Robert Tulip wrote:Your depiction of Gnosticism here is a case in point, understandable but false. It is as accurate as Nazi depictions of Jews, a stereotyping distortion aimed to foster derision and worse. I can understand why you advance this theory of the Gnostic claim about the world and evil, and it is something that I have been studying carefully. Hans Jonas, one of the top scholars of Gnosticism, also presents this theory that Gnostics thought matter was evil on the basis of a comment from Plotinus, so you are in good company.

Hi Robert.
It seems that Gnosticism comes in various flavours and varieties which are in conflict with each other. One might ask why the enlightened elite, privy to the "secret teachings" could not get their act together and agree on these things?
http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Demiurge.htm

Robert Tulip wrote:My view is that this Christian propaganda line about Gnosticism holding that the cosmos is evil is based on a simple error. The word “cosmos” in Greek means “world”, as in “cosmopolitan” as “citizen of the world”. As Heidegger has emphasised, “world” as a term has two conflicting meanings. On the one hand, world means the physical planet. But the more usual meaning of world is as a cultural construct, as the paradigm or framework used to develop our theories of meaning and purpose.

I agree with this understanding of the word "cosmos" having two meanings in the new testament. We use context to determine which is meant in specific instances.

Robert Tulip wrote:The original Gnostic claim, as I read it in the Bible, is that the physical material world of nature is good and created by God, but humanity has fallen into a lost and corrupted delusion by constructing an imaginary world which is alienated from and in conflict with the real world made by God. So when Gnostics say the cosmos is evil, they do not mean that physical creation is evil, but rather that the constructed fantasy world of religion is evil.

The point I would make here though, is that we are talking about the creation account in Genesis which is obviously about the creation of the material world and not some "cultural construct."
Gnostic views on the body and Docetism which emerged from Gnosticism shows that these Gnostics took a dim view of the created material body.
For them the real material world was the problem and their alienation was from that, and not a constructed imaginary world.

Robert Tulip wrote:The rise of the Deuteronomic condemnation of nature worship presents a fascinating piece of sociology. The key Deuteronomist was King Josiah. He allegedly found the lost book of the Torah in the temple half a thousand years after Moses allegedly wrote it. Josiah’s eradication of sun worship and female religion by the Jews as chronicled in the Books of Kings illustrates that these pantheist themes were widespread in Israel, but were seen as incompatible with the transcendentalist alienated monotheist patriarchal hierarchical dogma of YHWH as the framework of Israelite military security. So the denunciation of the wide old veneration of nature is just an example of how history is written by the victors, with a systematic sieve applied over the centuries to delete anything that was seen as uncongenial to orthomania. Only fugitive traces remain, such as in the day-millennium theory of fall and redemption.

The Genesis account is certainly not pantheist but has a clear and key distinction between the creator and the creation and books you approve like Job and the Psalms maintain that distinction.
The creation is indeed good and marvelous, but there is no promotion of nature worship,rather the creator of these created wonders.
This is the key error of paganism, worshiping created things or idols linked with nature cycles and fertility which are routinely dismissed as worthless by the prophets. The history reflects infection by these errors from the pagan nations around them and the opposition of the transcendent and true creator God, to these vain imaginings.
You chuck in the" history written by the victors" line to bolster another conspiracy theory, to add to the collection. You have no evidence that anything of this kind happened.
And as I said,if the Christians had been busily weeding out the "true" teachings in the old testament this would have shown up in the dead sea scrolls.
Since this is shown to be false you have a fallback conspiracy theory, as in the one above.

DWill wrote:despite what we now see as the disasters of Christianity, this evolution could be called progressive.

to me the day those roman imperial edicts started rolling was the day the music (and musicians) started dying

bye bye liberty pie, hello darkness my old friend.

but i'm like that, i have a bad attitude towards fascist totalitarianism.

