Historical Jesus, Biblical Jesus

[jimhabegger]

Trying to stop a post from the past being quoted every time I reply to a post. I've tried repeatedly to unselect it, but it still keeps coming up. I'm hoping that I've learned my lesson this time, and I won't ever try using that "Quote" button again. Now every time I reply to a post, I have to delete the old post that's automatically included.

[Rhythmcs]

Even enemies of Christianity wrote about Jesus in the 2nd century, now why would they do that if he had only been a construct by con artists?

Any number of reasons.  One being that some of them were perfectly okay with believing in magic men and competing gods.  Another that they were responding to christian claims in kind (as we often do on boards when we assume someone elses argument for the sake of conversation).  Then, ofc, there's the niggling tidbit that we do know that alot of people thought it was completely made up.  We call these people "non-christians"..and they outnumbered believers by a fair margin at the dawn of proto christianity.  There were even, as I mentioned before...apparently... people who didn't believe in the jesus legend or myth that -did- believe in the christ myth. Swirling around all of that, there were then and were before and are now and there have always been people who didn't believe in -any- of this horseshit, of any kind. We've got people on record calling every single invention of priests a con to fleece the faithful before this jesus or christ was a twinkle in said con mens eyes.

The notion that no one doubted christ or jesus is christian apologetic framing, not a historic reality.

[Cavebear]

According to Robert Price, reasoning to the best explanation is his whole reason for promoting a Christ myth view. He thinks that his Christ myth view is a better explanation for why we have all the stories that we have about a Jesus called “annointed one” crucified almost 2000 years ago, than saying that there really was such a person.

I'm uncertain about your intent here.  Are you saying that is evidence for thinking there was actually such a person?

No. 

Or is this a post about "reasoning to the best explanation" as a logical process?

Yes.

Thanks. I understand that. When I was younger, my friends were annoyed when I accepted arguments on both sides and then narrowed them down to some place in the middle. Where I decided which made more sense. And then chose a position seemingly most likely.

I don't have to work very hard at it most days now. I pretty much know what my reasoned thoughts are by this point.

[Bucky Ball]

Please just quote exactly what I wrote in future....yes?

No.
bla bl bla ...
Nothing you say has any support or references.
Everything you say is thus dismissed as made-up rubbish.
There is no point in quoting rubbish accurately.

Waffle........ nothing there about HJ.

Attempted evasion, as you are unable to address the point.

Trying to show off about how much you know about the 613 doesn't impress me at all.
Many of the old laws had long been forgotten or ignored, even by the Priesthood, ......Hey! Why don't you feature the reports about Jesus in your waffle?  
You focus upon everything but the accounts of Jesus. 

I couldn't care less what impresses you ... a fraud and charlatan. Yet another internet fake.
I have simply asked to to support your assertions.
You have never once referenced them or posted support, EVEN ONCE.
You are dismissed as the fraudster you are.

Many of the old laws had long been forgotten or ignored, even by the Priesthood, ... bla bla bla

Prove it. Yet another assertion. No support, no references. Dismissed.

Of course I think that his actions in the Temple happened.......  even Christians try to reduce them just like you do! How interesting!

Prove it.
No one cares what you think.
No support, no references. Dismissed.

[jimhabegger]

... in answer to your question and request is a much later example of how humans create their heroes and, dare I say, "gods" from whole cloth is a non pay-walled article from the Smithsonian.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/i...l-2198511/

If you'd like a more recent example there is Ned Ludd.

https://medium.com/@johnwelford15/who-wa...b7ed38a1eb

Thanks. I also did some searching on my own for examples of stories that started out frankly as pure fiction, being widely considered within a few generations as real stories. It's much easier for me now to understand people thinking that's what happened with the Bible stories about Jesus. One way that I can easily imagine it happening is through poetry and songs, and no one caring enough about people believing that the story was about a real person, to try to stop it from spreading, until long after that becomes impossible.

[Rhythmcs]

There's a well documented analog in cargo cults. Specifically the prince phillip movement. Briefly, they believed prince phillip to be divine...they started with a myth and added a man -but here's the kicker..they didn't recognize him when he payed them a visit and seeing him, the flesh and blood man, doesn't appear to have changed the beliefs of those cultists.

