Imperium

xrist is a mythological contruct whose origins are based upon Indo-European sun myths.
I refer you to Charles Morris` Aryan Sun-Myths the Origin of Religion.
S. Acharya goes even further than this and speculates that xtianity was a religion actually formulated by the emperor Constantine in the 4th century CE.
So to say that xtianity as a religion should be divorced from its mythological origins and for those origins to be presented as literal truth and thus a template for how one should live one`s life is patently absurd in my opinion.

The Bear

To start with you don’t offend me in the least by adopting the form “xrist” in preference to the proper form “Christ”. Nor do you offend me by failing to use a capital “X” as I am a devout atheist but out of consideration for people who DO become offended by such things, personally I do my best to avoid them.

I am aware of the hypothesis that there was no such a person as Jesus. It is a hypothesis that I reject as it is implausible owing to two factors. Firstly there is just too much evidence to the contrary, secondly there were many mystics wandering around at that time though Jesus certainly was number one when it came to getting up the Roman Nose and at the same time seriously pi55ing off the Pharisees and other “power that be”

I believe that in that Acharya is both right and wrong.

Certainly what emerged from the Conference of Nicea was a thing that took from original Christian myth and history and did a pick and mix with it whilst at the same time throwing a great deal of what Paul had written and came up with a code for a religion that delivered to the Roman emperor a “religion” that itself was supported by the Emperor, it’s also significant that it delivered the first pope.

That being so doesn’t make what emerged Christianity, it makes it a Roman Catholic (in the true meaning of catholic) Church (in the true meaning of church), that uses the carrots and sticks, many of which it added in the process, to keep boith king and pauper under the thumb of Rome.

Only if you can’t see that what emerged from Nicea wasn’t real Christianity but a thing that made use of a pick and mix of true Christianity, a set of values, beliefs, and directions based on Christ's life and teachings.

I guess it comes down to this. There are no doubt many true Christians who are members of many churches but that doesn’t mean there are many churches that are truly Christian. You can immediately rule out any that put any priest as an intermediary between God and man.

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Imperium

[quote=The Bear;502079]You presume too much. The intention is not offend, it is a form of shorthand.

There is absolutely no contemporary evidence to support the hypothesis that such a man ever existed.
I refer you to this excellent site which explores the issue in some depth.
Did Jesus exist?
In view of teh above site perhaps you could present some evidence to support your theory that jesus was an historical entity?

How convenient, so now you are an arbiter of who is and is not a true xtian?

rjt

[quote=Imperium;502068]Church attendance on a Sunday is not the only way to measure the size and growth of the church and if you read my previous post you would see that I acknoledged a decline in regular church attendance but simply stated within the COE figures had held fairly steady the past few years.

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Ignore List: The Prophets of ST Al the Unelectable.

The Bear

There are times that abbreviating a thing is offensive. Use of the form “Xtian” and especially “xtian” in my experience is a thing that many Christians find offensive.

Knowing that and continuing to do so, as is failure to use a capital “J” where you later make reference to Jesus, is simply rude and boorish.

On the one hand it really doesn’t matter if Jesus was corporeal or contrived, the teachings of Jesus are of the highest morality and so any person who does act in as close a manner to Jesus and what he taught as he can will not engage in the acts or cruelty that the majority of churches, especially the RC Church has done.

On the other hand there is a contemporary account of the presence of a real person called Jesus and who is presented as being the Christ. If you really “knew your onions” you would of course know this.

Not I, simply the comparison and contrasting what is written in Scripture compared to what so many Christian churches practice shows where the differences between what Christian CHURCHES have done and what the teaching of Christ tells Christians to do.

It’s interesting how the closer a man follows the teaching of Christ the less evil he does to other men, yet the closer a man follows the teaching of Mohammed the more.

Funny old world.

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Imperium

quote=rjt;502100
Relative to the dying off of the churches` aging congregations?

Imperium

[quote=The Bear;502116]In my experience genuine xtians do not or should not find offence at such a trivial thing and indeed should not find offence in anything at all if they genuinely follow in the footsteps of their master.
I find the use of the terms heathen or pagan by xtians offensive when they are referring to authentic Indo-European spirituality but I would never waste bandwidth by arguing about it!


Methinks thou art a closet xtian or you would never even have noticed such a trivial thing never mind raise objection to it.

Again an incredible remark by a supposed non-xtian. On what basis do you judge the middle eastern morality of jesus as being of the highest order?
If we all were to behave in the manner of jesus not only would the graveyards be overfull with the bodies of martyrs but do you not realise that his teaching can only lead to the exaltation of the ultimate in human failure?

There are no contemporary accounts and you have provided not a shred of evidence in support of your theory.
Where is your EVIDENCE?


All done in the name of and to the glory of the aforesaid jesus!


As I said the close following of the teachings of jesus is to cultivate the ultimate in human failure.

For_England

Since Jesus was an unofficial religious leader of a band of Galileans, this is hardly surprising. However Eusebius relates that he saw a handwritten letter of Jesus in the state archives of Armenia.

Tacitus tells us that Christ was put to death under Pilate. Had he not written that, I would ask whether there are any contemporary records that Pilate executed anyone? Does the lack of names and details that mean he didn't? The expectations this article comes with are very unrealistic. We are lucky to even have archeaological evidence that Pilate existed and was governor of Judea.

What about Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius? If by contemporary we have to have someone writing at the same time as Jesus lived, that is unrealistic, for he was not famous then.

If that was the case, there would be no explanation as to how all of the churches, throughout the ancient Roman world, as well as Persia and beyond, had four gospels. Irenaeus was not that influential, and Tatian made a harmony of the four gospel decades before Irenaeus. The Muratorian fragment at Rome, but translated from an earlier Greek work, assumes four gospels also. Justin quotes from the synoptics and John as 'the memoirs of the apostles' and informs us that they were read in the churches every week. Clement of Rome, who lived in the first century, quoted Matthew and John. What you won't find are quotations from these supposed masses of other gospels that we are supposed to believe were floating around among the orthodox, when the reality is all of these were private works confined to certain small sects in certain localities. There was no centralised hierarchy at the time, and therefore I cannot see how the four gospels would be recognised so universally, unless delivered that way from antiquity.

More like ignored, as they always had been. The Western Church didn't become powerful (and corrupt) enough to start outlawing books for another thousand years or so.

This again is very silly. There are no originals of any ancient book. We have very ancient copies of the gospels, spread over a wide area, and the same could not be said for Caesar and alot of other ancient writers. And the writer of John does claim to have met Jesus.

So that would place them all within the first century. However I'm not aware that this can be called a consensus - I was under the impression that alot of scholars [not Christian ones either] date some of the books earlier. Mark is usually put some time 65-75.

Placing the words 'the traditional church' in the singular suggests that there was some representative hierarchy that made these kinds of decisions, which there was not. What those words represent is the concencus of people living in vastly differing geographical areas. Also, I would like to see the reasons for stating that the gospel authors could not have served as apostles. The statement itself is poorly worded, since only two of the gospel writers were identified by tradition as being direct followers of Jesus - Mark and Luke wrote what they learned from eyewitnesses.


The title 'st' was added in mediaeval times - this is another very silly statement, since it has nothing to do with whether those people wrote the gospels or not.

Evidence please? I was under the impression even slaves lived into their thirties. Irenaeus defines a thirty year old as a 'young man' so I'd like to know what evidence this quote is based upon. I suspect it is based upon factoring in the high levels of infant mortality.

John would be 110 only if i) he was John the son of Zebedee, and i) if he wrote in the 90s. I've noticed a tendency among scholars to down-date the revelation to the sixties. John Robinson argued for a pre-70 date based upon the authors familiarity with pre-70ad Jerusalem - something only confirmed by archaeology.

Even scholars who believe Mark was written first do not make such a statement that Matthew was written a generation after - this also contradicts your previous statement that all the gospels were written between 70 and the 90s. Not many scholars would even date it as late as 100, and most would date it 70-90, with a significant number of able scholars dating it to the fifties and sixties.

Or perhaps he recorded the preaching of Peter, an eyewitness. As for ungrammatical, scholars are agreed the author knew Hebrew and Latin. Perhaps he wrote in the common Greek of the time, and not the refined Greek of the elites.

Another very silly statement. Caesar, for example, wrote in the third person in his Gallic wars.

Examples? Where?

That assumes the latest dating ranges of papyri, and dismisses the arguments of scholars like Thiede out of hand (he argues for first-century dating of a fragment of Matthew, and the identification with Mark of a fragment from Quamran which only matches Mark and nothing else, and which is pre-70ad). It also fails to appreciate that it would have been impossible for the churches across the empire to have settled upon the same books with the same texts, if they were created piecemeal or late. He also ignores early translations and quotations from the church fathers, scattered across the empire and beyond. The simply is not there for late or piecemeal creations of the New Testament books. Also, once again they overstate their case - p32, p46, p 64, p66, p75, p77 are dated to around 200, not 'late third century'.
p52, p90 and p98 are dated to around 150.

How? How did Irenaeus in Gaul persuade the Christian leaders in every town and city to adopt his canon? How did he persuade Tatian forty years before him, or Justin, or Ignatius, or Clement, to only use approved versions? How did he see to it that the early translations only had the approved books? Why is there no record of the conflict and disagreement Irenaeus faced as he tried to force other churches to adopt his canon?

How did they determine what would appear? Who are these 'fathers' - decisions were made by bishops, not fathers, and there were thousands of them. The first ecumenical council wasn't until the fourth century, and long before then there was universal agreement on the four gospels - how?

Yes, it also comes as no surprise that though most scholars believe that the passage about Jesus healing people and being the Christ was interpolated, that the majority of scholars have no such doubts about his reference to 'James the brother of Jesus'. This source forgot to mention that.

Yes - more than a thousand years later.

Ok, this article is getting sillier and sillier. By even the most generous definition of 'early', you would still be centuries off.

Yes, involving less than five percent of the NT text and consisting of scribal errors of the type found everywhere until printing was invented.

Every mind ultimately relies on belief and faith, because belief in God is not considered to be provable or disprovable.

This is mentioned by Thallus, c. 50ad.

More nonsense - we don't even know the names of the high priests other than through Josephus - the article assumes that such records would have independently survived, which is ridiculous.

It's a matter of debate whether the Roman Nazareth was built before or after 70ad, but at any rate it would have been a small village of a thousand or two inhabitants and hardly worthy of a notice by anyone. Even Bart Ehrman believes Jesus was probably born there!
I cannot see anything else worth responding to.

Smidgey

The whole argument whether or not Jesus really exists completely misses the point. C.S. Lewis had his famous: "Lord, lunatic or liar" trichotomy. He of course missed out 'myth'. But one can have myth without having to believe that the character of Jesus did or did not exist. But I digress.

The point is that whether Jesus did or did not exist is irrelevant to the truth of the Christian religion (and the same goes for any other religious founder, be it the Mormon one of the Islamic one).

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For_England

Nobody has said that if he existed, then everything said about him in the Bible is necessarily true. So no-one is 'missing the point' (except for you perhaps).
No, it's not irrelevant: if he didn't exist, then Christianity is false. If he did exist, it might be true or it might be false. Now, have you anything relevant to add?