DWill wrote:(remember, all I claim is the existence of the belief, not of Jesus himself).

oh that would be in my view a self evident claim.

it's interesting all the layers. I had very similar thoughts to yours listening to Phil Harlands lectures, sometimes you think "hell what's changed, that sounds just like last week"

PS: @ DB Roy, i dug the hell out of that post DB, thanks a million

DB Roy wrote:What the author of that article is attempting to do is discount any and all pagan influence in Christianity and lock it all down to strictly Jewish (OT specifically, which refers to as “mainstream Judaism”) influence—nothing else. He attempts by stating the following—read it carefully because the entire thrust of his article rests on it:

The issue that I am trying to address deals only with the New Testament literature, specifically the gospels and post-Revelation epistles. I not at all interested in 'defending' the wide array of post-apostolic 'interpretations' and 'syncretistic methods' of any later Christian folk--including the Church Fathers. It is the Jesus of the gospels and epistles, and the claims made and images used of Him and His work on our behalf in them that concerns me here. This means that Christian material and events after around 65ad is of little concern to me (except as it bears on questions of NT authorship perhaps), and does not count as evidence for New Testament authors' "borrowing" of mythic/pagan elements in their creation of the foundational documents of the church--because of the time frames involved. For example, the fact that the New Testament nowhere assigns a specific date (year, month, date, or day of week) to the birthday of Jesus, means that any allegations that the post-apolstolic [sic] church later 'borrowed' a birthday from a rival figure (e.g. Mithras, Sol Invictus) is irrelevant to the original objection above.

Hi DB.
I don't know why you think there is an issue here. The claim is that the gospels we have are drawn from pagan mythologies, even from as far away as India, according to you. So that's what's being examined.

DB Roy wrote:I can shoot a hole through that contention right now. Go to John 4:4 and read:

4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a])

In the story of Buddha, he becomes an ascetic for 6 years, gains disciples and nearly starves himself to death. He realizes this is not the way to enlightenment so he goes back to civilization and meets the daughter of a cowherd carrying a pail of milk-rice and begs her for a drink. She tells him that he is a noble Brahmin and she but a lowly Shudra and they cannot associate. But Buddha drinks and his followers desert him believing him to have given up the religious life. Clearly, the older story is Buddha's. In the Christian version, they have to account for why Jesus is hungry since he wasn't an ascetic so have to add this bit about the disciples off buying food.

There are similarities and differences. You have to find the primary source for the Buddha story and date it. If it came later than the gospel then it's not borrowed by the gospel writer.
The Buddha story changed and grew additions over time. You gave another parallel on temptation.
Here's a critique of the typically far fetched and unfounded claims of borrowing and parallels between Buddha and Jesus.
http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/buddha02.php

DB Roy wrote:While the article raised a lot of fuss about Paul, it skipped over the main thrust of his belief in resurrection—that he believed in resurrection of the spirit only. Moreover, Paul’s belief is in direct contradiction to the gospels. Explain you’re way out of that one. Well, he can’t so he dances around this point. Very much what the Christian members of this forum do when backed into a corner of their own making—dance, dance, dance.

Paul believed in a resurrection of the spirit only, you say.
How you can read 1 Corinthians ch. 15 and deny that Paul taught the resurrection of the body beats me.
http://www.biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthians/15.htm

DB Roy wrote:But the “brilliance” of the author shines through when he tries to point out that phrases as “washed in the blood of the Lamb” have Jewish roots and are not borrowed from paganism to wit:

To illustrate this from one of the alleged examples of borrowing, "washed in the blood of the Lamb" makes perfect sense being seen against the background of OT usage:

"Making robes white with blood is clearly a ritual rather than visual image: sacrificial blood purified utensils for worship in the Old Testament (see comment on Heb 9:21–22), and white was the color of robes required for worship in the New Testament period. [BBC, in.loc.]

So you see those pagan rituals that involved a priest being sprinkled with blood of a slain lamb was a coincidence—the Christian usage was a METAPHORICAL derivation from the OT!! There was no actual lamb!! He goes on to further contradict himself:

Likewise, the same goes for "sprinkled with the blood of Jesus", which could refer back to either of two OT passages/themes [although the Numbers 19 passage does not have any blood actually in the water of purification]:

Not only was there no lamb, there wasn’t any actual blood either!!!!

I can't see what you are complaining about here D.B. Read the new testament book of Hebrews which explains all this in detail.
The Christians understood the priesthood and sacrificial system to be fulfilled in Christ and did not promote animal sacrifice for that reason.
To claim borrowing from pagan religions on this point is unreasonable given the centrality of the temple and sacrificial system in the old testament writings.

"What history?" you ask Youkrst.
Maybe you missed it last time. www.bede.org.uk/jesusmyth.hym

Flann wrote:"What history?" you ask Youkrst.

sorry mate i've lost my place

what history about what was it i was asking?

Flann wrote:Maybe you missed it last time. http://www.bede.org.uk/jesusmyth.hym

that page reads to me like standard apologetics and the continuous "dodges" in it irk me, for example

in the "pagan similarities" section we get the accusation

using carefully pruned quotations, mis-translation and anachronism to produce a woefully inaccurate picture.

the guy says the whole pagan similarities thing requires

include every cult, heresy and sect you can get your hands on.

but this is all just so wrong... you can show the pagan similarities using no more than the NT alone

here, we already did that

http://www.booktalk.org/was-the-new-tes ... hilit=nash

fourth post on page 1

so many times when i was studying old texts i would be reading something and suddenly go "woah!!! that's just like the NT"

i'd be reading platonism, stoicism, hindu texts, buddhist texts etc etc and have to stop and say, man, no wonder they never told me about this at church

after a while it happened so many times i almost got used to it, "oh wow theres another one to add to the ridiculously long list of stuff in the NT i saw somewhere else", then when someone says what the guy on that link page says i just roll my eyes and facepalm then think man this guy must be a christian or have some agenda.

why else would you refuse to admit the obvious.

youkrst wrote:sorry mate i've lost my place

what history about what was it i was asking?

I referred to the history of Christianity prior to Constantine. That mythicists takes such as Constantine's decrees as history but reject historic evidence for an historic Christ and data relating to the early Christians, their churches and their beliefs.
Selective history.

youkrst wrote:so many times when i was studying old texts i would be reading something and suddenly go "woah!!! that's just like the NT"

i'd be reading platonism, stoicism, hindu texts, buddhist texts etc etc and have to stop and say, man, no wonder they never told me about this at church

after a while it happened so many times i almost got used to it, "oh wow theres another one to add to the ridiculously long list of stuff in the NT i saw somewhere else", then when someone says what the guy on that link page says i just roll my eyes and facepalm then think man this guy must be a christian or have some agenda.

why else would you refuse to admit the obvious.

To look at the pagan Copycat thesis in depth from a Christian perspective, here's quite a detailed study of the subject by Glenn Miller. http://www.christianthinktank.com/copycat.html
I can't upload the particular section from Miller's article, but the point he makes early on is that scholars in these fields have developed criteria for making determinations on borrowing of motifs,and stories.
He gives the example of Mesopotamian motifs and Greek myths.
It's not just enough to see something that is superficially similar and go "woah!!! that's just like the new testament".
In fact that's why the vast majority of these scholars reject the pagan copycat thesis for the gospels, as the alleged borrowings fail to meet the necessary criteria to establish it.
DB mentioned Buddha, yet how realistic is it that Indian mythology was available to Judean writers at that time? That's just one question, then the criteria need to be applied to these alleged borrowed motifs and stories.
Again DB rails about similarities between N.T. language of the lamb of God and the rites of Mithraism with a bull. But Mithraism postdates Christianity in the Roman world and of course Christians did not practice these rituals seeing the fulfillment of O.T. sacrificial rites in Christ's crucifixion.
And in fact the mythicists rely heavily on very old and rejected ideas by such as Kersey Graves. A recurring problem with Acharya S is her failure to to cite primary sources.
Modern scholarship in these fields has rejected the older "scholarship" mythicists rely on for various and good reasons.

I referred to the history of Christianity prior to Constantine. That mythicists takes such as Constantine's decrees as history but reject historic evidence for an historic Christ and data relating to the early Christians, their churches and their beliefs.
Selective history.

oh, thanks Flann

when you say

but reject historic evidence for an historic Christ and data relating to the early Christians, their churches and their beliefs.
Selective history.

you'd have to go through the historic evidence and data one item at a time so we could see what we were all inferring from it.

for example christians often cite the tacitus reference as evidence

"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind".

well some have problems with it

in 2014 an article by Richard Carrier detailing the reasons to suspect the "Their founder, one Christ, had been put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius" part in the passage is a Christian interpolation was published in Vigiliae Christianae[9] some of which are highlighted in Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus where he also presents reasons that even if it is totally genuine there are reasons to suspect Tacitus is merely repeating a story told by the Christians themselves.[52] Carrier also notes that there is a strange gap in the Annals of Tacitus for the period of middle 29 to middle 31: "That the cut is so precise and covers precisely those two is too improbable to posit as a chance coincidence." with Carrier citing Robert Drews suggesting that the period was cut because it provided no information regarding Jesus.[53]

i thought it was dodgy when i saw

https://jayraskin.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/294/

In order to make a joke out of the discrepancy, Tertullian writes in ad nationes, (circa 200 CE) “Even when by a faulty pronunciation you call us “Chrestians” (for you are not certain about even the sound of this noted name), you in fact lisp out the sense of pleasantness and goodness.” To the rhetorician Tertullian the thought never occurs that the Romans might be a better and more accurate source for the beginning of Christianity than the Christians themselves.

