Mythic Jesus

[Quantum Windbag]

There are two basic views of the Biblical Jesus as a real person today, the religious Christian view and the secular historical view. The religious Christian view takes the Gospels as accurate and reliable accounts of the life of Jesus, including all of the miracles. The religious Christian view demands that Jesus Christ was a popular and well known figure in the region, who drew crowds of thousands of people and performed great miracles, who was such a revolutionary figure that the Jewish priesthood was compelled to have him arrested and put to death in dramatic fashion before hundreds or thousands of witnesses.

The secular historical view, which may also be held by some Christians, takes the Gospels as exaggerated accounts of the life of a real Jesus. The secular historical view basically starts with the Gospels and then removes the fantastic or "supernatural" claims in the Gospels and accepts what is left as history. The secular historical view tends to minimize the role of Jesus in the region, stating instead that he was barely noticed by others. Secular historians who believe that Jesus existed rely on the Gospels as essentially historical, but inflated, accounts of his life.

All this is based on the idea that the Gospels are historical fact. But are they? At a minimum, they were written by unknown individuals 50 to 100 years after Jesus supposedly lived.
Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

Both of those views contradict your assertion that Jesus is not real.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

And imagine the number of people that were beaten, jailed, and killed because of their "lie"?!!
At some point somebody would have caved and said, "OKAY! I lied! Please stop!"
We're only human. We can only endure so much, and the Romans were experts at torture.

Those Roman torturers were actually quite impressed by the Christians. some of them were so impressed that they became Christians themselves. They knew that torture would convince innocent people confess guilt just to get it to stop, even gladiators and Roman soldiers, yet women were enduring tortures that would break strong men, and praying for the people that were torturing them.

This is your argument? That Jesus must have existed because the Romans tortured Christians?

The Romans tortured tons of people.

The only "proof" that Christians have for the life of Jesus is the Gospels whose origins were not even mentioned by historians until 130CE with Papias being the first.

Is that what I said?

What I said was the torturers, who were used to breaking strong men, were convinced of the reality of Jesus by the fact that they could not break women. That, believe it or not, is convincing proof of something, even if it is only mass hysteria.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

The fact that the Gospel of Mark is the first narrative story of the life of Jesus that was written, and the three other stories about the life of Jesus are dependent on it either directly or indirectly, makes the Gospel of Mark the lynchpin of the entire Jesus story. Understanding Mark is the key to understanding the whole story of Jesus.

Most scholars today agree that the Gospel of Mark was written either during or after the destruction of Judea by the Romans, which occurred around 70 CE. The most widely accepted dates for the writing of Mark range from between 66 CE to 100 CE, with a fringe of scholars claiming times outside of this range on both sides.

The period in which the Gospel of Mark was written is well known among scholars of ancient literature as an era of allegorical writing.

Allegory is defined as follows:

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
ALLEGORY


Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

I have no problem with the Bible existing as allegory and theology, but not as historical truth.

John is not dependent on Mark at all, and both Mathew and Luke are obviously dependent on another earlier gospel account which is commonly designated Q. Once again you are relying on sources that support you bias instead of looking at all the evidence.

Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[AmericanFirst]

The fact that the Gospel of Mark is the first narrative story of the life of Jesus that was written, and the three other stories about the life of Jesus are dependent on it either directly or indirectly, makes the Gospel of Mark the lynchpin of the entire Jesus story. Understanding Mark is the key to understanding the whole story of Jesus.

Most scholars today agree that the Gospel of Mark was written either during or after the destruction of Judea by the Romans, which occurred around 70 CE. The most widely accepted dates for the writing of Mark range from between 66 CE to 100 CE, with a fringe of scholars claiming times outside of this range on both sides.

The period in which the Gospel of Mark was written is well known among scholars of ancient literature as an era of allegorical writing.

Allegory is defined as follows:

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
ALLEGORY


Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

I have no problem with the Bible existing as allegory and theology, but not as historical truth.

John is not dependent on Mark at all, and both Mathew and Luke are obviously dependent on another earlier gospel account which is commonly designated Q. Once again you are relying on sources that support you bias instead of looking at all the evidence.

Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sky Dancer is just trying to justify his/her corrupt thought process. Jesus is real. Buddhism he/she promotes all the time is false religion.

 

[Sky Dancer]

The fact that the Gospel of Mark is the first narrative story of the life of Jesus that was written, and the three other stories about the life of Jesus are dependent on it either directly or indirectly, makes the Gospel of Mark the lynchpin of the entire Jesus story. Understanding Mark is the key to understanding the whole story of Jesus.

Most scholars today agree that the Gospel of Mark was written either during or after the destruction of Judea by the Romans, which occurred around 70 CE. The most widely accepted dates for the writing of Mark range from between 66 CE to 100 CE, with a fringe of scholars claiming times outside of this range on both sides.

The period in which the Gospel of Mark was written is well known among scholars of ancient literature as an era of allegorical writing.

Allegory is defined as follows:

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
ALLEGORY


Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

I have no problem with the Bible existing as allegory and theology, but not as historical truth.

John is not dependent on Mark at all, and both Mathew and Luke are obviously dependent on another earlier gospel account which is commonly designated Q. Once again you are relying on sources that support you bias instead of looking at all the evidence.

Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sky Dancer is just trying to justify his/her corrupt thought process. Jesus is real. Buddhism he/she promotes all the time is false religion.

Irony about Christians. You try and disprove other religions by reason and fact, but you won't do that with your own faith.

 

[Sky Dancer]

There are two types of "Jesus the Myth" theories prevalent in contemporary literature, that of the "Heavenly Christ" and that of the "Man of the Indefinite Past." What I term the "heavenly Christ" school posits that there is a subset of early Christian literature that regards Jesus as a being whose salvific activities took place in a realm that is not the very same as our own, the world that puts a 30-year-old man on a cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem on the order of a man keeping order in the city of Jerusalem. Instead it pictures the activity taking place on a heavenly plane of existence, somewhere between the earthly and the divine, and it claims analogy to this practice in other Mediterranean cults offering people other-worldly hope. They argue that Christ was later given a biography on earth, either as a fictionalization of the heavenly type or as a more concrete expression of the faith of a community that had started to regard Christ as a physical person. Before dismissing this transformation as too fanciful and the original as too outlandish, consider that you might be speaking at cross-purposes, as a cult with claims that some people have a difficult time understanding might evolve into a form more palateable to everyone's mind. Moreoever, there is real evidence of a form of Christianity that regarded Christ as a non-physical being in the Gnosic movement, so while this may not have primacy, it does have attestation in our evidence.



http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html

 

[Sky Dancer]

The fact that the Gospel of Mark is the first narrative story of the life of Jesus that was written, and the three other stories about the life of Jesus are dependent on it either directly or indirectly, makes the Gospel of Mark the lynchpin of the entire Jesus story. Understanding Mark is the key to understanding the whole story of Jesus.

Most scholars today agree that the Gospel of Mark was written either during or after the destruction of Judea by the Romans, which occurred around 70 CE. The most widely accepted dates for the writing of Mark range from between 66 CE to 100 CE, with a fringe of scholars claiming times outside of this range on both sides.

The period in which the Gospel of Mark was written is well known among scholars of ancient literature as an era of allegorical writing.

Allegory is defined as follows:

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
ALLEGORY


Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

I have no problem with the Bible existing as allegory and theology, but not as historical truth.

John is not dependent on Mark at all, and both Mathew and Luke are obviously dependent on another earlier gospel account which is commonly designated Q. Once again you are relying on sources that support you bias instead of looking at all the evidence.

Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You aren't supplying much evidence.

 

[Sky Dancer]

Those Roman torturers were actually quite impressed by the Christians. some of them were so impressed that they became Christians themselves. They knew that torture would convince innocent people confess guilt just to get it to stop, even gladiators and Roman soldiers, yet women were enduring tortures that would break strong men, and praying for the people that were torturing them.

This is your argument? That Jesus must have existed because the Romans tortured Christians?

The Romans tortured tons of people.

