There Exists No Solid Proof Of Jesus Existence

[Ouroboros]

I think the picture I was trying to paint in that ramble was that IMO there must have been many cults. I do not believe that there was this unified Jewish religion at that time.

Ok.

 

Here's why the "many cults" v "no cults" is kind-of self-refuting. Many isn't the same as none. If there were many cults at that time, the probability of one of them, or two, or three, being the one bringing about the early Christian cult increases, not decreases. How many of them believed in a non-body savior, and how many believed in some cult-leader savior who promised to free them from the Romans?

 

Do you see what I'm saying here? If there were many cults at that time, before or at the time of when the first Christians were supposedly to come about, then it's more likely one of them (or more) were that one. The argument that too many cults mean no cults isn't really logical. It's self-defeating. Either there were no cults, or there were cults. If there were cults, then probability increases.

[Ouroboros]

Who specifically preserved his writings during this time is unknown. And not all of them survived. Maybe 3/4's.

I see. There's no record of who preserved it.

[mcdaddy]

Does that make sense or am I barking up the wrong tree?

 

Ak, as usual, every syllable was pure wisdom.

 

i worship at your altar daily, and bring offerings of weed-infused rice crispie treats and malt liquor. i hope this pleases you.

[mwc]

I see. There's no record of who preserved it.

Right. And I found a copy of "The Cambridge Companion to Philo" and it says (p62):

X. The Transmission of the Philonic Corpus

 

It is quite uncertain how Philo’s works were transmitted through the crucial first few centuries, but it appears that they were known only within a fairly narrow stream of tradition. One must remember that Jewish culture in Alexandria was virtually extinguished after the revolt of 115–117 ce . Indeed, Philo’s writings passed at some point into the hands of Christians, by whom he was considered to be virtually, if not actually, a Christian. 88 Clement of Alexandria is familiar with Philo’s writings in the late second century ce , as is his successor, Origen, in the third century. Therefore, the Philonic writings had somehow been preserved, and apparently became the property of what is known as the Catechetical school in Alexandria. 89 When Origen moved to Caesarea in 233, he took a collection of Philonic writings with him, and this collection formed a portion of the library there, where they were utilized by the Church historian, Eusebius.

 

mwc

[Antlerman]

As they say... cleanup in aisle three.

[Ouroboros]

Right. And I found a copy of "The Cambridge Companion to Philo" and it says (p62):

...

Much appreciated.

[LivingLife]

Here's why the "many cults" v "no cults" is kind-of self-refuting. Many isn't the same as none. If there were many cults at that time, the probability of one of them, or two, or three, being the one bringing about the early Christian cult increases, not decreases. How many of them believed in a non-body savior, and how many believed in some cult-leader savior who promised to free them from the Romans?

 

Do you see what I'm saying here? If there were many cults at that time, before or at the time of when the first Christians were supposedly to come about, then it's more likely one of them (or more) were that one. The argument that too many cults mean no cults isn't really logical. It's self-defeating. Either there were no cults, or there were cults. If there were cults, then probability increases.

The idea I was alluding to was that w/o the unified Jewish sect, much of the gospel content gets thrown out. The picture the gospels paint was that there was this central authority of Jewish religion and jesus was opposed to them (sometimes). With the John the baptist tale, that flies in the face of Judaism. You also have mention of the healing waters of the well/pool and many other oddities that are not encapsulated in teh "law" of the Levites. So you have a mishmash of Jewish thought or not.

 

If we assume there was a unified Jewish authority, then the general gospel tale can make sense. The way I see it, is that you have a situation where the Levitical aspects has been reduced to a few pious folk. Even what I said earlier is incorrect as to the Romans seeing a religious control mechanism that seems to work. Something else must have happened. A hierarchy in a military based economy/government would find little use for religion if they were basically running the place with only minor sedition taking place.

 

If we then look at other tales of other folk that led the revolt, seeing that was crushed too, how then would that change the need of the occupiers to adopt the occupees religion. One hardly adopts a system you have just thoroughly defeated. On that note in the process of re-evaluating. A modern parallel, the Japanese kamikaze did not entice the US pilots to employ the same tactics in WWII.

 

With the OT as a foundational document we are led to believe that the Jews were this brave conquering organized army but then are overrun quite easily by a foreign and distant invading force, the Romans. The logistics alone must have been a nightmare to keep the troops supplied? Or was it merely a garrison? There really does not seem to be a great war preceding the occupation (I have not seen data to suggest this) where the Romans had a tough time. It begs the question, what happened to this mighty military prowess of the Jews?

 

Too much what one expects to find is simply not there.

 

The picture one can also get is that the Jews were colluding with the Romans, as suggested, they had accepted Caesar as king. Now how do you go from that to a revolt in a few decades?

