There Exists No Solid Proof Of Jesus Existence

[Ravenstar]

I think Monty Python got it right in The Life of Brian...

 

seriously

 

of course we don't know for sure if it was The People's Front of Judea or the Judean's People's Front, but let's not split hairs!

 

Brian: I am NOT the Messiah!

Arthur: I say you are Lord, and I should know. I've followed a few.

[qadeshet]

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?

 

For Heaven's sake, believe what you wish.

 

The Gospel of Thomas is extant in three Greek fragments and one Coptic manuscript. The Greek fragments are P. Oxy. 654, which corresponds to the prologue and sayings 1-7 of the Gospel of Thomas; P. Oxy. 1, which correponds to the Gospel of Thomas 26-30, 77.2, 31-33; and P. Oxy. 655, which corresponds to the Gospel of Thomas 24 and 36-39. P. Oxy 1 is dated shortly after 200 CE for paleographical reasons, and the other two Greek fragments are estimated to have been written in the mid third century. The Coptic text was written shortly before the year 350 CE.

 

Josephus mentioned over a dozen Jesuses so you can take your pick. However, none of them really matches the Gospel Jesus. I don't really care if there was a 1st century carpenter named Yeshua who may have got himself killed.. The Gospels and Epistles are full of Myths and Fables so where do we start looking for the Historical Jesus? Unless he walked on water, turned water into wine, raised the dead, and ascended to Heaven, he is not the "real" Jesus.

[Antlerman]

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.

Not after the discoveries of Nag Hammadi in 1945. That changed everything. We now have surviving documents of the losers in history to speak for themselves. It is those texts that changed the landscape of early Christianity that has led to much greater insights of possible realities on the ground. Call it like finding new fossil records. Ironically, even in studying the historical texts before 1945, just pealing off all the later patina of myths, a considerable wealth of knowledge emerged - again, studying the fossil record laying beneath the surface of later ages. One of those tremendous insights was that of a rich and diverse early Christianity that was anything but a clean line. It was the German theologian Walter Bauer who saw this and coined the term the Master Story, that keep referencing. That was a few years before 1945. Since then it really validates his insights. Even Bart Ehram draws off this in his work Early Christianities. The list could go on, Elaine Pagels, Karen King, Bart Ehrman, etc.

 

And the term fossil record seems to me best in examining this. Obviously we don't have a living dinosaur living in its natural habitat to examine, but we can tell a great deal about them and how they probably lived by examining discoveries. Is it going to be 100% accurate? Of course not, but it will become more and more illuminated as we consider greater areas of research, such as literary criticism, anthropology, ethnology, linguists, developmental evolution, psycho-social development, etc. And when it comes to looking at a human phenomena such as the birth of the Christian religion, you cannot just say "Hey, there's no external reference to Jesus by any other contemporary, and those the church cites do, aren't talking about Jesus, so therefore he's a concocted myth cut from whole cloth like Zeus." As if that's the only evidence to look at?

 

No, I cannot see Jesus being a purely mythological creation like Zeus being an equal possibility. It doesn't fit. Certainly mythological elements are layered onto the historical Jesus, but that much is evident. How could some new god being created explain what we see? I am very attracted to Burton Mack's social-movement model that began as a simple cynic-sage style preacher, then snowballed as it went. There were some core teachings that resonated with people that was that stone that attracted material as it went along. The pure myth model, has no stone that started an avalanche at all! I see the teachings as central. And those would have be significant enough to resonate with people to start a movement, which then fed itself as it went along its way - then drawing from other culturally relevant symbols attached to Jesus until you had the Christ.

 

Like Mack, I do not believe there was a single historical person that was all the faces of this Jesus we see in the later traditions and narrative stories of him, but that he is in fact an amalgam Jesus. As he says,

 

“A second criticism is that none of the profiles proposed for the historical Jesus can account for all of the movements, ideologies, and mythic figures of Jesus that dot the early Christian social-scape. We now have the Jesuses of Q1 (a Cynic-like sage), Q2 (a prophet of apocalyptic judgment), Thomas (a gnostic spirit), the parables (a spinner of tales), the pre-Markan sets of pronouncement stories (an exorcist and healer), Paul (a martyred messiah and cosmic lord), Mark (the son of God who appeared as messiah, was crucified, and will return as the son of man), John (the reflection of God in creation and history), Matthew (a legislator of divine law), Hebrews (a cosmic high priest presiding over his own death as a sacrifice for sins), Luke (a perfect example of the righteous man), and many more. Not only are these ways of imagining Jesus incompatible with one another, they cannot be accounted for as the embellishments of the memories of a single historical person no matter how influential.”

