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No. You're missing the point. Buddhist thought (for example) comes from Buddha...not the incorporation of christian thought into Buddhism.
There are two approaches to studying a religion: 1. the devotee way, and 2. the academic way.
I could take apart Buddhism the way Thrill dissembles Christianity. You may not be a Buddhist but you are as careless as a follower of Buddha. I don't mean to denigrate Buddhists, or adherents of Islam either. The fact is that most people have a religion that comes with their respective cultures. Its an accepted way of life of a religious devotee who has no need to question it.
Alexander Wynne is an academic expert on Buddhism. He found no historical evidence of a Prince Siddharta, nor could he establish any evidence from recovered scriptural texts proving any direct transmission of the Buddha's teaching to any disciple.
To say that Buddhist thought comes from Buddha is similar to typical utterances Christians make about Jesus. Devotees of either religion see nothing wrong with that. But you are neither a practitioner of Buddhism nor Christianity. You are not critical with the Buddhists. What's the reason for your attack on Christians?
People need religion that comes in various forms. The essence of all the world religions is one unchanging mystery of life.
There are two approaches to studying a religion: 1. the devotee way, and 2. the academic way.
I could take apart Buddhism the way Thrill dissembles Christianity. You may not be a Buddhist but you are as careless as a follower of Buddha. I don't mean to denigrate Buddhists, or adherents of Islam either. The fact is that most people have a religion that comes with their respective cultures. Its an accepted way of life of a religious devotee who has no need to question it.
Alexander Wynne is an academic expert on Buddhism. He found no historical evidence of a Prince Siddharta, nor could he establish any evidence from recovered scriptural texts proving any direct transmission of the Buddha's teaching to any disciple.
To say that Buddhist thought comes from Buddha is similar to typical utterances Christians make about Jesus. Devotees of either religion see nothing wrong with that. But you are neither a practitioner of Buddhism nor Christianity. You are not critical with the Buddhists. What's the reason for your attack on Christians?
People need religion that comes in various forms. The essence of all the world religions is one unchanging mystery of life.
You don't mean to denigrate Buddhists, but you say that Buddhist are careless. That doesn't make any sense at all.
I may not be Buddhist. Who are you to tell me what I am. I am a Buddhist. Is that a game you want to play. Okay, you are not a christian. You do not believe in god.
I am not critical of Buddhists. How odd, since one of our posters frequently criticizes me for being critical of things (and monks) in Buddhism.
You just seem to say anything that comes to you mind.
You don't mean to denigrate Buddhists, but you say that Buddhist are careless. That doesn't make any sense at all.
I may not be Buddhist. Who are you to tell me what I am. I am a Buddhist. Is that a game you want to play. Okay, you are not a christian. You do not believe in god.
I am not critical of Buddhists. How odd, since one of our posters frequently criticizes me for being critical of things (and monks) in Buddhism.
You just seem to say anything that comes to you mind.
Buddhists are careless. So are Christians, Muslims, whatever, with regard to the nitty gritty of their respective faiths. Their acceptance of their beliefs is no different from a child's acceptance of it mother without having to dig into who that woman is and how it ended up with her. Mom is good and that's all there is to it. Does this make sense now?
What you are critical about is not Buddhism, or even Christianity for that matter. Your issue is with people who get in the way you want your world to be.
Are you saying whatever's written down about history is truthful and accurate?
Why would you make such a ridiculous leap? He's not saying that at all. He's talking about a specific, well-known event in Massachusetts Bay Colony history, one that made the King of England crack down on the Puritans and eventually revoke the colony's charter. It's not some rumor or conspiracy theory. The Puritans didn't do this in secret. We know the names of the four Quakers who were hanged.
Thrill, you came across to me as the most formidable Christian basher on the internet. It's guys like you who keep me honest about my grasp on reality.
I listen to anyone who has something to say about my screwed-up perceptions. Ours is a cockeyed world, the center of which is me. Engaging others help me to walk straight.
You might want to try something more challenging. Below is a link to Douglas Harding, the man who discovered that he had no head. Try taking his spirituality apart.
On the Internet?????? Myuen, you don't get around very much on the Internet. Have you heard of Richard Carrier or David Fitzgerald or Robert M Price or Timothy Freke or Peter Gandy or....oh hell I can't name all hundred or so Jesus mythicist proponents. Me formidable? Hardly. I'm a piker compared to these fellows, many with PhD's in ancient religions. All I do is parrot what they say in their 400-500 page tomes of evidence for Jesus being a myth. Here is a partial list:
Contrary to what Michael Way and a few others say, Jesus mythicism is not fringe, it is very mainstream now because the evidence for Jesus being a myth is just so overwhelming. Against that Christians have only their faith-based belief he is real--no extra-Biblical historical evidence to speak of at all. Which is a large reason why Christians are facing a fatal paradoxical Catch 22 of sorts: the more people study Jesus on the Internet the more they evaluate the lack of evidence for Jesus and drop out of Christianity, the more they tell their friends who in turn do their own research and then tell THEIR friends after dropping out, and so and so on.
