There Exists No Solid Proof Of Jesus Existence

[Ouroboros]

We know that there were Christians in the 1st century. We don't know that the earliest Christians knew of an historical Jesus. The only Christ that Paul seems to know is from his visions.

Right.

 

So basically, the consideration is that the first Jesus belief was more like the Mythra cult, and Paul (or someone else) made Jesus into a historical person? Ok. I think I can see that happening.

[Ouroboros]

And of course it is a leap to assume Chrestus must be Christ. In the end we don't know. We just have maybes.

Well, we must assume Chrestus to be a fictitious character. He can't have been a physical leader that they followed, otherwise he would have been the first cult leader that they revered and worshipped. Besides, "Chrestus" could have been a spelling error etc, or "Christus" was a morphing of "Chrestus" over time. We already have accepted that the ideas changed and formed, so changing "Chrestus" to "Christus" isn't a big leap.

[mcdaddy]

[mcdaddy]

wow. that screenshot is totally misleading. its about the Chrestus thing.

[Ouroboros]

He said it was written by a "Christian" from the 4th century. I assume he meant a "Chrestian" from the 4th century, since Christians didn't exist.

 

[mcdaddy]

nobody's perfect.

 

[Vigile]

wow. that screenshot is totally misleading. its about the Chrestus thing.

 

Sure it wasn't a typo? Excavating the empty womb?

[mcdaddy]

i did that this morning. it is hump day and all.

[stryper]

Though I must admit I'll probably watch the video just for the chic.

[Akheia]

McD, you realize you've now gotten the attention of every het guy on this board, right? That is hilarious. Also, ouch, that can't be right.

 

Once you strip the similarities to other pagan gods and the stuff that sounds suspiciously like 1st/2nd-century concepts of divinity out of the Christian myth, what do you have left? Not much at all--a Jewish rabble-rousing apocalyptic visionary who was executed. There are like a dozen men who could fit such a generalized picture. Any one of the people Josephus (the earliest of the writers we've mentioned so far who was even vaguely close to Jesus' time) mentions out of his pack of Jesuses could have been the guy. It's a portrait more notable for its vagueness than for its clarity. Thanks to you guys, I now suspect Mark's gospel and Paul's visions had more to do with Christianity's origin than anything one of these Jesuses might have done. But as for Jesus himself, there's so little meat on his bones that anybody really could have done the job.

[stryper]

given that he was a wandering preacher is a desert land that was considered a backwater of the Roman empire.....he probably didn't have much meat on his bones to begin with.

[mcdaddy]

and if he didnt exist at all, that would be even less meat. some would say, zero.

[Antlerman]

What I don't get is that even if all these citations of Jesus by independent sources are worthless, and even if Crestos was somebody else, this shows that the church was reaching trying to find some external references to fill in the gaps of their early history. It doesn't translate into some coverup, nor that Jesus was not an actual person. It just shows errors in history. Even if there is not one stitch of external evidence of him as a person, it doesn't mean he wasn't. I personally don't buy the notion he was completely cut from whole cloth. What sparked the movements?

[Vigile]

What sparked the movements?

 

They morphed from other movements? Like Mormonism and the thousands of other sects. That's my hypothesis anyway.

 

I think that's hard for people to imagine today as xianity has become such a leviathan.

[qadeshet]

What I don't get is that even if all these citations of Jesus by independent sources are worthless, and even if Crestos was somebody else, this shows that the church was reaching trying to find some external references to fill in the gaps of their early history. It doesn't translate into some coverup, nor that Jesus was not an actual person. It just shows errors in history. Even if there is not one stitch of external evidence of him as a person, it doesn't mean he wasn't. I personally don't buy the notion he was completely cut from whole cloth. What sparked the movements?

 

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence? What sparked any movements? Do we need an Historical Zeus, Mithra, Isis, or Attis? Someone founded Christianity. It may have been Paul for all we know. Joseph Smith was real. Was Moroni?