 

(the Christian Myth, pgs 35, 36)

 

The key is that these are not the memories of a single historical person. Rather they are the product of active mythmaking surrounding a founding figure of whom a social movement began in his name. Those movements were of students, who probably lost their teacher to an early and tragic death, which propelled its message, and the mythmaking were to support the core teachings in an effort of social change - both religious and cultural. I do not believe Christianity began as a religious reformation movement, but something much more reaching. How does the pure myth model, with no Jesus whatsoever at the center address this?

 

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.

I don't agree it's just anyone's guess. I think it has to explain what we do know. Alien abduction models for instance aren't just a good as anyone else educated guesses.

 

And this comes back to what I originally was driving at in the entire debate. Yes, I think it is relevant and important to look at this question, but I get this strong sense that the zeal with which pure mythicist, zeitgeist, and Achrya S fans seem to have is a desire for there to be no historical Jesus at all in order to "disprove" Christianity. I see that as first not a pursuit in the interest of knowledge, but rather a political, ideological iconoclastic deconstruction of Christianity and hence any "authority" it is perceived to hold. I see that as a tenuous perch to stand on in order to challenge the traditional religion (really more the fundamentalist versions of it actually), as all it will take is one piece of evidence to come along that in fact does show an individual named Jesus lived around that purported time, and in fact IS that person that had a following which eventually became Christianity. Now what? The Church was right all along? Now you have to believe what they teach?

 

Seriously, what growth of understanding comes through this? That it was all just a lie? These are extreme opposite positions, neither of which fit the data very well. It's either a miracle sky-man descending from heaven, or a copy-cat rip off hoax of other religions foisted upon the world for political gain? I agree with looking beyond the myth, but to me to try to understand it as part of human history and how and in what ways it affects it, both positive and negatively, gives a whole lot more ground to stand on than imagining this was all just some lie. I don't see new data coming along that will completely destroy that understanding, like finding the bones of Jesus would destroy the miracle resurrection belief as a resuscitated human corpse would, or any bit of hard data that validates Jesus actually lived (finding bones instead of just tracks left in the record), would destroy the mythicist belief.

 

Again, what is the impetus behind trying to proof it was all a myth? And, how does that actually fit everything that is being looked at in these 'fossil records'?

[Vigile]

Ok AM, I'm clearly out of my element here. I've at best read a Mack book and picked up on things here and there, mostly from this site. Just enough to make me dangerously ignorant on the subject. I'll bow to your obvious greater knowledge here and stop making a fool of myself now.

[Ouroboros]

Good question A. Even if all the story about Jesus were stolen from older pagan religions and beliefs, how, who, why did suddenly a bunch of people around the Roman empire put those beliefs on a Jewish guy they all named Jesus? That's not the old pagan religion from Egypt as far as I know. I don't think I ever seen a mythical god in any of the religions that had a Jewish character named Jesus? Somewhere that was a new idea. Someone (or some people in agreement) must've started that at least. I don't see how a couple of independent churches of Mithras (or whatever) suddenly decides to change Mithras to Jesus and make him Jewish instead. That idea must've started somehow. To have multiple churches, independent of each other, with no binding element, coming up with that same idea around the same time, perhaps only supported by letters from a Paul that didn't exist (so they wouldn't have known him either), it's a very farfetched explanation for a unifying idea to come about.

 

It's almost like suddenly we had a bunch of churches in America with Christians converting to Bobbism. Bobbism is the belief that a Muslim terrorist, Bob, is a preacher in Iraq who teaches peace in the world. It's a Islamic cult. And it's becoming extremely popular. And no one of these churches have any connection to each other and no one started them. There are some letters floating around though from Judy, a preacher no one knows, who makes a bunch of claims about Bob. But no one knows Judy, and the letters are addressed to placed Judy's never been. Most likely they're faked by the Jerry Falwell.

