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I had originally wanted to do a Part 2 on this but I'd like to present my additional evidence in the form of a discussion with Christians. The problem has been NO Christian has been willing to step forth and defend their savior god when I extend this invitation to them. So I figure the best way to approach the issue at this point is to just throw it out there as a new thread and see if anyone in the Christian camp is brave enough to take on a friendly debate.
My contention: the Jesus of the gospels is a mythical character pure and simple. History shows he never existed. Any Christians want to contest my claim? Step forth.
I think Jesus may have existed. However, I think he was just a good talker and managed to convince people that he was something special. He then had a cult of followers. It's been done many times by many people.
I had originally wanted to do a Part 2 on this but I'd like to present my additional evidence in the form of a discussion with Christians. The problem has been NO Christian has been willing to step forth and defend their savior god when I extend this invitation to them. So I figure the best way to approach the issue at this point is to just throw it out there as a new thread and see if anyone in the Christian camp is brave enough to take on a friendly debate.
My contention: the Jesus of the gospels is a mythical character pure and simple. History shows he never existed. Any Christians want to contest my claim? Step forth.
Good grief. You seem to crave attention with all of these threads trying disprove apparently not only the Jesus of the Gospels but even the historical Jesus and the historical apostles.
It's got nothing to do with Christians not being 'brave enough' to debate you. You're becoming increasingly pompous. Your claims that Jesus is a copy of earlier pagan gods and heroes has been refuted by scholars and historians and simply doesn't hold up when the original source documents for those gods and heroes are read instead of relying on claims made by people on the internet such as yourself who in turn rely on other people such as yourself for their misinformation.
The two videos below are part one and part two by Dr. David Miano who is an ancient historian. Feel free to listen to him.
I for one simply have no interest having a 'friendly debate' with you and urge whoever reads this and is interested to simply listen to the scholars and ancient historians who study in this area.
I had originally wanted to do a Part 2 on this but I'd like to present my additional evidence in the form of a discussion with Christians. The problem has been NO Christian has been willing to step forth and defend their savior god when I extend this invitation to them. So I figure the best way to approach the issue at this point is to just throw it out there as a new thread and see if anyone in the Christian camp is brave enough to take on a friendly debate.
My contention: the Jesus of the gospels is a mythical character pure and simple. History shows he never existed. Any Christians want to contest my claim? Step forth.
Analyzing with the same historical frame of reference, what if we replace Jesus with Moses?
Did a historical Moses exist? How about a historic Abraham? Did he exist? What does your research say?
Analyzing with the same historical frame of reference, what if we replace Jesus with Moses?
Did a historical Moses exist? How about a historic Abraham? Did he exist? What does your research say?
The scholarship consensus is there's no historic Moses and no Exodus. In fact, regarding Abraham:
Quote:
Most historians view the patriarchal age, along with the Exodus and the period of the biblical judges, as a late literary construct that does not relate to any particular historical era; and after a century of exhaustive archaeological investigation, no evidence has been found for a historical Abraham.
Elsewhere I've read that the Solomonic golden age of Israel never happened, either. There's no evidence of such wealth and power ever concentrating in a Jewish state.
These conclusions are both more settled and less controversial than the historicity of Jesus, although it certainly makes you wonder what else was made up out of whole cloth in the overall Bible narrative.
My position remains that while I am a Jesus mythicist, it's not a hill I care to die on, nor is it something on which my thinking hinges or presents any problem for my contention that the Miracle-Working God-Man(tm) IS an invention.
I had originally wanted to do a Part 2 on this but I'd like to present my additional evidence in the form of a discussion with Christians. The problem has been NO Christian has been willing to step forth and defend their savior god when I extend this invitation to them. So I figure the best way to approach the issue at this point is to just throw it out there as a new thread and see if anyone in the Christian camp is brave enough to take on a friendly debate. hhatitual
My contention: the Jesus of the gospels is a mythical charac ter pure and simple. History shows he never existed. sAny Christians want to contest my claim? Step forth.
What Chrust Jesus did is he stepped into God's Spiritual Realm to intercede for humanity and left behavioral code based on universal agape. From beginning of humanity that is a resposibility of tribal shamans to enter spirit world and put light on afterlife.Christ Jesus is archetypal 'shaman' for the entire humanity. It really does not matter if there was Jesus Christ exactly the way the Gospels speak about him or not. I choose to know Jesus Christ.
I'm going to keep this thread on topic. I won't be making any excuses or explanations for why I'm doing what I'm doing as I did in Part 1. I'm going to present a series of FACTS. These are uncontested. No scholar disagrees with them that I have found. I'm interested in debating one or more Christians on them:
FACT 1: There is no historical evidence for Jesus outside the New Testament--the New Testament scholars agreeing that the New Testament is a religious manifesto with fictional characters set within a historical period much like Gone With the Wind being a fictional story set within the Civil War.
Any Christians who disagree with this fact? Please tell us so and why. Silence is agreement that this is a fact. I'll give a reasonable amount of time for a response, elaborate on the fact and then move on to FACT 2.
Last edited by thrillobyte; 12-26-2022 at 07:58 AM..
FACT 1: There is no historical evidence for Jesus outside the New Testament--the New Testament scholars agree being a religious manifesto set within a historical period much like Gone With the Wind being a fictional story set within the Civil War.
There is extremely scant historical evidence, which is different and a far lower standard than scientific evidence. It basically hinges on Tacitus and that Pilate stele that was found, which really just establishes that Pilate actually was procurator of Judea in that general time frame and crucified a guy named Jesus (a little like saying someone sent Joe or Jim or Fred to the electric chair).
That Pilate is a real historical character does not rub off on Jesus. Works of fiction reference real historical characters.
So for practical purposes it's fair to say IMO that there's no evidence for a discrete historic person who was THAT Jesus described (and embellished) years later in the gospels. I don't think it's technically correct to say there's no historical evidence, but rather very sketchy historical evidence, and most people really think too highly of historical standards of proof, particularly in the ancient world.
The scholarly consensus on the historicity of Jesus is really just saying that his existence is "least likely to be untrue" when looking at the utter paucity of the total body of evidence. Also, it's a circumspect and safe position to take publicly in a world where much of the funding and tenure for those kinds of historians and archaeologists and academics, come from people with skin in the game.
But here again, to me it is not even the central issue. We know that people don't make water into wine, walk on water or raise the dead, and the only ones claiming that Jesus did these things are not the dispassionate investigative reporters that some believers claim they are. They are religious partisans with different agendas and ideas and emphases about who Jesus is in the context of the overall mythos built up around him, likely at first orally and then captured in writing (including other gospels partly lost to us now). In the context of scholarship about the early church, I'd argue there was no consensus orthodoxy about Jesus that goes back to Jesus himself, whether he was in fact historic or invented. Orthodoxy was not swatting flies of conspiracy from the beginning; it was just competing for the title of orthodoxy, and there's a lot of evidence that they were themselves branded heretical by competing sects, some of whom did not even think that Jesus was corporeal, at least in the ordinary sense.
When you put all of this together it hardly matters who or what Bible Jesus was "based on". It's all campfire stories, ultimately.
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