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Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At, by David Fitzgerald. Recommended reading.

MrLink 8 Feb 4
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While I believe the story is quite plausible (the part about there having been a Nazarene preacher named Jesus - not the virgin birth, miracles or resurrection parts, of course) - on balance I am convinced its entirely fabricated. Utterly convinced. At the same time, if I'm wrong, what difference does it make? Not much. The really important parts are still a fiction.

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I have read things written by Dr. Hector Avalos and also watched some of his talks on youtube and in one of those talks he spends times answering questions after it and he states that he is an agnostic on the existence of the Biblical Jesus. I totally concur with him.

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This debate is generally characterized as "traditionalist vs mythicist". The latter position being that there was not an actual historic Jesus as a discrete individual, that he was either a composite or total invention.

This is completely separate from whether Jesus was The Amazing Miracle-Working God-Man -- it's just a debate about whether the Jesus mythos is pure mythos or has some basis in fact -- like when a movie claims to be "inspired by actual events".

So I consider it kind of an interesting peripheral issue.

I'm a mythicist myself, but it presents zero problem for me as an unbeliever if the gospels are embellishing on a living person, possibly even whose actual name was Jesus.

As to WHY I'm a mythicist -- I don't have an airtight case (and neither do traditionalists, BTW) but I think it's extremely fishy how Paul depicts Jesus compared to the gospels. Paul wrote just a few years, maybe less than 10 years, after the alleged events in the gospels, and the gospels would not be written yet for another generation. So if you read Paul as if the gospels don't exist and you have none of that information about Jesus (and Paul's initial readers were in EXACTLY that situation) -- you read about a Jesus as a sort of celestial being "seated in the heavenlies". If you delve into the original Greek you find that a lot of his references to "seeing" Jesus refer to spiritual sight, like seeing an apparition or a ghost, or seeing something in a vision. You have Paul appealing, not to the teachings of an earthly Jesus, or to any still-living eyewitnesses of those events -- you have him claiming to have had a private, personal, subjective experience of being caught up into heaven and given a vision by god! That's a really STRANGE choice to validate his truth claims given that appealing to eyewitnesses and actual events would have been FAR more credible.

Then you have Paul's fractious relationship with the nascent orthodoxy of the Jerusalem Council, and people like Peter, who would be a key alleged eyewitness. In fairness, if the accounts are taken at face value, some of that would be due to Paul's desire to bring the gentiles into the fold, but there are other plausible explanations. Such as that Paul was a loose cannon, claiming divine revelation, and therefore an existential threat to the truth claims of the council.

I think Paul was advancing something very similar to, and possibly even the origin of, what eventually became known as the "gnostic heresy" -- a more mystical Christian orthodoxy. The gospels were eventually written to establish a flesh-and-blood, fully human Jesus, and much later, the Council of Nicea did what turned out to be a brilliant move: they accepted BOTH the gospel and Pauline doctrines into the canon of accepted holy scripture, subsuming Paul into their orthodoxy and reinterpreting him. A lot of this was done by the simple expedient of arranging the order of the NT writings to have the gospels come first, so that by the time people read the Pauline letters, they read them in the context of the gospel accounts, using those accounts as a framing set of assumptions.

This explains a lot for me. The gnostic heresy finally died out by around 400 AD and the victors got to write history.

A lot of modern Christians imagine that they'd be completely at home in a first century gathering of Christians. My guess is it's far more likely they'd be totally lost and confused, possibly even scandalized. There's at LEAST a 50% chance that they would find themselves in a gnostic Christian community, or even some other variant that is lost now to the mists of time. Christianity was hammered out over several hundred years, it didn't spring fully formed from nowhere.

I go back and read this periodically and I really enjoy your points and perspective here. FYI

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Link - I got the audio book edition read by the author.
[amazon.com]

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Sarahroo29, here is your link to the book.

[amazon.com]

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Read it. Agreed.

I see no link.

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At this point in my life... I don't have time to waste trying to prove one way or another. As I look at it is like cigarettes to me... I am not a smoker.

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