 

This is when one tends to think the whole story is made up rather than representing anything that really happened. Jesus hardly fits the role of hero by any stretch of the imagination so why would Rome then suddenly venerate this person? Are we to believe they really were under the impression they killed god and suddenly had a change of heart?

 

By the time we start having "concrete records" of the Jesus fella, 3.5 centuries have passed and it has been already suggested that this is where the xian religion's foundations really emanate from.

[Adam5]

I think a good argument for the existence of a real Jesus is as follows:

 

The gospels of course are contradictory and poor sources.

 

However Jesus is recorded as saying a number of very odd things:

 

- his teaching is meant for the Jews only "only for the lost sheep of Israel"

 

- scare mongering about the imminent coming of the kingdom of God i.e. very soon

 

- an unattractive personality - xenophobic.

 

If I can remember he calls one poor gentile woman a dog for example. This to me speaks of a real person, not a fictional character.

 

I admit the stories are largely fictional, not eye witnesses, and sometimes ludicrous and not credible.

 

BUT if you were making up a religion to sell to gentiles, why make up a charater which was a racist fanatical Jew.

 

It doesnt add up.

 

My interpretation, jesus may be a real person, he preached a bunch of stuff probably a radical and xenophobic Jew. Maybe to the peasants of Galilee did a few faith healings. He was arrested cruficed and his disciples fled

 

The writings well after the event are not eye witnesses and largely fiction and plagierism - a life reconstructed from the old testament.

 

But certain events to me ring true, and fall into the "you wouldnt make it up" category. Your thoughts?

[♦ ficino ♦]

Hi Adam, I don't think your argument works. As I understand it, by the time the gospels were written (let's say, late 1st century CE), the gentiles were already the target market. And the gospels represent Jesus as saying the things you quote. And gentiles were converted, though not on the scale that occurred in the fourth century. So we have every reason to believe that gentiles read the anti-gentile stuff attributed to Jesus and were converted anyway. It then becomes only a secondary task to speculate how they understood those anti-gentile elements in the texts. So this assumption in your post seems to depend on further assumptions, for which we have no warrant:

 

"BUT if you were making up a religion to sell to gentiles, why make up a charater which was a racist fanatical Jew.

 

It doesnt add up."

[mymistake]

I don't know how it fits in Adam's argument but back then racist was good. They wanted racist. The perfect racist was one where anybody could swear loyalty to join the club and then they were in. Remember racism is used by a few to control the masses. So gaining members means you control them by culture. Join the club and you are in. "Now my children lets go eterminate the enemies of God who refuse His grace."

[Adam5]

Hi Adam, I don't think your argument works. As I understand it, by the time the gospels were written (let's say, late 1st century CE), the gentiles were already the target market. And the gospels represent Jesus as saying the things you quote. And gentiles were converted, though not on the scale that occurred in the fourth century. So we have every reason to believe that gentiles read the anti-gentile stuff attributed to Jesus and were converted anyway. ..

 

Hi Ficino, I am not sure I presented my argument very well. Another attempt...

 

Some events in the gospels are embarrassing to later Christians.

 

For example Jesus calls one gentile a dog and tells his followers his teaching was only for the Jews. This shows a character who does not like non-Jews.

 

If you were to make it all up from myth, to sell a new religion to gentiles, why not make it gentile-friendly? This is after all the target market.

 

Secondly the gospels themselves show an evolution of thinking.

 

In the first gospel Mark, Jesus is baptised by John the baptist. He is in effect joining a cult, and is a junior figure to John. This does not fit in well with the overall Christian story/ fairy tale.

 

In later gospels, this point is masked, I think in Luke Jesus does the baptising, and in the latest gospel John, Jesus is not baptised at all.

 

This says to me that:

 

1. The gospels were so poorly put together they needed several re-writes.

 

2. Later gospels needed to write out embarrassing stories. i.e. the earlier person had to be written out.

 

Your thoughts?

[Akheia]

I'm not Ficino but I'd agree with both points. Luke rewrites and embellishes quite a bit of what's found in Mark, and later gospel writers flat-out leave out stories in the earlier works and introduce others. It's easy to look at the omitted stories/verses and see stories that might not do what Christianity's fathers wanted to see done, and the newly-introduced stories/verses as elaborating on the evolving theology.

[mcdaddy]

wish i had time and opportunity to elaborate my thoughts on this. alas, i do not,.

[Ouroboros]

I don't know how it fits in Adam's argument but back then racist was good. They wanted racist.

That's the first time I've heard that argument. I'm not sure if the Romans or any inhabitants in the empire considered racism to be good, or even if they had such a term. I'm curious, what's your support for this claim?

 

The perfect racist was one where anybody could swear loyalty to join the club and then they were in. Remember racism is used by a few to control the masses. So gaining members means you control them by culture. Join the club and you are in. "Now my children lets go eterminate the enemies of God who refuse His grace."

