Freethought Nation

Why have you spent so much time slandering Murdock to no end only to recently show up here posting in her forums? You've presented yourself as a competitor with a competitive theory. Are you really embarrassed by the way I've critically analyzed your assertions and have thrown them back at you? What exactly have you been doing to Murdock elsewhere on the web? I think we all know the answer to that question but I'm interested in what you have to say about it. Why would you come here in the first place if you feel so ill towards everything Murdock?

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The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

I had ill feelings against Murdock's literature, and I was hoping to put those ill feelings behind me and deal with the ideas fairly. Maybe I was being too optimistic.

So this is about turning over a new leaf and trying to be fair? Fair enough.

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Abe, how would you feel if somebody had been spreading malicious smears about you and your work for around 6 or 7 years, without ever having actually studied your work in any meaningful way, and then decides to show up at your forum to post a few more harassing posts? Then, decide to turn over a new leaf after a few weeks as if nothing had ever happened? Would you feel like an apology is in order? Wouldn't you feel like, "what nerve?" It's very difficult to trust a person that appears to have no conscience. All that intellectual dishonesty over at IIDB from you, GDon and others has certainly taken its toll.

Nevertheless, you've been good lately so just keep it up and continue to behave yourself. Remember, Acharya has made up with others before such as Dr. Price for one example.

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

Awesome, thanks.

Don't get overly excited as we've all got our eye on you.

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

^

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Atheist Stumped by Overwhelming Evidence for Jesus' Existence...From an AGNOSTIC LIBERAL Scholar!

Any atheist who would be "stumped" by the NON-evidence for Jesus's existence is not very well read on the subject, so that's not impressive AT ALL.

As we know here, Ehrman himself is apparently oblivious to the arguments that address each of his contentions - arguments that have been around for decades to centuries. He is therefore not much of an expert on the subject of Jesus mythicism, so there's really nothing to be getting excited about.

I haven't listened to the program below, but I would be shocked if Reggie Finley/Infidel Guy was "stumped" by something Ehrman said. He should certainly know all these arguments about the "overwhelming evidence" - he's been aware of my work for years, as well as that of many other mythicists, including Price and Carrier. If he didn't know it, why the heck did he have Ehrman on without being prepared?



If someone wants to do a point-by-point refutation of Ehrman's contentions here, please feel free. You can search my sites and books for data.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

I was reflecting on that interview earlier in the thread, and yes it's pretty stupid overall. In the brief segment of the interview that the video maker included, Ehrman goes straight for the Julius Caesar fallacy and two others, followed by an appeal to Paul mentioning James the Brother of the Lord in Galatians.

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The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Ugh. That's pretty lame. Talk about special pleading and assorted other logical fallacies. It's as if he just fell off the turnip truck yesterday.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Hi, I've just joined, but would like to revisit this from the second page of this thread..

Don't you think it is interesting that Many of those epistles have passages that refer to "Paul" in the third person, such as Galatians 1 & Acts 15?

I note in some of those epistles reference to an established church, with a Council as you ApostateAbe did here -
Doesn't that strike you as beyond establishing a church? i.e. referring to a well established church? Especially for a character that allegedly had gotten his relatively recent revelations - the first revelations - from no man

I like this -

Good observations, CH.

Pre-Christian Churches of the Mediterranean

In his epistles to the various "churches" around the Mediterranean, the apostle Paul is clearly speaking to established gathering places or ἐκκλησία/ecclesia, the Greek word for "church" in the New Testament. This word ecclesia, however, was used frequently in pre-Christian Greek or Hellenized writings, referring to "assemblies" and "gatherings." The word or one of its cognates/derivatives is used a dozen or more times in the Greek Old Testament or Septuagint, e.g.:

Lev 8:3; Num 20:8; Deut 4:10, 31:12, 28; 1 Chr 13:5; Est 4:16; Ecc 1:1, 2, 12, 7:28, 12:8, 9, 10

Indeed, there's a biblical book by this very title: Ecclesiasticus or Sirach, deemed "apocryphal" by Protestants and also called, "The Wisdom of Jesus." Thus, in this pre-Christian text named "Church" we have "Jesus sayings" or Logia Iesou, centuries before Christ supposedly lived. (Interestingly, according to the Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary, to ecclesiastikon refers to "pay received for sitting in the assembly.")

Thus, we can see that pre-Christian Greek speakers - including many Jews, such as those who read the Septuagint ("LXX") - would have been quite familiar with the word ecclesia, and that such gatherings and places and assembly were not only established but also common.

Interestingly, in certain places in the LXX (e.g., Lev 8:3; Num 20:8) the Israelites are told to "gather the assembly," in which verses both the words "ecclesia" and "synagogue" (συναγωγὴ) are used. Hence, not only would these terms have been abundantly familiar to pre-Christian Hellenized Jews but they also appeared within the specific context of a religious gathering.

At Deuteronomy 4:10, we find a reference to "the church":


This passage is often translated so as to exclude the noun ecclesia, as the verb ecclesiazo is used shortly thereafter:


A more literal translation would be:


So, the gathering of the Lord in the Septuagint is called ecclesia or "the church," some 200 or more years before Christ supposedly walked the earth.