Once we accept this, then we have two Roman historians from between 110-120 C.E. mentioning not Jesus or Christ, but a man leading a Jewish rebellion named Chrestus.

Here are some more early references to Chrest or Chrestians. Here’s another interesting page on the use of the term “Chrestians”

I proposed a number of years ago that Tacitus originally wrote that Nero sent the Procurator Porcius Festus to put down the Christians/Chrestians.

Christian interpolators, misunderstanding, changed it to Pontius Pilate, and they changed Chrestus to Christ and Nero to Tiberius.

but as i've often said

even if there were a historical jesus, what would be the significance of it.

ok some guy called jesus gets crucified, if i granted that, i still dont see how it would say anything about the obviously metaphorical jesus.

if i can prove docetism existed does that mean that i have proved Jesus' body was either absent or illusory.

i say obviously metaphorical/mythological because the NT Jesus is the virgin born son of god walking on water etc etc

It's not just enough to see something that is superficially similar and go "woah!!! that's just like the new testament".

Flann when you've seen as many of the details of Jesus life in other texts as i have it has nothing to do with superficially similar, it has to do with common motifs in mythology.

imagine you were reading a book and you came across this

When the world-honored Buddha had left Savatthi Sariputta (Simon Peter) felt a desire to see the Lord and to hear him preach. Coming to the river where the water was deep and the current strong, he said to himself: "This stream shall not prevent me. I shall go and see the Blessed One, and he stepped upon the water which was as firm under his feet as a slab of granite. When he arrived at a place in the middle of the stream where the waves were high, Sariputta's heart gave way, and he began to sink. But rousing his faith and renewing his mental effort, he proceeded as before and reached the other bank.

The people of the village were astonished to see Sariputta, and they asked how he could cross the stream where there was neither a bridge nor a ferry. Sariputta replied: "I lived in ignorance until I heard the voice of the Buddha. As I was anxious to hear the doctrine of salvation, I crossed the river and I walked over its troubled waters because I had faith. Faith. nothing else, enabled me to do so, and now I am here in the bliss of the Master's presence."

this is just like simon peter in the NT

youkrst wrote:well some have problems with it



Quote:
in 2014 an article by Richard Carrier detailing the reasons to suspect the "Their founder, one Christ, had been put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius" part in the passage is a Christian interpolation was published in Vigiliae Christianae[9] some of which are highlighted in Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus where he also presents reasons that even if it is totally genuine there are reasons to suspect Tacitus is merely repeating a story told by the Christians themselves.[52] Carrier also notes that there is a strange gap in the Annals of Tacitus for the period of middle 29 to middle 31: "That the cut is so precise and covers precisely those two is too improbable to posit as a chance coincidence." with Carrier citing Robert Drews suggesting that the period was cut because it provided no information regarding Jesus.[53]

All this kind of thing amounts to special pleading in relation to Tacitus,Josephus,Suetonius and others and has been answered. I previously made the point that Tacitus was not in the habit of simply repeating what he was told by anyone. The Roman bureaucratic administrators kept records which Tacitus could easily have checked.

youkrst wrote: but as i've often said

even if there were a historical jesus, what would be the significance of it.

Well that's what Christianity is founded on,history not myth. Mythicists typically posit a concoction out of pagan mythology
and the invention of a new religion which was swallowed hook line and sinker, by those in a position to know if it was true or not,namely Jerusalemite Jews.
You reject Christian accounts of the execution of Peter and Paul under Nero. They proclaimed the message of death and resurrection of Christ and died for their beliefs.
Robert T.even claims that Peter was an astro-theological invention!

youkrst wrote: imagine you were reading a book and you came across this



Quote:
When the world-honored Buddha had left Savatthi Sariputta (Simon Peter) felt a desire to see the Lord and to hear him preach. Coming to the river where the water was deep and the current strong, he said to himself: "This stream shall not prevent me. I shall go and see the Blessed One, and he stepped upon the water which was as firm under his feet as a slab of granite. When he arrived at a place in the middle of the stream where the waves were high, Sariputta's heart gave way, and he began to sink. But rousing his faith and renewing his mental effort, he proceeded as before and reached the other bank.