[Antlerman]

What sparked the movements?

 

They morphed from other movements? Like Mormonism and the thousands of other sects. That's my hypothesis anyway.

 

I think that's hard for people to imagine today as xianity has become such a leviathan.

I don't doubt Christianity was a product of its time. To be sure. What I do not believe is the Master Story, I think I mentioned earlier, that Jesus descended from heaven with his teachings fully intact, trained his 12, who spread his pure teachings to the world, preserved in the Roman church by bishops supposedly trained by the 12. That's pure fiction. What I do see is that Jesus learned, was a product of his day, had insights of his own and created a basic teaching that frankly none of his disciples actually got, except maybe one or two.

 

What you have historically is an amalgam of teachings reflecting interpretations of a wide range of people who took his teachings and ran with them, going in a wide range of directions, interpreting them to their culture, through themselves, their own insights, their own agendas, their own motivations, some good some hostile towards others. Then a much later governing body appointed by Constantine to work out these differences, these many versions of Christianity to create one that can be governed and ruled like any structure in the Roman style of things. Thus teachings that could fit that one groups views became "Orthodoxy" or "correct thinking", and all others pushed aside, violently even. It become the points of view which could be most easily centrally managed by administrators that became "The Truth". And that is when and how the fictitious "Master Story", the myth of Jesus the god-man teacher from heaven was created to support this new organized religion.

 

Now dark conspiracies here. This is the natural evolution of a popular movement made State religion over the course of a couple hundred years time, and the "miracle" of the Emperor ceasing upon it in his climb to political power. Nowhere in this do I see any need, or justification to believe Jesus was a complete fabrication. That makes no sense, nor fits what we can see in looking at all these movements spawned in his name. There is an underlying kernel that is there, even if it's not the mythical notion as told in the myth of the Master Story.

[Antlerman]

What I don't get is that even if all these citations of Jesus by independent sources are worthless, and even if Crestos was somebody else, this shows that the church was reaching trying to find some external references to fill in the gaps of their early history. It doesn't translate into some coverup, nor that Jesus was not an actual person. It just shows errors in history. Even if there is not one stitch of external evidence of him as a person, it doesn't mean he wasn't. I personally don't buy the notion he was completely cut from whole cloth. What sparked the movements?

 

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence? What sparked any movements? Do we need an Historical Zeus, Mithra, Isis, or Attis? Someone founded Christianity. It may have been Paul for all we know. Joseph Smith was real. Was Moroni?

The creation of gods such as Zeus is markedly of a different order than the human teacher Jesus. That Jesus that was made into a god as is presented in the Church's theology is definitely myth-making. I like the title of the PBS special that goes into the process. It's called "From Jesus to Christ". That really sums up what we can observe in the texts, the various oral traditions, the miracle stories, the narratives, etc. It is a process of taking a central figure in the movement and deifying him. We do the same things to a lesser degree in imagining George Washington on his white horse crossing the Delaware. All you need is some who see him as from beyond this world in his transcendence nature, and there you have it. He becomes deified. He is an image of their imagination of him.

 

Other Christians however did not see him this way! And that blows a hole right into the whole 'he was like Zeus" as a pure myth theory. These Christians saw him as a Guru of sorts, as a teacher of Light, that as they followed his teachings, they too would realize for themselves what he had! This, is very human. Just read the Gospel of Thomas, to see instead an Enlightened teacher portrait of Jesus. That Jesus is a brother, not a god.

 

So.... how does that fit into the conspiracy theory of a purely mythical Jesus?

[qadeshet]

What I don't get is that even if all these citations of Jesus by independent sources are worthless, and even if Crestos was somebody else, this shows that the church was reaching trying to find some external references to fill in the gaps of their early history. It doesn't translate into some coverup, nor that Jesus was not an actual person. It just shows errors in history. Even if there is not one stitch of external evidence of him as a person, it doesn't mean he wasn't. I personally don't buy the notion he was completely cut from whole cloth. What sparked the movements?

