haha you shit head. JESUS WAS HISTORICALLY PROVEN TO HAVE LIVED BITCH! THERE IS LOTS OF EVEDENCE UR JUST GONNA BURN IN HELL
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Papabear - Can't recall if I've posted this before, but an author I read once gave a convincing, Biblical-only proof that Jesus must have existed. But no fundie will ever accept it, because the argument relies on stories from the Gospels contradicting Old Testament expectations and prophecies about the Messiah. Had the Gospel writers simply manufactured Jesus out of their imagination, then the Gospel stories would have agreed completely with all the OT prophecies with no disagreement or incongruity. The fact that several parts of Jesus's story (baptism by John, dying, etc.) contradicted the OT prophecies regarding the Messiah, and thus had to be explained away somehow, suggests that Jesus really did exist.
Of course, that's not "historically proving" that Jesus existed, it's merely providing a strong logical argument for his existence. This person is just another one of those self-declared religious zealots sitting near the bottom rungs of society and education, taking entirely too much glee in the fantasy of the roasting of all those people that are better than him/her... a pretty large lot, I'd say.
MK -- Yes, I believe I've read that or something like it. I think it may have been Price or Carrier. His main idea was that Jesus wouldn't have come from an unimportant backwater such as Galilee if he was fictional. Still doesn't work for me.
Explaining away other problems in the story is likely because there were several or more versions going around that got compiled, such as what happened with the Genesis creation and flood stories.
My position is that the biblical Jesus, the one doing miracles, has not been proven to have existed.
MK & Papabear: Yes, I'm pretty much with you on this. Also, there being a real personage behind the formation of the cult makes much more sense than the idea that some people simply decided to make it up out of whole cloth; mythology and religion rarely start like that.
Papabear and MK: Of course a lot of this depends on how you define terms like "messiah." For myself, I find arguments in favor of a hellenistic demigod as hebrew messiah totally unconvincing. As I also find arguments that offer up OT and NT discrepancies as proof.
As to the historicity of jesus, well, There was most likely a "messiah" figure behind the sacarii movement. And he was most likely executed with everyone else by the romans during Flavius Titus' campaign in judea. And that "messiah" is most definitely NOT the demigod of the gospels narratives. IMO
There's evidence of a character that Jesus was based on. Evidence of Jesus, the Son Of God (tm)? I'm sure we're all dying to see it.
You're the one who, according to Jesus' teaching, is going to be burning in hell.
MK & Papabear: Yes, I'm pretty much with you on this. Also, there being a real personage behind the formation of the cult makes much more sense than the idea that some people simply decided to make it up out of whole cloth; mythology and religion rarely start like that.
True enough.
I should add one thing to what I mentioned about Jesus's baptism. The fact the he was baptised, in itself, isn't the only thing that had to be explained, but that he was baptised by John was especially important - if you know your history.
Around the same time that Jesus's followers were promoting Jesus as the Messiah, John's followers were promoting John as the Messiah. John made even more sense, because John's traits and activities meshed better with OT prophecies regarding the messiah. This was quite a problem for the Gospel writers to overcome in their day - their narrative of Jesus not only had to promote Jesus as Messiah, but dismiss John as Messiah.
Trouble was that baptism event. If it hadn't happened, or if it wasn't a well-known event, it wouldn't have been written into the Gospels (all four, I must add). Apparently it did happen and was a well-known event, and could easily have been the John-supporters' main evidence that Jesus was inferior to John, and thus couldn't be the Messiah. Thus, the Gospels record the event as occurring, but each one puts words into Jesus's and John's mouths to make it sound like John is deferring to Jesus, acknowledging himself as inferior to Jesus.
More likely, Jesus hung out at the Jordan for a while and learned a lot from John, was actually baptised by him, and began his radical preaching thereafter. It does say that at the outset he preached the same message that John did, so clearly there was some bond between them. Jesus might well have been John's disciple until John was executed, and Jesus may have taken it on himself to continue the ministry.
And of course, it was only later, when the Gospels were written, that the miracles and such were added in. It's well documented by Biblical scholars and historians that many of the miracles that are attributed to Jesus are exactly the same kinds of miracles attributed to other miracle-workers of that day and age. This is more clearly the realm of the individual Gospel-writers' imagination filling in, because the Gospels don't agree on the miracles (John's miracles are very different from the other three, many in John don't show in the others, etc.).
JESUS WAS HISTORICALLY PROVEN TO HAVE LIVED BITCH!
I need to put this on a poster of some sort, its just that great a line.
The scholarship casting doubt on the historical existence of Jesus is impressive. The story seems to be a confabulation of Jewish messiah expectations, pagan mythology and perhaps Hellenic philosophizing. Further, messiahs and miracle workers were a dime a dozen in the early First Century. What's more a great many of the man-gods of the Mystery Religions had identical biographies, from virgin birth to rising from the dead. By the time of Jesus you couldn't get into the gods' bowling league if you hadn't risen from the dead. It was old hat. But real or fictional, there was nothing to distinguish Jesus from his predecessor man-gods. Most telling is the fact that the Jews were notable historians and the Romans virtually invented bureaucratic record-keeping. If a sparrow broke his tail in Upper Gaul, there was a scribe there to report it to the emperor. But contemorary records of Jews and Romans make no mention of Jesus. Nor, it would appear, did a single person living at the time make mention of a man who defied Jewish religious authority and Roman civil authority, drew huge throngs, worked miracles and arose from the dead. But hell, maybe they were all just busy.
Well, there is something you have to bear in mind. Flavius Josephus and many other contemporary Roman historians and Jewish alike indeed document the presence of a man called Jeshua and they say that he was or appeared to be the typical mad preacher of the times. However, they don´t spend too much energy in portraying him because, as one of the guys here quoted, he was as irrelevant to them as it would be for us today Al-Qaeda´s milkman or Bush´s chauffeur. Indeed, you have to place it in context of a very convoluted land in which mad preachers encouraged the population to be more religious or, more frightenly, a series of guerrilla like people slaughtered their own country men and Romans in order to impose their ideas. Now, there is not a single document that can guarantee two facts. One, that this person is the same person as the Gospels and, most important, that he is accurately the son of God according to the Gospels, let alone that somebody is going to Hell for questioning it. It´s a matter of faith, and there is no way you can look at it.
Even if a man named Jesus was proven to have existed (and he hasn't) it would do nothing to prove he was god, the son of god, capable of arising from the dead, walking on water, or any of that other shit.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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