The people of the village were astonished to see Sariputta, and they asked how he could cross the stream where there was neither a bridge nor a ferry. Sariputta replied: "I lived in ignorance until I heard the voice of the Buddha. As I was anxious to hear the doctrine of salvation, I crossed the river and I walked over its troubled waters because I had faith. Faith. nothing else, enabled me to do so, and now I am here in the bliss of the Master's presence."




this is just like simon peter in the NT

That's why I say you have to cite primary sources and date them to show this predates the gospels. Buddha predates Christ but many of the writings do not predate the gospels.
And that's why I take issue with Achary S and her repeated failure here in relation to primary sources. She claims scholarly basis, but is anything but scholarly.
Things are bad, when someone like R.G.Price who himself is critical of Christianity and very sceptical about an historical Jesus,casts a cold critical eye on the "scholarship" emanating from Acharya's fevered imagination.
www.rationalrevolution.net/temp/SunsofGod.pdf

Flann 5 wrote:Hi Robert.
It seems that Gnosticism comes in various flavours and varieties which are in conflict with each other. One might ask why the enlightened elite, privy to the "secret teachings" could not get their act together and agree on these things?
http://www.gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Demiurge.htm

Hi Flann, I appreciate you engaging on this complex and interesting material.

The article you link here is weak. It claims that Valentinians “believed that the material world was created by a lesser deity which they call the Demiurge” but in my reading the article fails to engage with the complexity of metaphors such as “Wisdom” and “Image of the Father”. My view is that a secret wisdom tradition which came from India to Egypt was primarily responsible for crafting the Christ Myth as it appears in the New Testament, but this teaching was only partially understood, and a range of lesser thinkers presented later misleading speculative interpretations, both orthodox and Gnostic.

Emperor Asoka of India sent Buddhist Theraputta missionaries to the West in the third century BC, and these founded the Egyptian monastic tradition of the Therapeuts which Philo describes at Lake Mareotis near Alexandria, where the Gospel of Mark was written. But the suppression of the history of these events was so severe that we have only a fragmentary record which remains to be reconstructed in a coherent and compelling way.

I think that the reason the enlightened elite could not get their act together was that they lived in a time of enormous upheaval, conflict and difficulty. The construction of the New Testament was a product of high enlightened wisdom, basing theology on astronomy. The key to this teaching was the ‘as above so below’ idea that events in history parallel the visible markers of the sky seen in the slow movement of precession as the structure of time. But this scientific community was fragile, and was shattered by war and oppression, and later writers had to work with highly conflicted polemical records. It is a bit like how today we struggle to assess the value of writing from the nineteenth century, partly due to the way orthodox Christians have twisted the work of writers such as Massey to create a distorted impression.

Flann 5 wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:My view is that this Christian propaganda line about Gnosticism holding that the cosmos is evil is based on a simple error. The word “cosmos” in Greek means “world”, as in “cosmopolitan” as “citizen of the world”. As Heidegger has emphasised, “world” as a term has two conflicting meanings. On the one hand, world means the physical planet. But the more usual meaning of world is as a cultural construct, as the paradigm or framework used to develop our theories of meaning and purpose.

I agree with this understanding of the word "cosmos" having two meanings in the new testament. We use context to determine which is meant in specific instances.

And yet the core idea of the Gnostic Library page you quoted about the Valentinian School is entirely based on this misreading of cosmos between world and planet. The Gnostics taught with Paul that the world is evil. It is a misunderstanding to say this meant matter is evil.

It really illustrates to me how analysis of ancient texts is prone to misunderstanding, with the idea that matter is evil falsely seen as the core idea of Gnosticism. It rather seems to me that this is a malevolent caricature put about by opponents of Gnostic teachers, and hatred of matter is not reflected in the serious Gnostic texts. It is rather like how Saint Paul says to follow the path of the spirit rather than the path of flesh, but flesh here has to be understood as euphemism for corruption and desire, not as a condemnation of the body.

Flann 5 wrote:
we are talking about the creation account in Genesis which is obviously about the creation of the material world and not some "cultural construct."

Maybe you should tell that to Saint Augustine, who wrote: “while dealing with the book of Genesis, … matters … at variance with the perceptions of [our] rational faculties… are in no way necessary to the … predictions of the scriptures.”

The Seven Days of Creation are recognised by Augustine and other Church Fathers as a cultural construct. Saying they are about the literal creation of the material world is just the degraded political view of young earth creationists who are too stupid to understand allegory or who have an agenda to promote delusion.