Far as Douglas Harding goes, he's dead. What am I going to do--debate his spirit in a seance???
On the Internet?????? Myuen, you don't get around very much on the Internet. Have you heard of Richard Carrier or David Fitzgerald or Robert M Price or Timothy Freke or Peter Gandy or....oh hell I can't name all hundred or so Jesus mythicist proponents. Me formidable? Hardly. I'm a piker compared to these fellows, many with PhD's in ancient religions. All I do is parrot what they say in their 400-500 page tomes of evidence for Jesus being a myth. Here is a partial list:
Contrary to what Michael Way and a few others say, Jesus mythicism is not fringe, it is very mainstream now because the evidence for Jesus being a myth is just so overwhelming. Against that Christians have only their faith-based belief he is real--no extra-Biblical historical evidence to speak of at all. Which is a large reason why Christians are facing a fatal paradoxical Catch 22 of sorts: the more people study Jesus on the Internet the more they evaluate the lack of evidence for Jesus and drop out of Christianity, the more they tell their friends who in turn do their own research and then tell THEIR friends after dropping out, and so and so on.
Far as Douglas Harding goes, he's dead. What am I going to do--debate his spirit in a seance???
I don't mean for you to debate Harding but his testimony that he had no head and the relationship of that awakening to the validity of religion.
As for Jesus being a myth, it is irrelevant to the teaching that has inspired the founding of Christianity. Are you debunking the belief that Jesus is a living God or what? Surely, you are better than that. Why stomp on an effigy? Debating the rational relevance of the teaching to human life would be effective way to destroy Christianity. Isn't that the point?
St. Paul's pre-conversion life as Saul was to hunt down Christians:
Logically, the Jews wouldn't want a historical record of Jesus nor want a historical record of their own acts.
2) The Romans?
Judaea was a Roman province subject to direct Roman rule. It was hardly the center of Rome. Yet, you would expect to have some more detail records of Pontius Pilate than what we heave.
We know nothing Pontius Pilate of his life before he became governor of Judaea. What we know is:
3) Romans kept many records, but there are no existing records of Roman crucifixions, but historians' accounts prove that Roman crucifixions were widespread. Besides which, few records of any kind from Ancient Rome exists.
I'm glad you rebutted, Gal. You and Myuen seem to be the only ones interested in debating rather than just throwing out useless insults. Sad that the thread has gone so far without a serious challenge till now.
Much of what you say is stock Christian defense of Jesus. Unfortunately there are many problems with it.
I wouldn't trust anything Christians wrote about Jesus because they have proven that their views are so clouded with bias and favoritism it renders their "information" useless, at least that's how mainstream scholars feel about the New Testament.
I'd expect any historian worth his salt to record the 3 hours of supernatural darkness that supposedly enveloped the earth at Jesus crucifixion. I would expect cultures in Russia, the Far East and Africa to paint hieroglyphics or cave paintings or writings to show that the sun was out and then mysteriously darkened for exactly 3 hours before suddenly reappearing. I would expect secular historians in Jerusalem during the crucifixion like Philo to have recorded a stupendous event like zombies rising from their graves and going into Jerusalem to speak to the residents. Philo doesn't mention a single word about Jesus or the zombies--that in itself is more unbelievable than Jesus causing all that.
Remember that all four gospels say that Jesus' reputation as a miracle worker spread throughout Israel and past its borders into all the surrounding areas. Jesus' name would have been carried throughout the Mediterranean as this awesome prophet of God who claimed to be God's son just Apollo and Hercules and Dionysus to name a few. Somebody among all the millions of people who either were in Jerusalem or in the areas and heard of Jesus would have recorded SOMETHING, let's get real. But for somebody as famous as Jesus here's what Bart Ehrman, noted Biblical scholar has to say:
“In the entire Christian century, Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religious scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!”
— Bart Ehrman (c.2012)
Pretty astonishing? Or just unbelievable to the point of not being factual?
