Jesus Christ: a Rigorous Discussion (or not)

[Luther Blissett]

Who wrote Psalms, and when? How did Luke write his gospel 100 years after the supposed birth of a christ?

[Iamwhomiam]

[Burnt Hill]

Funny how the original Christian Rock song was written and performed by an observant jew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Greenbaum

[KUAN]

Funny how the original Christian Rock song was written and performed by an observant jew.

Yeah, well it's easy to write good songs about christianity, it was made up with the mass market in mind

[brekin]

Funny how the original Christian Rock song was written and performed by an observant jew.

Yeah, well it's easy to write good songs about christianity, it was made up with the mass market in mind

Wasn't Jesus himself an observant jew? Either way Jesus is just alright with me. Jesus is just alright, oh yeah. And this cover song was made a bigger hit by a group that didn't have any big time Christians at the time. Statistics wise for rock groups though they probably have 1 or 2 now. Was pretty popular with Jesus Freaks at the time I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Is_Just_Alright



Another good one.



Jesus Was a Capricorn
Kris Kristofferson

Jesus was a Capricorn
He ate organic food
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoes
Long hair, beard and sandals
And a funky bunch of friends
Reckon we'd just nail him up
If he came down again
'Cause everybody's gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin' somethin' dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can't find nobody else, then help yourself to me
Eggheads cussing rednecks cussing
Hippies for their hair
Others laugh at straights who laugh at
Freaks who laugh at squares
Some folks hate the Whites
Who hate the Blacks who hate the Klan
Most of us hate anything that
We don't understand
'Cause everybody's gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin' somethin' dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can't find nobody else, then help yourself to me

[Burnt Hill]

Yeah-yeah-yeah, well
Uh, open your eyes and look within
Are you satisfied (with the life you're living) uh
We know where we're going, uh
We know where we're from
We're leaving Babylon
We're going to our Father land

[identity]

Who wrote Psalms, and when? How did Luke write his gospel 100 years after the supposed birth of a christ?

from BURTON L. MACK, WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT? — The Making of the Christian Myth:

It was centrist Christianity that became the religion of empire under
Constantine, collected together the texts we now know as the New Testament, and joined them to the
Jewish scriptures to form the Christian Bible. When these writings were first written there was no
centrist tradition, and none of them fully agreed with the other with respect to their views of Jesus,
God, the state of the world, or the reason for the Jesus movements.

It is also the case that, with the exception of seven letters by Paul and the Revelation to an
otherwise unknown John, the writings selected for inclusion in the New Testament were not written by
those whose names are attached to them. Many modern Christians find this fact difficult to
comprehend, if not downright unnerving. The problem seems to be that, if so, someone must have
been lying. A better way to understand this phenomenon is to realize (1) that most literature of the
early Christian period was written anonymously, (2) that the concept of an apostolic age was a
second-century creation, and (3) that the later attribution of this literature to names associated with
apostles can be explained in ways that show it was not considered dishonest. One helpful observation
is that anonymous authorship of writings intended for use in social institutions such as schools,
temples, and royal bureaucracies was standard practice in the scribal traditions of the ancient Near
East. Another is that, in the early period of collecting lore, interpreting teachings, and trying out new
ideas fit for the novel groupings spawned by the Jesus movements, many minds, voices, and hands
were in on the drafting of written materials. No one thought to take credit for writing down
community property even though authorial creativity is everywhere in evidence. Even the earliest
collections of teachings and stories about Jesus, such as the Sayings Gospel Q, the Gospel of
Thomas, and the little sets of anecdotes and miracle stories from the pre-Markan tradition bear the
marks of literacy and creativity, though none was signed by an author.

As for the later attribution of anonymous literature to known figures of the past, that also was a
standard practice during the Greco-Roman period. In the schools of rhetoric, for example, teachers
had their students write speeches and letters appropriate for such figures to see if the student had fully
understood the importance of a historical figure. It was what a recognized figure stood for that was
deemed important, not his personal profile. Scholars agree, in any case, that for these and other
reasons, most of the writings in the New Testament were either written anonymously and later
assigned to a person of the past or written later as a pseudonym for some person thought to have been
important for the earliest period. Striking examples of the latter are the two letters said to have been
written by Peter, both of which are clearly second-century creations.