That's how it works today too, so I'm not sure it was any different back then. Just saying.

 

But my understanding is that the Jewish people were despised by the government because of how stubborn they were and trouble they caused.

[mymistake]

I don't know how it fits in Adam's argument but back then racist was good. They wanted racist.

That's the first time I've heard that argument. I'm not sure if the Romans or any inhabitants in the empire considered racism to be good, or even if they had such a term. I'm curious, what's your support for this claim?

 

It was not my intent to imply they had such a term. I do not speak Latin. I do not know what terms they used or didn't use. I was not talking about words but rather the meaning of racism. Surely the principle was used before people created a word to identify it for words come after a need for each word arises. My source is everything I have ever learned about Western culture. Okay there are not two choices. But let me lay out two extremes on a continuum and you tell me where you think the Roman Empire and the Pope's Christendom fell on that line. Were they about in the middle or were they closer to one side than the other?

 

One extreme:

An open-minded beacon of freedom, who never saw themselves as being fit to rule anybody nor as being better than any other people, who viewed other cultures and nations with the attitude of "If they wish to remain politically independent and not worship our religion that is fine with us", who would never call other cultures "Barbarians", and who never served as a model for further racism later on in history.

 

The other extreme:

A close-minded center of authority, who saw themselves as having a divine mandate to rule and saw themselves as being inherently superior to outsiders, who viewed other cultures and nations with the attitude of "We shall absorb and conquer them and teach them the true religion", who called outsiders "Barbarians", and who served as a model for futher racism later in history.

 

Now any time during the Roman Empire or Christendom's conquests what is a commoner's best survival stratagy after his area is conquered? Convert to the conquer's religion and assimilate or refuse to convert because the conquer will accept your native culture and religion anyway?

 

Yes I am awair that early on Rome's policy was to allow other religions side by side as long as those other religions didn't deny the religion of Rome but they changed that policy later on when they realized it didn't work.

 

The perfect racist was one where anybody could swear loyalty to join the club and then they were in. Remember racism is used by a few to control the masses. So gaining members means you control them by culture. Join the club and you are in. "Now my children lets go eterminate the enemies of God who refuse His grace."

That's how it works today too, so I'm not sure it was any different back then. Just saying.

 

But my understanding is that the Jewish people were despised by the government because of how stubborn they were and trouble they caused.

 

Fair enough. It wouldn't have been the first time a conquered people caused trouble for the conqueres. Nor the last. Such problems are probably why genocide became a popular practice.

[Akheia]

I don't perceive racism in the NT or in history like we think of it today, being skin-color-related, but I do think they were ethnocentric (or whatever it is when you're bigoted against people from a particular area or country). The NT mentions an incident wherein Jesus is derided by listeners who say, to paraphrase, "how in the world can anything good come out of his town?"

 

It's interesting that only as the Judeo-Christian myths gained influence and became more and more extremist that Rome became less tolerant of others. I can see some rather uncomfortable parallels between then and now if that's indeed the case.

[mcdaddy]

NOONE CAN MAKE SENSE OUT OF THE BIBLE

 

STOP TRYING

 

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHGGGGG

[♦ ficino ♦]

Some events in the gospels are embarrassing to later Christians.

 

For example Jesus calls one gentile a dog and tells his followers his teaching was only for the Jews. This shows a character who does not like non-Jews.

 

If you were to make it all up from myth, to sell a new religion to gentiles, why not make it gentile-friendly? This is after all the target market.

 

Secondly the gospels themselves show an evolution of thinking.

 

In the first gospel Mark, Jesus is baptised by John the baptist. He is in effect joining a cult, and is a junior figure to John. This does not fit in well with the overall Christian story/ fairy tale.

 

In later gospels, this point is masked, I think in Luke Jesus does the baptising, and in the latest gospel John, Jesus is not baptised at all.

 

This says to me that:

 

1. The gospels were so poorly put together they needed several re-writes.

 

2. Later gospels needed to write out embarrassing stories. i.e. the earlier person had to be written out.

 

Your thoughts?

 

Hi, Adam, I agree with you and Akheia that one can see evolution of thinking from Mark to presumed later gospels.

 

As to Jesus' anti-gentile stuff:

 

You are arguing for a historical Jesus, i.e. that the guy depicted in the gospels is a fictionalized presentation of a real guy who preached the coming of the Kingdom, etc. Correct?

 

I side with you so far and not with the pure-myth starting with Paul as influenced by Philo and later given a story by Mark on lines of the Odyssey, or a similar "mythicist" account. That's just my suspicion, and I think the mythicists have many powerful arguments that need to be taken seriously. But I am not even a first-century historian, let alone a biblical scholar, so my opinion is not a professional one.

