Why do most "Christians" celebrate Xmas in a pagan way?

[Domingo Halliburton]

Amusing you want to close the thread on something that you "literally" have zero historical evidence for whatsoever. Did you read the link I already posted on that? The evidence in favor of the other conclusion (that pagans were copying Christians) isn't air-tight either, but its slightly stronger than any evidence you have for your position.

I don't even get why you care?

All I see in this thread is pontificating by you. No links.

A simple google search turns up what most historians believe....

Por exemplo:






1. Early Christians had a soft spot for pagans

It's a mistake to say that our modern Christmas traditions come directly from pre-Christian paganism, said Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. However, he said, you'd be equally wrong to believe that Christmas is a modern phenomenon. As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds.

Christian missionaries lumped all of these people together under the umbrella term "pagan," said Philip Shaw, who researches early Germanic languages and Old English at Leicester University in the U.K. The term is related to the Latin word meaning "field," Shaw told LiveScience. The lingual link makes sense, he said, because early European Christianity was an urban phenomenon, while paganism persisted longer in rustic areas.

Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, Shaw said, but they were also fascinated by their traditions.

"Christians of that period are quite interested in paganism," he said. "It's obviously something they think is a bad thing, but it's also something they think is worth remembering. It's what their ancestors did." [In Photos: Early Christian Rome]

Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, University of Bristol's Hutton told LiveScience, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver. However, Father Christmas and his other European variations are modern incarnations of old pagan ideas about spirits who traveled the sky in midwinter, Hutton said


They borrows from each other. Maybe I was a little off. Who gives a shyt?

 

[Soon]

I don't even get why you care?

All I see in this thread is pontificating by you. No links.

A simple google search turns up what most historians believe....

Por exemplo:






1. Early Christians had a soft spot for pagans

It's a mistake to say that our modern Christmas traditions come directly from pre-Christian paganism, said Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. However, he said, you'd be equally wrong to believe that Christmas is a modern phenomenon. As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds.

Christian missionaries lumped all of these people together under the umbrella term "pagan," said Philip Shaw, who researches early Germanic languages and Old English at Leicester University in the U.K. The term is related to the Latin word meaning "field," Shaw told LiveScience. The lingual link makes sense, he said, because early European Christianity was an urban phenomenon, while paganism persisted longer in rustic areas.

Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, Shaw said, but they were also fascinated by their traditions.

"Christians of that period are quite interested in paganism," he said. "It's obviously something they think is a bad thing, but it's also something they think is worth remembering. It's what their ancestors did." [In Photos: Early Christian Rome]

Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, University of Bristol's Hutton told LiveScience, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver. However, Father Christmas and his other European variations are modern incarnations of old pagan ideas about spirits who traveled the sky in midwinter, Hutton said

Once again Christmas and Easter are no where to be found in the Bible. These were the inventions of Roman Pagan culture in 250 AD over 200 years after Christ was crucified.

Christians in the 30 AD were being persecuted and martyred, The Jewish Christ, the Jewish Paul of Tarsus, and the Jewish Disciples never promoted Paganism not even once...to say they were fascinated by pagan traditions is a huge stretch.

I come to expect non-intelligent and uninformed conversations from Atheist, but I've never seen an Atheist come this bad.

 

[NZA]

"Jesus", "the holy trinity", and "noah" are three ridiculously different things to lump together. You're talking about 3 concepts with 3 completely different origins spread out over 1000 years!

"Noah", if the idea is true, obviously would have been shared all over the Middle East....you know, with it being a huge-ass flood and Noah's family being the only survivors and all. If not true, then of course flood stories are found across the Middle East - but since the stories were circulating 3000-3500 years ago in a mostly pre-literary time, it would be enormously difficult to prove that the Jewish story originated from a pre-existing non-Jewish concept, and not the other way around.

The idea that "Jesus" was from some "pre-existing concept from north africa and the middle east" is completely ridiculous. Even athiests, Jews, skeptics, etc - every serious historian at nearly every level - all agree that Jesus really existed. We're talking about the consensus of 99.99% of academics, not even talking about the Christian world. Universities have become notoriously anti-Christian, but you'd have to look far and wide before you found a history professor at any accredited university who thought Jesus didn't live. Not only do we have ample literary sources from the first, second, and third generations after Jesus, the entire Christian movement is nonsensical when it is not proposed to have started among a living Jesus figure. That's why every two years a new opportunist (with no historical creds at all but a lot of dollar-signs in their eyes) comes out with a new "this was how Christianity really started and there was no Jesus!" book...except every 2 years it's a brand-new theory with no relation to the previous theories...since every "Jesus didn't really exist" theory is so bunk that there's never anything worthwhile to build off of.

It's pretty easy to trace the development of "the holy trinity" concept in Christianity since we have a strong literary tradition in that period, from the first hints in Paul's writings to the form put forth in the 4th century creeds. It's also possible to see the Jewish roots of the concept, in the ideas of how the presence of God works in the world in the Jewish concepts of "Wisdom" (the personified breath and word of YHWH), the "Spirit" of God, and "Shekinah". It's true that the way it was eventually described in the 4th century was defined in a way indicative of Greek thought, as it was people whose thought patterns were much more Greek than Jewish who were now describing it. But you can trace its origins and development through the entire 300 years prior to that, and you'll see that you're always dealing with a fundamentally Christian concept that develops a fundamentally Jewish conception of God. There's literally no evidence for pagan/non-Jewish sourcing anywhere in there unless you have a completely naive, ignorant view of what "trinity" actually means in Christianity.


These fake zeitgeist-like theories are all over the place among conspiracy theorists - you can see them ridiculed by athiests, skeptics, Christians, and academics easily.

im not lumping all things together, im giving a brief listing of the many things that are adapted. calm down.

logically, the oldest telling of a story is probably the most original and therefore the most authoritative. the jews were not first with many of these stories, including the flood myth and several events that they share in common. the details that were changed by jews were done so to make common semmetic beliefs justify their own particular hebrew world view.

the various flood epics have been found on tablets even as far as 3800 years ago. the actual gilgamesh story itself is beleived to be 5000 years old. when you take this into account, you have to understand that by the time jews exist, they are living in a very well defined culture that predates them. their beliefs on deities evolved from pantheism to monotheism over time since they started out thinking that every group of people had their own god, then eventually they thought there was only one.

i never said a man named jesus never existed, i said that the concepts attributed to him pre-existed him. i have no idea if this particular guy actually lived or not and it doesnt change the fact that resurrection myths and the trinity were already in existence before him by the egyptians.

i have never watched zeitgeist and am not supporting anything that may be in it. im saying that the writers of the bible have adopted things that were influential and remixed them to give their own agenda more power. christians have continued to do this to this very day with integrating myths from various colonized people from africa to the americas, and now with new age hippie christians and prosperity preachers who continue to find ways to make their doctrine match certain local concerns.

 

[NZA]

When you say Middle East you mean Mesoptamia, which has already been established as Abraham's birth area and is where the creation story and flood story originated. Mesoptamia and Indus Valley are considered where the both the Homo sapiens sapiens (modern Humans) and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Neantherdals) coexisted until the Homo sapiens neanderthalensis became extinct. Humans have been around for 6 million years, but the ones that look like us has been around for about 200,000 years. These are the first civilization where laws and rudimentary writing took place and this was because of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Noah is not the only one who experienced the worldwide flood, because Archaeological findings found writings all over the world talking about the flood. But the Bible records a flood did occur.

Abraham also took what he learned about God in Africa and shared it with the world, this is something that Pan Africans like John Henrick Clarke feels should be more well known. The concept of God was not an invention of Abraham like Scientology, he took what his African host knew and shared it with the world. So pre-existing concepts from Africa should only be a surprise to people who think Jesus is white.

Holy Trinity is not in the original Gospel which is the Gospel of Mark, and the Holy Trinity, virgin birth are Gnostic concepts (Gnostics are from Alexandria, Egypt) which is influenced by both Greek/Egyptian mythology and not found in the original Gospel. Nicean Creed was convened specifically to address the Gnostic Bishops in Alexandria, Egypt.