Josephus' stuff is so heavily interpolated and tampered with it's not worth the papyrus it's written on. For starts the earliest copy we of Testimonium Flavianum dates to the 8th Century so we don't even know what was in the earliest copies that were circulating in the 2nd-4th centuries. Here's one Biblical scholar's evaluation:
The Josephus Testimonium: Let’s Just Admit It’s Fake Already
Tacitus is nearly 100 years after the crucifixion so anything he has to say is hearsay from Christians. Additionally, he never uses the word, "Jesus"--just "Christians" and "Christ" and as I have already pointed out Christs were a dime a dozen back then. I listed three prominent ones elsewhere in this thread or another thread.
But for somebody as famous as Jesus here's what Bart Ehrman, noted Biblical scholar has to say:
“In the entire Christian century, Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religious scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!”
— Bart Ehrman (c.2012)
vs.
Bart Ehrman's writing/book from 2012:
Quote:
Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth is a 2012 book by Bart D. Ehrman, a scholar of the New Testament. In this book, written to counter the idea that there was never such a person as Jesus of Nazareth at all, Ehrman sets out to demonstrate the historical evidence for Jesus' existence, and he aims to state why all experts in the area agree that "whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist."
Ehrman examines the historicity of Jesus and includes some criticism of Christ mythicists. As he does in other works such as Forged and Jesus, Interrupted, he disregards an apologetics-based or otherwise religiously-charged approach to aim at looking at the New Testament using historical-critical methodology. He argues that a specific historical Jesus really existed in the 1st century AD. Even as accounts about that figure later on brought in additional misinformation and legendary stories, Ehrman states, multiple reasons still remain to see things as framed around a flesh-and-blood actual person.
Ehrman surveys the arguments Christ mythicists have made against the existence of Jesus since the idea was first mooted at the end of the 18th century. To the objection that there are no contemporary Roman records of Jesus' existence, Ehrman points out that such records exist for almost no one and there are mentions of Christ in several Roman and Jewish works of history from only decades after the Crucifixion of Jesus, such as Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews and Tacitus's Annals. The author states that the authentic letters of the apostle Paul in the New Testament (which Ehrman believes are 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, 2 Corinthian and Romans) were likely written within a few years of Jesus' death and that Paul likely personally knew James the Just and Peter the Apostle. Although the gospel accounts of Jesus' life may be biased and unreliable in many respects, Ehrman writes, they and the sources behind them which scholars have discerned still contain some accurate historical information. So many independent attestations of Jesus' existence, Ehrman says, are actually "astounding for an ancient figure of any kind".
Ehrman dismisses the idea that the story of Jesus is an invention based on pagan myths of dying-and-rising gods, maintaining that the early Christians were primarily influenced by Jewish ideas, not Greek or Roman ones, and repeatedly underlining that the idea that there was never such a person as Jesus is not seriously considered by historians or experts in the field at all.
Many specific points by Ehrman concentrate on what may be regarded as the 'embarrassments' and 'failures' of the various depictions of Jesus Christ found in the gospels and the works of Paul which point to an account based on a real person, which was embellished, rather than a made-up figure. He notes that Jews in the first century AD expected their Messiah to come from Bethlehem, and Jesus is described as growing up in Nazareth, a dilemma that is simply not addressed in the Gospel of Mark (which has no nativity account) even though it is regarded as the earliest gospel. The betrayal of Jesus by Judas is another example, as critics of early Christianity found it strange that the Messiah would display the lack of personal awareness and foresight even to keep his close followers in line. Ehrman states that such things would make sense for a historical Jesus, who multiple people believed to have grown up, lived, and died in a certain time and place, as opposed to a purely-mythological figure with malleable personal details.
Ehrman, who was a fundamentalist Christian who turned into a agnostic atheist, has written numerous books challenging traditional views of the Bible himself. Did Jesus Exist?, however, contains scathing criticism of the "writers, bloggers and Internet junkies who call themselves mythicists". Ehrman says that they do not define what they mean by "myth" and maintains they are really motivated by a desire to denounce religion rather than examine historical evidence. He discusses leading contemporary mythicists by name and dismisses their arguments as "amateurish", "wrong-headed", and "outlandish".
Richard Cevantis Carrier (born December 1, 1969) is an American historian,[2] author, and activist, whose work focuses on empiricism, atheism, and the historicity of Jesus.
A long-time contributor to skeptical web sites, including The Secular Web and Freethought Blogs, Carrier has published a number of books and articles on philosophy and religion in classical antiquity, discussing the development of early Christianity from a skeptical viewpoint, and concerning religion and morality in the modern world. He has publicly debated a number of scholars on the historical basis of the Bible and Christianity. He is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus did not exist, which he has argued in a number of his works. Ca[b]rrier's methodology and conclusions in this field have proven controversial and unconvincing to most ancient historians, and he and his theories are often identified as fringe.
drop down to:
Elaborating on this hypothesis, Carrier asserts that originally "Jesus was the name of a celestial being, subordinate to God, with whom some people hallucinated conversations", and that "The Gospel began as a mythic allegory about the celestial Jesus, set on earth, as most myths then were."[63] Stories developed placing Jesus on Earth, and placing him in context with historical figures and places. Subsequently, his worshipers came to believe that these allegories referred to a historical person.
