Do you believe Jesus existed?

Ilios said:
He didn't really 'become Paul' in any meaningful sense, Paul is just a Romanisation of the Jewish 'Saul'.
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I know but his usage changed and it is interesting that although there is nothing to corroborate his execution by the the Romans by beheading except some reference in Acts by his mate Luke, a Saul is again mentioned outside Jerusalem when Titus was laying siege before the destruction of the city and Temple. Could that have been Paul.
elder said:
Didn’t Saul/Paul go blind for 3 days as well…?
Maybe they took the part out about his furious wanking?
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Allegedly but there is one description of him that states he was short, fat, bow legged and blind. I suppose he did a lot of wanking. Read Galatians and you realise that the target for his venom and vitriol in that letter is Peter, John and James the brother of Jesus. Then you realise there was a side to Paul that was pretty unpleasant. Nothing like a Christian.
 
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Certainly the jesus of the Bible never existed, the Bible is absolutely mental and I remain baffled how anybody can read that book and then say to themselves "yeah that's all perfectly rational and reasonable, I'm a believer".
But that's not to say the name or persona that some writings were based on didn't exist, there may well have been a jesus, there may well have been multiple Jesus's or non at all, it's really not that important..
All the nonsense in the Bible was wrote hundreds of years after any bloke called jesus would of lived, its all just made up nonsense that's has evolved over the centuries..
 
FritzzRider said:
Certainly the jesus of the Bible never existed, the Bible is absolutely mental and I remain baffled how anybody can read that book and then say to themselves "yeah that's all perfectly rational and reasonable, I'm a believer".
But that's not to say the name or persona that some writings were based on didn't exist, there may well have been a jesus, there may well have been multiple Jesus's or non at all, it's really not that important..
All the nonsense in the Bible was wrote hundreds of years after any bloke called jesus would of lived, its all just made up nonsense that's has evolved over the centuries..
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It is because of the supernatural claims that Jesus has become so prominent over the centuries but it appears that within the same movement there was John the Baptist before and his brother James after him. In fact after James, another of Jesus' disciples and also possibly a brother Simon the Zealot led the mission and during the Jewish Roman War that erupted soon after the murder of James, it was Simon that led the remaining followers to relative safety at Pella in Jordan although he was also eventually murdered. So we have at least 4 successive leaders of a movement that were all considered to be a threat to the authorities and were murdered as a result.

So rather than individuals perhaps it is their movement that should be seen as more significant. It is documented that the Ebionites after Jesus then followed James and Ebionite and Essene are considered synonymous by scholars. This is why Gentiles such as Paul strove to raise Jesus to the level of a God incarnate, to deliberately overshadow the movement itself which was messianic and nationalist and was clearly a threat to Roman rule and all those who collaborated with the Romans. The Dead Sea Scrolls of the Essene refer to these collaborators as prostitutes because they prostituted themselves to Rome.

Josephus refers to this movement as the Fourth Movement and describes it origin as among those who rebelled with Judas of Galilee and Zadok the Pharisee in 6 CE. Note this is the date put forward indirectly by Luke for the birth of Jesus when in fact Jesus was probably 10 years old at the time. Coincidence or hidden political reference? Was this movement really a separate movement to the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essene or just an extension of the Essene. That probably requires studying the relationship between the sects from the time of the Maccabees around 150 BCE.

So if it is the movement itself that is more significant then any individual master, then the teachings of Jesus become more important than Jesus himself because the teachings would have been consistent from John the Baptist to Simon the Zealot.
 
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FritzzRider said:
Certainly the jesus of the Bible never existed, the Bible is absolutely mental and I remain baffled how anybody can read that book and then say to themselves "yeah that's all perfectly rational and reasonable, I'm a believer".
But that's not to say the name or persona that some writings were based on didn't exist, there may well have been a jesus, there may well have been multiple Jesus's or non at all, it's really not that important..
All the nonsense in the Bible was wrote hundreds of years after any bloke called jesus would of lived, its all just made up nonsense that's has evolved over the centuries..
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It definitely wasn't written hundreds of years later, but there's a lot of fiction in it.

Paul's letters were written within 20-25 years of Jesus' life - although Paul never met Jesus, and several of 'Paul's' letters weren't written by Paul.

The Gospels were written between the year 65-100 - Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, in that order.

Mark is the first and shortest gospel. Matthew copies massive amounts of Mark (literally copy and paste, in places) and adds his own bits (and/or bits from other hypothetical documents) and throws a load of prophecy around. Luke then copies Mark and Matthew, and add other bits etc. John is quite different and is writing about 60 years after Jesus' death - although there's still evidence of knowledge of the other Gospels within it, and its probably the result of a separate 'Johannine' tradition.

None of the Gospels were written by the people's names that are attached to them, and we don't even know if our e.g 'Matthew' is what the original 'Matthew' looked like, or if what we call the Gospel of Matthew now is even the same document that ancient sources had. We know they've all been edited - both accidentally and deliberately - by scribes and translators. We also know the Gospels came out of decades of oral tradition, so by the time those stories are committed to writing, how much bullshit has been acquired by Chinese whispers over the years by people motivated to exaggerate, in order to convert others. The Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses - which would be uneducated Aramaic speakers - they were written by educated Greek-speakers decades later.

It's a big mess.
 
Mercia Blackcat said:
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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And let's not forget that Christians claim Josephus called Jesus the 'so called Christ'.

There's no way a good little Jewish boy like Josephus would have used that phrase.
 
AlpineExile said:
And let's not forget that Christians claim Josephus called Jesus the 'so called Christ'.

There's no way a good little Jewish boy like Josephus would have used that phrase.
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Totally agree. I posted earlier a list of early Christian writings and it claims that there may have been a Passion Narrative that was pre-Markan that he had access to (presumably in written form) and a group of scholars voted on each verse of the Passion Story in Mark to try and arrive at a consensus about what the pre-Markan story was. I'm not sure about such methodology because even if they arrived at an accurate version of the Passion Narrative that does not mean the story itself was true. It could still have been made up before Mark obtained a copy.

The Pre-Markan Passion Narrative

The Pre-Markan Passion Narrative on Early Christian Writings: the New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, and Church Fathers: information and translations of Gospels, Epistles, and documents of early Christianity.
www.earlychristianwritings.com

Extracting some of the lines they decided were authentic the following line came up that caught my attention straight away:

Mark 15:27 And with him they crucify two robbers, one on the right hand, and one on his left
Mark 15:29 And those passing by were speaking evil of him, shaking their heads, and saying, `Ah, the thrower down of the sanctuary, and in three days the builder!
Mark 15:32 The Christ! the king of Israel -- let him come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe;' and those crucified with him were reproaching him.

So this is around 30-32 CE and at least 20 years before Paul has coined the word Christ in his letters which is the earliest written evidence of its use. Christ being a Greek expression. This just was not a term that any Jews would have used. I can't understand how so many scholars considered it authentic as part of a Passion Narrative unless they accept that the original story was bullshit. The Ebionites who were the original followers of Jesus would never have called him that and they continued for hundreds of years to state he was simply a human being.

So even if there was such a Passion Narrative going round it could only have been Gentile propaganda.
 

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