 

As to your argument, though --

 

1. Jesus is not portrayed as unqualifiedly anti-gentile. He says the present-day Jews have even less faith than the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. He heals the centurions's slave (we don't know whether the slave "pais" was the centurion's erotic favorite, since that Greek word can cover slaves in general, but it's interesting that the thought presents itself). We have the parable of the Samaritan, a man more just than the two Jews of the parable. He does not call the gentile woman "dog" directly; he says something like one should not take the children's food and feed it to the dogs. He makes it clear that he is preaching to the house of Israel. As far as "Luke" goes, assuming the same writer wrote both Luke and Acts, we all know there's a huge effort made in Acts to justify the preaching of the gospel to the gentiles, and the end of "kashrut," So it's debatable how turned off a Gentile reader would be by the Jesus figure. Gentiles who would be attracted to early Christianity would certainly know that Judaism boasted a special, covenanted relationship with God. If they had any knowledge of the OT, they'd expect this all the more. Such readers would find Jesus' attitudes believable, it seems to me. So I suggest weakening "does not like non-Jews" to "discriminates in favor of Jews as the first recipients of his message" or something like that.

 

2. To the extent that "anti-gentile" remarks would be a turnoff to Gentiles, that problem has to be faced both by those who say the Jesus figure was invented and those who hold that there was a historical preacher who gave rise to the story. You are asking, why would someone put those remarks in if he's writing a wholly fictional gospel to a target audience of gentiles. Your opponent can ask, why would someone put those remarks in if he's writing a partly fictional gospel to a target audience of gentiles. The author of a partly fictional gospel need not include everything the historical Jesus said, after all. So it seems to me that you are working from an unexpressed premise like "no gospel writer would expect gentile readers to react favorably to a Jesus who discriminates in favor of Jews and makes an occasional derogatory remark about gentiles." I don't think we know that this is true. We can see that in fact enough readers did not have that reaction. The gospel writers could have put in such details to slip into gentile minds the notion that they are especially favored if they're being let in on the Kingdom that was originally not preached to them.

 

Part of my hesitation to accept your argument comes from its similarity to the argument used by christian apologists, that since the first witnesses to the resurrection were women, and women's testimony was not valued, therefore those details would not have been invented. Again, our evidence doesn't support such an assertion about women's testimony; we dont know that its construction of the writers' motives is correct; there are motives for inventing the detail (e.g. to show that "the last shall be first...").

 

Added: It may be too that Mark expected his readership to include Jews, and as you say, some later writers had less of such an expectation.

[Adam5]

I side with you so far and not with the pure-myth starting with Paul as influenced by Philo and later given a story by Mark on lines of the Odyssey, or a similar "mythicist" account.

 

I think the Odyssey account, although largely fiction, is based around some real events and places, and possibly real people. I suspect the gospels could be quite similar to this. Just my PoV but think a purely mythist perspective is going into the realm of the conspiracy theorist.

[♦ ficino ♦]

Cool, but I think the differences outweigh the similarities for the researcher when you compare the problem, was there a historical Odysseus, with the problem, was there a historical Jesus.

[mymistake]

I side with you so far and not with the pure-myth starting with Paul as influenced by Philo and later given a story by Mark on lines of the Odyssey, or a similar "mythicist" account.

 

I think the Odyssey account, although largely fiction, is based around some real events and places, and possibly real people. I suspect the gospels could be quite similar to this. Just my PoV but think a purely mythist perspective is going into the realm of the conspiracy theorist.

 

The Gospel of Mark is the Odyssey account. It was written so that the hero of Mark one-uped the hero of the Odyssey.

[qadeshet]

I side with you so far and not with the pure-myth starting with Paul as influenced by Philo and later given a story by Mark on lines of the Odyssey, or a similar "mythicist" account.

 

I think the Odyssey account, although largely fiction, is based around some real events and places, and possibly real people. I suspect the gospels could be quite similar to this. Just my PoV but think a purely mythist perspective is going into the realm of the conspiracy theorist.

 

The Gospel of Mark is the Odyssey account. It was written so that the hero of Mark one-uped the hero of the Odyssey.

 

Review of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark

[Akheia]

WELL! That is going straight onto my wishlist. Thanks, Qadeshet.

 

A few pages back MM linked a video series that dealt extensively with the parallels between Homer's Odyssey and Mark's Gospel. I'm not sure how anybody would refute that assertion now; it seems really strong. I've seen some attempts, but they seem to fall strongly into the argument-from-ignorance camp.

[mcdaddy]

Just started reading Elaine Pagels' book "Gnostic Paul". Very enlightening & educational. Also putting me to sleep. Such a strange combination of effects. I'm interested and disinterested concurrently.

 

HOLY SHIT IT'S TURNING ME INTO LEGION