Mark 1:10 makes it clear, and the Gospel of Mark doesn't confuse the issue. Gospel of John is considered to be written by Gnostics and is so radical that it is not grouped with the other 3 Gospels.

abraham has not been established to be a real person, so he has no established birth area.

the bible is not a good record of much of anything outside of belief systems and dogma. i would always try to use a more objective source for something historical and scientific like a flood. in that respect, since noah's story claims that only those in his boat survived, the bible is making a claim of exclusivity that would not allow for other perspectives. second, noah's story is not the first story, so it is less authoritative.

 

[Soon]

abraham has not been established to be a real person, so he has no established birth area.

the bible is not a good record of much of anything outside of belief systems and dogma. i would always try to use a more objective source for something historical and scientific like a flood. in that respect, since noah's story claims that only those in his boat survived, the bible is making a claim of exclusivity that would not allow for other perspectives. second, noah's story is not the first story, so it is less authoritative.

1) Why do Atheist talk so much about something they don't believe?
2) Bible was written by men, that's the reason why its important to study objective sources.

 

[NZA]

1) Why do Atheist talk so much about something they don't believe?
2) Bible was written by men, that's the reason why its important to study objective sources.

1) there are a multitude of reasons, but the fact that religion and religious people have actual power over collective populations' lives is a good reason for all citizens to be aware of what is motivating certain decisions. forget about atheists for a moment, even people of different faiths should understand the dominant faith to a functional degree so they will be safe and prosperous where they live.
2) you are absolutely right. even when people have been given a system of best practices to try to be objective, humans still make things less accurate or biased. then add the fact that most ancient people had little concept of the role of a "strict historian" and you get outright lies and myth making in lots of stories and documents. we always have to try to verify things with at least a second source.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I don't even get why you care?

All I see in this thread is pontificating by you. No links.

Really...you take the bold declarations in this thread, and I'm the one pontificating?

Here was the link you missed:

There's no actual evidence that Christmas was set in order to correspond to a pagan holiday, nor is there any evidence that early celebrations of Christmas bore any relation "a pagan day with a Christian spin". In fact, the opposite is true - it looks like a pagan holiday was set on the date that was already significant to many Christians.

As far as your correction:

A simple google search turns up what most historians believe....

Por exemplo:

1. Early Christians had a soft spot for pagans

It's a mistake to say that our modern Christmas traditions come directly from pre-Christian paganism, said Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. However, he said, you'd be equally wrong to believe that Christmas is a modern phenomenon. As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds.

Christian missionaries lumped all of these people together under the umbrella term "pagan," said Philip Shaw, who researches early Germanic languages and Old English at Leicester University in the U.K. The term is related to the Latin word meaning "field," Shaw told LiveScience. The lingual link makes sense, he said, because early European Christianity was an urban phenomenon, while paganism persisted longer in rustic areas.

Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, Shaw said, but they were also fascinated by their traditions.

"Christians of that period are quite interested in paganism," he said. "It's obviously something they think is a bad thing, but it's also something they think is worth remembering. It's what their ancestors did." [In Photos: Early Christian Rome]

Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, University of Bristol's Hutton told LiveScience, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver. However, Father Christmas and his other European variations are modern incarnations of old pagan ideas about spirits who traveled the sky in midwinter, Hutton said


They borrows from each other. Maybe I was a little off. Who gives a shyt?

How is that different from what I said?

It is true that, many centuries later and in a different cultural context (northern Europe), different local practices were incorporated into Christmas. That was a natural aspect of Christianity from the very beginning - just like, from New Testament times, Christian Jews were always allowed to keep being Jews and Christian Greeks were allowed to keep being Greeks, Christian cavemen were allowed to keep being cavemen (just joking). That wasn't anything new for the church, it was part of a process that happened all over the world in every culture - Christian beliefs and local celebrations don't have to be mutually exclusive.

It seems like you're agreeing with me on the facts now, no?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Lol at historians agree Jesus existed ..

