"Ancient Confession Found: 'We Invented Jesus Christ' "

Politics and religion
41

I’ll raise HumanTon’s ‘Romulus and Remus’ with…well lets start at the beginning, the ‘first’ big religion prior to all the others:

Hindusim:

Just to cover the ‘religion’ bases. And you need to keep in context the influence of the marauding ‘celts’ on the Indian continent and their cultural influence on the caste system and array of gods and myths. And let’s not forget all the other teeming ideology and inventiveness shown by:

The Ancient Greeks: Ancient Greece - Wikipedia

Ancient Egypt: Ancient Egypt - Wikipedia

Ancient Persia: History of Iran - Wikipedia

Ancient Babylonia: Babylonia - Wikipedia

These all left written traditions, all way before little ol Jesus turned up on the scene (and thank God he did at the time he did, in a brutally repressive Roman world). Having studied all these histories and traditions (and other less mainstream ones), Christianities ‘story’ is nothing special really.

What IS special about Christianity was how it found a huge resonance in many people of it’s time of birth. Here was a religion that put value on the poor and the weak (over the rich and powerful) and being kind and generous to others. It was a religion of general human worth and kindness. This was a marked contrast to the world in which your way into many towns was lined with dying crucified people, and the towns themselves were harshly divided between the haves and have-nots, the masters and the slaves.

Now weather this was a natural organic religion spread by the teachings of a wise man called Jesus, or weather it was a roman plan of subterfuge to pacify the Jews, probably is of lesser importance to the actual fact and influence of how Christianity changed the world, mostly for the good (but not always, as in later years when it became just a tool of the ruling class to be very un-christian for wealth and power gain (much as it is used to this day)). That influence of ‘good Christianity’ on all our lives today can not be overstated, as without it real modern civilization probably could not have taken place, we’d all still just be Masters and Servants (Kings/Peasants etc) stuck in very real and visible tyranny’s.

IF it was a Roman master plan to deal with the Jews, it completely backfired on them!

42

An idea for the next Total War game!

43

So I’m interested in why the closest thing that we could call science in this area, is saying that it is very likely Jesus existed. It seems like there is a massive lack of proof.

44

The ‘idea’ may be more important? besides it was a longtime ago, so little evidence that could be tested scientifically is available.

45

For most of the Epistles, the arguments against Pauline authorship are quite weak, I think – one doesn’t have to imagine a different author to explain stylistic variations and an internal development of doctrine. But even if we grant only the reduced canon for the sake of the argument, the undisputed letters still abound with so many references to Jesus’ earthly life that one wonders how these Mythicists could ever gain much traction. For example, references to Jesus’ brothers (Gal 1:19), their wives (1 Cor 9:5), and his descent from David (Rom 1:3) through his mother (Gal 4:4). One can surely try to take all that allegorically / spiritually, but that’s no longer interpreting a text, that’s torturing the text to make it agree with an external, independent hypothesis.

46

So why assume he existed? Feels like quite a stretch, so why is it accepted as “yeah, he probably existed”. Feels quite unscientific to me.

47

Why not? Put it this way, we also don’t have lots of real scientific evidence for lots of other stuff like did Buddha really exist? Did Moses? or what about What started the Big bang and why?

The fact that scientific evidence is lacking does not lessen the value of the objects those questions are based around. In fact we’d all be ‘poorer’ without having those points of references to ask questions about, read about etc. So with people like Jesus/Moses/Buddha, the proof of their actual existence is often less important than the influence of the ideals attributed to them, and those influences in our world.

48

Very few historical figures – probably none at all from antiquity – would survive a standard of evidence that defaults to distrust towards the few sources we possess. Most of the manuscripts we have are copies so young that, ironically, some fragments of the New Testament might be the only texts left standing.

49

My point exactly. Why claim that they existed? Can’t we accept that we don’t know, and it’s actually more likely that they are myths/stories passed down generations than real people? It’s an amazing stretch to claim that they existed with so little evidence of that. Especially because we have very strong evidence of many people who have existed (i.e. referred to in numerous writings), and at the same time people like Jesus is barely mentioned in the same texts.

50

This is basically the Copenhagen school of thought (Biblical Minimalism).

