Jesus myth theories

The Romans kept good records of some things, and certainly we don't need Roman sources to substantiate the existence of Herod the Great, who was a major figure in Jewish history. Romans did not keep records of crucifixions in backwater provinces. If they did, where are they? To them, Jesus would have been one of many itinerant preachers wandering Galilee. They crucified him because he entered Jerusalem during the sensitive time of Passover when a large and restive crowd was gathered in the capitol, and raised a ruckus challenging public order. But it's stretching it to say they saw Jesus as a political revolutionary. As for the three hours of darkness, the earthquake, etc., there are no records of those events because I suspect they didn't happen.

Not only do we have no secular record of the slaughter, but even three of the four gospels don't mention the event. Mark and John don't get into Jesus's birth at all, and Luke has a conflicting account. Historian R.T. France considers the event to be plausible, because Herod murdered his own children so what's some more infants in a small village? But I suspect it's just Matthew developing the theme that Jesus was following the pattern of Moses--which is the basic motif of his gospel.
Exodus reports that Pharaoh murdered the first born of the Hebrews.

It depends on what you mean by proof. I'd argue that there's substantial evidence that he existed as an ordinary man, by which I mean enough that reasonable people can be convinced, even though others disagree. As a matter of fact, most scholars in the field are convinced. What is left, after we sort out the factual inconsistencies, legends and fantastic miracle claims, is an enlightened teacher who preached peace, love and understanding and acceptance of society's rejects. Good enough for me. But I was planning to get to that after I finish looking at the problems with the copycat version of the Jesus myth theories.

 

Clear conception does not come from sensation but beholds the sensational.
The sensational held harmless and dear, bestows the peace of god.

 

"Immaculate conception" is a Catholic dogma meaning that the Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin. It refers to her own conception rather than the conception of Jesus.

 

Not so.
They teach as dogma the precepts of men. Immaculate conception was not dogmatically defined until 1854. The terms Immaculate and conception are symbols for conditions. The dogma is borrowed from the esoteric understanding. To sin is to miss the mark or the sign. The way we miss the mark or sign is not in our actions, but in our perceptions. God created man to create the good and he is good at it, but he misses the elemental signs of goodness and can only teach as he was taught. i.e., forgive them they know not what they do. They are reacting to incorrect premises. We react and instruct ourselves by our own premises. The measure, (the calculated weight) you give is the measure you receive. To give birth to innocent action and perceive the mark or judgement of god, weigh nothing as harmful. The mark of god is the real world or the world as god created it.

 

After writing this, I thought of one possible qualifier. Julius Africanus in the 3rd century reports that in a history by Thallus, now lost, there is reference to daytime darkness that occurred around the period Jesus is thought to have died. Since it's second hand information and sketchy, Africanus was a Christian, and might have been a solar eclipse, as Africanus thought it was, I doesn't change my original assessment.

 

So it did happen, but was reported incorrectly with misguided phenomenal judgements concerning eclipses.:biker:

 

Obviously we are looking for love in the wrong places. The wrong place to look for the cause of anything is history. It is not so that this moment comes from the past. The past is a character emerging from this moment and this is how we are informed by it. The part and parcel of history lies in mans justifications not in time. We are the only measure. We have measuring devices but we calibrate those based on some standard. In measuring the world neither true nor false gives weight. What is false is not true by definition. What is not real does not exist. False is not an accuracy and the truth sets us free. Knowledge is being shared. All of these documents of history are repositories of symbols, not time lines or actions.
That is the being we share with these documents. It is the meanings of the symbols that we share, i.e. not flesh and blood we deal in, but principality and power, the kingdom of the mind and it's effects.

 

How does jesus remove the sins from the world?

Teach you to apprehend it.

I am the light of the world

 

To you it is written, I have given the keys to the kingdom and you believe because you see what is, blessed are those who believe who have not seen.
We believe in order to see,

Father what is this?

Well Son, this is it take a look,

and see in order to believe.

 

Ignorance is bliss?

 

If you are asking, no. Ignorance is ignorance bliss is bliss. What is the same is same and what is different is different and not the same. Ignorance can be not knowing or it can be self denial. Sameness is self sameness, that is sameness is in purpose and content, not in degree of separation. It either is regardless of qualification, or it isn't. Multiple forms can have the same purpose and content though their exteriors appear dramatically different. Take mammal for example, many species displaying the same essential growth pattern to degrees of varying intensity or complexity. You can have a hot sandwich or a cold sandwich but you have essentially sandwich, regardless temperate degree, or you have human being regardless temper tantrum or cool apprehension.

 

Bliss is knowing that reality can be trusted.

What a relief!

Come unto me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.

 

oh , my . evidently our Native American scholar gave a much too ab-
reviated translation of the visitor's bestowed Ho-Chunk name . try this :

AmazinglyGracefulEasterBunnyManWhoWalksOnWaterBalancingEggsOnHead
.
.

