Freethought Nation

Can you touch on Tertullian's misquotes? By my count it was at least five times that he accused Marcion of removing passages from Luke that were never in Luke to begin with, but have only ever been found in Matthew. This severely detracts from the credibility of the Orthodox position that Marcion was the one who removed stuff from Luke instead of the Orthodoxy adding to Marcion, since they can't even get straight what in the hell he allegedly "removed".

I'd also be interested to see you touch on P75, which is allegedly our earliest manuscript of Luke, if I recall correctly, and how seeing how many of the "missing" portions line up with Marcion. For instance, both are completely missing chapters 1 & 2, the birth narrative, one of the major portions Irenaeus bitched about Marcion "removing".

The interesting thing about John is that it's addressed to an Egyptian audience. And it seems to be concerned with proselytizing Gnostics to the Orthodoxy. So what if Ur-John was indeed revised around 170 CE in order to receive what we now find as an attempt at proselytizing Gnostic type Egyptians into the Orthodoxy? Then we'd have a Gnostic text filtering into Marcion, more Gnostic texts, and then an Orthodox movement appearing on the scene equipped with the angle of presenting the formerly esoteric material to the masses in an exoteric, carnalized format (so as not to violate profaning the mysteries to the vulgar public), which then resulted in the revision of John during the latter part of the second century?

I think John, the original, is 100% Gnostic. I'm actually surprised by how much esoteric stuff remains. The biggest problem of John is the Logos concept. Had that been erased, it would look entirely different. That lead in, is a slightly more advanced version of Philo's theology. It's taken to a degree, that no other NT text has.

Interesting, so you have John as the earliest, with a later revision. This reminds me, have you read Jordan Day/ReligionFreeDeist's hypothesis on John? Here's the link for those who haven't- http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150394401416107

αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ μαρτυρία τοῦ Ἰωάννου,
ὅτε ἀπέστειλαν πρὸς αὐτὸν οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι
ἐξ Ἱεροσολύμων ἱερεῖς καὶ Λευίτας ἵνα
ἐρωτήσωσιν αὐτὸν· σὺ τίς εἶ; καὶ
ὡμολόγησεν καὶ οὐκ ἠρνήσατο, καὶ
ὡμολόγησεν ὅτι ἐγὼ ούκ εἰμὶ ὁ χριστός.

"This is the testimony of John..."

Unless we are already very familiar with the story it is not until we read all the way down to verses 25 and 26 that it becomes clear that this "John" is actually "John the Baptist". I am suggesting that this inquiring individual read no further than the first few lines before his initial question "What is this?" was answered..."this is the testimony of John". He likely believed this first line was a title and summarized the entire work. His brief mission was accomplished and he briskly rolled up the scroll and slapped a tag on it which read "Η ΜΑΡΤΥΡΙΑ ΤΟΥ ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ". Over time the titles of the gospels were assimilated and "Η ΜΑΡΤΥΡΙΑ" was replaced with "TO ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ" and the genitive was replaced with KATA + the accusative. It was only later that the "John" in the title was assumed to be both the author and "the disciple whom Jesus loved" and later came to be understood as John Zebedee...a character that is a complete alien to the gospel.

Interesting, so you have John as the earliest, with a later revision. This reminds me, have you read Jordan Day/ReligionFreeDeist's hypothesis on John? Here's the link for those who haven't- http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150394401416107

I've been going over some more youtube vids of Ehrman speaking and I can see how the guy seems really sincere about what he's doing. Now he flat out appeals to authority and puts it just like that to the public, which, is one down fall. But I think that he really believes that an appeal to authority is best in this instance. Of course that's debateable but all in all it's pretty obvious that he's been on a baby step series of realizations that broaden his horizons as he goes along. I can't help but to wonder if this whole ordeal about trying to write an e-book in 'favor' of proving that Jesus was historical might open several new avenues in his own mind. You never know. It would be hilarious if Ehrman ever gets to the point where he takes up a mythicist stance.

It is kind of funny watching Ehrman on video. The fall-back onto Authority just slays me. He's not alone of course. In ways, it's much more simple to go ahead and grant the argument.

Someone had sent me a blog post this week.

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comment ... ament_and/

I'm not certain who this PhD is, but somewhere in there the scholar uses "occam's razor" to say "Jesus Existed." My jaw kind of dropped. I think this person just proved the existence of Santa Claus, Leprechauns, and Unicorns. *shrug* Since so much of Jesus is counterintuitive, I'm not sure how occam's razor can be used to prove him "historical." Seems intellectually dishonest.

^And that's fine, but as Gerald Massey summed up in The Historical Jesus & The Mythical Christ- "..., a composite likeness of twenty different persons merged in one, that is not anybody."