51

Meh, it was special in that it really took off in the West, but Buddhism beat it by 500 years in philosophy, and with a real person to boot. There’s a case to be made for Christianity being the result of encountering Buddhism and bringing it West, if you go for the whole Essene monk bit.

52

For religions with well-documented foundings, there always seems to be a charismatic figure at the center. Muhammad, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard… In order for the religion to establish itself, it seems necessary that there be a person at the center of it with the ability to convince people that they are God’s chosen prophet. Why precisely would someone with the necessary people skills to found a religion ascribe that religion’s teachings to another person? To me, the existence of a religion’s founder doesn’t require the burden of proof. The existence of a charismatic prophet who attracted followers who continued to pass on his teachings after his death seems more plausible than someone formulating a set of teachings, ascribing them to a non-present founder, and then founding a religion whose members glorify the founder (with much less attention paid to the person who actually started the religion).

Edit: almost forgot. I did want to bring up a counter-example, but I couldn’t find the right search terms to locate what I was thinking of. IIRC, there was a millennial/revolutionary faith that swept through Polynesia in the 19th or early 20th century with a charismatic leader who appeared all over the place, but he was never documented or apprehended by authorities and eventually it was concluded that he never existed. So far as I know, no one ever found out who had started the movement. Anyone know what I’m talking about?

53

The descent from David is a general desideratum for a Messiah (that’s what the Messiah myth stipulates), so that doesn’t really prove anything. The Gal reference to “Brothers” refers to “Brother” as a cultic term of art (the term is used exactly in this way in the LXV too). In fact the frequency of this kind of use in Paul is what makes the “James, the Brother of the Lord” dubious as a reference tying Jesus to reality. In fact, the James/Brother reference, dubious as it is for these reasons, is ultimately the ONLY thing that makes the Jesus mentioned by Paul seem like he could possibly have been a human being. It’s not really strong enough to bear all that weight.

It’s not that mythicists are “torturing” texts, so much as we’ve got a veil of two thousand years of traditional translation and reading of the texts that doesn’t look at Paul without gospels goggles on. That’s really what mythicists are doing - taking a fresh look. What do the Paul writings tell us if we don’t look at them through gospels goggles? Well, it looks like they’re talking about a mythical being whom they think lived on earth at one time, but it doesn’t actually look like Paul, or any of the people Paul is talking about actually knew him personally. It also looks like the idea that the “Apostles” mentioned in Paul were actually personal disciples of the cult deity only comes in with GMark, which is almost certainly post-Diaspora.

It’s true that, on the whole, nothing very definite can be said either way here; a historical Jesus is still a viable hypothesis. But it’s just that: a hypothesis to explain the existence of the texts and religions. It’s not something actually evidenced in the texts.

54

From most mythicist points of view, the “charismatic leader” you are looking for is Paul, who claims, precisely, to be a prophet of the Jesus figure he references. There is no requirement for a cult centred around a mythological deity to have the mythological deity be the founding figure, and that’s the relevant comparison. There is no triangulating evidence for Jesus as a human being, he could quite easily be a mythical being on the level of any other, with Paul as his prophet.

Think of all the other thousands of cults at the time - surely their success depended on having charismatic founders and leaders, yes of course. That’s generally how it goes. But it’s not very often that the founder is eponymously the very deity of the cult.

55

What I was kind of getting at was that the charismatic figure tends to present himself as the earthly conduit of a divine message, carrying out the will of non-corporeal powers. In the case of Paul as founder, you have a figure claiming to know the guy who was the conduit rather than claiming to be the conduit himself. It just seems to me that “God has told me his plan for you” carries more juice than “this guy told me God’s plan for you” (assuming of course that the culture believes in direct revelation). As for the role of the divinity of Jesus, the scenario that makes more sense to me is that Jesus presented himself merely as a messenger of God, used that status to promote his teachings and found a sect, and then the later leaders of the sect declared him divine to boost his perceived authority.

56

But you see that’s the point with Paul if you look at it without gospel goggles - it doesn’t look like he’s talking about someone who was a person (conduit) at all, but about a divine being from the get-go, who just happened to sojourn on Earth for a time, and whom he is now channelling. i.e. more or less a standard mythological entity seen by a mystic in visions.