He was..ultimately.. irrelevant narrative detail to a preexisting belief system,..which, even in the most generous reading of magic book or friendliest description of history, is exactly what any jesus-the-man was. We might notice that contemporary believers are similarly unimpressed with this hypothetical historical man - whoever he is supposed to have been. Not even the authors of the nt gave a shit about any jesus-the-man.

[Minimalist]

1 Source criticism
1.1 Procedures for contradictory sources
1.2 Core principles for determining reliability
1.3 Eyewitness evidence
1.4 Indirect witnesses
1.5 Oral tradition
1.6 Anonymous sources

2 Synthesis: historical reasoning
2.1 Argument to the best explanation
2.2 Statistical inference
2.3 Argument from analogy

The problem with source criticism in the jesus myth is that we have NO primary sources.  

In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study.

The 'gospels' were written 40-100 years after the alleged fact and who knows how much editing they underwent by later church writers trying to keep up with all the doctrinal changes the church kept introducing?

Xtians 'claim' that the so-called Paul letters were written in the 50's CE.  We don't have those.  What we have are pious protestations from religitards that "Oh, yes.... they are real."  Sorry.  That's worthless.  Xtian writers tell us that the epistles were included by Marcion in his canon.  Fine.  Where the fuck are they?  All we have are what emerged from the much later xtian re-write to make those epistles somewhat compatible with evolving church dogma.  Half of those epistles are outright forgeries.  Scholars have identified multiple interpolations into even the 7 so-called "authentic" epistles.
It's like opening opening a sewer and trying to figure out which turd came from which asshole!

So the original pauline letters might have been Primary Sources and if we had them we would know.  But we don't.

Then there are the handful of virtually throwaway lines of dubious authorship or relevance by the Roman writers Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger.  They are all writing in the 2d century and thus far too late to be primary sources anyway even if they were 100% accurate...which is doubtful.
And none mention any "jesus."  Everything else is even later.

Frankly, there is no "there" there for historians.  We are left with, at best, oral tales in circulation and the memories of fallible humans until some asshole decided to write the story down (Mark?  for the sake of convention.) 

As Bart Ehrman wrote in "Jesus Before The Gospels,"

It was just a few years ago that I came to realize that the study of memory, as pursued by scholars who did not work on the New Testament, could provide some valuable and keen insights into such matters. These other scholars work in a number of disciplines well represented in the academy, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Their insights may be especially relevant to understanding how the earliest Christians told and retold the stories about Jesus after his death but before the Gospels were written. This was a mysterious period of oral transmission, when stories were circulating, both among eyewitnesses and, even more, among those who knew someone whose cousin had a neighbor who had once talked with a business associate whose mother had, just fifteen years earlier, spoken with an eyewitness who told her some things about Jesus.

How were such people—those people at the tail end of the period of transmission—telling their stories about Jesus? Did they remember very well what they had heard from others (who had heard from others who had heard from others)? Were the stories they told accurate reflections of what they heard? Or, more remotely, of what Jesus said and did? Or had their stories been molded, and shaped, or even invented in the processes of telling, remembering, and retelling the stories? During the forty to sixty-five years between Jesus’s death and the first accounts of his life, how much had the stories been changed?

Now, this is important, the above may also be total bullshit.  We have no evidence of these oral tales spreading.  The suggestion from later events is that there were a multitude of small, scattered, groups, with a multiplicity of beliefs all centered on this Savior-god who the Greeks called "Christos."  They weren't on Facebook or Instagram.  They weren't sending "letters" to other groups telling them how fucked up they were.  They were either so socially insignificant or so minimal in numbers that no one, anywhere, paid the least attention to them.  Tacitus and Josephus in their run ups to The Great Revolt never mention them as any sort of power group and Pliny the Elder refers to there being about 4,000 Essenes but they made the cut in Josephus!

So it is entirely possible that ONE of these groups suddenly came up with the bright idea that there was this guy "jesus" who really was the son of god and was born right here in Judaea ( the Chamber of Commerce would love that!) and all you other fuckheads had better get with the program.  We see that even today people believe lots of stupid shit.  Why would the ancients be any better?

[Bucky Ball]

Unlike the Greek and Muslim cultures, which did have traditions or "specialists" who actually spent their lives memorizing, for example, Homeric poetry, and for Muslims, the "hafiz" who memorized the Quran, Hebrews and Christians had no such tradition or "oral specialists". Christians (at least they used to, I don't think the academics do so any longer), claim they had "oral traditions". It was not true. Hebrew and Christian cultures were "writing" cultures. There was no Bible before the Judean priests assembled their "sources" in Babylon, and the Book of Nehemiah describes the introduction of the Torah of Moses by the Prophet Ezra, in a Fall Festival. Before that moment in history, there is no record AT ALL of any "Bible". In that sense the Ezra group invented Judaism, at the precise command of the Persian Emperor, (Artaxerxes) who needed the Judean priests to set up a cultural foundation for the revamp of Israel he needed, in order to reconstitute a stable society in his "new" state of Israel ... which he wanted to create a buffer between him and the invading Greeks and "sea peoples". Yahweh did not invent Judaism. Artaxerxes the Persian Emperor did, and as such historically this is known as the "Persian Imperative". The motivation was political, just as Constantine's and Alexander's and the Arabian motivations were political in using religion to unify culturally a far-flung empire. They had seen it work before and that's what they were trying to do.

The Jewish term "son of god" did not mean this person had an "actual" filial relationship with a deity.
The inventors of (later) Christian orthodoxy didn't get that. By then, they were no longer Jews.
(There were however all sorts of other "divine beings" in the Heavenly Court, for the Hebrews, but they were not gods and NONE of them had anything even close to an equal rank with Yahweh. )
That error was misconstrued by Christians who were not Jews, and Jews are still laughing about that, lo two thousand years later).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_God...%20God.%22
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic...son-of-god

If you want to know the actual history of how the OT was invented, "How the Bible Became a Book", Dr. William Schneidewind, and "Who Wrote the Bible", Dr. Richard Elliott Friedmann are good places to start.
And of course anything by Dr. William Dever, will disabuse you of all the bullshit you think you know about it.

[Minimalist]

In that book by Ehrman that I mentioned he goes into that stuff about how so-called bards "memorize" this stuff for later regurgitation to adoring crowds.  Scholars have determined that they are not so reliable as claimed.  Big surprise.

[Free]

My position here and elsewhere has always been to apply the historical methodology of argument to the best explanation.

I'm looking for articles to read about historical methods. I read the Wikipedia article, and another article that I found in a search. Can you recommend any online articles about historical methodology that are not behind paywalls?

The Wiki is sufficient for getting the gist. However, here is a video that explains it in less than 10 minutes.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/histori...ation.html

Edit: Scratch that, it has a paywall that I know how to get around.

[Free]

… your inability to reason to the best explanation …

According to Robert Price, reasoning to the best explanation is his whole reason for promoting a Christ myth view. He thinks that his Christ myth view is a better explanation for why we have all the stories that we have about a Jesus called “annointed one” crucified almost 2000 years ago, than saying that there really was such a person.

(edited to add the following)

I found this outline in the Wikipedia article about historical method:

1 Source criticism
1.1 Procedures for contradictory sources
1.2 Core principles for determining reliability
1.3 Eyewitness evidence
1.4 Indirect witnesses
1.5 Oral tradition
1.6 Anonymous sources

2 Synthesis: historical reasoning
2.1 Argument to the best explanation
2.2 Statistical inference
2.3 Argument from analogy

Looking at the details, it all looks like ambiguous, subjective, untestable judgments to me, not even trying or claiming to be objective or testable, and using words that are notoriously ambiguous and wide open for people to define any way they want to, to get the results that they want. Also, some of it looks like logical fallacies to me, including some of the best known ones in discussions about logic. It doesn't look to me like a way of finding out, or even trying to find out, what really happened. It looks more like it's designed for most people to agree with it, or at least not to openly reject it.

In spite of all that, I'm thinking that maybe there isn't any better way, in the world as it is today, to have a common framework and language for most historians to communicate with each other about what they're learning.

Perhaps you're not understanding that correctly. Once you go through steps 1.1 to 1.6, you then have what you need to begin the Synthesis. This is where you basically weigh all the evidence, discard what is heavily disputed by the evidence, keep what is confirmed, and formulate an opinion. 

No matter what you do, it will always come down to your opinion. The difference is whether or not preconceived bias has been permitted to affect your opinion. If you already believe Jesus didn't exist, you may toss evidence that shouldn't be tossed instead of reviewing it with an unbiased eye. Same goes if you are a Christian.

Me? I don't give a fuck if he existed or not. It's just the evidence to support that he did provides the better argument to the best explanation which favors the existence ONLY in the sense that there was a Jesus called Christ by many, who was crucified by Pilate circa CE 33.

After that is established, we see all the rest taking shape. We see the Gospels, letters,, Pliny, Josephus, Tacitus and scores of other documents attesting to this one singular event, indicating that it was this same Jesus who is the focus of all the exaggerated nonsense in the bible.

Some here eventually came to the realization that my arguments are not so much as to establish historicity of this Jesus, but rather to provide evidence that the proclaimed historicity of the Jesus in the gospels is false. That guy did not exist, not as he is portrayed in those books. 

Like I said earlier, he was likely just some short bald guy from out in the boonies who ended up getting his ass handed to him by the Romans.

[JC1432]

Are they one in the same, the same thing.
I believe they are the same thing.
any dissenters?
please explain

they are the same because the gospels are categorized as biography by experts, thus Jesus is according to the Gospels. also, non christian sources confirm the gospel narratives

[eider]

[quote="Cavebear" pid='365626' dateline='1656301075']

OK, that seems basically factual.  No declarations of John or some wandering human preacher named Jesus being a deity.  Preachers do and have existed.  Some claim to be one and some don't.  None are.

I think you deserve a reputation point for that (I may regret this later, but it seems appropriate now)...  Most would have just gotten angry and repeated themselves.  And I liked "Romans could threaten a three day self torturing death in the most horrific way, but Christianity can really scare folks with unbearable torture FOR ETERNITY".

Not sure about "self", though.

I've messed up this post and will try to write it again....
Thank you for that rep point.

Yes, crucifixion was a self-torturing death where the convict kept himself alive by pushing up in order to breath more easily and to alleviate the shocking pains. And his naked body kept urinating and defecating for some time for the entertainment of any watchers.  Busting a convict's legs ended it quickly, but jabbing a spear through a lower rib in to a lung could cause accumulated blood and fluids to clear and thus save a person. I've had that done to me in 2017, and seen it done in an A&E to save a kid who had basked his side on a bmx foot shaft.

[Rhythmcs]

If the guy in the book didn't exist, then we have ourselves a christ myth, not a historical jesus. I'm sure that plenty of bald randos got their asses handed to them by the romans.

[JC1432]

Unlike the Greek and Muslim cultures, which did have traditions or "specialists" who actually spent their lives memorizing, for example, Homeric poetry, and for Muslims, the "hafiz" who memorized the Quran, Hebrews and Christians had no such tradition or "oral specialists". Christians (at least they used to, I don't think the academics do so any longer), claim they had "oral traditions". It was not true. Hebrew and Christian cultures were "writing" cultures. There was no Bible before the Judean priests assembled their "sources" in Babylon, and the Book of Nehemiah describes the introduction of the Torah of Moses by the Prophet Ezra, in a Fall Festival. Before that moment in history, there is no record AT ALL of any "Bible". In that sense the Ezra group invented Judaism, at the precise command of the Persian Emperor, (Artaxerxes) who needed the Judean priests to set up a cultural foundation for the revamp of Israel he needed, in order to reconstitute a stable society in his "new" state of Israel ... which he wanted to create a buffer between him and the invading Greeks and "sea peoples". Yahweh did not invent Judaism. Artaxerxes the Persian Emperor did, and as such historically this is known as the "Persian Imperative". The motivation was political, just as Constantine's and Alexander's and the Arabian motivations were political in using religion to unify culturally a far-flung empire. They had seen it work before and that's what they were trying to do.

The Jewish term "son of god" did not mean this person had an "actual" filial relationship with a deity.
The inventors of (later) Christian orthodoxy didn't get that. By then, they were no longer Jews.
(There were however all sorts of other "divine beings" in the Heavenly Court, for the Hebrews, but they were not gods and NONE of them had anything even close to an equal rank with Yahweh. )
That error was misconstrued by Christians who were not Jews, and Jews are still laughing about that, lo  two thousand years later).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_God...%20God.%22
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/artic...son-of-god

If you want to know the actual history of how the OT was invented, "How the Bible Became a Book", Dr. William Schneidewind, and "Who Wrote the Bible", Dr. Richard Elliott Friedmann are good places to start.
And of course anything by Dr. William Dever, will disabuse you of all the bullshit you think you know about it.

 
it is not true that the son of God didn't mean a person had a relationship with diety. john 20:31 says Jesus is the Son of God, he was God. Jesus did things that only God could do, and was crucified for blasphemy - saying he was God

the reason the bible isn't memorized is because it is gigantic, way way more words than the quran can ever dream of.  there is no such thing as inventors of christian orthodoxy.  Paul wrote in 1 corinthians 15 a creed that comes from 0-2 years after Jesus death proclaiming his death, resurrection, and resurrection appearance. 