[Antlerman]

Ok AM, I'm clearly out of my element here. I've at best read a Mack book and picked up on things here and there, mostly from this site. Just enough to make me dangerously ignorant on the subject. I'll bow to your obvious greater knowledge here and stop making a fool of myself now.

Not at all. The intention isn't to intimidate. I'm just sharing why I see the whole Zeitgeist thing to be tenuous. I've spent a lot of time on peeling back the layers because it interests me on many levels. We learn from each other.

[Akheia]

Ouro, that POCM site might answer some of those questions for you. Jesus/Yeshuah was a pretty popular name. Jews were deeply unhappy about some of the politics WRT Rome and itching for some kind of big powerful change. Every one of Mark's stories about his heroic Jesus were modeled after earlier myths and every detail he gives for his "historical" Jesus are either unsupportable or disproven. That later gospels embellish and make even more outrageous those myths without adding a shred of supportable evidence isn't something any serious history wonk would dispute. No religion is going to be a total copycat of another, but the sheer number of elements Christianity borrowed from both other competing pagan religions and from Judaism, and the sheer amount of purely mythic nonsense in its gospels alone, ought to give you some serious thought.

 

The impetus is simply this, AM: we have a huge subset of evangelical Christians who are basing their hostile takeover of the world and the serious impediment of science on their myths being the honest to God unvarnished reality and truth. Do I want to deconstruct that toxic faith? Oh hell yeah I do. Absolutely. But I'd settle for its adherents waking up and realizing that it's all just myths and metaphors and backing off my right to live and believe as I choose.

 

PS: If you guys still want to believe there's a single historic Jesus Christ who sparked all this mess, then fine, it's your choice to believe something that is utterly without hard evidence. But don't think I won't remember this thread if I ever get shit about being a pagan. When I finally get around to starting my epic thread about the historic Hercules, I expect you all to be nice.

[Antlerman]

Good question. Even if all the story about Jesus were stolen from older pagan religions and beliefs, how, who, why did suddenly a bunch of people around the Roman empire put those beliefs on a Jewish guy they all named Jesus? That's not the old pagan religion from Egypt as far as I know. I don't think I ever seen a mythical god in any of the religions that had a Jewish character named Jesus? Somewhere that was a new idea. Someone (or some people in agreement) must've started that at least. I don't see how a couple of independent churches of Mithras (or whatever) suddenly decides to change Mithras to Jesus and make him Jewish instead. That idea must've started somehow.

It's really in Asia Minor where you see the whole Cosmic Christ face of Jesus taking shape. That does incorporate the mystery religion elements. As to whether Mithra was incorporated into Christ, or the other way around, the evidence can't exactly say which came first. But it doesn't matter, since you see the same phenomena happened whichever direction it went. People take meaningful symbols and incorporate them into the religious practices and myths. It's about something more than just ripping off ideas! It's about borrowing what works. Very different. What you see happening is the evolution of symbols as part of a social change that was happening. We do the same thing today, regardless if they are religious or secular symbols. Those symbols with other symbols become part of a myth system that serves to support those underlying social and cultural shifts.

 

Man, how much more interesting is that, as oppose to who ripped off who and is lying to us?

[mcdaddy]

Jesus got his name from the prophecy in Zechariah that named one of the two olive trees "Jesus" or the equivalent. That's how a mythical figure could have gotten a specific name.

[Ouroboros]

Ouro, that POCM site might answer some of those questions for you. Jesus/Yeshuah was a pretty popular name.

So was Peter, James, Mary... who picked "Jesus" as the name for this new myth?

 

Think about it. Let's have 10 different churches who believe in Mithras. Suddenly all 10 decides to believe in Jesus. All independent from each other. That's magic and not natural. The natural explanation is that there was somebody who came up with the idea first and then convinced them. Just "it was a popular name" isn't good enough. Johnson is a popular name in America. Why doesn't every cult start believing in "Johnson"?

