Really fed up with all the talk about religion

Robert Tulip wrote:

ant wrote:convieniently ignor historical evidence that does not suit your views

ant, I have long been a great admirer of Jesus Christ and still am. The dogmatists who contort the eternal archetype by believing a historical fiction are the ones who fail to admire the true story. They have nefarious political motives and no integrity. Belief in the Historical Jesus is the new fundamentalism.

I don't ignore evidence. It is the historicists who ignore the total lack of real evidence for Jesus, and the clear evidence for his invention. Philo represented the Jewish people in an Embassy to Rome in 40 AD. Josephus was the commander of Jewish military forces in Galilee in the mid first century. We have extensive writings from both of them, with no reliable mention of Jesus, who was supposedly "famed far and wide". Saint Paul omits anything that would confirm he is 2IC to the founder of the religion. It is all a crock.

The Gospels are pure fiction. "Famed far and wide" has the same zero status as "walked on water", "rose from the dead", "born of a virgin" and "lived in Nazareth" (which was only established later because the Bible said Jesus lived there).

When people start to recognise the Bible as the greatest work of literary genius in world history we will start to have a serious debate about religion. While people pretend it is historical fact they are mired in delusion.

Re Osiris, if you want to know about the continuity between Christian myth and ancient Egypt I recommend you read Christ In Egypt by DM Murdock. I note Ehrman reserves particular vitriol for Murdock, and is entirely sloppy and wrong in his refusal to engage on serious scholarship regarding the topics she writes about. There is a weird psychological and political process going on here, rather like how the Church Fathers whipped themselves in a lather in order to suppress Gnosticism.

Robert Tulip wrote: I have no plan to buy or read it, as the summary that Ehrman provided in his Huffington Post article put me off it quite badly, as I explain in my comments above.

Why Ehrman, who had been a pinup boy for rational theology, presented this amazing apostasy against reason will continue to be a source of lively debate.

I do suspect, however, that Ehrman is jumping on the Did Jesus Exist bandwagon

ant wrote:[

That's a hilarious presumption.

oblivion wrote:

ant wrote:[

That's a hilarious presumption.

Probably. Like I said, I need to read the book, not just the article.So, as we say here in Germany, I've made "nails with heads" and ordered the book. I'm without internet for 3 weeks so will make some (hopefully intelligent) comment about it when I'm back online.

With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul) -- sources that originated in Jesus' native tongue Aramaic and that can be dated to within just a year or two of his life (before the religion moved to convert pagans in droves). Historical sources like that are is pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind. Moreover, we have relatively extensive writings from one first-century author, Paul, who acquired his information within a couple of years of Jesus' life and who actually knew, first hand, Jesus' closest disciple Peter and his own brother James. If Jesus did not exist, you would think his brother would know it.

Moreover, the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on every ground. The alleged parallels between Jesus and the "pagan" savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions).

Why then is the mythicist movement growing, with advocates so confident of their views and vocal -- even articulate -- in their denunciation of the radical idea that Jesus actually existed? It is, in no small part, because these deniers of Jesus are at the same time denouncers of religion -- a breed of human now very much in vogue. And what better way to malign the religious views of the vast majority of religious persons in the western world, which remains, despite everything, overwhelmingly Christian, than to claim that the historical founder of their religion was in fact the figment of his followers' imagination?