not sure where you are coming from but the Jews only believed in one God. there were not many divine beings

no king invented Judiasm, it is impossible for one king to develop the Jewish scriptures that were written by many people over many centuries and many places

[Cavebear]

Are they one in the same, the same thing.
I believe they are the same thing.
any dissenters?
please explain

they are the same because the gospels are categorized as biography by experts, thus Jesus is according to the Gospels. also, non christian sources confirm the gospel narratives

Congrats. I always love it when new theists make their superstitious views perfectly clear. Saves a lot of my time. LOL!

[Inkubus]

Some here eventually came to the realization that my arguments are not so much as to establish historicity of this Jesus, but rather to provide evidence that the proclaimed historicity of the Jesus in the gospels is false. That guy did not exist, not as he is portrayed in those books. 

If you aren't looking for the water walking, fish multiplying necromancer then who are you looking for, and why?

[eider]

Even enemies of Christianity wrote about Jesus in the 2nd century, now why would they do that if he had only been a construct by con artists?

The same reason people write fan-fiction.

Could you give me an example of an enemy of Christianity writing 'fan-fiction' about Jesus?

The name I had in mind ranted on about Jesus being a cheap rebel with a bunch of nasty boatmen and taxmen as followers. Hardly 'fan mail'...... but he sure did believe absolutely in a Jesus.

[Inkubus]

Are they one in the same, the same thing.
I believe they are the same thing.
any dissenters?
please explain

they are the same because the gospels are categorized as biography by experts, thus Jesus is according to the Gospels. also, non christian sources confirm the gospel narratives

Dude, that post is four years old, you have an awful lot of reading to do.

Or is that a lot of awful reading to do?

[JC1432]

1 Source criticism
1.1 Procedures for contradictory sources
1.2 Core principles for determining reliability
1.3 Eyewitness evidence
1.4 Indirect witnesses
1.5 Oral tradition
1.6 Anonymous sources

2 Synthesis: historical reasoning
2.1 Argument to the best explanation
2.2 Statistical inference
2.3 Argument from analogy

The problem with source criticism in the jesus myth is that we have NO primary sources.  

In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study.

The 'gospels' were written 40-100 years after the alleged fact and who knows how much editing they underwent by later church writers trying to keep up with all the doctrinal changes the church kept introducing?

Xtians 'claim' that the so-called Paul letters were written in the 50's CE.  We don't have those.  What we have are pious protestations from religitards that "Oh, yes.... they are real."  Sorry.  That's worthless.  Xtian writers tell us that the epistles were included by Marcion in his canon.  Fine.  Where the fuck are they?  All we have are what emerged from the much later xtian re-write to make those epistles somewhat compatible with evolving church dogma.  Half of those epistles are outright forgeries.  Scholars have identified multiple interpolations into even the 7 so-called "authentic" epistles.
It's like opening opening a sewer and trying to figure out which turd came from which asshole!

So the original pauline letters might have been Primary Sources and if we had them we would know.  But we don't.

Then there are the handful of virtually throwaway lines of dubious authorship or relevance by the Roman writers Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger.  They are all writing in the 2d century and thus far too late to be primary sources anyway even if they were 100% accurate...which is doubtful.
And none mention any "jesus."  Everything else is even later.

Frankly, there is no "there" there for historians.  We are left with, at best, oral tales in circulation and the memories of fallible humans until some asshole decided to write the story down (Mark?  for the sake of convention.) 

As Bart Ehrman wrote in "Jesus Before The Gospels,"

It was just a few years ago that I came to realize that the study of memory, as pursued by scholars who did not work on the New Testament, could provide some valuable and keen insights into such matters. These other scholars work in a number of disciplines well represented in the academy, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Their insights may be especially relevant to understanding how the earliest Christians told and retold the stories about Jesus after his death but before the Gospels were written. This was a mysterious period of oral transmission, when stories were circulating, both among eyewitnesses and, even more, among those who knew someone whose cousin had a neighbor who had once talked with a business associate whose mother had, just fifteen years earlier, spoken with an eyewitness who told her some things about Jesus.

