Great set of info to show to christians/jesus lovers

JumpInTheFire · 05-09-2008, 04:17 AM

I nit-picked out certain info that is some really concrete and good stuff

enjoy and share

Quote:

The Incredible Disappearing Messiah

Meeting for the first time in March 1985, the Jesus Seminar has periodically brought together dozens of university scholars and gospel specialists representing every shade of Christian thought, plus a few Jews and atheists.
In their initial study, the scholars collected more than 1500 versions of approximately 500 Jesus parables, aphorisms, dialogues, and stories written during the first 300 years of Christianity.
After 6 years of debate and reflection the consensus was that 82% of the words attributed to Jesus were fake.
In phase two, between 1991 and 1996, the Jesus Seminar considered 387 versions of 176 'Jesus events'. Their conclusion: 84% of the activities attributed to Jesus were bogus.

Quote:

Caesar was an eyewitness to many of the events he describes in his commentaries. He wrote not for posterity but to have an immediate impact on the power players in Rome as he schemed to advance his own career.

The elapsed time between the wars and Caesar's own writing was a matter of months or at most a few years.

In contrast, the elapsed time between the gospel reports and the supposed events that they describe is at least 40 years for 'Mark' and 60-70 years for the other three Gospels.

And just who was witness to that fabulous nativity, 30-odd years before the grande finale?

At the most generous understanding, 'Luke' and 'Matthew' were recording hearsay testimony a century after angels, shepherds and wise men went calling.

The unembellished truth is that the gospel accounts were written by eyewitnesses to nothing but their own skills of fabrication.

For good reason, based on spatial and temporal proximity alone, historians give more credence to Caesar's commentaries than to the gospels, no matter how prolifically they were copied.

Quote:

"The first books of the Bible were written … during the period of the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BC … The trauma of the Exile created the need to construct and articulate a comprehensive historical past …"

– Magnus Magnusson (The Archaeology of the Bible Lands-BC, p40)

(Links below are seperate things chalk full of info)

Egyptian Roots of Catholicism
Genesis 1

Quote:

As it happens, we have an inordinate amount of Jesus dialogue. Nothing particularly novel or unique is put into his mouth, though much of it is contradictory or obscure. None of it comes from a reliable source.

The Gospel of Thomas (found in a Coptic translation at Nag Hammadi and in Greek fragments at Oxyrhynchus), for example, presents 114 "secret" sayings of Jesus, many of which are rephrased quotations from Jewish scripture and over half resemble dialogue which turns up in the New Testament. Others are simply silly:

"Saying 7: Jesus says: 'Blessed is the lion which a man eats so that the lion becomes a man. But cursed is the man whom a lion eats so that the man becomes a lion!'"
"Saying 114: Simon Peter said to them, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

Regular Christians, of course, are not very happy with the "5th Gospel" and cast doubt on its "reliability." The sayings are not (yet?) embedded in narrative stories to give them a semblance of historical reality and no miracles are mentioned. "Fake teachings, invented by the Gnostics" is the cry.

But does wrapping epithets of folk wisdom into a series of "incidents" and "encounters" – even with a miracle thrown in for good measure – make a fraud any less a fraud? Jesus supposedly spoke in Aramaic but the gospels were written in Greek. Literal translation from one language to another inevitably breaks down at numerous points. Not surprisingly the scholars of the Jesus Seminar dismissed more than eighty per cent of the godman's words as invention.

Who Says?
Who would have noted anything "Jesus of Nazareth" said before he emerged as a bona fide spiritual leader? Yet Luke (2.48,49) quotes the godman at the age of 12 in the "temple incident".

Ok, so let's grant that after her son made the big time Mary becomes the proud mum, full of anecdotes about her illustrious offspring ... Maybe she even reminisced about traipsing off to Bethlehem, even Egypt.

But Mary isn't everywhere. Matthew 3 reports dialogue between the godman and John the Baptist (let alone a voice from heaven!) in the wilderness of Judaea. Only when the Baptist gets imprisoned does JC choose his disciples so they wouldn't have been present either. So where does this little story originate, other than in the fertile mind of the gospel writer?

Ok, let's concede "unknown and unstated bystanders" run off to tell the tale ... In fact, we have to rely on such hearsay again and again: JC's night time chat with Nicodemus, his conversation with a Samaritan woman, when his disciples are off shopping, etc., etc.

But we're still not out of the woods. On several occasions the gospel writers quite specifically report Jesus’ conversations when neither they nor any other humans were present.

Who would have had the faintest idea of what Jesus said when he was on his own? For example, chapter 17 of the Gospel of John is entirely taken up with a monologue addressed by a solitary Jesus to God himself.

Matthew (4.3,10) tells of JC in the wilderness and having conversations with Satan.

Now how would Matthew know what was said? Are we to imagine Jesus reminisced, "Hey guys, one time I was in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights and guess who showed up ... ?"

If we take this step we may as well dream up the whole nine yards ...

Quote:

A Tale of Two Censuses :

Sulpicius Quirinius (Greek "Cyrenius" in Luke), Governor of Syria, conducted a taxation census of Judaea during 6-7 AD after Rome had deposed Archelaus and had annexed this minor province. The prefect appointed to Judaea was Coponius. Quirinius' census – based on property not a head count – did not extend to Galilee, a client kingdom which remained under the tetrarch Herod Antipas.

And no census would have required heavily pregnant maidens to make a 100 mile journey south!

Oops! Now, Acts 5.33 purports to tell the story of the disciples in the 30s AD. It calls as a "witness" an archetypal Pharisee priest called "Gamaliel" who advises the Sanhedrin to release the imprisoned disciples "just in case they were doing God's work."

As part of his dubious argument he cites the fate of two previous Messiahs – Judas the Galilean and Theudas. It just so happens Josephus (Ant. 20.5) also mentions both rebels – the Judas who raised a tax revolt under Coponius (about 6 AD) and "a certain magician Theudas" whose head was removed by the procurator Cuspius Fadus.

Unfortunately for the Biblical chronology Fadus was appointed after the death of Herod Agrippa in 44 AD – "Gamaliel" is recalling an event which hasn't yet happened!

Almost a century later – closer to his own time and no doubt influencing the author of Luke – a census was taken in Egypt. The "Kata Oikian" census of 104 AD required temporary city dwellers to return to their regular domiciles. This census did not extend beyond the borders of Egypt. Luke's story is a 'pick'n'mix' of a dimly remembered history, used as a literary device to give his hero the 'prophesied' birth in Bethlehem.

SOURCES:

S. Angus, The Mystery Religions (Dover Books, 1975)
Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries (Thorsons, 1999)
Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew (Harper Collins,1992)
Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (Yale, 1984)
Leslie Houlden (Ed.), Judaism & Christianity (Routledge, 1988)
Karen Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem (Random House, 1998)
Acharya S. The Christ Conspiracy (Adventures Unlimited, 1999)
Michael Walsh, Roots of Christianity (Grafton, 1986)
Peter Roberts, In Search of Early Christian Unity (Vantage, 1985)
Robert L. Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings (SCM Press, 1971)
The Illustrated Gospel of St John (Webb & Bower, 1985)

**Ristaron** · 05-09-2008, 11:42 AM

This is some good stuff. I hadn't seen most of this before. Thank you!