Fresh Ammunition

This is a great site. Some of you may not know about it:

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/

(WARNING: annoying music on home page. I don't know why people do that...)

Anyhow, next time some apologist claims there are "many historical references to Jesus Christ by the famous historian Josephus," just jump right here for the True Facts (tm):

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/josephus-etal.html

And there's a thread about syncretism going on right now in R&T. Read the amazing story of how Emperor Hadrian's boyfriend got turned into a god...and a stand-in for Jebus!

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/syncretism.html

Christian apologists, for their own convenience, blur the distinction between evidence of Jesus and evidence of Christians.

It is rather as if a child who believed in the Tooth Fairy was to be presented as evidence that the Tooth Fairy really existed.

I have used it in the past in some e-mail exchanges I used to have with fundies. Had forgotten about it, though, so thanks!

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=051734582X

I was reading this book two days ago, and came upon the "Josephus paragraph that's not Josephus'" there.

Go. Buy. It. Now.

Years ago, even! I raved about it in an Asimov thread. Outstanding book. I only wish it could be updated.

One of my favorite parts in it deals with an Israelite king who needed to seal a political alliance by marrying a non-Jewish woman.

This threatened the monopoly of the priesthood, which started plotting to remove the king by assassination.

The king heard about this, and solved it by the refreshingly straightforward method of killing a few priests. The rest took the hint.

Until the Buy-bull was written. The priests described the king's reign as a terrible time of famine, war, plague, misery, etc. etc.

Asimov dryly noted that they left a few things out. According to secular records, Israel under that king enjoyed 40 years of peace and plenty. It was only AFTER his death that the bad stuff happened.

Sort of reminded me of Bill Clinton...

This deserves to be posted in GD:Politics.

Sorry, don't mean to be fresh, but I've seen those sites and think they're rather silly.

We know less about Buddha (as far as I know) than we do Jesus and no one ever claims Buddha didn't exist.

The "founding" dynasty of China was always considered a mythical one, full of heroic figures and demigods and such. National Geographic just did a piece on this dynasty -- and it DID exist. Although no one is insinuating that it had demigods -- yet.

I've even read that they've found remnants of a Minos (the Minotaur legend) and the travels of the Argonauts. (Golden Fleece.) Then there's Troy. The world has certainly been full of prophets and why wouldn't some sort of a Jesus exist? (I'm taking a non-Christian POV here). At the risk of sounding presumptuous, wouldn't the better argument be that Jesus was a prophet, a teacher, even a minor one, whose life and teachings caught the eye of the powerful, and then away we went.

Jerusalem in the First Century CE had a Messiah on every street corner. I suspect the sayings, parables and miracles attributed to Jesus were hijacked from several of them. Just as the attributes of his divinity--born to a virgin impregnated by a god, miracles, death and resurrection, etc.--sound suspiciously similar to every other religion that was invented in the general neighborhood.

(I've recently been reading a bio of Alexander The Great. He was supposed to have crossed a body of water on dry land after the waters parted for him. That sure sounds familiar.)

There's a hint of the Composite Theory in the often misquoted historian, Flavius Josephus. According to him, one Messiah DID lead a religious revolt against Rome. Pontius Pilate sent the troops in and crushed the uprising. But that Messiah was Samaritan, not Jewish.

Compared to that guy, the Roman Empire could have probably done business with Jesus and his followers. Anyone who taught that people should pay their taxes and obey the established government would be a pretty good Messiah to have hanging around.

In fact, those sort of teachings probably helped Constantine to settle on Xianity as the One True Religion when he was trying to unify the Roman Empire.

As for the other examples, it's ALWAYS hard to separate reality from myth when you're talking about the founders of religions. There are good reasons for that.

The one website I see put up all the time is the Arachaya S. site, which I found very lame. (She's also a very poor writer, but I guess that's beside the point.)

Yes, you're right about not being able to separate myth from history. I suppose Jesus comes under more scrutiny than a Buddha or even Mohammed because of the vast reach and power of Christianity throughout history. Again, I see no reason to doubt the existence of a historical Jesus. Just who and what he was -- and what actually happened to him and what he did -- will probably never be settled. (The Gospel of Mark, if I'm not mistaken, has no mention of the Annunciation, Wise men, whatever. It's the earliest of the gospels unless you want to count the Gnostics, and I won't even go there for now. Though it's been a while since I've read the entire New Testament, and my memory may be faulty.)

You might want to watch for a documentary on Discovery Channel, about the life of Jesus. It's respectful (in terms of not mocking or laughing at faith) but also quite practical. For example, they posed a theory that even I, as a Christian, found interesting: that Jesus survived the crucifixion.

It was rare, but did happen, according to the historians they interviewed. They've found either firsthand accounts by survivors or eyewitnesses of crucifixions during Roman times. They suggest that survival may have morphed into a resurrection story, and that his followers would have found it quite miraculous under any circumstances, which would have been understandable.

On the gospel accounts.

Here's a great book on the subject: Who Wrote The Gospels? by Dr. Randal Helms.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0965504727/104-3030177-6967138?v=glance

I heard Helms speak once, at a Skeptic's Society meeting. He had one piece of good advice: "When you read the New Testament, always remember that you are not reading history or biography. What you're reading is propaganda. It was compiled to help spread a new religion, not as a factual account."

One of his Interesting Theories: the gospel of Luke may have been written by a woman. For one thing, it depicts Jesus and his disciples as a bunch of lazy spongers who live off the earnings of women.