Carrier asserts that the idea of a pre-Christian celestial being named "Jesus" is known from the writings of Philo of Alexandria on the Book of Zechariah. He argues that Philo's angelic being is identical to the Apostle Paul's Jesus: he is God's firstborn son, the celestial 'image of God', and God's agent of creation. However, Larry Hurtado contends that the figure named "Jesus" in Zechariah is a completely distinct figure, and that the Logos Philo discusses is not an angelic being at all.
In Carrier's view, Paul's reference in Romans 1:3 to Jesus being the "seed" of David describes his incarnation from a "cosmic sperm bank", rather than the usual interpretation of Jesus as a descendant of David. In Carrier's interpretation of Paul, Jesus possessed a surrogate human body, and thus the religious requirement of a blood sacrifice was fulfilled by his crucifixion by demons. Gathercole, however, notes that Paul's reference in Romans 1:3 is a common expression in the Septuagint, which simply refers to a "descendant", and that the theme of the descendants of David is common throughout the Old Testament. Carrier argues that like the school of early Jewish mysticism (100 BC– AD 1000), known as Merkabah mysticism, together with its views on the heavens and firmaments of creation, "Mythicism places the incarnation of Jesus below the heavens... being the whole vast region between the earth and the moon [the firmament], was well-established in both Jewish and pagan cosmology
So whatever Carrier presents as his facts - he isn't saying Jesus was nothing - Jesus was indeed something. What exactly he was is unknown to Carrier.
A big drop down on wikipedia's Carrier.
Quote:
New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes that Carrier is one of only two scholars with relevant graduate credentials who argues against the historicity of Jesus. Discussing Carrier's theory that some Jews believed in a "humiliated messiah" prior to the existence of Christianity, Ehrman criticizes Carrier for "idiosyncratic" readings of the Old Testament that ignore modern critical scholarship on the Bible. Ehrman concludes by saying "[w]e do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jew prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins—or killed at all—let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews, tortured and crucified in full public view. This was the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be."
Ehrman has also publicly addressed Carrier's use of Bayes' Theorem, stating that "most historians simply don't think you can do history that way." He said he only knows of two historians who have used Bayes' Theorem, Carrier and Richard Swinburne, and noted the irony of the fact that Swinburne used it to prove Jesus was raised from the dead. Ehrman rejected both Carrier and Swinburne's conclusions, but conceded that he was unqualified to assess specifics about how they applied the theorem. "I'm not a statistician myself. I've had statisticians who tell me that both people are misemploying it, but I have no way of evaluating it."
Why would you make such a ridiculous leap? He's not saying that at all. He's talking about a specific, well-known event in Massachusetts Bay Colony history, one that made the King of England crack down on the Puritans and eventually revoke the colony's charter. It's not some rumor or conspiracy theory. The Puritans didn't do this in secret. We know the names of the four Quakers who were hanged.
Minsk was questioning whether or not whatever's written down about history is truthful and accurate? And that is a legitimate question related to my dismissal of the Smithsonian magazine article.
Historical records are narratives crafted by observers with stories to tell. Even autopsy reports are viewpoints of medical examiners who are subject to challenge in courts of law.
The JFK Warren Commission Report is just that, a report. Surely, it carries more weight than a Smithsonian Magazine article written by some obscure journalists. And yet, the jury is still out on what happened to JFK. Are you puzzled with the skeptical American public also?
I presented the story of the Pilgrims, a good story. Another presented a bad story. I chose the good story over the bad one. Do I have the right to my belief in the goodness of people?
I don't mean for you to debate Harding but his testimony that he had no head and the relationship of that awakening to the validity of religion.
As for Jesus being a myth, it is irrelevant to the teaching that has inspired the founding of Christianity. Are you debunking the belief that Jesus is a living God or what? Surely, you are better than that. Why stomp on an effigy? Debating the rational relevance of the teaching to human life would be effective way to destroy Christianity. Isn't that the point?
Jesus is a living god????????
Of course I'm debunking that.
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Hardly. I'm a piker compared to these fellows, many with PhD's in ancient religions. All I do is parrot what they say in their 400-500 page tomes of evidence for Jesus being a myth. Here is a partial list:
