News Jesus of Nazareth was a ?mythical character? and never existed.

[Si]

Historical researcher Michael Paulkovich has claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was a ?mythical character? and never existed.

The controversial discovery was apparently made after he found no verifiable mention of Christ from 126 writers during the ?time of Jesus? from the first to third centuries.

He says he is a fictional character invented by followers of Christianity to create a figure to worship.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...character.html

It's the Daily Mail, so don't worry too much bible fans, the Daily Mail story could be just as false .

[seeandsee]

solid evidence

[pornguy]

Interesting.

I was reading not long ago about a copy of the Arrest warrant that they have issued from Rome at the same time. Even has a description of him, although its not what people tend to think.

[Si]

Originally Posted by seeandsee

no evidence

Fixed.

[Si]

Originally Posted by pornguy

Interesting.

I was reading not long ago about a copy of the Arrest warrant that they have issued from Rome at the same time. Even has a description of him, although its not what people tend to think.

Got a link to that? Sounds interesting.

[MaDalton]

Originally Posted by Si

Got a link to that? Sounds interesting.

[Si]

Originally Posted by MaDalton

[Phoenix]

Originally Posted by pornguy

Interesting.

I was reading not long ago about a copy of the Arrest warrant that they have issued from Rome at the same time. Even has a description of him, although its not what people tend to think.

I assume, he was described as someone from Iraq.
Not the blonde hair blue eyed figure you see on churces all across Asia..lol

[bagfull]

so paul was fake too?

[CaptainHowdy]

Ok ........

[Jeremy82]

The thing I don't like about religions is that it's more about some historical fairy tale and 'must do things' than about some universal philosophy.

[John-ACWM]

Originally Posted by MaDalton

[Lonny]

Originally Posted by MaDalton

That made my morning and coffee out my nostrils.

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by Si

Historical researcher Michael Paulkovich has claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was a ?mythical character? and never existed.

The controversial discovery was apparently made after he found no verifiable mention of Christ from 126 writers during the ?time of Jesus? from the first to third centuries.

He says he is a fictional character invented by followers of Christianity to create a figure to worship.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...character.html

It's the Daily Mail, so don't worry too much bible fans, the Daily Mail story could be just as false .

get the fuck outta here....you kiddin' me boy?

[MiamiBoyz]

Does this mean that there is some doubt about Santa as well...I always thought there were just a few holes in that story as well but certainly much more believable than that whole "son of god" shit.

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by MiamiBoyz

Does this mean that there is some doubt about Santa as well...I always thought there were just a few holes in that story as well but certainly much more believable than that whole "son of god" shit.

Santa is questionable but the Easter Bunny is a lock!

[ilnjscb]

today if Xristos had done the thing with the money changers at the temple, he'd have been shot

[oppoten]

Originally Posted by bagfull

so paul was fake too?

what I was wondering

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by bagfull

so paul was fake too?

here ya go: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1....The_Mythmaker

[oppoten]

Originally Posted by Grapesoda

here ya go: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1....The_Mythmaker

if he's a Talmudic scholar then I'm not accepting it as unbiased, sorry

[HerPimp]

Pontius Pilate & Tiberius Caesar are both real and wrote about him.

[SilentKnight]

FSM FTW.














(flying spaghetti monster...for the win)

[Robbie]

Originally Posted by HerPimp

Pontius Pilate & Apocrypha are both real and wrote about him.

The letter that Pilate supposedly wrote is only noted in the Bible.

As far as I can find, there is no other record of any writing by Pilate about Jesus Christ, except in the New Testament in the book of fables and fairy tales called the Bible.

[jigg]

This has been beat to death. Yet again an atheist on a crusade with the truth, and he just so happens to have a book for sale. Not much different from rabid evangelicals who hold the truth too. And he has a cheap site to boot..

Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus. Roman historian and senator Tacitus wrote about about the execution of Jesus. Then there's the Munich Talmud

“On the Eve of Passover they hung Jesu the Nazarine. And the herald went out before him for 40 days [saying]: ‘Jesu the Nazarine will go out to be stoned for sorcery and misleading and enticing Israel. Any who know [anything] in his defence must come and declare concerning him.’ But no-one came to his defence so they hung him on the Eve of Passover.”

Now whether he was what the bible describes him to be is another matter, considering how mistranslated and manipulated it is...

[JFK]

Originally Posted by jigg

This has been beat to death.

Now whether he was what the bible describes him to be is another matter, considering how mistranslated and manipulated it is...

[ilnjscb]

Originally Posted by jigg

This has been beat to death. Yet again an atheist on a crusade with the truth, and he just so happens to have a book for sale. Not much different from rabid evangelicals who hold the truth too. And he has a cheap site to boot..

Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus. Roman historian and senator Tacitus wrote about about the execution of Jesus. Then there's the Munich Talmud

?On the Eve of Passover they hung Jesu the Nazarine. And the herald went out before him for 40 days [saying]: ?Jesu the Nazarine will go out to be stoned for sorcery and misleading and enticing Israel. Any who know [anything] in his defence must come and declare concerning him.? But no-one came to his defence so they hung him on the Eve of Passover.?

Now whether he was what the bible describes him to be is another matter, considering how mistranslated and manipulated it is...

There are convincing arguments on all sides, with the Tacitus reference being possibly the strongest proof that at least 50 years after the death of YbN his legend was well established. The oldest manuscript of that passage is from like the 11th century though, and was held in an abbey.

[Robbie]

Originally Posted by jigg

Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus. Roman historian and senator Tacitus wrote about about the execution of Jesus. Then there's the Munich Talmud

That's interesting. I had never heard of these.

So I started googling them up.

Christians hang on to Josephus as "proof". But it turns out it was just one little phrase.

A guy named Louis Feldman studied the writings of Josephus from 1937 to 1980 in a book called: "Josephus And Modern Scholarship"
He worked with many scholars on the subject.

Here is their conclusion on that one paragraph about Jesus:

Opinion on the authenticity of this passage is varied. Louis H. Feldman surveyed the relevant literature from 1937 to 1980 in Josephus and Modern Scholarship. Feldman noted that 4 scholars regarded the Testimonium Flavianum as entirely genuine, 6 as mostly genuine, 20 accept it with some interpolations, 9 with several interpolations, and 13 regard it as being totally an interpolation.

It is impossible that this passage is entirely genuine. It is highly unlikely that Josephus, a believing Jew working under Romans, would have written, "He was the Messiah." This would make him suspect of treason, but nowhere else is there an indication that he was a Christian. Indeed, in Wars of the Jews, Josephus declares that Vespasian fulfilled the messianic oracles. Furthermore, Origen, writing about a century before Eusebius, says twice that Josephus "did not believe in Jesus as the Christ."


EDIT: I also just looked up if "Jesus" was a common name back in that time.
Yes it was. So if the name "Jesus" is ever mentioned in a historical way, it would be like the name "Joe" being mentioned now.

[OY]

They say Santa is Norwegian, but the Finns say he is a Finn - then again, he is supposed to be living on the North Pole, which is cold as fuck, but his reindeer can fly (guess that is cool), BUT the Swedes claims him as theirs, and the Americans say he is American because Hollywood says so!

God (good) damn, I am confused...

[Si]

If Jesus did not exist, does that mean Islam is also false?

AFAIK Jesus is mentioned in Islam, but not in the same way as in Christianity, he is but a prophet in Islam? And not the last prophet?

IDK, YOLO, LMAO.

[Robbie]

Originally Posted by Si

If Jesus did not exist, does that mean Islam is also false?

It pretty much means that in the year 2014 people shouldn't believe in fairytales started by backwards primitive people who didn't know what a molecule was or that the Earth is round and that the universe does not revolve around the world.

Hell, they didn't even know that other places outside of a few hundred miles existed.

To think that these goatherders wrote some stories...and educated people in 2014 still believe it, is just bizarre.

As Bill Maher said in his movie "Religulous" when he was questioning a United States Senator on religion: "Is there ANY other thing from the Bronze Age that you would believe in modern times?"

That kind of puts it in perspective right there.

[Mutt]

Originally Posted by Robbie

Here is their conclusion on that one paragraph about Jesus:

Opinion on the authenticity of this passage is varied. Louis H. Feldman surveyed the relevant literature from 1937 to 1980 in Josephus and Modern Scholarship. Feldman noted that 4 scholars regarded the Testimonium Flavianum as entirely genuine, 6 as mostly genuine, 20 accept it with some interpolations, 9 with several interpolations, and 13 regard it as being totally an interpolation.

It is impossible that this passage is entirely genuine. It is highly unlikely that Josephus, a believing Jew working under Romans, would have written, "He was the Messiah." This would make him suspect of treason, but nowhere else is there an indication that he was a Christian. Indeed, in Wars of the Jews, Josephus declares that Vespasian fulfilled the messianic oracles. Furthermore, Origen, writing about a century before Eusebius, says twice that Josephus "did not believe in Jesus as the Christ."

