168 replies to this topic

[Tiggs]

Yamato, on 29 June 2012 - 04:16 PM, said:

Jesus is the most historically documented person who ever lived 2000+ years ago.

Yeah. Those Roman Emperors. No contemporary historical documentation of them, at all.

[Yamato]

Tiggs, on 29 June 2012 - 06:05 PM, said:

Yeah. Those Roman Emperors. No contemporary historical documentation of them, at all.

Yeah.  Those Roman documents from that Roman Emperor of yours are everywhere these days just like Bibles.

[Tiggs]

Yamato, on 29 June 2012 - 06:25 PM, said:

Yeah.  Those Roman documents from that Roman Emperor of yours are everywhere these days just like Bibles.

Because mass duplication is exactly the same thing as being historical.

I'll send the memo to J K Rowling.

Edited by Tiggs, 29 June 2012 - 06:40 PM.

[Yamato]

Tiggs, on 29 June 2012 - 06:39 PM, said:

Because mass duplication is exactly the same thing as being historical.

What words are "exactly the same thing as being historical"?   That's pure semantics.   Send your straw memo out as you wish.

Mass documentation is no reason for you to think something isn't well documented, historical or not.   Derp.

[Beckys_Mom]

Tiggs, on 29 June 2012 - 06:39 PM, said:

Because mass duplication is exactly the same thing as being historical.

I'll send the memo to J K Rowling.

That was pretty good

[Tiggs]

Yamato, on 29 June 2012 - 07:00 PM, said:

What words are "exactly the same thing as being historical"?   That's pure semantics.   Send your straw memo out as you wish.

Mass documentation is no reason for you to think something isn't well documented, historical or not.   Derp.

Then feel free to produce contemporary evidence for Christ's historical existence & I'll provide contemporary evidence for any first century Roman emperor of your choice.

[Yamato]

Tiggs, on 29 June 2012 - 07:08 PM, said:

Then feel free to produce contemporary evidence for Christ's historical existence & I'll provide contemporary evidence for any first century Roman emperor of your choice.

I'm not going to feel free to accept your false premise.  It was a mistake on your part to assign me your straw that "no contemporary evidence exists" for Roman emperors of any century.  And I accept your apology.

We're not discussing Christ's historicity here, we're discussing Christianity's originality.  If you feel the need to discuss historicity yet again, post a new topic but please leave your straw out of it if I participate.

[Tiggs]

Yamato, on 29 June 2012 - 07:16 PM, said:

I'm not going to feel free to accept your false premise.  It was a mistake on your part to assign me your straw that "no contemporary evidence exists" for Roman emperors of any century.  And I accept your apology.

We're not discussing Christ's historicity here, we're discussing Christianity's originality.  If you feel the need to discuss historicity yet again, post a new topic but please leave your straw out of it if I participate.

If you're going to go around posting "Jesus is the most historically documented person who ever lived 2000+ years ago." - then expect to be called on it.

Truth is - he's not even close.

[Beckys_Mom]

Tiggs, on 29 June 2012 - 07:24 PM, said:

If you're going to go around posting "Jesus is the most historically documented person who ever lived 2000+ years ago." - then expect to be called on it.

Truth is - he's not even close.

Very true..I too agree  ..We all can make claims, but we should expect at any time to be called on it..

Edited by Beckys_Mom, 29 June 2012 - 07:32 PM.

[eight bits]

<p>Riyeh called it, especially

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this stuff is just Zeitgeist bs

but also worth mentioning, I think, is the first part of his sentence,

Quote

There is evidence the Abrahamic religions has origins from polytheistic religions

That's true, just as the polytheistic religions incorporate elements from older, especially shamanic, religious systems.

Tiggs, for example, mentioned the "resurrected" Horus.

Now, before I go down this road (which I know Tiggs doesn't like to go down, because it proposes a psychological foundation for this sort of thing), let me say up front that I am in full agreement with Tiggs' concluding assessment,

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If you're looking for the overall source for Christ's life - then the Old Testament prophets is where you want to concentrate your search.

With my only reservations being first, as Riyeh points out, there are elements of other religions mixed into the Hebrew Bible, and second, that it is hard to see how you tell a story about anybody fulfilling a body of prophecy, without telling a story that sounds a lot like the prophecy.

OK. so on to suvivals.

I've edited this to reflect Tiggs' correct observation that I mixed Horus and Osirs. (post 27 below, correction acknowledged with thanks.) Since most of the points stand, however...

Tiggs mentioned Horus being "resurrected." That was a family tradiition, because in a sense, so was his Dad.. But Osiris' ordeal was probably a holdover from an earlier shamanic phase.

Osiris was dismemebered and reassembled. That is an archetypal motif, and in religion, it is  an echo of the shamanic dismemberment crisis. It is an image of what wealthy modern people call "acute schizophrenia," whose adolescent onset was often the "sign" of favor by the spirits with whom the shaman-designate would work throughout his or her career. An elder shaman would play Isis, fostering the reassembly of the younger colleague's ego-consciousness.

