I agree. And, thanks for the info on Prof.Barbara Thiering. I hope they have e-book free to download

Other books may have a similar theme but are not backed up with the palaeographic, linguistic and archaeological evidence that Professor Theiring brought to her thesis. See:
[peshertechnique.infinitesoulutions.com]

Thank you for the link. I'll definitely check it out. Reading similar books, I have come to the conclusion that both John the Baptist and James the Just were Essene. I have found no evidence for the existence of Jesus. There is plenty of evidence however that the New Testament stories about Jesus are allegorical. I've been reading the latest Dead Sea Scroll translations and they support your conclusions about John and James, nothing about Jesus though.

Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1949 it has been possible to find the real history of Jesus and the movement that he founded, Try reading "Jesus The Man" by Barbara Thiering.

No. But that would be because Jesus was the son of the Essene mission to Gentiles and wanted to have Gentile converts admitted to the rank of Bishop, which was opposed by the school of John the Baptist who was called in the scrolls the Teacher of Righteousness, while Jesus was given such opprobrious labels as Wicked Priest and Man of a Lie.

Paul often spoke of Jesus in terms that cannot be understood correctly in any way other than as a historical, flesh-and-blood human being. Paul used the name “Jesus” 218 times in his writings (Strong, 2001, p. 453)

so jesus is plagiarism : )

Wear a crucifix or put a four-leaf clover in your wallet for all we care. What matters is you stand by your beliefs, you believe in yourself and you keep the faith!

Not weird, a commonsense response to the obvious fact that there was a real man called (in English) Jesus, and who precipitated a major shift in world history. Because power-seeking elites have covered up the real story of his life, often by imprisoning, torturing, and killing any who pointed out the illogicalities, impossibilities, and inconsistency of the cover story, it has taken until now for the truth to be revealed, i.e. that he did not die on the cross but was taken down and hidden in a cave where he was resuscitated; that he was not a god but the heir to a usurped throne who tried and failed to retake it but went on anyway to found a world-wide philanthropic movement. That that movement became corrupted by greedy power-seekers was not his fault.

He was not crucified in Jerusalem, he was crucified in Qumran. When he was taken down alive from the cross he was placed in one of the caves to be resuscitated.

Why, so, no more talk of Jesus for you? But He's the most popular guy of our time . . . next to the Beatles?

Maybe we could ask JimEdwards to explain

Jesus is the same as Joshua, a very common name in New Testament times.

"where the body is, there the vultures will gather."

The Son of God was his title as the political leader (king) in the Jewish sect called the Essenes. Anyone interested in finding out the real story should start with "Jesus The Man" by Barbara Thiering. Writing off the Bible as a "silly cult book" is as foolish as taking every word literally, neither contributes to the enlightenment of humankind.

What proof?Lore?

Most scholars of the New Testament are pushing a barrow of one sort or another. Either they are Christians looking for support for the credo, particularly the Resurrection, and therefore vehemently reject the findings of Dr Thiering that Jesus survived the Crucifixion. Others are not so committed but find little evidence in non-biblical sources for the very existence of the man called Jesus except one in Josephus which they claim may have been a later interpolation. The scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls are convinced that they were all written before the New Testament period, but Dr Thiering, an acknowledged leading expert in palaeography, makes a very good case that there were not only contemporary scrolls among them, but that these contained references to Jesus and John the Baptist as rival leaders of the Qumran sect. All the scholars accept that the writers of the scrolls used a technique called the 'pesher' in interpreting Old Testament books to find hidden messages to future generations. Dr Thiering guessed that Jesus and his disciples, being themselves trained in this method of study as members of the community, would have it in mind when writing their own record of their history. Their justification for doing so would be that they were a nationalistic movement that would be regarded as subversive by the foreign occupying power and their puppet ruler, Herod. It is therefore reasonable to assume that using the pesher technique to interpret the Gospels and Apocalypse would reveal a history that would be known to initiates but concealed to non-initiates. This history, as Dr Thiering extracted it, makes complete sense of this turbulent period, giving dates and even times of day, that tie in with the already known secular records. What is more, it is a history devoid of miracles and the supernatural, in which references to God are only found in ranks and titles and angels are, as the Greek word means, messengers. The title Christ, Greek for Messiach, refers to the chrism, the anointing oil used when the heir to the throne is anointed King, as Jesus was by the leader of the women's house at Qumran, Mary Magdalene.
Although she was a lecturer in the School of Divinity at Sydney University, Dr Theiring defined her own position as agnostic. I do not regard her claims as extraordinary, but rather as 'blowing the whistle' on the extraordinary claims of Christians based on literal interpretations of the cover story of a middle eastern independence movement from a decadent Roman Empire. More information can be found at the website preserving the late Dr Thiering's other writings: [peshertechnique.infinitesoulutions.com]

They are one and the same. Jesus was not a peasant, he was the legitimate heir to the throne of David, and the town of Nazareth did not exist in Jesus' time. He was the Christ or Messiah, meaning the Anointed, because he was that King. He was the man Saul of Tarsus met on the road to Damascus, who was on his way to exile because he did not want the Romans to find out that he had survived his crucifixion and was planning to continue his subversive political activities. That is why Paul created the cover story of his miraculous 'Resurrection'.

So where are you getting your information? Do you have data? Cause no scholar that I have read (and I've read many) has made that argument.

Christians, then, were considered rebels/activists. I remember a line from the soundtrack album of the movie Jesus Christ Superstar which I find funny and amusing and sensible. Judas was sort of protesting to Jesus:

"Every time I look at you I don't understand
Why you let the things you did get so out of your hand
You'd have managed better if you'd had it planned
Why'd you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?
If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication
Don't you get me wrong - I only wanna know"

One of my favorite songs.

There's a really interesting theory that Jesus and Judas were up to something. The Gospels say that Judas was a "thief" because he took money from the purse, yet Jesus put him in charge of the money. There's also the comment Jesus made to Judas "That thou doest do quickly..." Judas' "betrayal" was more likely a failure. Jesus and he had a plan, it went south, and the Romans caught them both.

"So where are you getting your information?" Partly from my studies as a theological student at Sydney University and later private research. A lot of it comes from the works of former Sydney University theologian, the late Prof. Barbara Thiering, a leading palaeographer and expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library. Her first popular book, "Jesus The Man" (in US "Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls" ) shocked the Christian world with its radical reinterpreting of the New Testament stories, and scholarship was strained to its limits trying vainly to refute her conclusions. She followed it up with "The Book That Jesus Wrote" and "Jesus of the Apocalypse" which continued the life of Jesus and his descendants and followers, to his death in Rome in about AD70.

The first time I came across the theory was in a book called The Trial and Death of Jesus by Haim Cohn. He built the case for that. I've seen it scattered throughout some of the scholars I read. I realize it's controversial, but it also seems more right than Judas working for the priests since they already knew who Jesus was.

Actually, I don't play that game. I refuse fundamentalist thinking in all its forms.
Much of the bible is fiction, but, like many of the ancient writings, it has some reality built in, and it tells those stories based on their own political narrative.