The only "proof" that Christians have for the life of Jesus is the Gospels whose origins were not even mentioned by historians until 130CE with Papias being the first.

Is that what I said?

What I said was the torturers, who were used to breaking strong men, were convinced of the reality of Jesus by the fact that they could not break women. That, believe it or not, is convincing proof of something, even if it is only mass hysteria.

It doesn't prove the historical existence of Jesus. It may prove mass hysteria though.

 

[Sky Dancer]

There are two basic views of the Biblical Jesus as a real person today, the religious Christian view and the secular historical view. The religious Christian view takes the Gospels as accurate and reliable accounts of the life of Jesus, including all of the miracles. The religious Christian view demands that Jesus Christ was a popular and well known figure in the region, who drew crowds of thousands of people and performed great miracles, who was such a revolutionary figure that the Jewish priesthood was compelled to have him arrested and put to death in dramatic fashion before hundreds or thousands of witnesses.

The secular historical view, which may also be held by some Christians, takes the Gospels as exaggerated accounts of the life of a real Jesus. The secular historical view basically starts with the Gospels and then removes the fantastic or "supernatural" claims in the Gospels and accepts what is left as history. The secular historical view tends to minimize the role of Jesus in the region, stating instead that he was barely noticed by others. Secular historians who believe that Jesus existed rely on the Gospels as essentially historical, but inflated, accounts of his life.

All this is based on the idea that the Gospels are historical fact. But are they? At a minimum, they were written by unknown individuals 50 to 100 years after Jesus supposedly lived.
Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

Both of those views contradict your assertion that Jesus is not real.

My assertion is that there is very little evidence of the existence of a historical Jesus.

I'm interested in this topic and I'm looking at it from many different points of view.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

The fact that the Gospel of Mark is the first narrative story of the life of Jesus that was written, and the three other stories about the life of Jesus are dependent on it either directly or indirectly, makes the Gospel of Mark the lynchpin of the entire Jesus story. Understanding Mark is the key to understanding the whole story of Jesus.

Most scholars today agree that the Gospel of Mark was written either during or after the destruction of Judea by the Romans, which occurred around 70 CE. The most widely accepted dates for the writing of Mark range from between 66 CE to 100 CE, with a fringe of scholars claiming times outside of this range on both sides.

The period in which the Gospel of Mark was written is well known among scholars of ancient literature as an era of allegorical writing.

Allegory is defined as follows:

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
ALLEGORY


Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

I have no problem with the Bible existing as allegory and theology, but not as historical truth.

John is not dependent on Mark at all, and both Mathew and Luke are obviously dependent on another earlier gospel account which is commonly designated Q. Once again you are relying on sources that support you bias instead of looking at all the evidence.

Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You aren't supplying much evidence.

Evidence of what?

You claimed the other three gospels were based on Mark, I proved that they are not.

 

[syrenn]

The fact that the Gospel of Mark is the first narrative story of the life of Jesus that was written, and the three other stories about the life of Jesus are dependent on it either directly or indirectly, makes the Gospel of Mark the lynchpin of the entire Jesus story. Understanding Mark is the key to understanding the whole story of Jesus.

Most scholars today agree that the Gospel of Mark was written either during or after the destruction of Judea by the Romans, which occurred around 70 CE. The most widely accepted dates for the writing of Mark range from between 66 CE to 100 CE, with a fringe of scholars claiming times outside of this range on both sides.

The period in which the Gospel of Mark was written is well known among scholars of ancient literature as an era of allegorical writing.

Allegory is defined as follows:

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
ALLEGORY


Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

I have no problem with the Bible existing as allegory and theology, but not as historical truth.

John is not dependent on Mark at all, and both Mathew and Luke are obviously dependent on another earlier gospel account which is commonly designated Q. Once again you are relying on sources that support you bias instead of looking at all the evidence.

Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sky Dancer is just trying to justify his/her corrupt thought process. Jesus is real. Buddhism he/she promotes all the time is false religion.

Both are cults.
Neither is right
Neither is wrong

 

[Quantum Windbag]

This is your argument? That Jesus must have existed because the Romans tortured Christians?

