Sounds like you're talking about the right instead of academia.
Make America Great Again
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Why do people still believe in Jesus and Christianity?
- Thread starter TexanManWithPlans
- Start date
Make America Great Again
#DumpTrump
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Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
So there is no other life in the Universe except on our planet. There are no alternate planes of existence, no other dimensions, no multiverses. We are all alone in this single universe which is doomed to Heat Death in 200 billion years. Awesome!
Iolo/Penderyn
Verified User
Take a look at any mythical material - take the 'king' Arthur stories, for instance - and you find that they feel quite unlike most of Mark, say, even the earlier versions which are much closer to a likely historical figure we happen to know very little about. I was taught what they used to call 'practical criticism' by an early pupil of F.R. Leavis, then studied under him myself, so I got well trained, and even given the problems of translation etc etc etc I can assure you this is not myth.
saltydancin
Verified User
As with the communism of Christianity suicidal sociopsychopathilogical homicidal human farming socioeconomic machine & it's Christiananality pedophilia interpretation of one nation under God with "serve the Pope or die" from Islam "death to the infidels" dhimmitude servitude law of the land ever since SCOTUS granting standing with fabricated misnomer immaculate conceptions for thieving US Constitutions - old glory - old testament - absentee voting ballots arsonists.
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
we are......one day at a time.....
The Romans executed and crucified many people they considered to be common criminals. They did not keep records or write books about them. An illiterate Jewish peasant from the backwater of Galilee with a ministry of less than 20 people would have not even registered a blip on their radar of what they deemed important.
Jesus' apostles were illiterate Jewish peasants from a provincial backwater. I am not sure why you expect illiterate peasants to be keeping diaries about Jesus. Very few people in antiquity were literate, not to mention we probably have less than one percent of anything that was written 2000 years ago - the rest was lost, rotted away, or discarded.
Antiquity was largely an oral culture, not a written one. Paul's New Testament epistles were written about 20 years after Jesus' execution, and the literate, Greek-speaking Paul purportedly met two of the original companions and apostles of Jesus: Peter and Jesus' brother James.
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Iolo/Penderyn
Verified User
Anyone who expects the Romans to have mentioned Jesus should try to reconstruct the history of Roman Britain and its change into the countries of modern Britain using Roman records. Try finding out even what language people spoke. The Imperial authorities simply weren't interested in their subjects' lives or deaths.
Okay, the international scientific community really does not care if you do not think the big bang is a valid scientific theory.
You are going to have to pay me money if you want me to teach you about the discovery, science and reasearch concerning the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan. I had to pay college tuition to acquire knowlege of that nature.
It is anachronistic belief to assume antiquity is like the modern age, with journalists, bureaucrats, government employees diligently recording the most mundane events, and hermetically sealing the papyrus scrolls to ensure they survive 2000 years for our reading pleasure.
Very few people were literate or capable of writing in the middle iron age of two millennia ago. And they certainly would not have been diligently recording and archiving the execution of an obscure Jewish peasant.
For the people who could write in antiquity, they certainly were not writing about illiterate peasants who were executed as common criminals.
The surprising thing actually is that there is such a substantial written record about an illiterate Jewish peasant from a provincial backwater, compiled within 20 to 50 years of his execution.
Christ did have follewers (disciples) and did many teachings, and drew large crowds,
so I wouldn't completely dismiss his life as an illiterate peasant.
What we call Palm Sunday drew large crowds and attention as he rode into Jerusalem.
He was treated as a king -the palms and cloaks on the ground to sanctify his way
Iolo/Penderyn
Verified User
Jesus was certainly highly literate, but not in Greek or Latin, which were the only languages that counted. And an awful lot of people were treated as kings in various provinces, yet the Romans couldn't be bothered to recall any who didn't seriously threaten their rule.
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I am referring to the historical Jesus.
The Jesus who miraculously fed large crowds with two fish and a loaf of bread is obviously an embellishment of the New Testament, and cannot be confirmed historically.
We actually have virtually no writing which actually survives from the first century. Ancient writing is almost never physically or chemically capable of surviving for two thousand years.
What we have are hand-written copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies, relentlessly hand copied over many centuries.
The Romans would have had to deem any "arrest records" of a Jewish peasant so important, they would had to have had committed government bureaucrats over the decades and centuries to repeatedly hand-copy the "arrest" record and rap sheet of Jesus, and commit to doing so over the course of centuries.
I really do not think that passes the laugh test.
why are they the only languages that counted? Aramaic was the lingua franca.. his earthly power came from the common folk -not the Hebrew scholars.
I'm not sure if Pilot actually got pressure from Rome,or just saw him as a threat to his rule over Judaea
Iolo/Penderyn
Verified User
Because, as Cypress points out, they were the languages that produced what texts survive.
the historical Jesus had a lot of power -dismissing him as an "Illiterate peasant" diminishes his historical role.
Palm Sunday was an historical event as well
He was crucified for his threat to power,not because he claimed divinity.
yes on the writings and oral traditions -agree
well Buddhists have the Pali cannon -which were also a rewrite/compendium of Buddhas suttas.
They were passed down by oral tradition as well
does that diminish their worth? Sorry I'm not following the point here
Literate in the sense of being able to read and write. Jesus was born to peasant parents in a one horse town in a provincial backwater. He undoubtedly spoke Aramaic, but there is basically a zero chance he went to school and learned how to write. The NT explicitly points out that some of his peasant disciples from Galilee were Aramaic speaking illiterates, which would have been the standard, universal expectation for peasants from Gallile.
I think there is a reason the NT was written in Greek by highly literate people of the Hellenistic world. None of the illiterate Aramaic speaking followers of Jesus could write anything down in Aramaic. If they could, we should have had a NT written in Aramaic
You are thinking anachronistically.
His profound historical role did not come to fruition until centuries after his death.
At the time of his life he was an impoverished Jewish teacher of the apocalyptic tradition of Jewish theology.
He was born an illiterate peasant in a one horse town.
He lived his life in a provincial backwater.
His ministry consisted of probably less than 20 people. Peasant men and women all.
50 after his death, Christianity was a tiny, obscure cult of a subsect of Jews.
Almost no Romans had ever heard of Christianity even 100 years after Jesus' death.
It was not until the fourth century AD that Christianity became a a major religion in the Roman Empire, and ultimately became the state religion.
Greek and Latin were the languages of the literate classes and the elite. That was a legacy of the Hellenistic world, and the Empire. Anyone who wanted to read Homer, Plato, Virgil would need to read Greek or Latin. Aramaic would have been no help. Learning to write in Aramaic would have been a waste of time for the educated classes of the Empire in the first century. Even educated Jews did not write in Aramaic, they wrote in Hebrew. Almost the entire Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and only a vanishingly small part of it was written in Aramaic.
On the second tangent, Pontius Pilate did not have to check with Rome to execute Jesus. Rome would have been told nothing about Jesus. As provincial governor, Pilate had the authority to execute criminals, traitors, anyone who threatened the Empire's interests. The Jewish historian Josephus suggests that Pilate was notable for his ruthlessness.
If the NT account is even close to being accurate, the second that Jesus confessed or was suspected of claiming to be the king of the Jews, his fate was sealed. Pilate would have immediately had him executed as a traitor and a threat to the Empire.
one correction there is only a few were left that openly called themselves Followers.
They were killed if they practiced openly - of course it took Constantine to embrace Christianity to make it a world religion -but there were many followers up until he did so. Which is why Constantine recognized it