I'm not a Biblical scholar but this paragraph is a prime example of how so much of what passes as 'academic' study of events and people that are two thousand years old is horeshit. None of the books written in Antiquity that we have today are original copies, they are centuries older and in most cases MANY centuries older so you could take anything written in any of them as 'suspect'.

Josephus was a Jew who became a Roman lackey, he became known as the Jewish 'Benedict Arnold', a traitor who during the Jewish revolt against the Romans saved his own ass while trapped in a cave with 40 men under his command who all died by killing each other rather than surrendering to the Romans. After that he spent the rest of his life writing about Jewish history.

That Testomonium Flavianum has been turned upside down and inside out a thousand different ways, there is wide acceptance that Josephus does refer to Jesus in it, not some other Jesus, in some translations Josephus refers to him as 'Jesus, the so called Christ', which as a Jewish non-believer in Jesus as the Messiah would make sense using the adjective 'so called'. Scholars also widely believe that later on Christians edited/added wording to make sure it was clear that the Jesus described was the Jesus they believe was the Messiah.
IF that's true that there were Christian writers who redacted Josephus' work to support their own beliefs it raises another question - why didn't they do a better and more thorough job of it? They easily could have added and embellished a lot more than they did. From my reading of all the arguments plus the history it looks to me like they were just trying to clarify that the Jesus mentioned was their Jesus not some random other guy named Jesus.

The best supporting evidence provided by Josephus for the historical fact of Jesus as a real person comes via John the Baptist whom Josephus also wrote about and there is little to no argument from the major scholars that casts doubt on his writings about John the Baptist, one of the central figures in the life of Jesus.

The idea that a man named Jesus from whom the religion of Christianity sprung from never existed is far more irrational and without evidence than that he did exist. The Jewish world of that time was filled with Messianic wannabe cult leaders, they all had their followings, there were many different sects of Jews fighting amongst themselves. There was no need to make up a Jesus character, he and others like him existed. He had a huge impact on his followers and after his death they went out and preached what Jesus taught them. Later on they wrote the gospels, and like all religious scripture they wrote about Jesus and his times metaphorically creating the myths we are all familiar with in the New Testament. Not even the Pope takes what's written in the Bible as literal history.

Now Moses, there's a guy for whom there is real serious doubt whether he ever existed, he pre-dates Jesus by almost 1,500 years, at a time when there is no written history at all, it's doubtful the Jews at that time even had a written language. It's possible that generation after generation of Israelites passed down stories about a great leader named Moses - it's also possible that whoever wrote the Old Testament just made it all up out of his/their imagination.

[Robbie]

Mutt, I can only go by what a true scholar who spent 43 years in serious study of it said.

No offense, but you and I are just a couple of guys on a porn message board. That guy is probably the greatest expert in the world on Josephus.

None of it really matters. Like I said, in the end we are talking about very primitive people and their superstitions.

[Mutt]

Originally Posted by Robbie

Mutt, I can only go by what a true scholar who spent 43 years in serious study of it said.

No offense, but you and I are just a couple of guys on a porn message board. That guy is probably the greatest expert in the world on Josephus.

None of it really matters. Like I said, in the end we are talking about very primitive people and their superstitions.

I've read all the arguments by all the scholars, there's no way of knowing what really happened in 1400BC or 33AD. Which is frustrating because it's such important history. I don't believe in any of the divinely orchestrated happenings in either of the old or new testaments but I am fascinated in how it all came to be and how much of the non-supernatural parts of the bibles were based on real people and real events. There is no other source for the history of ancient Israel than the scriptures. Even the most atheistic of archeologists use the Bible as their starting point because there simply isn't anything else other than some references to the Israelites in artifacts found in surrounding countries.

That it was so long ago and there being no way to really invalidate any of it is what allows people to suspend their disbelief.

The staying power of these religions boggles my mind. I don't understand the word 'faith', people who say they have faith that the Bible is the truth, to me you either believe or you don't.

[JFK]

Originally Posted by Robbie

EDIT: I also just looked up if "Jesus" was a common name back in that time.
Yes it was. So if the name "Jesus" is ever mentioned in a historical way, it would be like the name "Joe" being mentioned now.

Hey Joe, where you goin with that cross in your hand ?