Was Jesus a Historical Figure?

Doing Good Works is silly? Au contraire, Your Sensibleship.

I don´t think it has much to do with gays.
In Europe we have much less of fanatic Christians and they have less to say in daily life.
The great majority in a country has the same religion whatever Roman Catholics, Lutherans or Protestants or a mixture of the two. Then of course there are the Greek Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox.
When I went to school we learned about creation in religion and evolution in history. Amazing was certain similarities in both. We just accepted the two.
Because of the fanatic Christians in USA the non fanatic/sceptical/non believers get to be more fanatic.
If you can´t discuss a subject but get arguments which are supposed to be the truth hammered in you yourself get aggresive and stubborn.
It is more or less PC to be against the church today.
In my hometown a man bought a house next to the church. The church has been there for several hundred years and the guy was born in that town.
He knew that the churchbells ring regularly and still he forced the church to stop the ringing. If he can´t stand it he should have bought a house some other place.
Just as stupid as the guy who bought a house by the beach and the complained about the seagulls and wanted the town to get rid of them. This has nothing to do with the church but just shows how people want their will.

Fanatic? Or, just true believer? Fanatic has a pejorative connotation, that might reflect one's non-neutral position, I believe.

Religion by its very definition should be believed. Religion was never meant to be a smorgasboard, I believe.

Those with strength of conviction of their beliefs are those generally branded fanatics, especially when some would presume to pronounce judgment or spiritual consequences on those who do not share the same beliefs.

Certainly the Orthodox Jew would perceive the historical Jesus much differently than would the Christian and also different groups of Christians will not always agree on certain attributes or circumstances though one cannot be Christian and believe there was no Jesus. No less 'fanatical' or given to religious fervor however are those who are certain that Jesus did not exist and that Christians or Jews or anybody else professing belief in God are all delusional and lack the intelligence to escape supernatural drival.

Jesus as a man and a cult leader of that time period who know one way or another.

Jesus as the son of god, bringing long dead men back to life, and on and on nonsense that a sane 10 year old would not buy into unless he was brain wash from birth.

You misspelled drivel, which is surprising given the amount of drivel which you produce. I don't know if your boy Jesus existed or not, but i do know that there is no reliable corroborative, contemporary evidence.

If the boy Jesus did not existed where did Paul the Apostle, or Paul of Tarsus get his ideas from ? Afterall Paul's influence on Christian thinking arguably has been more significant than any other New Testament author. Christianity is commonly said to owe as much to Paul as to Jesus.

Certainly Paul's letters have had a significant effect on Christian teachings and thought. But not only Paul, but other New Testament writers, and those that extended beyond the New Testament into the Second Century wrote of those they knew who professed first hand experience with Jesus of Nazareth. It would have required a great conspiracy and an amazing cooperative effort for so many of such diverse backgrounds to have put together such a well constructed myth that would be included in so many different writings in so short a time.

You might wish to do a little research there was similar stories to the nonsense concerning Jesus floating around for at least a thousands years before these men birth.

They did not even need to come up with new fiction just cut/paste old stories.

You can always find amazing similarities and it is really easy to attempt to extrapolate coincidental similarities into something significant. You've probably seen the e-mail comparing all the really wierd coincidences involving President Kennedy and President Lincoln. There are infinite twists to plots in fiction but a finite number of plots (36 according to George Polti who did a study on it once.) Likewise there are only so many scenarios that one can make up.) Take almost any detailed horoscope in the hands of a skilled interpreter and you could believe it was written by somebody looking into your very soul. Find any person who has not had an infinite number of similar experiences that you have also had.

Nevertheless, for the large number of writers to all have devised such similar relatively unique spiritual understandings, the same cast of characters, and the same recollections of history over such a wide area in so short a time would be so remarkable a coincidence as to defy any rational conclusion that all those writing about Jesus and Christianity made it up.

Rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak, why is there no thinking along the lines here that maybe many of the bible's figures were not larger than life figures, when they existed, but they had good publicity agents after their death. Sort of like Emily Dickenson was little known in her life, and now is a famous American poet.

Actually, what proof would prove Jesus lived? Once historical figures have been dead longer than the society they lived in, all persons can be doubted to have existed. Bethlehem had no birth certificates back then. So, the doubters would win based on no records. The logic is akin to an IRS audit.

Another reason I believe he did live, as an historical figure, is that there are gospels that the Catholic church banned, and persecuted those that were its followers, I thought. Usually, when there are different opinions about a celebrity, the celebrity was quite real.

No need to reply. I just want other readers to see there is another side to your specific logic above.