 

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence? What sparked any movements? Do we need an Historical Zeus, Mithra, Isis, or Attis? Someone founded Christianity. It may have been Paul for all we know. Joseph Smith was real. Was Moroni?

The creation of gods such as Zeus is markedly of a different order than the human teacher Jesus. That Jesus that was made into a god as is presented in the Church's theology is definitely myth-making. I like the title of the PBS special that goes into the process. It's called "From Jesus to Christ". That really sums up what we can observe in the texts, the various oral traditions, the miracle stories, the narratives, etc. It is a process of taking a central figure in the movement and deifying him. We do the same things to a lesser degree in imagining George Washington on his white horse crossing the Delaware. All you need is some who see him as from beyond this world in his transcendence nature, and there you have it. He becomes deified. He is an image of their imagination of him.

 

Other Christians however did not see him this way! And that blows a hole right into the whole 'he was like Zeus" as a pure myth theory. These Christians saw him as a Guru of sorts, as a teacher of Light, that as they followed his teachings, they too would realize for themselves what he had! This, is very human. Just read the Gospel of Thomas, to see instead an Enlightened teacher portrait of Jesus. That Jesus is a brother, not a god.

 

So.... how does that fit into the conspiracy theory of a purely mythical Jesus?

 

There is no evidence of this Guru in any of the Epistles. And there is nothing of a personality in the Gospels, just a mouthpiece for Church doctrine. What Christians believed in the 2nd Century is no help in establishing an Historical Jesus. Based on the total lack of Primary Evidence, I place the higher probability in a Mythical and Mystical Christ.

[Vigile]

What I do see is that Jesus learned, was a product of his day, had insights of his own and created a basic teaching that frankly none of his disciples actually got, except maybe one or two.

 

I fully accept that there could have been a man, who was a teacher that inspired a movement via legends and word of mouth remembrances of his sermons. But without direct evidence, I see it as at least equally possible and even probable that he was no more than an amalgamation morphed from other sects. Today, for example, we have the euphemism "echo chamber" reflecting the idea that political spin and commentary tends to bounce around from one source to the next, making it difficult to trace its original roots, but which is expressed by most of a particular political persuasion. We also have loads of people sitting down writing ideas, creating paradigms, developing documentation for their cause.

 

Consider that we are now 2,000 years removed from the original sources and we only have a few surviving documents to guide us in our search, and as you point out, the documents that survived were those of the winners.

 

I don't think there has to be a conspiracy for Jesus to merely be, as qadeshet suggested, another Zeus or Mithra. It seems to me that it's anyone's guess at this point. So, yes, he could have been a guy who actually said some original things that people remembered and then later recorded, or perhaps a lot of different people said and wrote things that ended up being attributed to one man, who perhaps never really existed because the lines of history faded and we aren't really sure who originally said what.

[Antlerman]

If the Jesus of the Gospels for the church then that is much later than the second century. The Wisdom gospels are early as early a or earlier or earlier than the canonical Gospels show a different different Jesus. Are you buying the myth of the master story?

[Vigile]

Are you buying the myth of the master story?

 

Dunno, I'm just using my own logic based on the evidence I've seen over the years. It's probably laughable when considered from the point of view of a studied scholar like Burton Mack. I'm not really buying anything. Just suggesting what could be a reasonable explanation. I don't think it's necessarily the MOST reasonable conclusion that the story was built on a single "prophet" or preacher.

[Antlerman]

Sorry on cell phone. Not directed to you. Will have to wait till later.

 

[Ouroboros]

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence? What sparked any movements? Do we need an Historical Zeus, Mithra, Isis, or Attis? Someone founded Christianity. It may have been Paul for all we know. Joseph Smith was real. Was Moroni?

Well, if Paul didn't exist either, then Jesus would've been an invention of a fictitious character. It's like considering Lord of the Rings written by Bilbo. If Paul founded Christianity, then at least Paul must've been real. It's a bit strange to think that a invented character invented a real religion.

