Do you believe Jesus existed?

elder said:
I have acknowledged it and again they were from way after he was supposedly lived and just reference him, they dont validate or prove that he lived. they don't provide any documentary evidence of his life, or more importantly from a Roman perspective his trial and execution. the video that PinzaC55 posted discusses it and I also responded to the guardian article that Turner the Cat posted.

I also accept that he may have existed, which some athiests, jews other non christians accept. I just don't think he did and am just tired of people pointing to be bible as proof he existed.
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You did acknowledge the Guardian article I submitted by a renowned scholar of antiquity - by completely dismissing it. This was after claiming there were writings on King Arthur from the time of King Arthur when that simply isn't true. What you have to understand with the gospels anyway is that they are likely based on previously written proto gospels and they, in turn were likely based on smaller written statements people had made of sayings made by Jesus. Can we prove that? No, but scholars think it likely and as an aside, we dont have originals of most documents from antiquity anywhere. What is clear is the evidence for Jesus meets the accepted criteria in historical scholarship to believe he probably existed as a historical figure. Instead, you're putting your faith in people who run phone in shows on youtube. One is a cartoonist, one is an activist and the one who wrote the book is not a credible historian, has no phd, no history working in academia and also writes scifi books on time travel.
 


Turner the Cat said:
You did acknowledge the Guardian article I submitted by a renowned scholar of antiquity - by completely dismissing it. This was after claiming there were writings on King Arthur from the time of King Arthur when that simply isn't true. What you have to understand with the gospels anyway is that they are likely based on previously written proto gospels and they, in turn were likely based on smaller written statements people had made of sayings made by Jesus. Can we prove that? No, but scholars think it likely and as an aside, we dont have originals of most documents from antiquity anywhere. What is clear is the evidence for Jesus meets the accepted criteria in historical scholarship to believe he probably existed as a historical figure. Instead, you're putting your faith in people who run phone in shows on youtube. One is a cartoonist, one is an activist and the one who wrote the book is not a credible historian, has no phd, no history working in academia and also writes scifi books on time travel.
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nope, i claimed the opposite. if that wasn't clear then i'm clearing it up now.

we're going around in circles. "what you have to understand" is i don't believe he existed (though it's possible he may have) and you nor anyone else can prove that he did. end of story. there's no point either of us wasting the other's time over it.
 
elder said:
nope, i claimed the opposite. if that wasn't clear then i'm clearing it up now.

we're going around in circles. "what you have to understand" is i don't believe he existed (though it's possible he may have) and you nor anyone else can prove that he did. end of story. there's no point either of us wasting the other's time over it.
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Maybe not proof but some people might like to persuade you otherwise using arguments that do suggest the historicy of Jesus.
 
elder said:
nope, i claimed the opposite. if that wasn't clear then i'm clearing it up now.

we're going around in circles. "what you have to understand" is i don't believe he existed (though it's possible he may have) and you nor anyone else can prove that he did. end of story. there's no point either of us wasting the other's time over it.
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But how do you explain the extraordinary efforts made by people like Paul, Mark, Luke and others to counter the claim of the Ebionites that Jesus was a human being to create a belief system based on a supernatural Son of God born from a virgin. So what was going on that motivated such a response if Jesus didn't exist. There must obviously be some background story to explain their campaign that even attempted to airbrush the family of Jesus out of history. Why the deliberate obfuscation over someone if they didn't exist?
 
Mercia Blackcat said:
But how do you explain the extraordinary efforts made by people like Paul, Mark, Luke and others to counter the claim of the Ebionites that Jesus was a human being to create a belief system based on a supernatural Son of God born from a virgin. So what was going on that motivated such a response if Jesus didn't exist. There must obviously be some background story to explain their campaign that even attempted to airbrush the family of Jesus out of history. Why the deliberate obfuscation over someone if they didn't exist?
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The clumsy, disorganised and widely discrepant sources about Jesus' life from very partisan and unreliable, non-eyewitness sources, certainly pose a huge problem to historicity. There's also tremendous amounts of word-for-word copying in the synoptics - the relationship between those writers was a literary one, not one of any shared experience.

However, because of some of this clumsiness, it does make more sense I think that a real person existed around whom a lot of wild nonsense was added onto, and certain elements of his life were deliberately altered and forced to fit - especially by Matthew, who wants to bend and twist Jesus inside out to make him try and fit 20 prophecies per sentence 😄.
 