The Romans tortured tons of people.

The only "proof" that Christians have for the life of Jesus is the Gospels whose origins were not even mentioned by historians until 130CE with Papias being the first.

Is that what I said?

What I said was the torturers, who were used to breaking strong men, were convinced of the reality of Jesus by the fact that they could not break women. That, believe it or not, is convincing proof of something, even if it is only mass hysteria.

It doesn't prove the historical existence of Jesus. It may prove mass hysteria though.

I mentioned mass hysteria because it cannot be mass hysteria. Mass hysteria is a group manifestation of fear, not faith.

 

[American Horse]

There are two basic views of the Biblical Jesus as a real person today, the religious Christian view and the secular historical view. The religious Christian view takes the Gospels as accurate and reliable accounts of the life of Jesus, including all of the miracles. The religious Christian view demands that Jesus Christ was a popular and well known figure in the region, who drew crowds of thousands of people and performed great miracles, who was such a revolutionary figure that the Jewish priesthood was compelled to have him arrested and put to death in dramatic fashion before hundreds or thousands of witnesses.

The secular historical view, which may also be held by some Christians, takes the Gospels as exaggerated accounts of the life of a real Jesus. The secular historical view basically starts with the Gospels and then removes the fantastic or "supernatural" claims in the Gospels and accepts what is left as history. The secular historical view tends to minimize the role of Jesus in the region, stating instead that he was barely noticed by others. Secular historians who believe that Jesus existed rely on the Gospels as essentially historical, but inflated, accounts of his life.

All this is based on the idea that the Gospels are historical fact. But are they? At a minimum, they were written by unknown individuals 50 to 100 years after Jesus supposedly lived.
Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

Both of those views contradict your assertion that Jesus is not real.

My assertion is that there is very little evidence of the existence of a historical Jesus.

I'm interested in this topic and I'm looking at it from many different points of view.

He wouldn't have been historically significant until he made a splash, but when he did it was only as a rebellious figure of a minor Jewish sect. Still, the history of his clash with the authorities was written about by historians of the time, but only after the fact. The destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, was a much larger event than the life and death of Jesus, but it meant that all the records of Jewish civilization were destroyed including those of Jesus' own life.

I suggest that you get a copy of historian Michael Grant's "The Jews in the Roman World"
In it Grant says that it is unlikely that Jesus got a trial, but rather an informal interrogation. It is also unlikely that it would be claimed that he was crucified if that was not the case, since that is such a damaging outcome to the claim of his being a messiah. A messiah could only prove himself by success, and crucifixion is the antithesis of success. Therefore the damaging admission that Jesus had been crucified would never have been made if it was not true. Soon after the event Pontius Pilate had to put down another disturbamce, this time in Samaria, after which he was recalled to Rome, but before he'd arrived the Emperor he served under, Tiberius Caesar had died.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

There are two basic views of the Biblical Jesus as a real person today, the religious Christian view and the secular historical view. The religious Christian view takes the Gospels as accurate and reliable accounts of the life of Jesus, including all of the miracles. The religious Christian view demands that Jesus Christ was a popular and well known figure in the region, who drew crowds of thousands of people and performed great miracles, who was such a revolutionary figure that the Jewish priesthood was compelled to have him arrested and put to death in dramatic fashion before hundreds or thousands of witnesses.

The secular historical view, which may also be held by some Christians, takes the Gospels as exaggerated accounts of the life of a real Jesus. The secular historical view basically starts with the Gospels and then removes the fantastic or "supernatural" claims in the Gospels and accepts what is left as history. The secular historical view tends to minimize the role of Jesus in the region, stating instead that he was barely noticed by others. Secular historians who believe that Jesus existed rely on the Gospels as essentially historical, but inflated, accounts of his life.

All this is based on the idea that the Gospels are historical fact. But are they? At a minimum, they were written by unknown individuals 50 to 100 years after Jesus supposedly lived.
Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

Both of those views contradict your assertion that Jesus is not real.

My assertion is that there is very little evidence of the existence of a historical Jesus.

I'm interested in this topic and I'm looking at it from many different points of view.

