Historical Jesus, Biblical Jesus

[Minimalist]

Feel free to write your story.  Just have the decency to label it "FICTION," unlike the 4 scumbags who wrote out those fucking gospels!

[jimhabegger]

Feel free to write your story.  Just have the decency to label it "FICTION," ...

Thanks. The only change to my story for now would be in what happens to Paul, when he decides to create his new religion. For the rest, I'm doing some more reading. For example:

Collective Memory and the Reliability of the Gospel Traditions

"The continued presence in Christian communities of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry until the time when these events were recorded is a guarantee only of the community’s agreed version, not of the exact details of the event itself."

[Dom]

Feel free to write your story.  Just have the decency to label it "FICTION," ...

Thanks. The only change to my story for now would be in what happens to Paul, when he decides to create his new religion. For the rest, I'm doing some more reading. For example:

Collective Memory and the Reliability of the Gospel Traditions

"The continued presence in Christian communities of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry until the time when these events were recorded is a guarantee only of the community’s agreed version, not of the exact details of the event itself."

We all agree how the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood goes, too.

[jimhabegger]

The only change to my story for now would be in what happens to Paul, when he decides to create his new religion. For the rest, I'm doing some more reading. For example:

Collective Memory and the Reliability of the Gospel Traditions

"The continued presence in Christian communities of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry until the time when these events were recorded is a guarantee only of the community’s agreed version, not of the exact details of the event itself."

We all agree how the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood goes, too.

Yes, but there's still a question of how well the story would be remembered after 50 or 100 years, if we didn't have it in writing. For example, maybe it could change into "Little Wolf and the Big Green Flying Sombrero," with little wolf going to his cousin's house instead of his grandmother's house. That's what I'm hoping to learn about in my reading.

[Minimalist]

The earliest written variant of LRRH dates to the 11th century.... and it had apparently been circulating for centuries prior to that.

It was finally written down in the 17th.

https://www.medievalists.net/2013/11/the...hood-tale/


I wouldn't rely on humans to remember anything at all.

[jimhabegger]

The Three Little Pixies and the big bad fox:

The Three Little Pixies (weebly.com)

"... the earliest known version of the story actually features not pigs, but pixies."

The pixies in the fox story live in an oddly domestic colony; two who dwell in wooden and stone houses are eaten. The fox, in search of prey, knocks at each door and calls "Let me in, let me in" before breaking the house open. However, a clever third pixie lives in an iron house which the fox can't break into. At the end, the fox finally captures the pixy in a box. However, the pixy uses a magical charm to trick him into switching places, and the fox dies.

This is not going well for my Jesus story ...

Maybe if I read some historical Jesus stories, I can get some ideas about how to squirm out of this. 

(later)

Goldilocks And the Three Bears:

Actually she didn't have a name at all.

And she wasn't a pretty girl either.

We have a strong case to believe she wasn't even a human being!

The History Behind the Story of Goldilocks - Owlcation

Another version of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Goldilocks":

Anguish Languish (crockford.com)

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers

Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe hat search putty yowler coils debt pimple colder Guilty Looks. Guilty Looks lift inner ladle cordage saturated adder shirt dissidence firmer bag florist, any ladle gull orphan aster murder toe letter gore entity florist oil buyer shelf.

The translations are left ashen exorcise.

[Chas]

bla bla bla

The Gospel according to Eider :

It's not deism without a deity, by definition.

To further your education, an attempt at reducing your ignorance:-

My Deism recognises that everything all together is 'one', but not aware of or involves with us.
But there is a 'controlling force' that 'rules' here, within this universe, this tiny part of everything, and you, me and everyone, everything is governed by that controller.  It's not bothered with us but we should be bothered about it.

Now let's see you apply your iq or your insults to that one.  Take care..... you don't want to look daft again, like when you didn't understand what a deposition is.

That's not even close to atheism.

[eider]

That's not even close to atheism.

Correct........ I'm a deist. 

[eider]

We all agree how the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood goes, too.

I believe that there are some rather different and quite shocking versions circulating up in the cloud, or wherever.

[jimhabegger]

I'm a deist.

You need post your definition of "deist" whenever you tell someone that, because there isn't any place on the Internet where "deist" is defined by deists the way that you define it, so there's no way for anyone to know what you mean by it without you telling them. The only people that I found defining it the way you do were people who were not deists, disparaging deism.