It would have been easy enough to copy Osirs, but the Christian writers didn't. In fact, they found a Jewish pretext (Psalm 34: 20) to call attention that they weren't  - the idea that not a bone of Jesus was broken. Translation: this is not a dismemberment narrative. And of course, the giveaway that this is intentional is that it is John (19: 34 ff.) who tells us this - the evangelist who knows this stuff, and is writing late enough to have plausibly already heard about the Osiris proto-Zeitgeist thing from others who can't tell, or would rather not dwell on, the difference between a resurrection and a dismemberment crisis.

If the Christian writers imitated something, then Jesus' "appearance to named indiviiduals after death" narrative much more closely resembles a ghost story that Pliny the Younger tells, at about the same time as the Gospels are being written, which Pliny attributed to Athenodorus Cananites (life dates spanning the turn of the Era), perhaps intending to assert a biographical fact.

http://www.vroma.org...iny07-27-E.html

It is the readers' willingness to accept Jesus' resurrection as a biographical fact, rather than a psycho-spiritual motif story, that gives the Christian version any sort of recruting appeal. Osiris was available for worship at the turn of the Era, for anybody who was so inclined. Me-tooing him with a Jewish Messiah School dropout wouldn't be a marketing strategy of genius. Product differentiation, not low-fidelity tone-deaf imitation, is the key to profit.

Edited by eight bits, 29 June 2012 - 08:08 PM.

[Darkwind]

Yamato, on 29 June 2012 - 04:16 PM, said:

Jesus is the most historically documented person who ever lived 2000+ years ago.   If someone feels comfortable denying the existence of Jesus they might as well deny all other history that came before it.  And what does such a person call a Christian who does that?   There's a mirror moment.

Other than the Bible there is no documentation of Jesus. There is nothing contemperary to his time. If there is your going to have to cite it.
This is interesting read, but it is long and I am only posting the summary.  Y'all can read the whole thing  at the site.  

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A review of references to Christ outside the Bible

http://www.skeptical.../bible/id3.html


Summary
In sum, the evidence for the historical evidence for Jesus is non-existent:
1) There are no proven, legitimate references to the existence of Jesus in any contemporary source outside of the New Testament.
2) The New Testament accounts do not provide a real 'biography' for Jesus. The early writings imply only that he was a divine figure and consistently fail to locate Jesus in any chronological setting; they also fail to cite those sayings attributed to him in the (later) Gospels, even when they are wholly applicable.
3) The existence of Jesus is not necessary to explain the origin or growth of Christianity.

[Tiggs]

eight bits, on 29 June 2012 - 07:35 PM, said:

OK. so on to suvivals. Tiggs calls what Horus went through as him being "resurrected." Thus does Tiggs pay sincere tribute to the completeness with which Christian concepts have come to dominate modern religious discussion.

No, Horus was dismemebered and reassembled. That is an archetypal motif, and in religion, it is  an echo of the shamanic dismemberment crisis. It is an image of what wealthy modern people call "acute schizophrenia," whose adolescent onset was often the "sign" of favor by the spirits with whom the shaman-designate would work throughout his or her career. An elder shaman would play Isis, fostering the reassembly of the younger colleague's ego-consciousness.

As far as I recall - Horus wasn't dismembered. That was his Father, Osiris.

I was referring to the story of Horus returning to life after dying from a scorpion Bite.

Edited by Tiggs, 29 June 2012 - 07:46 PM.

[Yamato]

Tiggs, on 29 June 2012 - 07:24 PM, said:

If you're going to go around posting "Jesus is the most historically documented person who ever lived 2000+ years ago." - then expect to be called on it.

Truth is - he's not even close.

Your straw truth maybe.   And that's because you pump all manner of BS into my meaning that was never there.

Jesus is probably the most historically documented person who ever lived.  I don't know what your definition of history is "exactly", but history is lived.   History is made every day.    History is the cause and effect that determines events.  Your dead in the dustbin emperors don't have "contemporary" influence on anybody, so it would behoove you to understand that history is about a lot more than what you scrounge up out of books (that are by no means free from mass duplicity).  

Take a good look at the world around you and try to decipher what influences us today from what doesn't.   If you can't do that, then you have no idea what I'm talking about.

[Tiggs]

Yamato, on 29 June 2012 - 07:52 PM, said:

Your straw truth maybe.   And that's because you pump all manner of BS into my meaning that was never there.

"Jesus is the most historically documented person who ever lived 2000+ years ago.   If someone feels comfortable denying the existence of Jesus they might as well deny all other history that came before it."

You can cry "Straw man" as hard as you like. But it's absolutely obvious what your intention was.

[Ron Jeremy]

Yamato, on 29 June 2012 - 04:16 PM, said:

Jesus is the most historically documented person who ever lived 2000+ years ago.  

O RLY?

And why do you chose your nick and avatar with the most disgusting thing ever existed in history?