Sorry kid mostly all Historians say he didn't

I can count on 2 hands of historians that say he existed and Those historians used second hand accounts not historian today agrees only ones in the past

Strange, I see almost the exact opposite conclusion when I do research. It's not just that I can find historians who think that Jesus existed. It's that they say not only that Jesus existed, but that nearly all serious historians agree on that fact. I'm not just talking about Christian historians - even noted non-Christian or anti-Christian historians like Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey, Paula Fredriksen, Geza Vermes, and Hyam Maccoby are strong in their affirmation that not only they themselves, but all the serious historians they know declare that Jesus really existed.

You claim that "mostly all historians say he didn't". Can you quote any serious historian stating that most of his collegues say Jesus didn't exist? Because I find them saying the exact opposite.

Scholars who specialise in the origins of Christianity agree on very little, but they do generally agree that it is most likely that a historical preacher, on whom the Christian figure "Jesus Christ" is based, did exist. The numbers of professional scholars, out of the many thousands in this and related fields, who don't accept this consensus, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Many may be more cautious about using the term "historical fact" about this idea, since as with many things in ancient history it is not quite as certain as that. But it is generally regarded as the best and most parsimonious explanation of the evidence and therefore the most likely conclusion that can be drawn.

The opposite idea - that there was no historical Jesus at all and that "Jesus Christ" developed out of some purely mythic ideas about a non-historical, non-existent figure - has had a chequered history over the last 200 years, but has usually been a marginal idea at best.

In literally every historical book of the era that covers Jesus (Cambridge Ancient History, Oxford Classical Dictionary, etc.) the existence of Jesus is taken as fact. Note the wikipedia entry on the question, which has extenstive references if you check:

Although there is "near universal consensus" among scholars that Jesus existed historically, biblical scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the details of his life that have been described in the gospels. While scholars have sometimes criticized Jesus scholarship for religious bias and lack of methodological soundness, with very few exceptions, such critics do support the historicity of Jesus, and reject the theory that Jesus never existed, known as the Christ myth theory.

nearly all modern scholars consider the baptism of Jesus and his crucifixion to be historically certain... these "two facts in the life of Jesus command almost universal assent" and "rank so high on the 'almost impossible to doubt or deny' scale of historical 'facts' they are obvious starting points for an attempt to clarify the what and why of Jesus' mission."

Or from Professors Alanna Nobbs and Edwin Judge, two of Australia's most noted historicans:

In our judgment, the second part of your statement is quite far from reality. While historical and theological debates remain about the actions and significance of this figure, his fame as a teacher, and his crucifixion under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, may be described as historically certain.

Here are some more specific cites:

As Professor Bultmann, Professor of New Testament studies, once wrote:

“Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community.”

Paul Maier, former Professor of Ancient History, remarks: “The total evidence is so overpowering, so absolute that only the shallowest of intellects would dare to deny Jesus’ existence.”

Also, Craig Evans who is widely known for his writings on the subject of the historical Jesus says that: “No serious historian of any religious or nonreligious stripe doubts that Jesus of Nazareth really lived in the first century and was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea and Samaria.”

Even the most skeptical of New Testament scholars Bart Ehrman (who is certainly no friend of Christianity) states that:

“These views are so extreme (that Jesus did not exist) and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.”

Scholar Michael Grant says: “To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has ‘again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars.”

In truth, the claim that Jesus never existed as a historical person is not on the table of historical scholarship (unless you are an atheist blogger). According to Richard Burridge: “I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that (that Jesus did not exist) anymore.”

Or more:

some judgments are so probable as to be certain; for example, Jesus really existed, and he really was crucified, just as Julius Caesar really existed and was assassinated. .... We can in fact know as much about Jesus as we can about any figure in the ancient world.

Marcus Borg, Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions


There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.

Richard A. Burridge, Professor of Biblical Interpretation, Kings College, London, inJesus Now and Then


This view [that Jesus didn't exist] is demonstrably false. It is fuelled by a regrettable form of atheist prejudice, which holds all the main primary sources, and Christian people, in contempt. .... Most of its proponents are also extraordinarily incompetent.

Maurice Casey, Nottingham University, in Jesus of Nazareth


Jesus did exist; and we know more about him than about almost any Palestinian Jew before 70 C.E.

Prof James Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary, in Jesus Within Judaism


I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus .... We have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period.

Prof Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina in an interview by The Infidel Guy


Research in the historical Jesus has taken several positive steps in recent years. .... the persistent trend in recent years is to see the Gospels as essentially reliable, especially when properly understood, and to view the historical Jesus in terms much closer to Christianity’s traditional understanding

Prof Craig Evans, Arcadia Divinity College, Arcadia University, in What are They Saying about the Historical Jesus?


we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. ..... In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.

The late Michael Grant, eminent historian of the Roman Empire, in Jesus: an historian's review of the gospels


[The following is beyond reasonable doubt from everyone's point of view:]that Jesus was known in both Galilee and Jerusalem, that he was a teacher, that he carried out cures of various illnesses, particularly demon-possession and that these were widely regarded as miraculous; that he was involved in controversy with fellow Jews over questions of the law of Moses; and that he was crucified in the governorship of Pontius Pilate.

A.E. Harvey, formerly at Oxford University, in Jesus and the constraints of history


So in one sense I think I’m not alone in feeling that to show the ill-informed and illogical nature of the current wave of “mythicist” proponents is a bit like having to demonstrate that the earth isn’t flat, or that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, or that the moon-landings weren’t done on a movie lot.

Larry Hurtado, Emeritus Professor, Edinburgh University, on Larry Hurtado's Blog


An ancient historian has no problem seeing the phenomenon of Jesus as an historical one. His many surprising aspects only help anchor him in history. Myth and legend would have created a more predictable figure. The writings that sprang up about Jesus also reveal to us a movement of thought and an experience of life so unusual that something much more substantial than the imagination is needed to explain it.

Emeritus Professor Edwin Judge, Ancient History Research Centre, Macquarie University, Sydney, in the Foreword to The truth about Jesus by P Barnett


I think that the New Testament does provide prima facie evidence for the historicity of Jesus. It is clear, then, that if we are going to apply to the New Testament the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we should not require independent confirmation of the New Testament's claim that Jesus existed.

Jeffery Jay Lowder, writing on the Secular Web


.... a growing conviction among many scholars that the Gospels tell us more about Jesus and his aims than we had previously thought ..... subsequent Christianity may be in greater continuity with Jesus than was previously thought.

J Paget, Cambridge University, in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus


Jesus did more than just exist. He said and did a great many things that most historians are reasonably certain we can know about today. .... A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today - in the academic world at least - gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.

M A Powell, Trinity Lutheran Seminary, in The Jesus Debate


Historical reconstruction is never absolutely certain, and in the case of Jesus it is sometimes highly uncertain. Despite this, we have a good idea of the main lines of his ministry and his message. We know who he was, what he did, what he taught, and why he died. ..... the dominant view [among scholars] today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism.

EP Sanders, Oxford & Duke Universities, in The Historical Figure of Jesus


Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically.

The late Graham Stanton, Cambridge University, in The Gospels and Jesus


Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it [the theory that Jesus didn't exist] as effectively refuted.

Robert Van Voorst, Western Theological Seminary, in Jesus outside the New Testament


[In answer to the question, did Jesus exist?] I would say it is much more likely that he did than he didn’t. To believe that he had been imagined or invented is a much harder task than to rely on the available evidence, which is obviously not as clear-cut as one would like, but is sufficiently good to say that somebody by the name of Jesus existed around the time when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea in the first century AD.

Geza Vermes, Oxford University, in A new church is born, History magazine


The historical evidence for Jesus himself is extraordinarily good. .... From time to time people try to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but virtually all historians of whatever background now agree that he did

NT Wright, Oxford & St Andrews Universities, in the Guardian

 

[Mess World]

Strange, I see almost the exact opposite conclusion when I do research. It's not just that I can find historians who think that Jesus existed. It's that they say not only that Jesus existed, but that nearly all serious historians agree on that fact. I'm not just talking about Christian historians - even noted non-Christian or anti-Christian historians like Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey, Paula Fredriksen, Geza Vermes, and Hyam Maccoby are strong in their affirmation that not only they themselves, but all the serious historians they know declare that Jesus really existed.

You claim that "mostly all historians say he didn't". Can you quote any serious historian stating that most of his collegues say Jesus didn't exist? Because I find them saying the exact opposite.






In literally every historical book of the era that covers Jesus (Cambridge Ancient History, Oxford Classical Dictionary, etc.) the existence of Jesus is taken as fact. Note the wikipedia entry on the question, which has extenstive references if you check:







Or from Professors Alanna Nobbs and Edwin Judge, two of Australia's most noted historicans:





Here are some more specific cites:




Or more:

That's just heresay

 

[Soon]

1) there are a multitude of reasons, but the fact that religion and religious people have actual power over collective populations' lives is a good reason for all citizens to be aware of what is motivating certain decisions. forget about atheists for a moment, even people of different faiths should understand the dominant faith to a functional degree so they will be safe and prosperous where they live.
2) you are absolutely right. even when people have been given a system of best practices to try to be objective, humans still make things less accurate or biased. then add the fact that most ancient people had little concept of the role of a "strict historian" and you get outright lies and myth making in lots of stories and documents. we always have to try to verify things with at least a second source.

1) I have heard this argument before.

But if you have a low life preacher or backsliding Christian, do you think religion is the problem or the person's lack of character?

There was a time when there was no Christianity or Judasim or Islam was the world a better place, worse or the same? The reason I ask cause I wonder if this fight is because of arrogance, or do you believe there was a Utopia at some point in human history and you want to go back to those times. Cause if the Atheist goal is to destroy religion, do they think the people who are power hungry will have better motives.

2) I agree, they don't get the most out of the Bible because of their limited knowledge and believing the Bible is the inerrant word of God. There are Christians who can't tell you where Bethlehem or Nazareth are located. So it will go over most Christians head that the authors wrote what they believe, it could be prophetic, historical, or inspirational. There are some who probably believe the entire Bible was dictated like the Ten Commandments were to Moses.

 

[Mess World]

Scholarly opinions on the Jesus Myth

It's not most historian's job to prove Jesus existed Since there isn't any sources outside the bible for him. Now maybe if the library of Alexandria or the byzantine's Imperial Constantinople library
weren't destroyed we would have more info on biblical times
Unfortunately all there is is what's preserved now

You really wanna know then translate the 1000s of scrolls in Timbuktu

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Scholarly opinions on the Jesus Myth

It's not most historian's job to prove Jesus existed

No idea what you're trying to argue now. You do realize that almost all the quotes on the link you just provided agree with my position and explicitly contradict your position?


You really quickly went from "mostly all historians agree he didn't" to "ah, they all agree he did exist, but that's not their job anyway."

Since there isn't any sources outside the bible for him. Now maybe if the library of Alexandria or the byzantine's Imperial Constantinople library
weren't destroyed we would have more info on biblical times
Unfortunately all there is is what's preserved now

You really wanna know then translate the 1000s of scrolls in Timbuktu

No, there are a number of other sources.

First off, the Bible wasn't put together until more than 100 years after Jesus. Until then, each of the books of the Bible were a seperate writing, a seperate source. You can't pretend like they don't count because they were eventually collected into the Bible. If they're invalid just because they're Christian, then you have to explain why a writer would write a biography of a fake person at a time period when everyone reading the book would have been able to know that the person was fake.

At the very least, you have:

Paul
Mark
Didache
Matthew
Luke
John
Josephus
Tacitus
Clement
Ignatius
Pliny the Younger
Suetonius
Lucian
the Jewish Talmud


Of course, some of these sources give very few details about Jesus (such as the mere fact that he inspired Christians), and others could be derivative of earlier sources. But you can't pretend that they don't exist, or that you can dismiss detailed sources just because Christians wrote them.

And the writings aren't the only evidence. Another piece of profound evidence - why would Christians have been willing to break out of Judiasm and paganism both into a minority sect based on the death of a person, and be wiling to die themselves for that belief, if the person they were dying for never even existed?

There's no good historical explanation for the existence of Christans who believed in Jesus's life without the existence of a Jesus to instigate that belief, which is why a different "Jesus myth" crops up every five years, and why most of them have nothing to do with each other.

Jesus myth theories have to violate both the historical evidence and Occam's Razor to a profound degree.

 

[Soon]

No idea what you're trying to argue now. You do realize that almost all the quotes on the link you just provided agree with my position and explicitly contradict your position?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Just like the Gospel of Mark came from the Marcan community, Gospel of Luke from the Lucan community, and Gospel of Matthew came from the Matthean community. The Gospel of John came from the Johannine community.

The Johannine community is considered by many scholars, both secular and religious scholars to be Gnostic in their beliefs. I, II, & III John along with Revelations also come from this community. And no one believes the Gospel of John represents the true Jesus compared to the first 3 Gospels, and the discourse and proclamations made in the Gospel of John is pretty radical along with the fact the entire Gospel is written in one voice.

I think the place we're coming from on how we read the history and the NT is similar, I just think you're wrong in this area of gnostic influence.

The idea that the Johannine community was Gnostic never had more than a minority following, and as wikipedia again points out, that understanding was compromised when we unearthed Gnostic writings and found out what gnostics actually believed:

Though not commonly understood as Gnostic, many scholars, perhaps most notably Rudolf Bultmann, have forcefully argued that the Gospel of John has elements in common withGnosticism. Christian Gnosticism did not fully develop until the mid-2nd century, and so 2nd-century Proto-Orthodox Christians concentrated much effort in examining and refuting it. To say John’s Gospel contained elements of Gnosticism is to assume that Gnosticism had developed to a level that required the author to respond to it.Bultmann, for example, argued that the opening theme of the Gospel of John, the pre-existing Logos, was actually a Gnostic theme. Other scholars, e.g. Raymond E. Brown have argued that the pre-existing Logos theme arises from the more ancient Jewish writings in the eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs, and was fully developed as a theme in Hellenistic Judaism by Philo Judaeus.

Comparisons to Gnosticism are based not in what the author says, but in the language he uses to say it, notably, use of the concepts of Logos and Light. Other scholars, e.g. Raymond E. Brown, have argued that the ancient Jewish Qumran community also used the concept of Light versus Darkness. The arguments of Bultmann and his school were seriously compromised by the mid-20th century discoveries of the Nag Hammadi library of genuine Gnostic writings (which are dissimilar to the Gospel of John) as well as the Qumran library of Jewish writings (which are often similar to the Gospel of John).

I've spent some serious time delving into gnostic sources and NT themes, and I just don't see Gospel of John as fundamentally gnostic in any way. You can draw a loose connection with some of the language, but not the overall meaning or themes. The Gospel of John, like every NT book, has a fundamentally Jewish view of God and the world at its root, not a gnostic view.

And the point is that there were other Christian communities and Christians were fragmented in their beliefs.....

Look up the "Church of the Holy Sepulchre", the clergy of the different Orthodox still are very territorial of their sections of the Church. And of course with Protestantisms the Christian community is even more divided.

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at with all this.

Yes, the early Christian community, middle Christian community, and modern Christian community had many divisions.

No, that doesn't mean that one of those divisions during NT writing times was a gnostic/Jewish split. Gnostic Christians did one day become prominent, but not until a couple generations after John was written, and even then the things they wrote looked nothing like John.

 

[Mess World]

No idea what you're trying to argue now. You do realize that almost all the quotes on the link you just provided agree with my position and explicitly contradict your position?


You really quickly went from "mostly all historians agree he didn't" to "ah, they all agree he did exist, but that's not their job anyway."

Exactly did you really read it

‘Jesus Christ never existed at all,’ historian claims

Here you go