The True and False Definitions of Deism (World Union of Deists)

(bolding mine)

I decided to Google "what is deism", and here is the first thing that I saw:

"de·ism /dē-izəm/
Noun
Belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe."

That is a common definition of Deism, and I will refer to it from this point on as "the Google definition." Part of the Google definition I agree with, and part of it I disagree with. I agree that Deism is the "belief in the existence of a supreme being," but I disagree with the part that states "specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe." I am convinced that some "revealed" religionists have lied throughout the years to distort the true definition of Deism in order to make Deism look worse and their religion/religions look better.

[eider]

I meant, it looks to me like none of the people that I've seen promoting a historical Jesus have any real ground to stand on, for saying that their story is about a real person. I'm not sure if you were responding to that or not. Are you saying that seeing things in the gospel stories that Christianity tries to hide, and/or not seeing anything in Paul's letters about a real person, are reasons for thinking that your Jesus story is about a real person?

Yes........ I do believe that much of the gospel of Mark is a real account based upon the memoirs of a witness and written by an occasional witness,  I also take interest in any negatives in any of the gospels.  

One example from several:
Understanding that Christianity fiddled and messed with the accounts I often wonder why Christianity left negative/unhelpful reports in them........  It would have been so easy to redact any mentions about Jesus valuing his friends first, and to pop in verses which told that Jesus was really in to his Mum and siblings, so why not? OK, so G-John tried to at the end, a pathetic attempt at best, but G-Mark told the exact opposite. 
So....why did Christianity not just cut and paste its own, throughout (as in Josephus' entry) , rather than just here-and-there?

Could it have been that the early believers were scared silly about cutting out pieces right out of the gospels in places? Sure, they dared to crank the account as with the Barabbas story, and they turned the tales of Jesus enjoying his grog with rotters in to being 'nasty stories by enemies'......  but they left so many of them there for consideration.

Yes, I think there's a man who caused trouble in there, and I think that Christianity is massively stressed by proposals that Jesus was just a name used by Paul (and others) for a theocracy based upon fear, which it was. People just accusing Christianity of madness doesn't seem to bother it, it just decides that the devil is driving them, or whatever......

[jimhabegger]

... I think that Christianity is massively stressed by proposals that Jesus was just a name used by Paul (and others) for a theocracy based upon fear ...

Where do you see signs of Christianity being massively stressed by those proposals? Can you give me some examples?

(later) There might not be anyone in this discussion besides you and Free who are thinking of denouncing or discrediting religious beliefs as a way of trying to change them or what people do with them. For everyone else, it might be a kind of … sexual orientation?   I’ve seen it described that way many times. For example, “I just like fucking with them.”

[jimhabegger]

I meant, it looks to me like none of the people that I've seen promoting a historical Jesus have any real ground to stand on, for saying that their story is about a real person. I'm not sure if you were responding to that or not. Are you saying that seeing things in the gospel stories that Christianity tries to hide, and/or not seeing anything in Paul's letters about a real person, are reasons for thinking that your Jesus story is about a real person?

Yes ...

I've seen that argument used by people promoting a historical Jesus, that anything in Christian writings that embarrasses Christians can be considered as true, because if people were inventing the stories, they wouldn't put anything into them that would embarrass them. I'm wondering if there has ever been any empirical validation, or any validation from people with training and experience in psychology and sociology, of any of the amateur psychology and sociology theories that are used in promoting any historical Jesus or Christ myth theory.

[jimhabegger]

If a person wants to believe something, or wants other people to believe it, that could possibly explain why they’re saying it, but it is not a reason for thinking that it's false, and it doesn't add anything to any arguments against it.

[eider]

If a person wants to believe something, or wants other people to believe it, that could possibly explain why they’re saying it, but it is not a reason for thinking that it's false, and it doesn't add anything to any arguments against it.

.....if you say so..... Jim.

[eider]

The quest for a historical Jesus has never been, and will likely never be "a conspiracy to discredit and defame Christianity".  None other than christians are trying to prove such a person exists.  Why would anyone else be interested in trying?