You started this thread with this post.

One of the problems faced by Christian scholars is that there is no record of Jesus's existence in any contemporary source. The earliest literature concerning him was written by Paul, who never knew him or anyone else who might have known him and who never heard anything about his life story. Paul mentioned none of these now-so-familiar details, which were added much later by unknown writers who pretended to bear the names of various disciples and who sprinkled their writings with mythic data gathered from sacred-king traditions of contemporary Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Persian and Levantine salvation cults.
The Jesus Myth | Is Christ a Historical Person?

I have disproved every single link you posted, have proved that there is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is Alexander the Great. There is about the same level of historical evidence for the existence of Jesus as there is for Julius Caesar.

The extra biblical sources that mention Jesus include the Talmud, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Seutonius, the Gnostic Gospels, and the Apocrypha. For some reason you want to reject the evidence. Until you supply something that actually questions the fact that we have 5 eyewitness accounts preserved in the Bible, numerous non biblical sources that mention him, and the fact that the only historian you have cited in an attempt to disprove Jesus actually went out of his way to not mention Christians at all, you have nothing but twaddle and conjecture.

It is not up to me to provide evidence that Jesus existed anymore than I have to prove Alexander existed. If you want to question the historical record you have to provide the evidence that refutes that record. You have not even begun to do that.

That puts the ball in your court. If you have some real evidence to provide that the historians throughout the centuries missed somehow, feel free to link to it. So far all you ave done is made a fool of yourself.

By the way, if you are serious about finding the historical Jesus, I suggest you start here. After you go through this, and read the cited books, you might be able to discuss the subject intelligently.

Historicity of Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[hortysir]

The fact that the Gospel of Mark is the first narrative story of the life of Jesus that was written, and the three other stories about the life of Jesus are dependent on it either directly or indirectly, makes the Gospel of Mark the lynchpin of the entire Jesus story. Understanding Mark is the key to understanding the whole story of Jesus.

Most scholars today agree that the Gospel of Mark was written either during or after the destruction of Judea by the Romans, which occurred around 70 CE. The most widely accepted dates for the writing of Mark range from between 66 CE to 100 CE, with a fringe of scholars claiming times outside of this range on both sides.

The period in which the Gospel of Mark was written is well known among scholars of ancient literature as an era of allegorical writing.

Allegory is defined as follows:

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
ALLEGORY


Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

I have no problem with the Bible existing as allegory and theology, but not as historical truth.

John is not dependent on Mark at all, and both Mathew and Luke are obviously dependent on another earlier gospel account which is commonly designated Q. Once again you are relying on sources that support you bias instead of looking at all the evidence.

Biblical criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You aren't supplying much evidence.

You aren't paying much attention.

You have been pwned on this subject

period

 

[Sky Dancer]

Is that what I said?

What I said was the torturers, who were used to breaking strong men, were convinced of the reality of Jesus by the fact that they could not break women. That, believe it or not, is convincing proof of something, even if it is only mass hysteria.

It doesn't prove the historical existence of Jesus. It may prove mass hysteria though.

I mentioned mass hysteria because it cannot be mass hysteria. Mass hysteria is a group manifestation of fear, not faith.

Mass hysteria makes perfect sense.

 

[Sky Dancer]

There is no historical evidence of Jesus. The only so-called "evidence" are from believers.

No independent historical evidence.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

It doesn't prove the historical existence of Jesus. It may prove mass hysteria though.

I mentioned mass hysteria because it cannot be mass hysteria. Mass hysteria is a group manifestation of fear, not faith.

Mass hysteria makes perfect sense.

Of course it does, if you want to reject everything science knows. Since I prefer to live in reality I will continue to mock you.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

There is no historical evidence of Jesus. The only so-called "evidence" are from believers.

No independent historical evidence.

Lie.

 

[Sky Dancer]

There is no historical evidence of Jesus. The only so-called "evidence" are from believers.

No independent historical evidence.

Lie.

If you have any independent historical evidence of Jesus life, produce it.

It doesn't exist. It is hearsay based on hearsay based on hearsay.