Thus, over the course of the second and third centuries, centrist Christians were able to create the
impression of a singular, monolinear history of the Christian church. They did so by carefully
selecting, collecting, and arranging anonymous and pseudonymous writings assigned to figures at the
beginning of the Christian time. As they imagined it, this history was foretold by the prophets of the
Old Testament, inaugurated by Jesus and his sacrifice for the sins of the world, established by the
apostles in their missions, and confirmed by the bishops in their loyalty to the teachings of that
illustrious tradition. And because all the New Testament writings were now regarded as written by
apostles and their associates, the differences among their views of Christian beginnings were
effectively erased. In the centrist Christian imagination, the four gospels merged into an amalgam of
the one gospel story, and the letters of Paul and the other apostles were read as “witnesses” to these
dramatic events that inaugurated the Christian time. This means that the impression modern readers
have of the New Testament as a charter document for Christianity, a kind of constitution written in
concert by a college or congress of apostles, is thoroughly understandable. That is exactly what the
centrist Christians of the fourth century intended. The problem is that this charter was created for the
fourth-century church by means of literary fictions. It is neither an authentic account of Christian
beginnings nor an accurate rehearsal of the history of the empire church. Historians of religion
would call it myth.

from Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man - How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?

One last factor affecting any efforts to date the
Gospels is our uncertainty as to when to date the
historical Jesus. All today take for granted that
Jesus was born at least two years before the
death of Herod the Great in the year 2 b.c.e. and
that he died by the sentence of Pontius Pilate. He
would have been "about thirty" (Luke 3:23) when
his ministry commenced, and he would have died
a year or three years later, about 27 or 30 c.e.
How well-founded are these dates? Not very.

As we will see in some detail, Herod the
Great is associated with the birth of Jesus in
Matthew's gospel for purely literary reasons:
Matthew was copying Josephus's Moses nativity,
and he needed a "modern-day" counterpart to the
persecuting Pharaoh. There was one candidate for
this role: Herod the Great, known by all as a
ruthless butcher. The two years business comes,
again, from fictive details of Matthew's story: the
tyrant killed all the babies and toddlers of
Bethlehem up to two years old since the Magi
had seen the natal star rise two years previously.
Luke places the birth of Jesus in the reign of
Augustus Caesar, Herod's contemporary. He
mentions Augustus for the sake of the empirewide
census that took Joseph and the heavily pregnant
Mary to Bethlehem. But this story, to which we
shall return, is full of errors, placing the census
under Quirinius a decade too early. We may
accept with less difficulty Luke's estimate that
Jesus was about thirty, though we have no idea
how he knew it, and it is well to note that this
was not the only estimate: Irenaeus thought Jesus
lived to the age of fifty. After all, did not the
temple elders reprove his rash words by pointing
to his tender age? "You are not yet fifty years
old!" (John 8:57). If he were thirty, why not
make the point even stronger? "You are not yet
forty years old!" And if he had been nearly fifty
at this point in John's narrative, given his
three-Passover chronology, he would have died at
fifty. Irenaeus says that all the presbyters of Asia
believed this (Against Heresies 2.22.4-5). Irenaeus
figured that Jesus had died under the emperor
Claudius. And such a dating must make us
wonder how familiar Irenaeus can have been with
the canonical gospels, perhaps not as familiar as
Eusebius makes him, if he could so boldly reject
the testimony of all four that Jesus was crucified
under Pilate. Or did he imagine Pilate to have
served under Claudius?

And the link with Pilate is more tenuous
than one might think. Scholars have always
choked on the implausibilities attendant upon the
gospel trial scenes, with the Sanhedrin convening
on Passover eve itself, and the Jew-baiting Pilate
being so reluctant to hand Jesus over to death.
But if one rejects these features of the stories,
what is left? Many see the difficulties with the
Sanhedrin trial as so insuperable that they erase
all Jewish involvement from the record, placing
the whole initiative and responsibility on the
shoulders of the Romans. But isn't the Pilate
story even more outrageous? Why retain it as
evidence of any Roman involvement at all? It is
a tenuous link.

