Caesar's Messiah

[Jimmy_Jam]

Ok. You seem to form your opinions based on personal experiences and a very skeptical position that demands greater proof than I or hardly anyone can provide. I am fine with that.

What I give you is what I believe and why. No, I do not expect you to believe it because I do. We all live with our decisions. Thanks for taking the time and we shall see where our paths may cross again.

I form my opinions based on a combination of observation and research. I wouldn't say I am a very skeptical person. I have a healthy level of skepticism, and yes, some of that is based upon experience. Research tends to back it up.

A person who is predisposed to believe in something will look at an event or phenomenon that is unexplained and attach supernatural significance to it. They will do it almost automatically, like the girl in my example who did a couple of weird things with her body and said some things in a strange voice and BINGO, instant possession. I will almost guarantee you that most of the people who were there that night and still alive probably to this day believe they witnesses a demonic possession and an exorcism.

Some events or phenomena remain unexplained, some get explained. Given my experiences, research, and general observations of human nature, I am a skeptic, because human nature never ceases to let me down in that regard. Embellishment and hysteria are part of the human condition. Nearly every person who recounts an event will embellish it, almost without fail, and in many cases unintentionally. The motivations for doing so may vary, but any eyewitness account is based on what is happening to them, and how it affects them.

I've seen too many times when essentially good-hearted people of faith have been duped into believing something miraculous was happening, and nobody could convince them otherwise. There are religious con-men that are fully aware of this tendency, and exploit it to great reward. I don't go so far as to say that Jesus was an outright invention of the Romans as the OP suggests. But think of the Romans. They had been conquering people for centuries. They were well aware of what it takes to subjugate a people. It is therefore not even remotely a stretch to think that they used this rising religion, which before the first Council of Nicea had been an esoteric collection of competing sects or cults, for it's political benefits.

 

[The Truth Writer]

You have it backwords.
It was written and intended for Gentiles not Jews.
If it was intended for Jews then it would have been written in Aramaic, not Greek.[/QUOTE
Well it just happens that there are claims that the first writing were Aramaic and being translated. Check this out > Aramaic Bible Disciples New Testament Genesis Exodus Jonah Daniel Isaiah Jeremiah Zechariah Malachi.

 

[Capstone]

Welcome to the discussion, TruthWriter.

Since some of the links in this nearly 2-year-old thread were blown up during the recent software "upgrade", here they are again:

Summary here.

Hopefully someone will try to challenge Atwill's thesis on the merits of its observations this time around. I'm talking mainly about the litany of strange but chronologically-correct parallels between the Gospels and the writings of Titus's historian, Josephus.

Time will tell...