm kind of surprised that more christians aren't responding to this thread. And after AUB thoroughly dismantled YoYo, we probably won't get too many more. (nice job, by the way, AUB)

 

So, I went in search of the Christian argument against the Mythicist position. I read christian reviews of books like "The Christ Conspiracy", and "The Jesus Mysteries" and "Deconstructing Jesus".

 

What I found was kind of amazing. They poke fun at the mythicist premise, like it's some brand new idea that someone has come up with. They accuse people of believing Jesus is a myth only because of their "fallen nature" and sinful inclinations. They pick at little details in these books without addressing the big issue.

 

Christians have it so thoroughly ingrained in their psyche that the gospels begin with the birth of a literal baby in Bethlehem, that any other thought cannot even be considered. The rationalization is amazing. I don't know whether they just have too much personally invested, or they've been completely brainwashed, but christians have no ability to consider any other thought, no matter how much it makes sense.

 

Here is the big issue: GNOSTIC CHRISTIANS WERE THE FIRST CHRISTIANS.

[Guest Rufus]

OK so I started reading the original attachment but had to stop because it was arse. The whole basis of his argument is that there is no historical reference to Jesus because the Bible is not a historical document. But it is. It is one off the most authenticated collection of books around. And yet he starts talking about another Rabbi and claims there is not a lot of evidence for him yet still considers him real. So we have an historical viable document of Jesus, then we have word of mouth, there can be traced back a line of people from the disciples; disciples disciples as it were.

 

If someone claims to have known Jesus wouldn't Occam's razor suggest that they had? Why lie about it? What would they have got out of it?

 

As for the dating of the gospels etc, it's a good point, but from a scholarly perspective you have to take in dating methods, the majority of our dates for things could be wildly out, when someone dates something they really mean somewhere in the century the quoted dates appear. If our dating works properly. The earliest date they give the gospel of John is 50-60AD, 20 to 30 years after Jesus, and is one of the smallest time periods in ancient history. From a man who would then be around 60 and according to legend was urged to write down what he had been telling people before he died. The Jewish tradition has always been an oral tradition. As for why no toher historians mention Jesus, yeah, that one gets me, but then again it was hardly an earth shattering event for the Romans,

 

wow, someone in a backwater of the Empire claims to be God, wow, let's write it down! Only the people who it mattered to would have recorded it. Which they did.

 

I love the stuff about Paul not mentioning Jesus' biography! Why would he? He's writing letters of help and encouragement to churches, which by thei very name and anture would already know the story of Jesus through and through, remember the majority of churches were started by the 12 disciples.

Wait there's more, yeah the disciples stole th ebody, that myth even gets mentioned in the Bible, yep the disciples fought off a load of Roman soldiers and then moved the stone and nicked th ebody. Then when they were getting killed for it, still didn't give the body up. And for what? Why make all this stuff up? Church these days, especially in America can make vast amounts of cash, the early church was poor and everyone shared so that all were equal. Maybe the rest of that article answers this, I'll read more.

[Mythra]

rufus: you take the standard christian perspective, and it is a misconception.

 

You believe that christ was a man, and this was the start of christianity.

 

If this is true, then explain to me how the gnostics branched off and gained credence during a time when there still would have been thousands of people alive who had seen Jesus and been around him.

 

How does an idea that Jesus was an allegory get off the ground, if it originated in a historical event?

 

The facts are, that the gnostic christians branched off, not from the literalist christians, but from the gnostic pagans. That's why all of the gospel story is a replica of earlier pagan stories.

 

Then, the literalists began adding to the allegory and convincing people it had really happened.

[Mythra]

Mark's is the first of the gospel stories to have been written.

 

Explain to me why mark knows nothing about angels visiting Mary, Virgin births, Herod killing babies in bethelehem, 12 year olds teaching the teachers, and a risen christ coming and giving instructions to disciples.

 

These are pretty important details. Very strange that Mark left them out.

[Mythra]

OK so I started reading the original attachment but had to stop because it was arse. The whole basis of his argument is that there is no historical reference to Jesus because the Bible is not a historical document. But it is. It is one off the most authenticated collection of books around.

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This is quite a ridiculous statement. The bible most certainly is not a historical document. The bible is riddled with geographical errors, biographical errors, ridicuous stories (like the teleporting of Phillip in Acts).

 

Why do you think we can't determine Christ's date of birth? Because the two accounts that reference known events cannot be reconciled. There is a 10 year discrepancy.

