(07-26-2022, 03:27 AM)Minimalist Wrote: That's quite accurate, Epy. What the modern Historical Jesus crowd gets wrong is their own place in the chronology.That's your first mistake. You've bunched 'the HJ crowd' all together as if they think and move as one.
Quote:For 1250 years there was only one jesus. The biblical jesus. Anyone who questioned that risked execution by these loving xhristards! Early Enlightenment scholars began questioning that story and eventually came up with the idea that jesus was just another ancient myth. The jesus freaks defended their hero with everything they could muster but by the later 19th century the tide was turning against them. Darwin had a lot to do with that. The BJ story could not survive many hits and retain its credibility. It was only towards the later 19th century that anyone started trying to dumb jesus down into something which could be called a "Historical Jesus" just, as you said, a cult leader who got himself killed but didn't or couldn't do any magic tricks.Yes, I reckon that's right....... Any who questioned any part of 'church' was dead very quickly. And until last century it was dangerous to question church; closed groups kept challengers out of society, work, everything.
Quote: The HJ crowd loves to pretend that they are in battle with the Mythicists but they really aren't.No...... the true HJ crowd just research HJ. Mythers are no problem to Christianity nor much interference upon HJ folks.
Christianity stumbles when in conversation with competent HJ researchers. Christianity doesn't seem to bother with mythers.
Quote:They have conceded the field. No one cares if there was some dumbass who got himself killed. He is a historical irrelevancy. It was the BJ who unleashed the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Wars of the Reformation on the world. It was the BJ that had to be opposed so that humanity could break loose from the chains of heavenly slavery that the church bound them in.But you do...... you do take interest in HJ, and write upon this thread. It's true that in recent years I have wondered why I haven't walked away from HJ and taken up whatever..... but this thread is full of folks other than HJers, so the subject is still alive.
Quote:As an analogy consider Nazareth. It has gone through the same dumbing down that the HJ crowd has inflicted on the godboy. Nazareth started out as a city and was gradually reduced in importance down to the level of a small hamlet. In fact, the archaeological remains suggest that what was there in the early first century was a farm for a single, extended family. But the HJ crowd will concede that because it preserves the idea that there was a "Nazareth" at all which is all they care about.I wonder what title Nazareth had when it was just a Hill which itinerant workers set up their family tents upon? The two Canas and three other hills were no doubt occupied as well, all within a morning's walk of Zippori which Antipas was throwing money in to?
What was Nazareth titled in Eastern Aramaic, I wonder? Was a 'city' some kind of 'secure place'?