The above was sent to another, and Jim certainly isn't a Christian!
The majority of HJ writers that I have read do not believe in any but a man, so your paragraph above just shows that you haven't read them; One example out of many, Crosson describes a Jewish peasant with some abilities, a peasant with a veryu few followers, shuffling from one community to next offering a kind of 'magic for meal' deal. So how come you describe such as Crosson as a Christian? That's just ignorant.

I've been more than polite to you. You write well and present your best arguments and some christians don't do that well. 

You referred to Jim as if he's a Christian, so you certainly aren't polite, rather you seek to upset, methinks?

But I think it is time for me to just say that your posts clearly demonstrate you are are trying to promote a christian viewpoint in careful ways.  Not that it changes my mind in any way.  I'm just going to stop bothering to read your posts.  I know what you are trying to do.  It isn't affecting me  and I know nothing I say will affect you.  

It gets pointless after a while.

Hello "ignore" setting...

And over the extremist's 'event horizon' Jim goes, eh?   
Come on....... send me over too......  in to the black hole with Eider......Swoooooosh! Arghhhhhh!

[eider]

I wrote:-
<Drivel snip>We can read that even the Baptist (in prison) had heard about Jesus drinking too much and being with very unpleasant mates. Christianity tries to hide/deny that so maybe it is true?

And you asked for a citation.
Read Matthew:-11.2-18
The Baptist was clearly worried about what he had heard. And in 11:3 John asks 'Are you the one?' which, by the way, smashes all that stuff about those two being related in any way.

I wrote:- We can read that Jesus lead a very violent riot in the Temple, trashing the money-bazaar, and that he had enough followers to picket the Temple courts. Christianity prefers to push that incident in to the background, so maybe it is true?
and you replied:-

Push it into the background? And here's me thinking the church promotes the money changer yarn as a vital part of the story?

By the time Paul was writing his letters there was NO MENTION of the above event, and in G-John the authors just popped a minor version of that event in to (about) the third week of his mission.
The Church took that event right out of the last week, to ensure that it could not be the reason for any arrest. 
Which church were you thinking of?

And I wrote:- ..................   the more one searches so the more can be found that Christianity doesn't want to focus upon.

Excellent; now where can I find it?

In the gospels........ time to get searching for answers, then you might remember them, maybe?

[Bucky Ball]

To further your education, an attempt at reducing your ignorance:-

My Deism recognizes that everything all together is 'one', but not aware of or involves with us.
But there is a 'controlling force' that 'rules' here, within this universe, this tiny part of everything, and you, me and everyone, everything is governed by that controller.  It's not bothered with us but we should be bothered about it.

Now let's see you apply your iq or your insults to that one.  Take care..... you don't want to look daft again, like when you didn't understand what a deposition is.

That's not even close to atheism.

I get what a deposition is. The problem YOU never referenced or supported it in any way with references.
You slapped a modern concept on an ancient culture. It's not unusual for amateurs to commit Presentism.
Seems like you are doing quite a lot of reading my posts which you claimed you mostly ignore.
LOL

My Deism recognizes that everything all together is 'one', but not aware of or involves with us.
But there is a 'controlling force' that 'rules' here, within this universe, this tiny part of everything, and you, me and everyone, everything is governed by that controller.  It's not bothered with us but we should be bothered about it.

LOL. Clearly YOU are more than "bothered" by it. Thanks for the sermon. You cannot even "define" what you're talking about.
Your rubbish is dismissed and the crap it is.

But that's all nice, and you are correct in saying "my deism". It's a nice fantasy you have there.
It's "your" deism alone. It's no one else's definition of deism.
Your "force" is not one that is recognized by science. You have no evidence that one force controls everything, and in fact
we know from Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle, that fundamentally nothing is "controlled".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

We also know that order arises in this universe spontaneously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theo...gularities.
Your "force" is unknown, unnecessary, unseen, undetected.
Why would you possibly think you would be seen to be in a position to dish out advice about what we should be concerned with ?
What you're describing is the very essence of an abusive relationship.

You posit a force because you never took a science class.
How about you tell us exactly what this force controls, how that control is different from the ones sciences describes, and then tell us how this control works.
Obviously you made this up from nothing, and have no evidence for it.

But you can do one thing, for sure. Connect dots in the gospels.

[mordant]

Feel free to write your story.  Just have the decency to label it "FICTION," ...