 

Why did John say that Bethsaida was in Galillee? It wasn't. And, it was supposedly the town he was born in.

 

I could go on and on. But to say the bible is a historical document is trash talk.

[Guest Rufus]

Sorry, historical in that it is a document talking of past events, rather than a document relating science. Herodotus' Histories is an historical document though not alwasy factually correct (and there are less manuscripts for that than the Bible).

[Mythra]

The bible takes it's historical information from Flavius Josephus, and his works, "Antiquities". Then it combines it with fantastic stories of miracles and wonderous happenings, for which there is no evidence outside of biblical writings.

 

You see this in the fact that Josephus knew all about John the Baptist, but nothing about a Jesus of Nazareth. Oh, and there was no such place as Nazareth in the early first century.

 

The "miracles" of Jesus are actually the greatest proof that he did not exist. The argument that Jesus did not make it into the historians' accounts because he was just an obscure person is beyond ridiculous.

 

In the gospel accounts, Jesus raised three people from the dead. Just this alone would have caused such a stir that within two months, everyone in Palestine would have known the name of Jesus. This didn't happen, because the gospel story is just that. A story.

[Mythra]

The "Myth" position is certainly nothing new. This was the major division in christianity for it's first 400 years.

 

The original argument in christianity, was whether Jehovah god was Christ's father, and whether the OT rules had to be followed. You can see this argument clearly in Romans and Galatians. At this point, christ was not yet deemed a historical person.

 

Marcion, one of the "founding fathers" of the gnostic christians, did not believe that Jehovah God was the creator, nor did he believe that Jehovah was Christ's father. He wanted to make a clean break with the angry, cruel YHWH of the old testament.

 

Then, the argument shifted as people started to believe that Jesus had been a real person. The gnostic - literalist fight went on for at least all of the second and third centuries.

 

You can see this in 2 John, as the literalists desperately fight to maintain their position and attempt to discredit the gnostic christians by calling them "anti-Christ". This WAS NOT a statement against unbelievers. It was a statement against the gnostic christians.

[spamandham]

In the gospel accounts, Jesus raised three people from the dead.  Just this alone would have caused such a stir that within two months, everyone in Palestine would have known the name of Jesus.  This didn't happen, because the gospel story is just that.  A story.

 

Many more than 3 were raised.

 

Matthew 27

51At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. 52The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

 

So we have zombies wandering all over Jerusalem, and no-one thought that worthy of being recorded except for Matthew?

 

Ooo! Ooo! I know I know! Pick me! It's because they all loved sin and didn't want to record anything that would prove Jesus was god. (they hated freedom too!)

[Mythra]

So we have zombies wandering all over Jerusalem, and no-one thought that worthy of being recorded except for Matthew?

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No shit. Quite a historical event to have gone unnoticed. No wonder the Jews completely discount the gospels.

 

You know, I said that the myth position didn't require a conspiracy. That isn't exactly right. It did. But, it wasn't a conspiracy to invent a religion, to invent a god-man.

 

The conspiracy comes in when the literalist roman church makes the claim that the gnostics branched off from them, and then uses pseudepigraphy (writing books and ascribing them to a different author) to make it look like the gnostics were just an offshoot of the "legitimate" religion.

 

This was a complete reversal of the way it actually happened. It was an elaborate deception, but a very succesful one. I have to think that it only happened at the start, though. It didn't take long for people to actually start believing that Jesus had been an actual person. I'm sure that by the time we get to Eusebius in the early fourth century, they bought it hook, line, and sinker.

[cmotdibbler]

Many more than 3 were raised. 

 

Matthew 27

51At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. 52The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

 

So we have zombies wandering all over Jerusalem, and no-one thought that worthy of being recorded except for Matthew? 

 

Ooo!  Ooo!  I know I know!  Pick me!  It's because they all loved sin and didn't want to record anything that would prove Jesus was god.  (they hated freedom too!)

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That quote in Matthew about the tombs opening up and holy people appearing to many people is one that confirmed my belief that the bible is nonsense. What was the ultimate fate of these resurrected people? Did some of the "freshly" dead live out their normal lifespan? What if the bodies were in an advanced state of decay? Did they get new skin? Can the resurrected return to their spouse, what if the spouse re-married, then what find a zombie partner? Too much BS, whoever added this embellishment had a pretty low opinion of human intelligence.

