Fabrication in Gospels
by SickofLies 21 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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SickofLies
Did Jesus Begin as a Myth?
A conventional perspective on Jesus is that he was a real man in Galilee who had some followers, but that later on supernatural elements and outlandish stories became attached to this real figure.
But evidence suggests the development of the Jesus character happened the other way around. The otherwordly, god-like qualities appear to have been there first, and only later did historicity become added as one of his attributes--and quite clumsily.
http://www.thegodmovie.com/clip-JesusBeginMyth.php -
heathen
I think jesus was just too hated to have been made up . The jews hated him and the pagans hated him so why would people follow him even to death, like sheep amongst wolves even ? That baffles me . The requirements to be a true christian would have been thought of as absurd if there was nothing to it but to abstain from everything including sex and march right into the jaws of hell .....................
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A Paduan
Jesus was a spiritual and political leader of great renown. A political leader of renown ?
he triumphantly entered Jerusalem with his followers a few of the meek
violently disrupted the business of the temple violently ?
put to death as a revolutionary a revolutionary ? wasn't it a common blasphemy thing ?
Given these facts, Jesus would have been one of the most remarkable figures in Palestine.
Maybe, given those "facts"
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SickofLies
Was there a Jesus? Of course there was a Jesus – many!
The archetypal Jewish hero was Joshua (the successor of Moses) otherwise known as Yeshua ben Nun (‘Jesus of the fish’). Since the name Jesus (Yeshua or Yeshu in Hebrew, Ioshu in Greek, source of the English spelling) originally was a title (meaning ‘saviour’, derived from ‘Yahweh Saves’) probably every band in the Jewish resistance had its own hero figure sporting this moniker, among others.
Josephus, the first century Jewish historian mentions no fewer than nineteen different Yeshuas/Jesii, about half of them contemporaries of the supposed Christ! In his Antiquities, of the twenty-eight high priests who held office from the reign of Herod the Great to the fall of the Temple, no fewer than four bore the name Jesus: Jesus ben Phiabi, Jesus ben Sec, Jesus ben Damneus and Jesus ben Gamaliel. Even Saint Paul makes reference to a rival magician, preaching ‘another Jesus’ (2 Corinthians 11,4). The surfeit of early Jesuses includes:
Jesus ben Sirach. This Jesus was reputedly the author of the Book of Sirach (aka 'Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach'), part of Old Testament Apocrypha. Ben Sirach, writing in Greek about 180 BC, brought together Jewish 'wisdom' and Homeric-style heroes.
Jesus ben Pandira. A wonder-worker during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (106-79 BC), one of the most ruthless of the Maccabean kings. Imprudently, this Jesus launched into a career of end-time prophesy and agitation which upset the king. He met his own premature end-time by being hung on a tree – and on the eve of a Passover. Scholars have speculated this Jesus founded the Essene sect.
Jesus ben Ananias. Beginning in 62AD, this Jesus had caused disquiet in Jerusalem with a non-stop doom-laden mantra of ‘Woe to the city’. He prophesied rather vaguely:
"A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides, and a voice against the whole people." (Josephus, Wars 6:3)
Arrested and flogged by the Romans, he was released as nothing more dangerous than a mad man. He died during the siege of Jerusalem from a rock hurled by a Roman catapult.
Jesus ben Saphat. In the insurrection of 68AD that wrought havoc in Galilee, this Jesus had led the rebels in Tiberias. When the city was about to fall to Vespasian’s legionaries he fled north to Tarichea on the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus ben Gamala. During 68/69 AD this Jesus was a leader of the ‘peace party’ in the civil war wrecking Judaea. From the walls of Jerusalem he had remonstrated with the besieging Idumeans (led by ‘James and John, sons of Susa’). It did him no good. When the Idumeans breached the walls he was put to death and his body thrown to the dogs and carrion birds.
Jesus ben Thebuth. A priest who, in the final capitulation of the upper city in 69AD, saved his own skin by surrendering the treasures of the Temple, which included two holy candlesticks, goblets of pure gold, sacred curtains and robes of the high priests. The booty figured prominently in the Triumph held for Vespasian and his son Titus.
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SickofLies
But was there a crucified Jesus?
Certainly. Jesus ben Stada was a Judean agitator who gave the Romans a headache in the early years of the second century. He met his end in the town of Lydda (twenty five miles from Jerusalem) at the hands of a Roman crucifixion crew. And given the scale that Roman retribution could reach – at the height of the siege of Jerusalem the Romans were crucifying upwards of five hundred captives a day before the city walls – dead heroes called Jesus would (quite literally) have been thick on the ground. Not one merits a full-stop in the great universal history.
But then with so many Jesuses could there not have been a Jesus of Nazareth?
The problem for this notion is that absolutely nothing at all corroborates the sacred biography and yet this 'greatest story' is peppered with numerous anachronisms, contradictions and absurdities. For example, at the time that Joseph and the pregnant Mary are said to have gone off to Bethlehem for a supposed Roman census, Galilee (unlike Judaea) was not a Roman province and therefore ma and pa would have had no reason to make the journey. Even if Galilee had been imperial territory, history knows of no ‘universal census’ ordered by Augustus (nor any other emperor) – and Roman taxes were based on property ownership not on a head count. Then again, we now know that Nazareth did not exist before the second century.
It is mentioned not at all in the Old Testament nor by Josephus, who waged war across the length and breadth of Galilee (a territory about the size of Greater London) and yet Josephus records the names of dozens of other towns. In fact most of the ‘Jesus-action’ takes place in towns of equally doubtful provenance, in hamlets so small only partisan Christians know of their existence (yet well attested pagan cities, with extant ruins, failed to make the Jesus itinerary).
What should alert us to wholesale fakery here is that practically all the events of Jesus’s supposed life appear in the lives of mythical figures of far more ancient origin. Whether we speak of miraculous birth, prodigious youth, miracles or wondrous healings – all such 'signs' had been ascribed to other gods, centuries before any Jewish holy man strolled about. Jesus’s supposed utterances and wisdom statements are equally common place, being variously drawn from Jewish scripture, neo-Platonic philosophy or commentaries made by Stoic and Cynic sages.
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SickofLies
Invisible Friend
'Jesus of Nazareth' supposedly lived in what is the most well-documented period of antiquity – the first century of the Christian era – yet not a single non-Christian source mentions the miracle worker from the sky. All references – including the notorious insertions in Josephus – stem from partisan Christian sources (and Josephus himself, much argued over, was not even born until after the supposed crucifixion). The horrendous truth is that the Christian Jesus was manufactured from plundered sources, re-purposed for the needs of the early Church.
It is not with a human being that the Jesus myth begins. Christ is not a deified man but a humanised god who happened to be given the name Yeshu. Those real Jesuses, those that lived and died within normal human parameters, may have left stories and legends behind, later cannibalised by Christian scribes as source material for their own hero, but it is not with any flesh and blood rebel/rabbi/wonder-worker that the story begins. Rather, its genesis is in theology itself.
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SickofLies
God's Truth – Lies
Would the partisans of Christ have set out deliberately to lie? Were they such barefaced charlatans that they concocted falsehoods and deceits merely to advance themselves and their designs? By their own admission, YES they were. They may well have been believers, in that they held to a certain faith. On this was built the fanaticism either to die, or to kill others, for that faith. But faith absolves the believer from any fidelity to objective truth.
Religious fantasy advances in small steps by which those who already ‘see a higher truth’ help the less gifted to achieve that sublime state by using various devices. In Jewish tradition, one such a device was ‘midrash’, the teasing out of new, contemporary meanings from antique, sacred texts. By such means, the scribes could resolve a current issue by interpreting what the scripture had ‘really meant’ all along. Was that a lie?
False accreditation was another much used method, common practice during antiquity. Most of the texts in both the Hebrew bible and the New Testament were forged in the names of their authors to give them ‘authority.’ This merely helped others recognise 'the higher truths' presented to them. Who could argue with Solomon, say, or Apostles of the Lord?
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SickofLies
CITING GEOGRAPHY, AND KNOWN HISTORICAL FIGURES AS "EVIDENCE"
Although the New Testament mentions various cities, geological sites, kings and people that existed or lived during the alleged life of Jesus, these descriptions cannot serve as evidence for the existence of Jesus anymore than works of fiction that include recognizable locations, and make mention of actual people.
Homer's Odyssey, for example, describes the travels of Odysseus throughout the Greek islands. The epic describes, in detail, many locations that existed in history. But should we take Odysseus, the Greek gods and goddesses, one-eyed giants and monsters as literal fact simply because the story depicts geographic locations accurately? Of course not. Mythical stories, fictions, and narratives almost always use familiar landmarks as placements for their stories. The authors of the Greek tragedies not only put their stories in plausible settings as happening in the real world but their supernatural characters took on the desires, flaws and failures of mortal human beings. Consider that fictions such as King Kong, Superman, and Star Trek include recognizable cities, planets, and landmarks, with their protagonists and antagonists miming human emotions.