Flann 5 wrote: Gnostic views on the body and Docetism which emerged from Gnosticism shows that these Gnostics took a dim view of the created material body. For them the real material world was the problem and their alienation was from that, and not a constructed imaginary world.

Flann, you have just accepted black Christian propaganda, based on the caricatures put about by heresiologists with an agenda to ally throne and altar.

Docetism, said to be the teaching that Christ only ‘seemed’ to come in the flesh, is just a propaganda caricature of the original spiritual teaching about Christ, which had to be blackened in order to justify the claims that the Gospels are history rather than fiction. This blackening was immensely successful, to the point that theology has broadly failed to engage with the real basis of Docetic thought as the original Christ Mythicism.

If you can justify your claim above by direct reference to early Gnostic sources rather than commentaries on them, I will be surprised. You could make just the same false critique of Paul’s view of the flesh by similar selective misreading.

Flann 5 wrote: The Genesis account is certainly not pantheist but has a clear and key distinction between the creator and the creation and books you approve like Job and the Psalms maintain that distinction.

But we don’t have the history of earlier versions of these texts, although Job is said to derive from earlier texts. The dominant monotheistic view in the Bible is that God is external to the creation, so naturally if any older traditions were adapted for Jewish use this core belief would be inserted.

The esoteric wisdom tradition is pantheist, whereas the exoteric political tradition is panentheist. It is precisely this unacceptability of pantheism in politics that consigns pantheist teachings to secrecy and allegory, as seen in the day=millennium code of the Bible.

Flann 5 wrote:This is the key error of paganism, worshiping created things or idols linked with nature cycles and fertility which are routinely dismissed as worthless by the prophets. The history reflects infection by these errors from the pagan nations around them and the opposition of the transcendent and true creator God, to these vain imaginings.

To say the true creator God is transcendent is itself a vain piece of imagination. We have no way to assess whether creativity is intrinsic or extrinsic to matter, but there are strong psychological and political drivers to favour the extrinsicity thesis of transcendentalist monotheism. The prophets had a strategic military security agenda to inculcate Jewish obedience and unity as defence against their large neighbouring empires, and this agenda was served by the condemnation of the diversity inherent in veneration of nature and promotion of a monolithic faith.

Flann 5 wrote:You chuck in the" history written by the victors" line to bolster another conspiracy theory, to add to the collection. You have no evidence that anything of this kind happened.

Wow, can you really so easily dismiss the anathemas against heresy by the Christian Emperors which for a thousand years meant that possession of heterodox literature was a capital crime? That history of Christendom is the very model and type of formal conspiracy to produce conformity and obedience and eradicate all material that clashed with the 'breathing together' of the conspirators.

Flann 5 wrote:And as I said,if the Christians had been busily weeding out the "true" teachings in the old testament this would have shown up in the dead sea scrolls.

I am not going to get into a debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls, since I don't know how they relate to the Gnostic tradition. I would rather focus on textual analysis of the Bible, to understand how ideas now condemned as Gnostic and pantheist, especially the idea that Jesus was invented, are actually central to its construction.

Flann wrote:Well that's what Christianity is founded on, history not myth.

do you mean that Jesus, the saviour of the world, only begotten Son of God, born of a virgin, walking on water, turning water into wine, overcoming the temptations of Satan, casting out demons, rising from the dead... is history not myth?

if christianity is founded on history why do you need faith?

have you ever wondered why we have these scant references to Jesus and yet no-one mentions this bit of "history"

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

well it's an obvious myth rip from the OT

Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying, "Every son who is born you are to cast into the Nile

not history, mythology.

Flann you mention Josephus as evidence of historical Jesus

does it not strike you as strange that Josephus has a story about three old mates of his being crucified and one surviving?

Crucifixion of three men and the survival of one.

The only person known in history to survive a Roman crucifixion is a friend whom Josephus saves after intervening with the Roman commander. Three are taken down but only one survives.

Josephus, Life, 75, p. 20 of Whiston’s Translation

... as I [Joseph Bar Mathias] came back, I saw many captives crucified; and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered.


The gospels have a mysterious Joseph of Arimathea appear and go to the Roman commander and ask for Jesus to be taken down from among the three crucified. Jesus lives and the other two presumably die.

Mark 15:42-46

When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, {43} Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. {44} Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. {45} When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. {46} Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.