[Ouroboros]

As for the dating of the gospels etc, it's a good point, but from a scholarly perspective you have to take in dating methods, the majority of our dates for things could be wildly out, when someone dates something they really mean somewhere in the century the quoted dates appear. If our dating works properly. The earliest date they give the gospel of John is 50-60AD, 20 to 30 years after Jesus, and is one of the smallest time periods in ancient history. From a man who would then be around 60 and according to legend was urged to write down what he had been telling people before he died. The Jewish tradition has always been an oral tradition. As for why no toher historians mention Jesus, yeah, that one gets me, but then again  it was hardly an earth shattering event for the Romans,

 

And here I thought that Christians refuse to believe the dating methods!

So dating methods only work when you date Holy Books, but not when you date Bones? Unless the bones are holy too, of course...

 

Perhaps the earliest piece of Scripture surviving is a fragment of a papyrus codex containing John 18:31-33 and 37. It is called the Rylands Papyrus (P52) and dates from 130 A.D., having been found in Egypt. The Rylands Papyrus has forced the critics to place the fourth gospel back into the first century, abandoning their earlier assertion that it could not have been written then by the Apostle John.{7}

 

The Oldest fragment is from 130 AD. And this Fact is taken from a Christian website.

[Ouroboros]

wow, someone in  a backwater of the Empire claims to be God, wow, let's write it down! Only the people who it mattered to would have recorded it. Which they did.

So Jesus doing miracles in the central station of trade in Arabia, Egypt, Sumaria, South Europe connecting Africa and Asia. That "little" place is the backwater?

 

Wasn't the claim in Acts that people from all nations were there and heard the apostels speak in tongues? So people from the whole world are interested in a backwater place, for ... what... the olive oil?

 

If the airport Heathrow had a guy running around doing miracles, even without tv, cellphone, phones, faxes and internet. Information would spread throughout the world in a few days. You would have Ngurugurhg in Nehiribiri talking about the miracles perfomed at the Great Central of Flying Steel Birds. If the oral tradion for 30-40 years carried the information about Jesus doing some stuff in the backwater, what do you think 10,000 people from the whole world would carry in a month?

 

I say the abscence of secular and diversed beliefs and mythologies in other cultures from the known world at that time, is the proof that nothing major really happend. Maybe Jesus existed, but he didn't do miracles or nothing extraordinary really happened. He was a surfer dude with some cool ideas. That's it.

 

You said it yourself. Jesus was in the backwaters and did only backwater thing, namely, anything that anyone could do at anytime ... talk bullshit under the influence.

[Mythra]

On the dating of the gospels:

 

More bs from the widely held and speculative christian rumor mill.

 

Justin Martyr wrote his works around 150 CE. He knew lots of the stories about jesus, and some of the "teachings" and "parables", but he knew nothing of the written gospels named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

 

These got selected about 30 years later out of tons and tons of gospel stories that were available to choose from. I believe it was Irenaeus who decided there should be only four gospels, because there were four beasts of the apocalypse in the revelation account.

 

Who knows how many times these stories were re-worked in the second century, before they became so widely distributed that no more modifications could be made?

[Mythra]

thankful, you dummy. (no offense)

 

Jesus IS Dionysis. (with a little jewish flavoring added in)

[Guest Rufus]

coolness, from what I heard that the earliest date for that manuscript was around 50CE, that's th eproblem with dating methods, it's either way off the mark or the closest ever. It's like dating ancient humans, once you get that far back the you get a span of hundreds and hundreds of years, one ealry humna could be an ancestor or a successor of another! And anyway, the dating question is not gonna help because 'archaeology is not a precise science', only about 1 - 10% of anything turns up, again go back to early humans, considering how few bones are around it is always going ot be touigh to link them in evolution, hence what happened with Neanderthals.

I was looking up about whether Nazareth existed in the 1st C, v. interesting I always wondered about the Nazerene bit as they were a part of the Jewish priesthood, not to do with where Jesus came from. Still made me laugh that they found little evidence of the original Nazereth under the present one. If I were going to dig for it I would take a reference to it, say th eBible and see it was next to a cliff and then dig there, not under a town that bears th esame name. Genius!!

[Vigile]

thankful, you dummy.  (no offense)

 

Jesus IS Dionysis.  (with a little jewish flavoring added in)

 

Really, I thought Jesus was Oedipus Rex. Oh yeah, he didn't marry his mother. But he did sacrifice himself for the good of the whole. Now why can't I get that straight?