Thanks. The only change to my story for now would be in what happens to Paul, when he decides to create his new religion. For the rest, I'm doing some more reading. For example:

Collective Memory and the Reliability of the Gospel Traditions

"The continued presence in Christian communities of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry until the time when these events were recorded is a guarantee only of the community’s agreed version, not of the exact details of the event itself."

I'm put in mind of how often in the US we have a collective agreement on certain things that aren't really true at all. For example, large numbers of people agree that the US was "founded as a Christian nation". There was certainly a strong Protestant default consensus but the founders were more properly Deists which is very different from what a modern Fundamentalist would consider properly "Christian" and both of those things are very different from how a Catholic would view matters. There's a consensus that proto-america was a wild, untamed and basically uninhabited wilderness that conveniently ignores the brutal subjugation and cultural rape of the indigenous peoples by the US (and Canada), countries that view themselves as basically aways on the side of truth and justice. There's general consensus that capitalism has no "dark side" at all and that competing economic systems must inherently and invariably degenerate into totalitarianism, and that hybrid systems are slippery slopes rather than potential balance points.

So yes ... there was "the community's agreed version" of Christianity, which need have nothing at all to do necessarily with what actually was true. Indeed, with evidence mounting that there were many competing "orthodoxies", some very different from the one that actually won out in the end, it seems that the "community consensus" that survives to this day may be heavily slanted, given that early Christians disagreed about basic things like whether Jesus was a flesh and blood god-man or an apparition or something in between.

[Rhythmcs]

Yes........ I do believe that much of the gospel of Mark is a real account based upon the memoirs of a witness and written by an occasional witness,  I also take interest in any negatives in any of the gospels.  

One example from several:
Understanding that Christianity fiddled and messed with the accounts I often wonder why Christianity left negative/unhelpful reports in them........  It would have been so easy to redact any mentions about Jesus valuing his friends first, and to pop in verses which told that Jesus was really in to his Mum and siblings, so why not? OK, so G-John tried to at the end, a pathetic attempt at best, but G-Mark told the exact opposite. 
So....why did Christianity not just cut and paste its own, throughout (as in Josephus' entry) , rather than just here-and-there?

Well, beyond the fact that you're aware of it trying to do exactly that - because they weren't completely free to pick whatever they wanted and there was no attempt to resolve all of these narratives when they were created.  None of them were ever meant to be collected into a single book.

This is generally considered to be the argument of inconvenience or embarrassment, and beyond the fact that they did engage in the behavior and didn't have free reign to do more of it...you really don't know what would have been inconvenient or embarrassing to the authors.  

People apply this sort of thinking to nazareth, for example.  I believe chris hitchens thought that was a convincing argument to the historicity of the character.  That no one would twist themselves into the knots the NT twists itself into to make jesus came from nazareth unless he was actually from nazareth.

John provides another reason. Can anything good come out of nazareth, it has one of it's characters ask, suggesting that the place was viewed as unimportant and lowly. You see, the author of john doesn't find anything embarrassing about it's god having come from a lowly and unimportant place - rather, that's yet another demonstration of it's power and ability, that it is a god.

There are others.

[Minimalist]

Excellent points, Mord.


I, for one, am eager to read Jim's Story of Frank.  Fuck knows the tale could use some updating.  Not every sequel is worse than the original.  Just look at Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan.  Far better than Star Trek I!

[Bucky Ball]

That's not even close to atheism.

Correct........ I'm a deist. 

Actually he's not.
He made up his own personal definition, and then applied it to himself.
There is no deity in his definition, thus it's not what 99.9 % of readers of the word "deism" understand ... the common definition.

[Minimalist]

Deism itself was invented to explain the unexplainable.

Honestly, is any of it more or less stupid than this?

In Mayan culture, Tepeu the maker and Gucumatz the feathered spirit created the world with their thoughts. They created beings to look after their creation. First, they made animals of the sky and land but needed a being that could properly communicate, so they made man. They made him out of clay, but he crumbled apart. Then, they tried making him out of wood but he was empty-headed and hearted. Finally, they made men out of corn, and these men were empathetic and intelligent.

[Rhythmcs]

It's fun to see the abrahamic and norse creation myths generative themes both described as leading to malfunctioning rejects of a human being in one quick passage from mesoamerica. Poetic justice.

[Minimalist]

I hate to be the one to break it to the Mayans but they're wrong about the wooden empty headed and hearted ones.  They all became republiKKKunts!