"...Christian scholars over the centuries have admitted that ... "there are parallels between the Mysteries and Christianity"1 and that "the miracle stories of the Gospels do in fact parallel literary forms found in pagan and Jewish miracle stories,"2 "...According to Form Criticism the Gospels are more like folklore and myth than historical fact."3

1. Metzger, HLS, 8.
2. Meier, II, 536.
3. Geisler, CA, 320.

- Who Was Jesus? 259

I actually think that the comparison between Jesus Christ and Santa Claus is a good one. Just as the character of Santa Claus was not apparently a composite of other mythical characters, there seem to be no good reasons to think that Jesus Christ was any different. The hypothesis that Jesus was a composite of many mythical characters seems to be little more than the imaginings of authors in the 19th century who wanted to believe in that idea but did not seem to have much in the way of ancient evidence.

...Thus, the Jews do not identify Jehoshua Ben-Pandira with the Gospel Jesus, of whom they, his supposed contemporaries, know nothing, but protest against the assumption as an impossibility; whereas the Christians do identify their Jesus as the descendant of Pandira. It was he or nobody; yet he was neither the son of Joseph

3
nor the Virgin Mary, nor was he crucified at Jerusalem. It is not the Jews, then, but the Christians, who fuse two supposed historic characters into one! There being but one history acknowledged or known on either side, it follows that the Jesus of the Gospels is the Jehoshua of the Talmud, or is not at all, as a Person. This shifts the historic basis altogether; it antedates the human history by more than a hundred years, and it at once destroys the historic character of the Gospels, together with that of any other personal Jesus than Ben-Pandira. In short, the Jewish history of the matter will be found to corroborate the mythical. As Epiphanius knew of no other historical Jesus than the descendant of Pandira, it is possible that this is the Jesus whose tradition is reported by Irenæus.

Irenæus was born in the early part of the second century, between 120 and 140 A.D. He was Bishop of Lyons, France, and a personal acquaintance of Polycarp; and he repeats a tradition testified to by the elders, which he alleges was directly derived from John, the "disciple of the Lord," to the effect that Jesus was not crucified at 33 years of age, but that he passed through every age, and lived on to be an oldish man. Now, in accordance with the dates given, Jehoshua Ben-Pandira may have been between 50 and 60 years of age when put to death, and his tradition alone furnishes a clue to the Nihilistic statement of Irenæus.

When the true tradition of Ben-Pandira is recovered, it shows that he was the sole historical Jesus who was hung on a tree by the Jews, not crucified in the Roman fashion, and authenticates the claim now to be made on behalf of the astronomical allegory to the dispensational Jesus, the Kronian Christ, the mythical Messiah of the Canonical Gospels, and the Jesus of Paul, who was not the carnalised Christ. For I hold that the Jesus of the "other Gospel," according to the Apostles Cephas and James, who was utterly repudiated by Paul, was none other than Ben-Pandira, the Nazarene, of whom James was a follower, according to a comment on him found in the Book Abodazura. Anyway, there are two Jesuses, or Jesus and the Christ, one of whom is repudiated by Paul.

But Jehoshua, the son of Pandira, can never be converted into Jesus Christ, the son of a virgin mother, as an historic character. Nor can the dates given ever be reconciled with contemporary history. The historical Herod, who sought to slay the young child Jesus, is known to have died four years before the date of the Christian era, assigned for the birth of Jesus.

So much for the historic Jesus. And now for the mythical Christ. Here we can tread on firmer ground.

meh, actually Santa was a composite of several characters including St. Nicholas and others. Same with Jesus, he's a collage of characters. The fact remains that there's no core to the onion.

"Numerous parallels have been drawn between Santa Claus and the figure of Odin, a major god amongst the Germanic peoples prior to their Christianization."

The claim by ApostateAbe that: "The hypothesis that Jesus was a composite of many mythical characters seems to be little more than the imaginings of authors in the 19th century who wanted to believe in that idea but did not seem to have much in the way of ancient evidence."

You don't seem to be aware of 2 John 1:7: "For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist."

The Gnostic sect of Docetism denied Jesus had come in the flesh. If he didn't come in the flesh then he never existed except mythically. Abe, you can now stop repeating nonsense like it was all made up in the 19th century because that is a lie that gets repeated across the net. The concept that Jesus is a composite character is based on overwhelming evidence, as even more honest Christian NT scholars concede:


See more Christians quotes here.

There are two simple insights to keep in mind when it comes to the mythicist position:

1. When the mythological layers of the story are removed, there is no core to the onion.

2. A composite of 20 people is no one. In other words, a collage of 20 different people whether historical or mythical or both, is simply not one person and never will be.