 

Jews were deeply unhappy about some of the politics WRT Rome and itching for some kind of big powerful change. Every one of Mark's stories about his heroic Jesus were modeled after earlier myths and every detail he gives for his "historical" Jesus are either unsupportable or disproven.

Jews? So the Romans were Jews? Think about this too. Jesus was a Jew in the story. The Romans were Spanish, Italian, Egyptians, German, English, ... Why did anyone of them suddenly think a Jewish god was better than their old pagan ones? Mark was supposedly written by a Roman, not a Jew. Why model their old pagan beliefs on a group of people that was considered obnoxious and stuck-up? The Jews were not popular, where they? Where they the template for revolt against the old religions? Why didn't the model the new religion after "Vesuvius the mighty Roman"? Why "Jesus the weak Jew"?

 

That later gospels embellish and make even more outrageous those myths without adding a shred of supportable evidence isn't something any serious history wonk would dispute. No religion is going to be a total copycat of another, but the sheer number of elements Christianity borrowed from both other competing pagan religions and from Judaism, and the sheer amount of purely mythic nonsense in its gospels alone, ought to give you some serious thought.

Still doesn't explain where they came from. Shared delusions are unusual. Shared delusions over distances is impossible without something unifying the ideas in the delusion.

 

PS: If you guys still want to believe there's a single historic Jesus Christ who sparked all this mess, then fine, it's your choice to believe something that is utterly without hard evidence. But don't think I won't remember this thread if I ever get shit about being a pagan. When I finally get around to starting my epic thread about the historic Hercules, I expect you all to be nice.

I seriously have no problem with pagans.

[Ouroboros]

Jesus got his name from the prophecy in Zechariah that named one of the two olive trees "Jesus" or the equivalent. That's how a mythical figure could have gotten a specific name.

That's a very mysterious explanation still.

 

Somehow, suddenly a bunch of people at different places in the world decided that this was the name they would use in their religion. Telepathy?

 

The thing is, my understanding (which could be wrong) is that the myth-only theory suggests that all started in the Roman empire, by non-Jews. So why would Jewish religious literature have anything to do with the choice of name, setting, story, etc.?

 

Put it this way, the myth must've at least started with the Jews, not the non-Jewish Romans, right? A non-Jewish Roman wouldn't have a clue of using Zechariah olive tree for naming their new god.

[Antlerman]

The impetus is simply this, AM: we have a huge subset of evangelical Christians who are basing their hostile takeover of the world and the serious impediment of science on their myths being the honest to God unvarnished reality and truth. Do I want to deconstruct that toxic faith? Oh hell yeah I do. Absolutely. But I'd settle for its adherents waking up and realizing that it's all just myths and metaphors and backing off my right to live and believe as I choose.

And this underscores the point I was making. What happens when we do find "hard evidence"? What then? Did you just grant them license to proceed with their hostile takeover and anti-intellectualism? That's the core flaw I see here, and a dangerous and tenuous one, considering how it sets itself up for failure. What then happens to how you believe too?

 

I see knowledge and education as the key to eliminating fanaticism supported through ignorance. I don't see destroying idols as the path, as again, your position can easily be destroyed itself. I don't believe in fighting fire with fire is effective towards actual change. I see evolving understanding with a solid base of knowledge as reasonable, and effective, even if that process takes longer than open warfare with each side clubbing each other with blunt objects.

 

PS: If you guys still want to believe there's a single historic Jesus Christ who sparked all this mess, then fine, it's your choice to believe something that is utterly without hard evidence. But don't think I won't remember this thread if I ever get shit about being a pagan. When I finally get around to starting my epic thread about the historic Hercules, I expect you all to be nice.

Bear in mind, the mythicist position doesn't have "hard evidence" either. Again, what best fits all the data? It's not just as good as any other idea if it doesn't explain very well. If it does, than its a better model for understanding. It never claims "This is the facts". It's all about what works to explain best.

 

If you wish to talk about Hercules as a human, certainly I'll be interested in the data you present.

[Vigile]

Ok AM, I'm clearly out of my element here. I've at best read a Mack book and picked up on things here and there, mostly from this site. Just enough to make me dangerously ignorant on the subject. I'll bow to your obvious greater knowledge here and stop making a fool of myself now.