 

Well, that certainly has a nice ring to it. However, if we could shorten it to GracefulKangarooManWhoHopsOnWater, that would be more accurate because the truth is that I cannot balance two eggs on my head as I hop across the lake. Hell, I have enough trouble with just one egg on level ground while standing still.

 

The only thing I hate more than being spoken of in public is being photographed by someone hiding in the bushes as I take my morning walk through WHAT USED TO BE the privacy of the woods. Had I seen you, I would have kicked you silly and photographed you after putting your finger in your nose as you lay there unconscious.

 

Crucifixion. The word crucifixion comes from the Latin “crucifixus” meaning “fixed to a cross”. It was a favorite form of Roman execution leading to slow death by exposure and suffocation as breathing and circulation were severely restricted. Jehovah’s Witnesses make a big deal out of Jesus dying on a stake instead of a cross. The Greek word used in the New Testament is stauros, which is consistent with a stake with or without a cross beam. In any event, the operative terms are; execution and affixed. It was also characteristic of Roman crucifixion that the victim’s arms were affixed to the cross. Hanging by the neck isn’t crucifixion. The victims of Vlad the Impaler would ordinarily be described as having been impaled, not crucified. Both were ghastly deaths, so we might ask what’s the difference? But in deciding whether or not Christians are copying, it’s something to keep in mind.

A favorite of internet Jesus mythicists is Kirsey Graves’ The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, written in 1875. Of the sixteen he identifies, how many were actually crucified? Exactly none! On the list is the Buddha, whom Buddhists believe died a natural death in old age. Adonis was gored by a bull. Attis committed suicide by castrating himself. He wasn’t affixed to a tree. He turned into a tree. Baal was slain in battle by Mot (Death). Bacchus (Dionysis) was eaten by Titans, Baldor was slain by a magic spear. Krishna was mortally wounded by an arrow. Osiris was drowned and dismembered. Orpheus was struck by lightning. Horus and Mithras never died. Tammuz went directly to hell without passing Go. Thor was killed by a serpent. Beddru didn’t exist, or is Graves’ garbled version of the Japanese rendering of the Buddha. Zoroaster was assassinated while he was worshipping. Not on the list are two deities for whom a better case could be made, Innana (Ishtar), who was impaled on a meathook, and Oden, who hung on a tree. Besides the fact that records of Oden’s “hanging” appear nine centuries after Jesus, he wasn’t executed. He had himself hung to gain knowledge. Graves omits citations and generalizes far beyond his facts. Sloppy, sloppy sloppy! And yet his work lives on, immortalized by the internet.

 

So Jesus did have original sin? The "clean" conception goes back to the garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge. As it's states in Genesis 4:1 (Young's literal translation) "And the man knew Eve his wife, and she conceiveth and beareth Cain". So there's a link between knowledge and conception.

Leviticus 15:16 "When a man has an emission of semen, he must bathe his whole body with water, and he will be unclean till evening"

This proves that orgasm leads uncleanliness and is therefore the source of original sin.

 

The Lord’s Supper: An important rite for Christians is the Lord’s Supper, aka communion or the eucharist.
Eucharist Definition
dictionary.search.yahoo.com
n. noun

1. A sacrament and the central act of worship in many Christian churches, which was instituted at the Last Supper and in which bread and wine are consecrated and consumed in remembrance of Jesus's death; Communion.

Was this practice copied from other religions? Communal meals as religious rites are as old as the practice of sacrifice, in which the meat of the sacrificial animal was shared by the worshippers. Where the victim was human, as in the case of the Aztecs, for example, that involved an act of cannibalism.
The ritual of the eucharist commemorates the Last Supper, in which Jesus reportedly used the metaphors of bread for His body and wine for His blood. By partaking of these, the faithful are incorporating into themselves the body and blood of Christ, figuratively (Protestants) or literally (Catholics). This metaphor was distinctive enough in the Roman world to lead to rumors of cannibalism!
The closest counterparts in the Roman world were Mithraism and the cult of Bacchus. Because those were mystery religions whose adherents were bound by oaths of secrecy, we don’t know much about their rituals, but apparently Justin Martyr, Christian apologist of the second century, heard enough to convince him that the ritual meal in Mithraism was similar to that of Christianity in enough resects that he concluded the Devil must have instituted it to confuse people. Superficially, the rites appear to have looked much the same: a piece of bread and a cup of liquid were placed before initiates while the priest spoke some words. Whether or not people thought, symbolically or literally, they were consuming the body and blood of Mithras is unknown, but given the association of the Christian rite, and not the Mithraist one, with cannibalism, that seems questionable. It isn’t unlikely that the rituals developed independently of each other, since taking basic staples of diet in a celebratory meal doesn’t seem to be particularly unusual. Justin Martyr notwithstanding, we also don’t know which religion adopted the practice first.
The rituals of Bacchus (Dionysus) were centered around eating and drinking during orgies. As portrayed in Euripides play, The Bacchae, initiated tore animals to pieces and ate their flesh raw. In ordinary Roman observance, the ritual was just a regular meal, in which the wine flowed freely, as did sex. If Christians were copying this, they toned it down considerably.