by neat blue dog 15 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Anna Marina - “...I have never heard anyone say John the Baptist wasn't a real person.”
Neither have I.
Maybe it was a black-vs-white assumption that since Bible “critics” refute literalism, it must mean that they disbelieve everything the Bible says. 🙄
Or maybe it was just a half-assed straw-man argument. 😏
"Josephus also said that Jesus was killed on a cross." - neat blue dog
Absolutely correct. "He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross..." - ANTIQUITIES OF THE JEWS Chapter 3 Subsection 3 Josephus Complete Works 1983 edition
"he was a captured jewish rebel who worked his way up society Rome where he wrote about seeing Caesar ascend to heaven." - Simon
Could you tell me which one of the works of Josephus that this is found in so that I can post the direct quote here and help to show how unreliable Josephus was. Thanks.
The double standards of the Watchtower are apparent here-- they cherry pick information to tell the faithful what they must believe-- but don't do serious research whatever you do!
It is often misleading to read what you think is "scholarly information" on the internet only to find that it is the work of "Bible scholars" that is those with an agenda to prove at any cost that the Bible is pure divine instruction.
So after that caveat, it is interesting to find that the character of John the Baptist was a figure from Egyptian mythology.
He was called Anup, (like Can in Turkish, Johan in Czech and in English John). Remember that he was exactly six months older than Jesus, in itself this indicates an astronomical interest which the ancient religions did not simply value highly but took the annual movements of sun, moon and stars as the very root of all divine activity. In the solar religions, the birth of the sun at the shortest day (Christmas) was the birth of the solar God and at the equinox the annual sacrificial death and resurrection of the Sun god. John/ Anup was a mirror image of the Sun Gods activity: That one will go on increasing and I will decrease John 3;30. Jesus said John came both before him and after him! To those in the know it meant the Solar myth, the original and best so to speak.
If we look for a "meaning" in this we are no wiser but if we were Gnostic Christians we would have got the message!
I won't go into details partly because it has little impact unless it is possible to acknowledge the off-putting heretical connections between what has been sacralised in the Bible as Holy Truth-- and its pagan antecedents. This objection is of course exactly what the Catholic faith promoted and enforced in the fourth and fifth centuries; a total prohibition and destruction of all the pagan sources of the new syncretised Universal Roman Church.
All the major stories of Christianity happen to have pagan astronomical origins and many of the minor details, the correspondence with specific star formations and alignments are even more compelling. The Bible is a holy fraud.
It's like believing in Voldemort because Harry Potter does.
Simon ...
Touche.
Rub a Dub
Any manuscript, that is a hand written text, say the Bible or the works of Josephus-- are helplessly susceptible to 'corrections' insertions, amendments and pet opinions of later copyists.
Bearing this in mind, I think the case for Josephus' shortcomings might be overstated. As a rule his works are given credence as a literate and conscientious report of events as he understood them. He was a Jew and also a pharisee surprisingly but this conferred some status within his Jewish community. There were many factions of Jewish belief at the time often creating further divisions and extremists due to the presence of the Roman overlords. There were those who opposed and those like Josephus who colluded. Josephus also enjoyed Roman patronage.
His apparent contradictions were probably the incongruities of those who later tampered with his text who dishonestly (or who really tried to be helpful!) included a third party's marginalia.
If Jesus had existed he would have written reams on the subject since he (Josephus) lived close to Galilee. As it is there are no writers who recorded Jesus' words or activities as a primary source. This is the gold standard for historians. No primary sources; then its only hearsay.
Half banana - "The double standards of the Watchtower are apparent here-- they cherry pick information to tell the faithful what they must believe-- but don't do serious research whatever you do..."
Once again, for the newbies, lurkers, and trolls...
...if you have to cheat to defend your beliefs, your beliefs don't deserve to be defended.
