Agnostic.com

7 3

Heil Jesus!
I was studying a bit of history around the foundation of Christianity. I like to gather evidence for those encounters with believers who always seem astounded when confronted with supportable history.
It seems that what think of as Christianity may have been around for some time before JC was born (let's take it as fact that he did exist for this argument).
There was a sect of Zeus worshipers who saw the Greek pantheon as a single deity (deius = Zeus = deity) with many different personalities and faces. This sect was all over the eastern Roman empire and one day a down on life Jewish carpenter facing a nervous breakdown and severe depression encounters a preacher.
At first JC finds them annoying, but after a while of too and fro he is bitten by the 'word'.
Rising through the lower ranks JC is seen to have a gift with words. Using a simple message repeated often he beguiles those around him and also himself. Hercules was a son of Zeus and so is he!
His rhetoric grows with the crowds that gather to listen to his speeches. Eventually the Jewish priests begin to find their financial cut of worshiping YHWH. This will cause him problems as they will put pressure on the Romans to nail him to a cross later.
So like Hitler, JC became an uber cult leader with many who would lay their lives down for him. We only need to look at how Hitler is revered by many less than a century after his demise.
At least JC didn't seem to want to exterminate his enemies, but by creating a religion there are those who want to.

Sofabeast 7 Aug 21
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

7 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

1
  • This minor Jewish cult would have gone into obscurity if Constantine had not adopted it.
    And according to mythology Zeus married his older sister.
1

I tend to think of Jesus being more like Buddha. A man who developed a philosophy that was popular and after he died, people wrote stories that incorporated more traditional story lines that included the super natural and/or miracles, when the original was just a man who was a philosopher. It would be the people who later made them into religious figures. Then men themselves probably would not be happy with what people did with their stories after they died.

0

There do appear to be many common beliefs the Jesus story shares with other belief around the same time. Mithra was one but even Alexander the Great had stories written about him that he was born of a virgin (much more common in that time concerning heroes) and that he did magical things. I would be willing to believe that these beliefs were incorporated into the Gospels especially considering that Christianity took hold and was preserved in the Greek and Roman areas outside traditional Hebrew strongholds. Most of the letters of Paul in the NT were to people in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome.

1

Ohferpetesake....

3

The provenance of the Gospels is crap. The content CAN be seen in numerous bronze age pre-Christian beliefs. But the content is crap too, so what is the objective?

3

What if JC never existed? There is absolutely no proof that he was real. "Assumed" proofs are all, at least, written 100 years after JC's supposed death.

4

We cannot take it as fact in any argument that JC was around for some time before he was born. It makes no sense at all unless you are an Evangelical Christian. The fact that elements of what we know as Christianity is found also in other religions simply shows a similarity in religions.

Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:682628
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.