Not at all. The intention isn't to intimidate. I'm just sharing why I see the whole Zeitgeist thing to be tenuous. I've spent a lot of time on peeling back the layers because it interests me on many levels. We learn from each other.

 

Don't worry. My feelings aren't hurt. The greatest lesson I have ever learned through education is the vastness of my own ignorance (I think Descartes called it learned ignorance). I can see better now how my lay viewpoint can lead me astray on this as I just don't have a great enough understanding to reach a valid conclusion of any kind. I didn't finish Zeitgeist btw. After 5 or so minutes it seemed a bit reaching so I didn't bother with it. I appreciate you filling in some blanks for me here.

 

I think part of me (emotional side) just wants it to all be based on a mythical creature as the symbol it has become had been such a thorn in my side growing up.

[Ouroboros]

I didn't finish Zeitgeist btw. After 5 or so minutes it seemed a bit reaching so I didn't bother with it.

I did finish it. I did look into some of the claims. And some of them were extremely overreaching and unsupported. Shooting too low will miss the rabbit. But so will shooting too high. Myth is one thing. Myth only is another. There are middle ways that work here.

 

I think part of me (emotional side) just wants it to all be based on a mythical creature as the symbol it has become had been such a thorn in my side growing up.

Well, that's not good.

[Akheia]

AM, there isn't ever going to be hard evidence for Christianity's claims. The claims themselves are utterly false. We know that. But nice try Like asking what if we find hard proof that humans used to breathe pure methane gas. We're not going to discover a town named Arimathea that existed in Jesus' day because it was a purely metaphorical invention created to prove and demonstrate a point...much like Jesus himself was.

 

I've made my points as best I think I can, and I've learned from this thread. I appreciate you guys being so civil. I still think the mythicist position is the one that fits all available data (which is to say, the utter lack of evidence). Between all your arguing yourselves into a historical Jesus and questioning the motivations for those first mythicists to put pen to paper, I somehow missed anybody actually mentioning any actual evidence for the historical camp's assertions that any event in the NT ever actually happened, much less the stories around Jesus. And Ouro, thanks for the vote of confidence for us pagans

[Ouroboros]

And Ouro, thanks for the vote of confidence for us pagans

Oh absolutely. I think pagans are cool.

[mymistake]

It's about borrowing what works.

 

I'm afraid you and I will never agree about "what works".

 

Very different. What you see happening is the evolution of symbols as part of a social change that was happening. We do the same thing today, regardless if they are religious or secular symbols. Those symbols with other symbols become part of a myth system that serves to support those underlying social and cultural shifts.

 

Man, how much more interesting is that, as oppose to who ripped off who and is lying to us?

 

I find who ripped off who and what is a lie to be far more interesting. To me the search for a "historical" Jesus is about proving Christianity wrong and setting people free from that cult.

[mcdaddy]

Jesus got his name from the prophecy in Zechariah that named one of the two olive trees "Jesus" or the equivalent. That's how a mythical figure could have gotten a specific name.

The thing is, my understanding (which could be wrong) is that the myth-only theory suggests that all started in the Roman empire, by non-Jews. So why would Jewish religious literature have anything to do with the choice of name, setting, story, etc.?

 

 

That's not how I view it at all. I think it completely started in Palestine with Hellenistic Jews.

[Ouroboros]

That's not how I view it at all. I think it completely started in Palestine with Hellenistic Jews.

Well, there you have it. It did start with some core group at least, or groups close to each other. Perhaps it was a group/cult without a leader or perhaps it was one/several with a/few leader(s). Or maybe it was a couple of groups with different ideas, and leaders, competing cults, who later merged. But somehow they all must've gotten the idea of giving the Hellenistic philosophies a common name from the "olive branch" you mentioned earlier. Some common theme must have brought the competing cults together under one umbrella.

[Antlerman]

AM, there isn't ever going to be hard evidence for Christianity's claims. The claims themselves are utterly false.