I've always liked this Douglas Adams quote from 'Hitchhikers':

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”​

 
Rick O Shea said:
I've always liked this Douglas Adams quote from 'Hitchhikers':

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”​

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Taken from the religious believe that the earh is a supercomputer programmed to answer the biggest philisophical question ever. Meh. I'ts a theory just like any other.
 
Rick O Shea said:
I've always liked this Douglas Adams quote from 'Hitchhikers':

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change”​

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Reminds me of a quote attributed to Nietzsche “There was only one Christian, and they killed him”
 
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Ilios said:
The clumsy, disorganised and widely discrepant sources about Jesus' life from very partisan and unreliable, non-eyewitness sources, certainly pose a huge problem to historicity. There's also tremendous amounts of word-for-word copying in the synoptics - the relationship between those writers was a literary one, not one of any shared experience.

However, because of some of this clumsiness, it does make more sense I think that a real person existed around whom a lot of wild nonsense was added onto, and certain elements of his life were deliberately altered and forced to fit - especially by Matthew, who wants to bend and twist Jesus inside out to make him try and fit 20 prophecies per sentence 😄.
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Matthew loved a good prophesy so much that every one he used was out of context like this one:

Matthew 1:23: "'Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,' which means, 'God is with us.'".

This references Isaiah 7:14: "therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: the maiden is with child and she will bear a son, and will call his name Immanuel".

The word translated here as "maiden" is almah, meaning a young woman of childbearing age rather than a virgin. Matthew, however, used the Greek translation of Isaiah rather than the Hebrew original, and the word that appears there is parthenos, meaning virgin.

Old Testament messianic prophecies quoted in the New Testament - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Because of this I find it hard to accept he was Hebrew as he would have been ridiculed by his fellow Hebrews.

It is the same with Stephen in Acts. Stephens speech in Acts 07:16 makes an error taken from Joshua 24:32 as he identifies Abraham's tomb as bought from the Sons of Hamor in Shechem and not the one a hundred miles further south bought from Ephron the Hittite at Mamrein Hebron. Joshua's ancestor Joseph's burial place was bought by Jacob from the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem. This would have been laughed at and ridiculed in the Sanhedrin. The fact Stephen (a Hellenised name) would be making a speech about the history of the Jews to the Sanhedrin is ludicrous.

Joshua 24:32 And Joseph’s bones, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem in the tract of land that Jacob bought for a hundred pieces of silver from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem. This became the inheritance of Joseph’s descendants.

Acts 07:15 Then Jacob went down to Egypt, where he and our ancestors died.
Acts 07:16 Their bodies were brought back to Shechem and placed in the tomb that Abraham had bought from the sons of Hamor at Shechem for a certain sum of money.

Clearly only a Gentile like Luke could make such a fundamental mistake of confusing the tombs of Abraham and Joseph which tends to indicate that Stephen was ficticious.
 
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Rick O Shea said:
I've always liked this Douglas Adams quote from 'Hitchhikers':

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”​

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Bloody Vogons.
😠
 
Mercia Blackcat said:
But how do you explain the extraordinary efforts made by people like Paul, Mark, Luke and others to counter the claim of the Ebionites that Jesus was a human being to create a belief system based on a supernatural Son of God born from a virgin. So what was going on that motivated such a response if Jesus didn't exist. There must obviously be some background story to explain their campaign that even attempted to airbrush the family of Jesus out of history. Why the deliberate obfuscation over someone if they didn't exist?
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again with the bible… How may times for fuck’s sake :lol:
 
elder said:
again with the bible… How may times for fuck’s sake :lol:
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But that is where the conflict has been recorded. So was it political rather than religious? Paul under the name Saul prosecutes the early followers of Jesus. He claims to be a Jew and a Pharisee but may have been a Herodian through marriage if not by birth. The Herodians were Greco-Arabs rather than Jews. Paul is also a Roman citizen and at times when he gets in trouble there is usually a Roman cohort nearby to come to his rescue. He nearly murders James but then has his supernatural conversion, so he claims. Suddenly Saul becomes Paul and judging from his letters, he works from within to destroy the mission in Jerusalem led by James.