Likewise, just because the Gospels mention cities and locations in Judea, and known historical people, with Jesus behaving like an actual human being (with the added dimension of supernatural curses, miracles, etc.) but this says nothing about the actuality of the characters portrayed in the stories. However, when a story uses impossible historical locations, or geographical errors, we may question the authority of the claims.
For example, in Matt 4:8, the author describes the devil taking Jesus into an exceedingly high mountain to show him all the kingdoms of the world. Since there exists no spot on the spheroid earth to view "all the kingdoms," we know that the Bible errs here.
John 12:21 says, "The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee. . . ." Bethsaida resided in Gaulonitis (Golan region), east of the Jordan river, not Galilee, which resided west of the river.
John 3:23 says, "John also was baptizing in Aenon near Salim. . . ." Critics agree that no such place as Aenon exists near Salim.
There occurs not a shred of evidence for a city named Nazareth at the time of the alleged Jesus. [Leedom; Gauvin] Nazareth does not appear in the Old Testament, nor does it appear in the volumes of Josephus's writings (even though he provides a detailed list of the cities of Galilee). Oddly, none of the New Testament epistle writers ever mentions Nazareth or a Jesus of Nazareth even though most of the epistles got written before the gospels. In fact no one mentions Nazareth until the Gospels, where the first one got written at least 40 years after the hypothetical death of Jesus. Apologists attempt to dismiss this by claiming that Nazareth existed as an insignificant and easily missed village (how would they know?), thus no one recorded it. However, whenever the Gospels speak of Nazareth, they always refer to it as a city, never a village, and a historian of that period would surely have noticed a city. (Note the New Testament uses the terms village, town, and city.) Nor can apologists fall on archeological evidence of preexisting artifacts for the simple reason that many cities get built on ancient sites. If a city named Nazareth existed during the 1st century, then we need at least one contemporary piece of evidence for the name, otherwise we cannot refer to it as historical.
Many more errors and unsupported geographical locations appear in the New Testament. And although one cannot use these as evidence against a historical Jesus, we can certainly question the reliability of the texts. If the scriptures make so many factual errors about geology, science, and contain so many contradictions, falsehoods could occur any in area.
If we have a coupling with historical people and locations, then we should also have some historical reference of a Jesus to these locations and people. But just the opposite proves the case. The Bible depicts Herod, the Ruler of Jewish Palestine under Rome as sending out men to search and kill the infant Jesus, yet nothing in history supports such a story. Pontius Pilate supposedly performed as judge in the trial and execution of Jesus, yet no Roman record mentions such a trial. The gospels portray a multitude of believers throughout the land spreading tales of a teacher, prophet, and healer, yet nobody in Jesus' life time or several decades after, ever records such a human figure. The lack of a historical Jesus in the known historical record speaks for itself.
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SickofLies
What is Nazareth?:
Nazareth was a small agricultural village of no importance and which would have disappeared from all memory if not for its associations with Jesus in the gospel traditions. If it was occupied on a permanent basis, it wouldn’t have held much more than 1,000 people and possibly only as many as 500. Luke describes it as a “city” rather than “village,” which is inconsistent with what little we know.Where is Nazareth?:
Nazareth was located close to the Via Maris, a major trade route between Palestine and Egypt. It was also close to Sepphois, an important city. Modern Nazareth is about 15 miles southwest of the Sea of Galilee and 20 miles west of the Mediterranean Sea. It is situated on a hill in the north of the Plain of Esdraelon, around 1200 ft above sea level.Did Nazareth exist?:
No references to it can be found in the Old Testament, Josephus, rabbinic texts, or the otherwise exhaustive Roman records. Because of this, some have argued that no such village may have existed at all. No houses or architecture has been identified. Archaeologists have, however, identified small caves in a chalk ridge that were closed to the outside, presumably to make homes.Why is Nazareth important?:
The only ancient significance to Nazareth are the gospel traditions that Jesus’ mother came from here (according the Luke) and that Jesus grew up here (according to Matthew and Luke). Early Christian pilgrims paid no attention to Nazareth, but after legends about Mary developed around the 6th century, it began to attract more and more visitors.Today the modern village of Nazareth dwarfs whatever might have existed in ancient times and is filled with mostly Arab Christians. It has become a popular site for Christians visiting Israel.
http://atheism.about.com/od/bibleplacescities/p/Nazareth.htm