But what claims are you narrowing it down to? That their understanding of history is largely mythological, or that its teachings are utterly false? You see, I think again this comes back to what I said earlier in this thread (if not, certainly many others), that 'faith' is normally in something more than understanding historical and scientific facts. To your average Christian it is 'true' because it speaks to them. That is how myth operates. So to say, "If I can show Jesus was ripped off from Mithra, this proves its all wrong", misses the real salient point. It is still truth to those whom its stories speak to something inside them. They equate the 'fact' of God with that internal reality.

 

I was speaking directly over coffee with one of the scholars in that famous Jesus Seminar we have referred to here. It was an interesting discussion with her. She openly realizes that most of its stories stories are myth, the Virgin Birth, the Nativity, etc, yet how she puts it, "To me it is true". She explained even if it never happened in history, its story is a human story. It speaks to something inside her and is truth to her. I get that. I understand how that functions that way. And I believe for most people, even though they aren't as educated and insightful as her into this type of direct recognition, that is how if operates for your average 'believer'. They believe it because it speaks truth to them, regardless if Jesus actually walked on water or not.

 

So are Christianities claims "utterly false". All of it? All the teachings? Everything? I wouldn't go that far. Obviously some 'facts' are wrong, but are those the core of what it claims as the truth, or are its teachings about human love and spirituality flawed? Those are different arguments.

 

I've made my points as best I think I can, and I've learned from this thread. I appreciate you guys being so civil. I still think the mythicist position is the one that fits all available data (which is to say, the utter lack of evidence).

It didn't address any of the points I raised, so no it doesn't fit all availble data. And what was it that Gadjet cited, "An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?" That's very true, and in fact applies here.

 

Between all your arguing yourselves into a historical Jesus and questioning the motivations for those first mythicists to put pen to paper, I somehow missed anybody actually mentioning any actual evidence for the historical camp's assertions that any event in the NT ever actually happened, much less the stories around Jesus.

I find the Q studies to be telling. The oral traditions, the social movement impetus, the various contemporary writings of other Christians that were selectively excluded from the texts, the fact that many of these teachings in fact do show the insight of a single individual, etc. It's a highly complex web of schools of thought arising in this persons name. I don't see slapping another name on Mithra to explain this well at all.

 

Besides, how is this 'arguing ourselves into believing in a historical Jesus'? What would motivate that? Fear he didn't exist?

[Antlerman]

It's about borrowing what works.

 

I'm afraid you and I will never agree about "what works".

Oh that's easy! Did Christianity grow and survive the day? Yes? It worked. Period.

 

Very different. What you see happening is the evolution of symbols as part of a social change that was happening. We do the same thing today, regardless if they are religious or secular symbols. Those symbols with other symbols become part of a myth system that serves to support those underlying social and cultural shifts.

 

Man, how much more interesting is that, as oppose to who ripped off who and is lying to us?

 

I find who ripped off who and what is a lie to be far more interesting. To me the search for a "historical" Jesus is about proving Christianity wrong and setting people free from that cult.

I find that interesting only as the tip of the iceberg of understanding deeper truths. I find it boring to just conclude, "See, it's all a big lie!". That not seeking understanding, IMHO.

[Chikirin]

Back in NT days, there were no newspapers, driver's licenses, databases, etc. I think it is asking too much for there to be such evidence for the existence of a common person who lived in a backwater region that was repeatedly destroyed by military campaigns.

[mcdaddy]

Back in NT days, there were no newspapers, driver's licenses, databases, etc. I think it is asking too much for there to be such evidence for the existence of a common person who lived in a backwater region that was repeatedly destroyed by military campaigns.

 

Evidence, as in one single contemporaneous report?

[Vigile]

 

Well, that's not good.

 

Why? I was just admitting an emotional bias. I do my best to be objective when I assess a subject. Admitting a bias I have no control over allows me to at least examine my views on the subject more carefully knowing they can be influenced by the bias.

[Chikirin]

Back in NT days, there were no newspapers, driver's licenses, databases, etc. I think it is asking too much for there to be such evidence for the existence of a common person who lived in a backwater region that was repeatedly destroyed by military campaigns.

 

Evidence, as in one single contemporaneous report?

 

Well where are you supposed to go find it? Everything is buried in fucking sand. The region got destroyed over and over. Yes, it's still a lot to ask for. You guys are being completely unrealistic.