Did Jesus even exist? Given the lack of any contemporaneous accounts of the Jesus character, at face value, the Doherty explanation given below seems more sensible than the belief that the people making up the Jesus stories literally believed in a living, breathing, super-powered, magician rabbi two thousand years ago who managed to get killed by some non-magical humans anyway. Are there any real refutations of it other than the consensus of bible scholars who obviously have vested interests in the topic?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Doherty#The_Jesus_Puzzle>In all four of these works, Doherty presents views on the origins of Christianity, specifically promoting the view that Jesus is a mythical figure rather than a historical person. Doherty argues that Paul and other writers of the earliest existing proto-Christian Gnostic documents did not believe in Jesus as a person who incarnated on Earth in a historical setting. Rather, they believed in Jesus as a heavenly being who suffered his sacrificial death in the lower spheres of heaven at the hands of the demon spirits, and was subsequently resurrected by God. This Christ myth was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Middle Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus.
>>18522644>Doherty says that the Jesus myth was given a historical setting only by the second generation of Christians, somewhere between the 1st and 2nd century. He further says that even the author of the Gospel of Mark probably did not consider his gospel to be a literal work of history, but an allegorical midrashic composition based on the Old Testament prophecies. In the widely supported two-source hypothesis, the story of Mark was later fused with a separate tradition of anonymous sayings embodied in the Q document into the other gospels. According to Doherty, the Q-authors may have regarded themselves as "spokespersons for the Wisdom of God," with Jesus being the embodiment of this Wisdom.[10] In time, the gospel-narrative of this embodiment of Wisdom became interpreted as the literal history of the life of Jesus. Doherty denies any historical value of the Acts of the Apostles, and refers to works by John Knox, Joseph B. Tyson, J.C. O'Neill, Burton L. Mack and Richard Pervo in dating Acts into the 2nd century and regarding it as largely based on legend.[13]
>>18522644>>18522645I'm not convinced on mythicism. What are the main arguments, it's just about Q and Mark being constructions?
>>18522659No
>>18522718What are the arguments?
>>18522659>>18522720I'm quite new to mythicism but I believe the theory is that the concept of Yashua (Jewish word for Savior of Yahweh) was slowly developed by hellenized jews in an attempt to synthesize Judaism with ideas of dying and rising saviors present in other cults (such as the Osiris cult) and platonistic ideas like the logos, which is a mediator between god and humans. Philo of Alexandria is an example of such a jewish philosopher. The gospel of john also refers to jesus as the logos. Paul's letters also make it clear that he never talks about biographical details of an earthly jesus, but only speaks of him as someone known through visions and revelations based on scripture. So, for example, in Romans 16:25-27 he says>25 Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, 26 but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience that comes from[a] faith— 27 to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen.or Colossians 1:25>25 I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness— 26 the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. 27 To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.Clearly, this alludes to the Jesus theory as a mystery of a dying and rising savior figure hidden within the scriptures which is slowly being revealed to the jews through visions and revelation. The later belief that jesus was a literal historical figure performing magic tricks probably arose because common people either didn't understand the metaphorical versions or didn't find it convincing enough to rally around.
>>18522745This actually makes Christianity a lot cooler to be honest.
>>18522750I don't really disagree, but most bible scholars think it's false (although their jobs depend on claiming it's false, since christians would no longer fund them if they started saying that jesus didn't even exist). I should try reading Richard Carrier's book Jesus from Outer Space at some point.