On the other side is the resistance, what Josephus refers to as the Fourth Movement in addition to the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essene. Classed as Zealots, their extreme wing was the Sicarii known as Assassins and the Avenging Priests who carried concealed curved daggers. These may have been wings of the Essene who also included the Ebionites (The Poor) who were the real early followers of Jesus and James. There would have been Zealots and Sicarii among his followers too.

John the Baptist was really executed by Herod because Herod was paranoid that because John was so popular among the people he could launch a rebellion against him even though John had expressed no such intent. The reason for John's murder was political and not because of the silly story in the Bible which Josephus confirms. In 6 CE Judas of Galilee and Zadik the Pharisee lead a rebellion that is defeated and ends with the death of Judas. Two of his sons would later be killed in rebellion. Just to be a Galilean was enough to be of suspicion in Judea and along rolls Jesus and a bunch of Galileans. Crucified for sedition by the Romans he is succeeded by his brother James.

Jesus lasted 2 years and James would last around 35 before he too was murdered but James had been accepted as Zaddik (Righteous Teacher) by all the messianic sects in Palestine so that didn't go down well and must have been a major factor that lead to the Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE. This time the Sicarii did exact revenge on those who plotted the murder of James. By the end of it, Jerusalem had been raised to the ground and the Temple destroyed. Escaping the genocide that followed all of the messianic sects fled abroad including the Essene who his their scrolls at Qumran but never returned. At Masada the Sicarii made their last stand.

How can you remove events in the New Testament from that? It was political rather than religious, Propaganda written by Gentiles that was antisemitic was allowed to flourish unchallenged. Many of the characters in the Gospels were central to that struggle.
 
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Mercia Blackcat said:
But that is where the conflict has been recorded. So was it political rather than religious? Paul under the name Saul prosecutes the early followers of Jesus. He claims to be a Jew and a Pharisee but may have been a Herodian through marriage if not by birth. The Herodians were Greco-Arabs rather than Jews. Paul is also a Roman citizen and at times when he gets in trouble there is usually a Roman cohort nearby to come to his rescue. He nearly murders James but then has his supernatural conversion, so he claims. Suddenly Saul becomes Paul and judging from his letters, he works from within to destroy the mission in Jerusalem led by James.

On the other side is the resistance, what Josephus refers to as the Fourth Movement in addition to the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essene. Classed as Zealots, their extreme wing was the Sicarii known as Assassins and the Avenging Priests who carried concealed curved daggers. These may have been wings of the Essene who also included the Ebionites (The Poor) who were the real early followers of Jesus and James. There would have been Zealots and Sicarii among his followers too.

John the Baptist was really executed by Herod because Herod was paranoid that because John was so popular among the people he could launch a rebellion against him even though John had expressed no such intent. The reason for John's murder was political and not because of the silly story in the Bible which Josephus confirms. In 6 CE Judas of Galilee and Zadik the Pharisee lead a rebellion that is defeated and ends with the death of Judas. Two of his sons would later be killed in rebellion. Just to be a Galilean was enough to be of suspicion in Judea and along rolls Jesus and a bunch of Galileans. Crucified for sedition by the Romans he is succeeded by his brother James.

Jesus lasted 2 years and James would last around 35 before he too was murdered but James had been accepted as Zaddik (Righteous Teacher) by all the messianic sects in Palestine so that didn't go down well and must have been a major factor that lead to the Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE. This time the Sicarii did exact revenge on those who plotted the murder of James. By the end of it, Jerusalem had been raised to the ground and the Temple destroyed. Escaping the genocide that followed all of the messianic sects fled abroad including the Essene who his their scrolls at Qumran but never returned. At Masada the Sicarii made their last stand.

How can you remove events in the New Testament from that? It was political rather than religious, Propaganda written by Gentiles that was antisemitic was allowed to flourish unchallenged. Many of the characters in the Gospels were central to that struggle.
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Didn’t Saul/Paul go blind for 3 days as well…?
Maybe they took the part out about his furious wanking?
 
elder said:
nope, i claimed the opposite. if that wasn't clear then i'm clearing it up now.

we're going around in circles. "what you have to understand" is i don't believe he existed (though it's possible he may have) and you nor anyone else can prove that he did. end of story. there's no point either of us wasting the other's time over it.
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Of course he existed, and looked just like a younger Robert Powell, complete with long flowing locks.
 

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