"We invented Jesus Christ"

[aitm]

oh thats going on FB, this outa.....................be...........legend......................wait for it...............dary!

[frosty]

This seems like a perfect opportunity to type up a quote from a conspiracy book I got for Christmas years ago. I forget the title of it, but it's a wide red book written by an author respected for various topics he has written on, and the book takes an interesting twist: Instead of questioning the government version of events, they question both the government version AND the conspiracy theorist points of view, making a more thought provoking book in itself. There are various incidents in the book he writes about from start to finish.

Now to my point, there is one part of the book about Jesus and it questions his origins. I remember an interesting passage where he quotes a scholar from the past that questions Jesus' origins and raises even more questions about the people that originally worshiped the concept of 'Jesus'.

The book is lying around somewhere, but when I find it, I'll write down the relevant parts in this thread. Or maybe I can make a thread of my own. But it will, or should, spark interest especially on this forum.

[Minimalist]

I've been looking for reports out of the conference about this "evidence" they claim to have.  I am suspicious that there seems to be nothing.

Silence.

{insert sound of crickets chirping}


Still nada.

Could they be lying?

[Gerard]

My position on a historical Jesus is agnostic at best..............however, confirming a person lived who was known as Jesus the Christ as reported by the Bible is useless to any believers if he was only a historical person but was not the son of God.....

.......so there is no use or value to the believer that he lived without any divinity confirmation......other than the fact that evidence for his divinity is non existent so that their wanting to debate his physical existence would end up being a moral (no pun intended) victory if they could prove it.

Now with that said it is very curious that nothing is said about Christ in the canonical gospels from the time he was a young child in the temple to his adulthood preaching. That not a very good biography of any historical account of this person........but of course the response from theists is that the gospels only account for what is relative to God's revelation to us in their text............but yet they debate using the gospels as historical evidence.....(can you say William Lame Craig?).

Interesting enough there are additional extra-biblical gospels (like the gospel of Thomas) which account for a lot of Christ's childhood and younger life which are pretty bizarre and would add to the mythological state of this person.

My best efforts in research and study of the subject tells me that their were lots of Jesus's in the first century and some of them proclaiming a prophetic status among Jewish sects..................but whether the one accounted for in the canonical text actually did exist remains unsolved.............but I'd lean in my agnostic position that it is more myth and wishful story telling among believers than historical fact.

As far as the divine claims though............that is complete fabrication as a result of embellishment and exaggeration over decades of story telling before it was even documented in a foreign land in a foreign language far removed from the source of the supposed accounts...........

I think that in the early first century and just before there were many cults in the Greek world who worshiped a Christ (anointed one), a Logos or some other intermediate between God(s) and men. That was a thing in religious philosophy in those days. Some of them may have been persons on Earth but they were mostly made up living in some sphere of the Heavens. Somehow this tradition could have syncreted with the Jewish saviour / messiah business and these many saviour cults came to be centered around the Jesus thing (whether there actually was a Jesus or not). So many Christs rather than many Jesuses. Which makes you wonder what subset of Christ followers were persecuted by Nero, or alluded to by Tacitus etc. First century "Christians" may not necessarily have been Jesus followers.

Gerard

[Youssuf Ramadan]

ISome of them may have been persons on Earth but they were mostly made up living in some sphere of the Heavens. Somehow this tradition could have syncreted with the Jewish saviour / messiah business and these many saviour cults came to be centered around the Jesus thing (whether there actually was a Jesus or not). So many Christs rather than many Jesuses. Which makes you wonder what subset of Christ followers were persecuted by Nero, or alluded to by Tacitus etc. First century "Christians" may not necessarily have been Jesus followers.

Gerard

Yeah, I was under the impression that the name Jesus didn't really exist in its own right in antiquity anyway - more that the Hebrew name Y'shua was translated through Greek (missing a Greek equivalent to the Hebrew 'sh' letter and using a sigma) and then into Latin and adding another 's' as an ending.  Sort of Y'shua to Y'sua to Y'sus.  Can't remember where I read this and I'm not completely sure that it is correct though...

 :-k