Paul and the mystery schools

In consideration of the fact that in the NT, "Paul" is depicted as following a route around the Mediterranean similar to that of the Greek sages Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana, as well as the mythical proselytizer of Dionysus, Orpheus, to the seats of important and famed mystery schools, it would be logical to suggest that "Paul" was touring said mystery schools or "ecclesias." His epistles reflect a possible formulaic documentary tradition, and I am reminded of the fact that Apollonius likewise allegedly shared epistles with important wisdom teachings. The similarities between Paul and Apollonius are intriguing.

As concerns a possible influence on the shape of a church, this Egyptian sacred "house of goodness" could not be more striking:



Note that this fascinating image contains the hieroglyph for "goodness," which resembles a cross with a sacred heart at the bottom.





Churches of Chrestos

Moreover, one word for "good" in Greek, among others, is χρηστὸς or chrestos. Hence, if these Egyptian "houses of goodness" were still in existence after Alexander the Greek's conquest of Egypt, when that nation began to be Hellenized and Greek became the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, these sacred buildings might have been called ecclesias or "churches of Chrestos," centuries before Christ purportedly lived.

In this regard, the word χρηστὸς or chrestos is used numerous times in the Septuagint, and the earliest church in Egypt is a Marcionite building, above the doorway of which appeared the words "Jesus the Good" or Iesous the Chrestos - the earliest dated Christian inscription.

Interestingly, the site Marcion.info makes some very pointed statements in this regard:


We would argue that the canonical gospels as we have them appeared at the end of the second century, but most certainly the rest of this paragraph ranks as meritable.

Furthermore, in the earliest extant copies of the Bible, such as the Codex Sinaiticus, the words translated as "Christ" and "Christians" are, in the original Greek, Chrest and Chrestians. There is more about this fascinating discussion elsewhere on this forum.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

I hope this goes to the right topic: It is supposed to go as a reply to Pre-Christian Churches of the Mediterranean. There is even more. Synagogues do not make their appearance in Palestine until around 1st century AD. Until then, all Jewish worship was to be at the temple in Jerusalem (where tithes could be collected and power consolidated). The first synagogues were in places like Alexandria (3rd century BC) where it was impossible to keep Temple authority alive without them.

Paul also wrote that the name 'Christian' was first used at Antioch to differentiate between them and the Nazarenes, of which Paul was one. It is a very good assumption that churches pre-existed Nazarene conversion attempts. It is also highly likely that even from the start, the Christian churches were never majorly Jewish, but comprised of Greeks and Romans who were initiates into the 'Truth Seeking' religion which came out of Hellenized Persia. It is telling that of the first century 'Bishops of Rome', only 3 were Jewish. Assuming Peter was a real person, there are two others, in the first 13 popes. Right after Peter, however, are Roman and Greek bishops. If Judeo-Christianty or a general Christianity arose out of a diaspora Jewish community, it is scarcely believable that all their leaders would be non-Jews. Yet that is what modern Christians are led to believe.

A further bizarre item. There are about 10 first century images of "Jesus' that have survived down to modern times. These are mostly mosaics and none of them show nail wounds in the extremities or a crucifixion. They all show Jesus as beardless and Roman even when posed among Jews.

I'm going to have to press for a reference on that, because all I've ever heard is that the earliest Christian iconography dates at earliest to the Third Century, not the First. And even the ambiguous items like the Alexander Graffito is third century as well. I've heard of some magical stone gems depicting guys crucified on them that are supposed to be pretty early. I forget which century they date to, but all the ones I've ever been shown are ambiguous, no reference to Jesus or Christ or Messiah or whatever else.

Thank you for your comments and interest in this subject, cythara and GA.

Earliest Imagery of Jesus

Despite almost 2,000 years of searching, there are no extant first-century images or artifacts of any sort from Christianity. There is an odd artifact from Caesarea that supposedly names Pontius Pilate (note the misshapened "I" and "T" in this inscription, which look like they were added later), but nothing specific to Christianity to indicate that anyone had even heard of it during the first century. It is only at the very end of the first and into the early second century that we begin to see whispers of Christianity's existence in any form. Yet, the earliest extant texts call the figures involved in this movement "Chrest" and "Chrestians," not "Christ" and "Christians." Surprisingly, the word "Christian" doesn't appear in the historical record as we have it until the middle of the fourth century, at the earliest.

As concerns imagery of Jesus Christ in particular - or, rather, Jesus the Chrest - the earliest portrayal dates from the third century. From Wikipedia's "Depiction of Jesus":



"The Healing of the Paralytic," oldest known image of Jesus, from the Syrian city of Dura Europos (c. 235)

The fact that there is no standard depiction of Jesus and that his image morphs from era to era and place to place speaks of his mythical nature. This sort of development is classic to mythology, especially where gods/goddesses have been merged and changed over the centuries or millennia by having new attributes added to or emphasized in their characters.

The information concerning the establishment of synagogues in Alexandria by the third century but not in Palestine until the first century is important and relevant, in consideration of the fact that the Greek word "synagogue" appears in the Septuagint in a religious context. As we know, the Septuagint was translated at Alexandria, traditionally around 200 BCE, although some claim that evidence points to an ongoing effort possibly continuing into the first century AD/CE. Some of the Egyptian synagogues may have been under the direction of the Jewish patriarch purportedly mentioned by Hadrian in a letter discussing the Alexandrian Jews and Christians (likely "Chrestians") worshipping the hybrid god Serapis.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it: