Yadda wrote on Apr 8^th, 2014 at 11:48am:

Yadda, do the imagining without the histrionics... You never know, you might see the wisdom.

BTW I wouldn't quote Matthew... His blunders with scripture are now obvious and embarrassing. He was clearly making it up as he went and misreading Hebrew text.

John Smith wrote on Apr 7^th, 2014 at 10:43pm:

Explain.
How do you not link them?

Soren wrote on Apr 8^th, 2014 at 7:52pm:


you cannot prove that the Jesus that was recorded on Roman records, is the same Jesus written about 50yrs later. Jesus was a popular name. How do you know that was the one they were referring too?

let me guess... faith?

Soren wrote on Apr 8^th, 2014 at 8:33pm:

I think fictional stories of his life were necessary because there were none. So little was known of this character. Even Paul (the greatest of Christian evangelists) had never met him.

Many gospels were subsequently written about him, all bar four declared heresies by Christian leaders even 200 to 400 years after Jesus' supposed death, which demonstrates that orthodoxy depended on political considerations of the time.

Even the gospel of Mark was redacted many decades after it had been written.

I could go on, but the point I'm making is that the Jesus of history (if there even was a history) has been, over the first few hundred years of Christianity so amended and recast (starting with Paul himself) that it renders that Jesus impossible to know and totally irrelevant. Who was he? Who knows?

What we do know is what (starting with Paul) evangelists have made him and that is the relevant figure... The Jesus of Christianity... The eternally good man - the personification of good, in fact. I could say in the same way as king Arthur and Sir Galahad are the personification of courage, nobility and chivalry, but I think figures central to a religion clearly occupy a higher plane in our collective psyche than mythical figures of folklore.

In the end, I don't think the historicity of Jesus is even necessary for a modern interpretation of Christianity.. Especially to a modern ear that may find rising from the dead somewhat macabre and creepy as opposed to wondrous and marvellous.

John Smith wrote on Apr 8^th, 2014 at 10:51pm:



What do you want proven?

And what would you accept as evidence for whatever it is that you want proven?

NorthOfNorth wrote on Apr 8^th, 2014 at 9:50pm:

Something else that I find intriguing is the possibility that the Jesus of Christianity (in that he is cast as the personification of good), is how the concept parallels Plato's form of the GOOD. While Plato asserts that we may have notions of good, those notions are just pale reflections of the form of GOODNESS. Christianity, it could be said, casts Jesus incarnate as the materialised Platonic form of the GOOD.

The Platonic GOODNESS  in Christianity now has a human body and mind that walks, talks and even dies. But Platonic forms cannot die, they are ideas (in the Greek sense), so he is resurrected and returns to the world of the forms (the Christian Heaven), where he becomes the co-personification of the Jewish Yahweh and the Platonic form of the GOOD.

The rest, the stories of his life, are just that... They are fillers to keep wondering minds satisfied... many of them are even carelessly defined, with little to no interest in associating them with actual history occurring around them, nor even with the facts of that history, except where convenient to do so.

Another interesting point to me is that while 1st century Palestine must have been a hellish place of eternal conflicts, The gospels has Jesus wandering around for a few years as if in the grounds of Plato's Academy, having philosophical debates with Jewish leaders as if he were a latter day Socrates. Only at the end, do we glimpse the brutality of Roman Palestine (as Socrates finally witnesses the injustice of the Athenians and also pays the ultimate price).

John Smith wrote on Apr 9^th, 2014 at 8:34am:


Until you see the holes in his hands, you will not believe, 

Thomas 

John Smith wrote on Apr 9^th, 2014 at 11:15am:




I like that