[Mythra]

rufus: If you are going to present an argument for christianity, you really should do some more homework. The gospels aren't dated by archaeology. They are dated by examining the extrabiblical writings of the early christian apologists and the early christian critics and those who were skeptical of the whole thing.

 

The first century would be writers like Martyr, Celsus, Polycarp, Papius, Clement.

 

It is inconceivable that Martyr would not have mentioned the written works of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John if they had been in existence at that time.

 

The confusion comes when you see the word "gospel" written by someone. It means a certain thing to us today. (as in, the four gospels)..

 

It meant something quite different between 50 CE and 180 CE. As I understand it, there were over 50 different "gospel" stories written about Jesus.

[Mythra]

Oh, and about Nazareth.

 

Again, we don't have to rely on archaeology.

 

Josephus lists 65 towns and hamlets that were located in Galilee in his day. Nazareth is not among them.

 

And, the gospels indicate that there was a synogogue there. It could not have been a little "farm community" as christians claim, if it had a synogogue.

[spamandham]

The whole basis of his argument is that there is no historical reference to Jesus because the Bible is not a historical document. But it is. It is one off the most authenticated collection of books around.

 

The question isn't so much whether the books are legitimately old, the question is whether they were intended as historical records or not. The Iliad is legitimately old, but it is not a historical document. The Indian Veda's are older than the Bible, but they are also not historical documents. Many Egyptian hyroglyphs record fantastic stories about gods and the afterlife intermingling with actual historical figures and places. Are these historical merely because they include bits of real history?

 

Most writers of fiction include some real people, places or events to some degree. Shall we conclude that all such books are historical documents? Have you ever seen Galaxy Quest?

 

So we have an historical viable document of Jesus, then we have word of mouth, there can be traced back a line of people  from the disciples; disciples disciples as it were.

 

Considering that none of the writers of the NT ever claim to have personally known Jesus, and Paul as well as the writer of Acts (assumed to be the same writer of Luke) both clearly indicate their testimony was handed down not only to them, I'd say there's some truth to the claim it was handed down via word of mouth long before it was penned.

 

If someone claims to have known Jesus wouldn't Occam's razor suggest that they had? Why lie about it? What would they have got out of it?

 

No-one who wrote about Jesus claims to have known him personally. Even the author-of-John's claim, which happens in the postscript of his gospel (John 21:24), is understood by Christain scholars not to be a claim of eyewitness, but merely a claim that the author recorded what he knew accurately. We do not know that the author of John is the disciple John. The book was written anonymously and assigned an author much much later by the church.

 

The earliest date they give the gospel of John is 50-60AD, 20 to 30 years after Jesus, and is one of the smallest time periods in ancient history.

 

I'd be interested in your source for this. No serious scholar (Christian or secular) that I'm aware of allows for a date earlier than 90CE for the complete version, although it is possible that it was a two part work with portions started in the 60CE time frame. Note that these are gracious, since the earliest extant fragments of the original text date to ~mid-2nd century (Rylands library papyrus #P52), and the earliest complete extant copy is 100 years later still, leaving plenty of time for modifications to be made to the original.

 

But, read John 21:22-23 closely. Why would the author of John feel the need to explain why Jesus didn't mean that John would live forever? The obvious answer is that John was dead at the time that was written. Clearly, a dead John could not write about his own death.

 

 

The Jewish tradition has always been an oral tradition.

 

That may be true, but the NT writers were obviously not Jewish. They were not trained in Hebrew/Aramaic, and were grossly ill informed about the contents of the Talmud. Matthew goes as far as to reference non-existent passages from Jewish scriptures (2:23). 2:23 could be a transliteration error, but if so, it still proves that the author of Matthew was not Jewish.

 

Wait there's more, yeah the disciples stole th ebody, that myth even gets mentioned in the Bible, yep the disciples fought off a load of Roman soldiers and then moved the stone and nicked th ebody. Then when they were getting killed for it, still didn't give the body up. And for what? Why make all this stuff up?

 

You're assuming the stories related to Jesus' resurrection are true. If they are not, then none of this is a problem.

 

Church these days, especially in America can make vast amounts of cash, the early church was poor and everyone shared so that all were equal. Maybe the rest of that article answers this, I'll read more.

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Church leaders were not poor by local standards in the first century. They were well taken care of by their flocks, were well respected, and basically didn't have to do any work. It was a great life that attracted tons of preachers.