For another, some of the miracles have their gender transposed. Instead of Jesus raising a centurion's little daughter from the dead, that story becomes an account of a poor widow's adult son being brought back from the dead to care for her.

That would have really appealed to women in a society where poor widows could be reduced to begging on the street if they had no male family members for support. (Helms theorizes that the writer was a widow herself, and a Gentile.)

I really doubt that anyone could have survived a Roman crucifixion. It's interesting that Islam treats the crucifixion in a similar way, though it just says that Allah took Jesus straight to Heaven, as he did Mohammed and other prophets. At least I THINK that's what it says. As usual, there is some disagreement on exactly what the deity said and meant.

That version rather neatly sidesteps the whole Resurrection business. Since Jesus never really died, no resurrection was necessary.

Apparently it did happen, according to the fellow interviewed on the Discovery Channel. And, being that it was so rare, it would have been regarded as a miracle by Jesus' followers. Again, no one is saying this DID happen -- it's just a theory like everything else.

Although some may contest the notion that Jesus et. all are portrayed as "lazy spongers," Luke's gospel is more concerned with the women in Jesus' life than any other. We have the Annunciation, Mary's visit with Elizabeth, what Catholics call the Magnificat (which I think is beautiful poetry, btw), and so forth. I seem to remember that other women, such as the Marys -- Magdalene; Mary, wife of Cleophas -- play a role in Luke.

I remember reading a book and accompanying essay which posed that the Odyssey was not written by Homer, but a woman. For one thing, there are all the homely details; feminine things, housewifely things, that a man would not think of. Compare it to the Iliad, which is war, war, and more war.

There is one problem with that theory, to my mind: the notion that men cannot assume the feminine point of view or hold a credible sympathy for women's suffering and/or culture. It's just not true. Look at the great Greek dramatists: Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, and the great women characters they created -- Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone.

There is a man named Brian Moore who wrote a remarkable book, "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne." It is the story of an Irish Catholic spinster/drunk, and how she comes to face the terrible truth about her life. The character he creates is just perfect. I still cannot believe how he, a male author, was able to so perfectly create a woman's psyche.

Well, this is very, VERY off-topic, so I'll get off my soapbox.

And we can both be off-topic!

I think there are some parallels between Homer and the Bible, in that both probably described real events but with a LOT of embellishment after the fact.

e.g., Homer describes Troy as a sprawling metropolis with those famous "topless towers." But the Troy that Schliemann et. al. found was a small place--you could walk between its east-west protective walls in about 2 minutes, IIRC.

I've read some theories that the Iliad had its roots in a trade war between Greece and Troy. And if Homer had stuck to the real facts, it would be about as interesting as reading the stock market results in the Wall Street Journal.

So was there a war between the two, as Homer described? Probably.

And during the last battle, did giant sea-serpents come out of the Aegean to swallow Laocoon and his sons? Probably not.

That's the parallel I see with the Bible--figuring out what is likely to have happened, in light of what we know about how the world actually works.

Oh, as far as "thinking like a woman," I like the story about D.H. Lawrence and his research.

He allegedly gave his wife a very thick notebook, about 200 pages, and told her: "I want you to write down everything you feel when we make love."

She's supposed to have replied: "I'll need a bigger book."

My favorite is still Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Yeah, I think I had heard that somewhere, about the trade war theory and Troy and Athens. Makes a lot of sense. You know, I'm not surprised that Troy was tiny -- after all, when you've been to the medieval castles and see how damned small they are; but to the people of the time, they must have been huge.

The Iliad is definitely my less favorite of the two; war, war, war; death, death, death. I had a prof in college who used to ask, every time we met to discuss Homer, "What was the best death you read about?" Cuz damn, there were a lot of them.

wrong reply

Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) and Mohammed were real individuals. Accounts of their lives were recorded during their lives and after their deaths. The forementioned never referred to themselves as gods or divine offspring. The founding dynasty of China was the Qin, who unified the warring states to form the China we know now. Google is your friend.

Did a Jesus exist? Yes, since Yeshua bin Yosef was a common name. Did the Biblical one exist and do everything attributed to him? That's a subject of research and debate. John Shelby Spong has quite a few books on the topic. One supposition was that the New Testament was reverse engineered to create a Messiah from the Old Testament prophets to galvanize the faithful.

I would never question otherwise. Actually, I have to wonder if even Zeus may have been a real person at one point -- a powerful king who lived on a mountain who became a god in the memories of the people as the centuries passed.

Thanks for the name of Qin dynasty -- real cool article about them in NG. Been so long ago since I've read it, couldn't remember the name.

I do object to the folks who hypothesize that Jesus was imaginary (and I have seen websites who've done this) because very few, if any, figures, legendary or otherwise, are made up out of whole cloth. Human beings are just not that imaginative, I'm afraid. For example, I've had people point out to me that all cultures have a flood legend of some sort. I say, "Of course they do. The earth's regions flood regularly."

I'm sure there was a historical Jesus, and not just because I was raised Catholic. It just makes more sense that way, at least to me. But I can certainly see why the debate continues since all we have are accounts written after his death. And everyone is entitled to their thoughts and opinions. Save for some very stupid and poorly thought-out theories I've read recently, more than a few are plausible.

of the synoptic gospels followed -- and that he made a virtually nil impact on society at his time. That's why there's no mention of him in legitimate historical sources.

Also, there may have been splicing of life histories. Not to mention the insertion of lots of fairy tale hocus pocus.

At least, that looks like the a likely explanation. YMMV.

He was a nobody, at least to the power elite, when he was crucified. But as I've said, theories are theories and we just don't know.

Bookmarked, locked and loaded.