everything jesus did and knew was from egyptian mystery schools. He was an arrogant semite who, once he obtained knowledge of how to do certain egyptian rituals and various things at alexandria went on a literal ego trip and declared himself the son of God. Nothing he did was above a pharaoh AT ALL. and he fucked most of the rituals up. You can't use seals/etc and rituals to do spiritual ascension especially enochian shit like Pistis Sophia. So, he made it to the top of yaldabaoths court which was destroyed and anchored his soul there. You wanna join the tard. Follow in his steps. How can yo verify this? ask an LLM precisely what this knuckle head did in the 33 years he was alive? what mystery schools and egyptian this and that does every aspect of what he did look like and you will get what the fuck actually did and How he damned his soul by using enochian seals to run through gates to yaldabaoth's old Archon vessel throne. It's 'masters of the universe' except there's no magical sword or anything .. just ruin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocryphon_of_Johnand since no one else knew this, he ignorantly and arrogantly ran through egyptian spells/etc incorrectly .. and fucked himself and seemingly all the other tards who believed in his message. Now I get why the jews laugh at people who follow him and how it was literally a constructed reverse hellinism demiurgic capture. I did what I said just yesterday with an LL it poured out all the details :Memphis rite/Pistis/Jeueverything this fuckface did is covered under. All of it is demuirgic soul lock. The egyptians would have laughed at him if they were around during his time. Not even pharaohs that did far more and went higher then him declared ever they were the son of God/etc.. actually akhenaten did and the egyptians detailed how it was fucked. Jesus channeled similarly like a tard and vectored to yadlabaoth's highest court.
>>18522757>(although their jobs depend on claiming it's false, since christians would no longer fund them if they started saying that jesus didn't even exist)Are you fucking retarded? Where do you think they get their funding from?
>>18523247That's interesting but the book was probably written too late to tell us what the inventors of the Jesus myth were thinking.>>18523364From private Christian donors or boards of private institutions with Christian members.
1.Why is it even a debate about if Jesus real, it’s obvious just anti Christian hatred, thwre are iver 20,000 manuscripts proving Christ’s existence, literally thousands more than ancient historical figures. “Did he even exist?” What are you talking about, something at least starts from somewhere. 2. People don’t die for a lie, it is recorded all of Jesus’ disciples got brutally murdered apart from John for not renouncing Christ since they knew the Kingdom of Heaven was worth inheriting for the short lived pain they’d experience while being murdered. 3. Someone in this thread trying to say Christianity isn’t cool, how is it not cool? All of Western civilisation was founded on Christian values, every modern comfort you experience, the architecture of the buildings you walk past every day, the very fact you can post your stupid little comments on here is because of Western civilisation and the list goes on. No other people or culture compare to that founded on Christianity.
>>18523535>thwre are iver 20,000 manuscripts proving Christ’s existence,This isn't actually true. The manuscripts you're referring to are medieval christian manuscripts talking about jesus, not actual contemporary or near-contemporary writings about the man.>People don’t die for a lie, it is recorded all of Jesus’ disciples got brutally murdered apart from John for not renouncing ChristNo it isnt. This literally isn't actually a real thing that happened in history. Also, people die for lies all the time.Modern western civilization exists due to a rejection of christianity and an embrace of naturalism and science. Christians did not create modern society. The west under christianity up until the Renaissance and eventually the Enlightenment was a shithole.
>>18523535The west was founded upon Greece and Rome who were pagan. Try again
Bump. I'm looking into Richard Carrier's mythicism more now and the evidence against historicism is really damning.
Christianity, as a religion, has no native mysticism. It inherited an apocalyptic Jewish messianism, a Pauline crucifixion theology, and a set of ethical teachings about charity and repentance. What it did not inherit from its Palestinian origins was a contemplative metaphysics. It had no doctrine of the soul's ascent through hierarchies of being. It had no analysis of divine names. It had no triadic structure of procession, rest, and return. It had no theurgic theology. It had no apophatic negation as a pathway to union with the Absolute. These doctrines did not exist in the Gospels. They did not exist in Paul. They did not exist in the Synoptic tradition. They did not exist in the rabbinic Judaism that formed Christianity's immediate background.Christianity acquired its mysticism in a single documented act of literary theft, from the works of a pagan neoplatonist named Proclus, who Christians invented a fake name and gave credit to for his work instead: Dionysius the Areopagite never existed. The "Dionysian corpus" (do some research into this) is a word-for-word ripoff / re-branding of metaphysical philosophy written by the neoplatonist, Proclus in Athens. He had to flee from Athens to continue his work, when his academy was forced to close down by Christian emperor Justinian. 4 years after the academy was closed down, christians take credit for his works and bolt on some BS about jesus into it, while crediting the work to a made-up person with a made-up story that Paul converted them to Christianity.
ITT: Deniers going>Nuh-uh, Nuh-uh, Nuh-uh