More astonishing still is the widespread
Jewish and Jewish-Christian tradition, attested in
Epiphanius, the Talmud, and the Toledoth Jeschu
(dependent on a second-century Jewish-Christian
gospel), that Jesus was born about 100 b . c . e . and
was crucified under Alexander Jannaeus!

The point is this: since we cannot really
determine exactly when Jesus would have lived
or died, it is useless to speculate upon how much
or little time would have been necessary for the
Jesus tradition to grow and mutate from fact to
fancy. By our evidence, vague as it is, the
Gospels might possibly have been written as late
as the third century c.e., while the life of Jesus
may have been over in the first century b . c . e .!

[Luther Blissett]

from Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man - How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?

…The point is this: since we cannot really
determine exactly when Jesus would have lived
or died, it is useless to speculate upon how much
or little time would have been necessary for the
Jesus tradition to grow and mutate from fact to
fancy. By our evidence, vague as it is, the
Gospels might possibly have been written as late
as the third century c.e., while the life of Jesus
may have been over in the first century b . c . e .!

I'll help: it's all fiction, made up many decades or a century or more after the fact. There was no Jesus of Nazareth. Or, there were many, because Jesus was the most common name in Nazareth around the first century BC. But there was certainly no christ and no resurrection.

[minime]

from Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man - How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?

…The point is this: since we cannot really
determine exactly when Jesus would have lived
or died, it is useless to speculate upon how much
or little time would have been necessary for the
Jesus tradition to grow and mutate from fact to
fancy. By our evidence, vague as it is, the
Gospels might possibly have been written as late
as the third century c.e., while the life of Jesus
may have been over in the first century b . c . e .!

I'll help: it's all fiction, made up many decades or a century or more after the fact. There was no Jesus of Nazareth. Or, there were many, because Jesus was the most common name in Nazareth around the first century BC. But there was certainly no christ and no resurrection.

Or, this is a fiction, propagated by someone who couldn't possibly have a clue.

[vince]

[identity]

I'll help: it's all fiction, made up many decades or a century or more after the fact. There was no Jesus of Nazareth. Or, there were many, because Jesus was the most common name in Nazareth around the first century BC. But there was certainly no christ and no resurrection.

from Robert M. Price, Deconstructing Jesus

The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a
progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot
very well have been all of them at the same time. Attempts, such as Crossan's, to combine
several of these portraits only demonstrate how arbitrary the procedure is. Most even of
critical scholars studying Jesus are at least liberal Christians, and one suspects they cannot
bring themselves to stop at agnosticism about the historical Jesus. "He might have been this,
he might have been that. We don't know for sure." No, one suspects that even the radicals
of the Jesus Seminar still need a single Jesus to function as a religious totem: "One Lord,
one faith, one baptism" (Eph. 4:5). Thus they will choose one possible Jesus and promote
him as the ideal for the church to follow. Or they will, like Crossan, preserve as many of
the newly reconstructed Jesus slices as they can by gluing them into a new pie. But this will
not work. And once one accepts that sad conclusion, the implications are striking indeed.

Later on, I will discuss the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. They all had in common
some form of Docetism, a superspiritual, nakedly mythic view whereby Jesus Christ was a
pure spirit, merely sporting the illusion of a fleshly body. This he needed in order to
communicate with flesh-bound humans, but actual incarnation was out of the question, since
many early Christians viewed the body as far too sinful for Jesus to have had one. So he
only seemed to. In this, he was like the Olympian gods who might appear in any
of a thousand forms. Zeus appeared as a bull, a shower of gold coins, a swan, an old man,
and so on. Athena might appear as a crone or a warrior maid. This meant that the gods were
beyond gross bodies of flesh. Even so, in the Acts of John, Jesus appears in different guises
to the brothers James and John in the very same moment. One sees him as a beardless
youth, while the other beholds a gray beard sage. Then they rub their eyes and see two more
different images! To John, Jesus appears differently at different moments. Scholars call this
motif "the polymorphousness of the savior." Again, it is the hallmark of Docetism: to have
many forms is to have no true form at all.