How were such people—those people at the tail end of the period of transmission—telling their stories about Jesus? Did they remember very well what they had heard from others (who had heard from others who had heard from others)? Were the stories they told accurate reflections of what they heard? Or, more remotely, of what Jesus said and did? Or had their stories been molded, and shaped, or even invented in the processes of telling, remembering, and retelling the stories? During the forty to sixty-five years between Jesus’s death and the first accounts of his life, how much had the stories been changed?

Now, this is important, the above may also be total bullshit.  We have no evidence of these oral tales spreading.  The suggestion from later events is that there were a multitude of small, scattered, groups, with a multiplicity of beliefs all centered on this Savior-god who the Greeks called "Christos."  They weren't on Facebook or Instagram.  They weren't sending "letters" to other groups telling them how fucked up they were.  They were either so socially insignificant or so minimal in numbers that no one, anywhere, paid the least attention to them.  Tacitus and Josephus in their run ups to The Great Revolt never mention them as any sort of power group and Pliny the Elder refers to there being about 4,000 Essenes but they made the cut in Josephus!

So it is entirely possible that ONE of these groups suddenly came up with the bright idea that there was this guy "jesus" who really was the son of god and was born right here in Judaea ( the Chamber of Commerce would love that!) and all you other fuckheads had better get with the program.  We see that even today people believe lots of stupid shit.  Why would the ancients be any better?

the gospel narrative is confirmed by non-christian sources.  paul wrote in 20 years after Jesus death and included an early christian creed in 1 corinthians the early church believed in the death, resurrection, and post-death Jesus appearances to many people.  Jesus as God was there from the beginning and not added later. 

the book of acts and luke was written no later than 62-63 AD as the account stops when paul was in prison in rome and did not include his death.  but scholars say Luke and Matthew took information from Mark, so Mark would have had to be written earlier than the book of luke, so mark could be from the late 50s

the only epistles are from Paul.  mark did not have any epistles. not sure where you are getting that

[eider]

I agree that people who only attended one of his talks might not have learned much from it. I hadn’t thought about that before. Besides, I’m thinking now that maybe none of it was anything they hadn’t heard before.

Part of my interest in his teachings is just curiosity, to see how they compare with the beliefs and practices of Christians. Another part is that it helps me communicate better with some of my Bible-believing friends.

Jesus didn't do very well with his campaigning..... he sent his disciples out in to Galilee in pairs in attempt to win support and they all failed, hence his last-ditch attempt at gaining a following in Jerusalem during the week before Passover.

Comparison with his 'teachings' and Christianity's practices? Good luck with that.  
I'm a bible believer.... well, in part, but Deists don't believe in an aware or interested Deity so quite a lot of redaction is required by such as us.  We are non-theists.

[eider]

...Josephus most probably did write about Jesus but we just don't know what he wrote. 

Well......... Christians fiddled with that section. For sure.

[eider]

As I understand the history of the development of christianity, the followers of Jesus (I say this from what I think was their POV) considered themselves jewish at first.  Then basically got kicked out as just one of "another weird sect", and decided to embrace the separation.

The jewish leaders were not especially stupid (keeping their cult together for a millennia), but they sure botched THAT one.  LOL!

I sometimes imagine how different the world would be if they (the jewish establishment) had just glommed onto the new cult version.

Yes........ and of course there was no development of christianity during Jesus's time....... that all got spun after his time.

[eider]

Whatever I say about Jesus is about the character in the gospel stories who is called “Jesus,” regardless of whether or not any such person ever existed. In the gospel stories, Jesus approves of Peter calling him “the Christ.” I understand that “Christ” is an anglicized form of a Greek word which is a translation of an Aramaic word or a Hebrew word which can sometimes be translated as “anointed” in the same way that kings were anointed in the Old Testament.

It looks to me like some people, including his apprentices or full time students, thought that he was going to Make Israel Great Again.   That might be true, but not in all of the ways that they thought.

OK.... fair enough, but in trying to gather any truth from them I auto-bin any mentions of Christ, or prophesies fulfilled, or miracles that cannot have natural explanations........  I bin quite a lot. I'm after an Historical Jesus, not any kind of involved God.

[JC1432]

they are the same because the gospels are categorized as biography by experts, thus Jesus is according to the Gospels. also, non christian sources confirm the gospel narratives

Dude, that post is four years old, you have an awful lot of reading to do.

Or is that a lot of awful reading to do?

so funny isn't it!  maybe somehow i'll get a reply