The crucial point to notice is how, yes, you have characters called “apostles” and people in Jerusalem whom Paul mentions, but there is nothing (apart from that dubious James/Brother reference, that’s the ONLY thing) which might induce you to believe that any of the people Paul is talking about knew Jesus personally, as a human being and were personal disciples of his. Only if you read Paul with the gospels in the background does that idea automatically pop into the mind. But the gospels are much later than Paul (if we are to believe the orthodox scholarly datings, even fairly conservative ones), so there’s no compelling reason to do so. So why not take Paul as Paul, and see what he has to say for himself? If you do so, you find he’s talking about a divine being.

The strange thing is that this idea of the Jerusalem people (apostles, pillars, etc.) being personal disciples of the cult deity while he sojourned on Earth seems to only come in with GMark - i.e. it’s his own “wrinkle” he’s added to an earlier mythology, a link he’s made that isn’t found in Paul, taken by itself.

To give what looks at first sight like the most obvious counter-example, consider the “credo” in Corinthians 1:15. When we read that with the gospels in mind, it looks like the term “according to Scripture” means either “according to the gospels”, or (if we’re more aware of scholarly conclusions) “according to prophecies in the LXV”. But actually, it could just as easily mean “scripture is the place where we get this idea FROM”. Also the term that’s used for “was seen by”, opthe, is a term that’s used in the LXV consistently for divine self-revelation. Could that be visions of a resurrected person they’d previously known personally? It could be; but it could also just as easily be plain visions derived from scripture-poring and mystical exercises. And the latter is more compelling if there isn’t any other evidence to suggest personal discipleship - which there isn’t. The word “disciple” is nowhere found in Paul, in relation to anyone mentioned by Paul as a fellow cult member.

57

But isn’t that precisely the orthodox view, which we were supposedly challenging? That the divine Son has existed forever, took human flesh, lived on Earth for a time, and then returned to Heaven? And with Paul mentioning both Jesus’ birth “of a woman” (Gal 4:4) and his crucifixion (1 Thess 2:15), that seems to put precise boundaries on the duration of this “sojourn”.

“according to prophecies in the LXV”

LXV=65. If you’re talking about the Septuagint, that would be LXX=70.

58

The key question is not the content of the myth, but whether there’s a human being behind the myth. The Jesus Christ we all know and love is obviously a myth, prima facie a myth (i.e. even if there were a human Jesus, then much of the content of the texts would have to be understood as mythical addition, etc.) Many myths have divine beings interacting with well-known places, even well-known kings of the past, etc., so that alone isn’t proof of historicity.

The notable thing about Christianity is that it claimed for a long time to have proof of such a divine being, via eyewitness accounts (the gospels). In the 18th/19th century, with the rise of rationalism and deeper philological analysis of biblical texts, it became untenable to view the gospels as eyewitness accounts of anything, far less a divine being who’d taken on flesh and resurrected. So the search for a “historical Jesus” took shape. Initially the idea was to strip the fantastic from the story and take the quotidian remnants as evidentiary of a human being. But without provenance for the texts, that’s obviously untenable (cf. the future-archaeologists-unearth-comic book argument).

So what’s left is the historical Jesus as a hypothesis to explain the existence of the texts and the existence of the religion. But for that hypothesis to be viable, normally with historical research, you’d need some triangulation from other evidence (preferably archaeology, but other witnesses, and preferably hostile witnesses will do, and failing that, but most weakly, something internal to a text that links the author of the text to the hypothetically existing person - e.g. eyeballing, report of testimony from others, etc.).

Taking all that, the only thing that’s really left as possibly evidential of a human Jesus is the thin gruel of the James/Brother mention in Paul. That’s it. That’s the only thing that historical Jesus proponents can hold on to that’s historically sound. (Unless you simply go “hardcore”, ignore the philology and take the gospels as historical evidence; but most orthodox scholars don’t even do that nowadays, it’s a move reserved for committed Christians.)

LXV=65. If you’re talking about the Septuagint, that would be LXX=70.

Woops, yes my mistake! :)

59

I tend to agree with this. It’s difficult to express how a modern mindset might differ from a historical one, but this seems to be a case of taking modern thinking and just drawing a straight line backwards, whereas it didn’t really work that way.

Speaking of which, this conversation reminded me of tap-repeatedly’s relatively recent Rome:Total War 2 review, where Matt Sakey reveals that his degree was in the Roman History, and cites this little snippet:

60

I think we are all going to hell…i blame the Romans.