Now, obviously no modern scholar believes Jesus was a bodiless ghost. And yet the
theological mytheme of docetic polymorphousness is surprisingly relevant to the contemporary
discussion of the historical Jesus. Call it a parable. Because in the same way that a Jesus
who could take so many forms so readily had no real form to begin with, we may say that
a "historical Jesus" capable of being portrayed with nearly equal plausibility as a magician, a
revolutionary, a Cynic sage, an apocalyptic prophet, and so on, has no true and certain form
at all! The various scholarly reconstructions of Jesus cancel each other out. Each sounds good
until you hear the next one. The inevitable conclusion is that even if there was a historical
Jesus who actually walked the earth two thousand years ago, there is no historical Jesus any
morel The original is irrecoverable, unless someone invents a time machine and goes back to
meet Jesus as in Michael Moorcock's novel Behold the Man.

Generations of Rationalists and freethinkers have held that Jesus Christ corresponds to
no historical character: There never was a Jesus of Nazareth. We might call this categorical
denial "Jesus atheism." What I am describing is something different, a "Jesus agnosticism."
There may have been a Jesus on earth in the past, but the state of the evidence is so
ambiguous that we can never be sure what this figure was like or, indeed, whether there was
such a person. Among contemporary scholars, Burton L. Mack seems to me to come closest to
this assessment in that he seems to conclude that we cannot penetrate behind the various
Jesus figures shaped by the disparate Christian sects and cults to meet their own religious
needs.

[Laodicean]

[minime]

faith... Faith... FAITH... Goddamn it!!!!

[stickdog99]

[Elihu]

1 Cor 15

35But some one will say, ‘How do the dead rise? 36unwise! thou — what thou dost sow is not quickened except it may die; 37and that which thou dost sow, not the body that shall be dost thou sow, but bare grain, it may be of wheat, or of some one of the others, 38and God doth give to it a body according as He willed, and to each of the seeds its proper body. 39All flesh not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another of fishes, and another of birds; 40and heavenly bodies, and earthly bodies; but one the glory of the heavenly, and another that of the earthly; 41one glory of sun, and another glory of moon, and another glory of stars, for star from star doth differ in glory.

42So also the rising again of the dead: it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; 43it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body; there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body; 45so also it hath been written, ‘The first man Adam became a living creature,’ the last Adam for a life-giving spirit, 46but that which is spiritual not first, but that which natural, afterwards that which spiritual. 47The first man out of the earth, earthy; the second man the Lord out of heaven; 48as the earthy, such also the earthy; and as the heavenly, such also the heavenly; 49and, according as we did bear the image of the earthy, we shall bear also the image of the heavenly.

50And this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood the reign of God is not able to inherit, nor doth the corruption inherit the incorruption; 51lo, I tell you a secret; we indeed shall not all sleep, and we all shall be changed; 52in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, in the last trumpet, for it shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we — we shall be changed: 53for it behoveth this corruptible to put on incorruption, and this mortal to put on immortality; 54and when this corruptible may have put on incorruption, and this mortal may have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the word that hath been written, ‘The Death was swallowed up — to victory; 55where, O Death, thy sting? where, O Hades, thy victory?’ 56and the sting of the death the sin, and the power of the sin the law; 57and to God — thanks, to Him who is giving us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ;

58so that, my brethren beloved, become ye stedfast, unmovable, abounding in the work of the Lord at all times, knowing that your labour is not vain in the Lord.

Young's Literal Translation

Luke 24

38And he said to them, ‘Why are ye troubled? and wherefore do reasonings come up in your hearts? 39see my hands and my feet, that I am he; handle me and see, because a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me having.’ 40And having said this, he shewed to them the hands and the feet, 41and while they are not believing from the joy, and wondering, he said to them, ‘Have ye anything here to eat?’ 42and they gave to him part of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb, 43and having taken, he did eat before them,