Jesus between age 12 and 30. . . (page 4)

ProdigalSon

I don't doubt that Jesus existed. I just believe that he taught gnosis and that wasn't good for the Roman Empire....OR the Pharisees.

The proof of Jesus' historicity would be of great interest to me. Can you share it with us Pahpa?

Pahpa

There is plenty of information on the historical Jesus on-line. Just type

the subject "Historicity of Jesus". One site lists some sources:

Jewish: Josephus, Talmud

Roman: Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius

Opponents: Celcus, Lucian... etc....

The Gnostics who taught the "secret knowledge of Christ" were one

of the early groups that denied that Christ came in the flesh. Many

scholars feel that Peter's and John's letters were directed at the

Gnostics because of their denial. (Ex: 2 John 7-12)

superpunk

I think he was doing the same thing all of us do; Jack off, chase girls and play Call of Duty.

SweetBabyCheezits

Also have to wonder how long it took to develop and perfect his water-into-wine schtick.

If YouTube was around back then, I'm pretty sure he would've been posting bar tricks to the JC channel.

I love reading the parallel sayings. It becomes fairly obvious that Jesus didn't get any of his best stuff from the OT, but rather from his predecessors in the east: Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, etc. The Jewish stuff was the context he lived in during his early life and his final three years but it was clearly not the basis of his philosophy. If the gospels are to be believed he opposed the Jewish religious system, he didn't endorse it.

ProdigalSon

Pahpa, Josephus' one paragraph mentioning Christ has been known to be a blatant forgery for 200 years. Here's a guy who wrote tomes about insignificant nobodies, but of the the most important man who ever lived, we have one paragraph completely out of context in the middle of stuff that's totally unrelated. Jesus also escaped the notice of every other secular historian of the first century, not to mention the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Don't you think it's kind of strange that when Jesus died there was an earthquake strong enough to toss all the dead out of their graves but no one noticed except whoever wrote it into the Bible (centuries later, I might add).

You say scholars feel that the letters of Peter and 1 and 2 John are refuting the Gnostics.... what I'm reading is that scholars don't even believe those four books to be authentic and shouldn't even be in the Canon. As for the others you mentioned, not one of them was a contemporary nor were they offering any "proof", they were just mentioning the Christ as the object of the Christian religion. Not even Paul, upon whose writings the Church built their doctrines, ever met Jesus, nor does he even mention any of the things he did while on earth. He even fails to mention that Jesus' mother was a virgin. Are we supposed to assume that Paul left that out because he just assumed that we would know this?

C'mon man, you gotta do better than that if you're going to claim there's "proof". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

keyser soze

Those were his party years. There's nothing recorded about him because most of it is a blur.

SweetBabyCheezits

Those were his party years. There's nothing recorded about him because most of it is a blur.

As my BIL said, "Of course he was a stoner: a thirty-something with no place to lay his head?? Duh."

Mad Sweeney

Since it is apparently more than just OK to toss around hypotheses pulled from the ether, here's one:

A guy is born to a really young Jewish girl who is engaged to a middle aged Jewish man. They raise him as an average, lower-middle class Jewish kid in a town called Nazareth. He's naturally a precocious kid with an inquisitive mind and charismatic personality.

When he reaches his teens he decides to travel the known world to learn everything there is to know. He goes all over the place and learns all kinds of stuff then in his late 20s he returns to his homeland. He sees what a screwed-up system his native people live under (both under the Roman political and the Jewish religious thumbs) and decides to do something about it.

To convince Jewish people to listen to him, to let him save them so to speak, he knows he has to couch his teachings in the context of their worldview; he has to be the Messiah they've been waiting for. So he does. He collects a core group of followers and goes on speaking tours of the land. He teaches many of the same things Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, and other eastern wise men taught. Most people don't get it. Even his closest followers don't get it. They even say so and are quoted as saying so in the documents later written about the life and death of this teacher.

He tries his best for three years to get through to the Jewish people but only a small handful really devote themselves to his teaching and few if any of them really understand what he's getting at because his point is clouded by the Jewish tradition he has to couch his teachings within.

Then he's gone. Some say he is crucified. Others say he escaped and ran off to start a family. His followers begin an oral tradition about his life and teachings that takes on a life of its own.

In the meantime, an opportunistic Jewish lawyer named Saul grabbed ahold of this man's story and added all sorts of fancy stuff to it, linking events in his life to prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures. These prophetic applications, along with what was left being passed around of the original stories continued to spread and be discussed like a crazy game of "telephone" until finally, a couple decades after his disappearance, someone decides to write some of it down. Then someone else does, too. And Saul, now called Paul, has been writing, too, a little about the teacher from twenty years earlier and a lot about how he wants this new religion to look and operate as a spinoff of Judaism.

The rest, as they say, is history.

SweetBabyCheezits

^^ Sounds too true to be good.

Jesus between age 12 and 30. . .

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