Forget all the similar stories and the miracles around Jesus and let us just stay with his preaching and him being against certain things in the Jewish religion.
Why would Paul refer to Jesus if he never had existed instead saying Paul himself had said all this?
Why would anybody who comes up with new ideas whatever it is in religion, philosophy, new invents or politics tell people that these new ideas come from someone else than themselves?

You mean, the New Testament is written only for the glorification of a Jewish person named Jesus, who lived among the Jews in the middle of the 1st century AD.??


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Foxfyre the writers was in the same or related cults so I see no such problem with them coming up with similar nonsense to say nothing of our complete lack of knowing who wrote the those books just because they was given names does not mean that they was author indirectly by anyone with those names. They could not be author directly as far as we know all those stories were place down on paper well after the lifetime of anyone name.

All the writing was done over a few hundred years and only some of it got into the bible, as we know it today.

What we know of those writing that is far more then what got into the bible new testament is likely to only be a small fraction of what was lost of that cult writings.

As a said on it face this is nonsense that not even a non-brainwash 10 year old would buy into.

Can you imagen - yes the NT was collected to tell about Jesu life.

The New Testament is the name given to the second major division of the Christian Bible, the first division being the much longer Old Testament. The New Testament is sometimes called the Greek New Testament or Greek Scriptures, or the New Covenant.

The original texts were written by various authors after c. AD 45, in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

Its books were gradually collected into a single volume. Although Christian denominations differ as to which works are included in the New Testament, the majority have settled on the same twenty-seven book canon: it consists of the four narratives of the life and death of Jesus, called "Gospels"; a narrative of the Apostles' ministries in the early church, probably by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, which it continues; twenty-one early letters, commonly called "epistles" in Biblical context, written by various authors and consisting mostly of Christian counsel and instruction; and an Apocalyptic prophecy.

To note is that Paul´s letters are written much earlier than the four Gospels.
Still the Gospels are put before the letters in the NT

At least Jesus did not write a biography praising himself and all his deeds as so many modern people do now adays.

So a hundred years plus after the "events" the Romans are taking note of the writing and claims of a new cult?

So what does that prove even if correct other then the cult was becoming known to the Romans during that time period?

That the writings and even secret claims of scientology is now known prove what about the correctness of it claims that the earth is a prison planet for souls who lost some galaxy war?

References and links please to your claims.

Here are some links - you can find even more in internet. You can buy books about the subject, you would know if you had followed articles in newspapers during your life about archeology in the near east - there have also been articles by theological researchers, historians and siecentists. Forget about people who build only on their beliefs. It is much more interesting when people get a result which has nothing to do with their belief.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament
http://www.ntgateway.com/
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/newtestament.html
http://www.abu.nb.ca/courses/NTIntro/indexNTIntr.htm
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/manuscripts.html

The mother church and been proven in later times to had forge any number of documents and there is more then some question concerning Tacitus writings having been improve upon after the fact.

I did a fast check and came up with the following.

The surviving copies of Tacitus' works derive from two principle manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts, which are held in the Laurentian Library, and written in Latin. It is the second Medicean manuscript which is the oldest surviving copy of the passage describing Christians. In this manuscript, the first 'i' of the Christianos is quite distinct in appearance from the second, looking somewhat smudged, and lacking the long tail of the second 'i'; additionally, there is a large gap between the first 'i' and the subsequent long s. Georg Andresen was one of the first to comment on the appearance of the first 'i' and subsequent gap, suggesting in 1902 that the text had been altered, and an 'e' had originally been in the text, rather than this 'i'[18].

In 1950, at Harald Fuchs request, Dr. Teresa Lodi, the director of the Laurentian Library, examined the features of this item of the manuscript; she concluded that there are still signs of an 'e' being erased, by removal of the upper and lower horizontal portions, and distortion of the remainder into an 'i'.[19] In 2008, Dr. Ida Giovanna Rao, the new head of the Laurentian Library's manuscript office, repeated Lodi's study, and concluded that it is likely that the 'i' is a correction of some earlier character (i.e. an e), the change being made an extremely subtle one. Later the same year, it was discovered that under ultraviolet light, an 'e' is clearly visible in the space, meaning that the passage must originally have referred to chrestianos, a Latin word which could be interpreted as the good, after the Greek word χρηστός (chrestos), meaning 'good, useful'. "I believe that in our passage of Tacitus the original reading Chrestianos is the true one" says Professor Robert Renehan, stating that it was "natural for a Roman to interpret the words [Christus and Christianus] as the similarly-sounding χρηστός".[20] The word Christian/s is in Codex Sinaiticus (in which Christ is abbriviated - see nomina sacra) spelled Chrestian/s in the three places the word is used. Also in Minuscule 81 this spelling is used in Acts of the Apostles 11:26.[21]


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