[Antlerman]

There is no evidence of this Guru in any of the Epistles. And there is nothing of a personality in the Gospels, just a mouthpiece for Church doctrine. What Christians believed in the 2nd Century is no help in establishing an Historical Jesus. Based on the total lack of Primary Evidence, I place the higher probability in a Mythical and Mystical Christ.

Now that I have access to a full keyboard behind an actual laptop instead of screwing around on a stupid phone while sitting on a bench taking a break on a 15 mile bike trail (I don't know why I interrupted my ride to attempt to respond!)....

 

There's a lot of flaws in your reasoning here. To start with the last statement that you have a lack of primary evidence you leap off to a total mythic Jesus, is like saying you leap to UFOs. How does this follow? That's like the Creationists denying evolution because "Were you there??", as they like to say! There is a whole lot more to this than a simple black and white equation. I don't believe the pure mythicist position (as opposed to myth heaped upon a real person, which I hold to), really fits a deeper examination of what we have. And part of that is the extra-biblical writings which I referred to (let alone the internal evidence to the texts themselves, which I referenced).

 

The "Guru" reference I cited was in fact as I said the Gospel of Thomas, as well as the other Wisdom Gospels which are early - as early as or preceding even Mark, which is the earliest of the canonical Gospels. You say that the canonical Gospels are a "mouthpiece" for the church - but you fail to see what I said about how that these were in fact selected by committee, or at least the outstanding tradition of the proto-orthodox wing of early Christianity. That part of early Christianity selectively chose texts which supported their more easily-managed version of the Christian faith. You are ignoring that there was not one message of Christianity that later had "other" ideas creep in (that's the Master Story myth, you appear to be buying into in your perception of history, and consequent conspiracy myth), but there was actually quite a wide range of contemporary, competing ideas! And that, makes my point.

 

This is not any one fabrication, but rather an explosion of contemporary ideas that began as a single inspiration. Whatever that looked like. And with that being a single inspiration that caught on like wildfire, evolving quickly into many creative interpretations, I see that as a single source. A single individual - even as small an idea that may have even been, though I think it was more relevant than that originally. The pure myth idea makes no sense. How do you explain what I just referred to in some whole-cloth fabrication notion? How does that fit?

[LivingLife]

The Jesus of the bible never existed. For example, there could not have been a virgin birth as we now know what makes that part of the reproduction plausible.

 

This is how I looked at the whole issue and as has been stated here, once the mythos part is stripped away, you are not left with much more than an ordinary man that may have had some unique perspectives on religion of the day.

 

In the last stages of my deconversion I was happy to acknowledge a secular jesus which is pretty much where most atheists end up (I think). By secular, I mean he was probably a man with some insight into the the human condition and saw through the religious control and waffle of the day. The embellishments as far as an invented religion goes, once the meme had been adopted by Rome, this jesus fella had to have said ...... (fill in the blank) and brings us pretty much to the accounts we all grew up with.

 

If you have had discussions with Jews, their concept of a mosheoch (sp?) is vastly different to that of the christians and while they do not like the idea when you tell them their story is also borrowed and made up it does show a different concept to what may have been their expectations back in the day.

 

When you take a few steps back, you can see a common story of someone that went against the grain and bucked the system and garners a following and is done in for sedition/rebellion. You have a hero figure.

 

The pantheon of gods and demi gods have similar stories and IMO the only reason xianity survived is because that it had a political backing enforcing it in the then empire and also morphed certain aspects of the pantheon into the invented religion. When you strip away the control mechanisms you are left with squat like vague political campaign promises that are never realised.

 

In the end it really boils down to WTF did a ME zombie god have that was sooooo special to the world that requires that I give him anymore credence to existence than say king Arthur or any other medieval figure?

 

Because god(s) exist only in the minds of folks, the James passage of working out your own salvation (w/o fear and trembling) still makes sense.