Brava, Overlapping! It's so clear to me now!
CalebInFloroda
JoinedPosts by CalebInFloroda
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JOB 42 : 16
by brandnew inanybody tries throwing that overlapping / generation bullshiiiii down your throat.......you tell em to explain that.!!!!!!.
"and job saw his children, and grandchildren.......4 generations".
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74
That's it! The Jesus stories are most reasonably explained as myth. History makes this obvious.
by Island Man ina careful examination of the historical pagan religious context existing at the time of the genesis of christianity leads any reasonable person to conclude that jesus is just another one of several similar myths.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn7teoa9ark.
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CalebInFloroda
One other thing, IslandMan, you do know that Jews don't believe Jesus is the Messiah or believe in the Gospel accounts right?
You brought up the gospels and their writers and the claims of Jesus' powers-- you are aware that while we Jews can accept Jesus as an historical person, we don't at the same time believe any of the other stuff?
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74
That's it! The Jesus stories are most reasonably explained as myth. History makes this obvious.
by Island Man ina careful examination of the historical pagan religious context existing at the time of the genesis of christianity leads any reasonable person to conclude that jesus is just another one of several similar myths.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn7teoa9ark.
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CalebInFloroda
OntheWayOut: No, I gathered it was a joke. I just thought the information would be interesting to add.
IslandMan: My comments are not reflections of my personal convictions, but I have come to understand that since most people are commenting about their personal views that some might tend to see my posts as sharing what I personally believe as well.
I more than often add things as Devil's advocate not to perpetuate my view but as a tool to help other's think. Carrier is an intelligent person, but his arguments are two dimensional. They don't hold water in Judaism.
The argument that Jesus was imaginary doesn't match Jewish history. I'm Judean, myself, supposedly of the Davidic house since I am Sephardic from Iberia. Gentiles tend to make claims about us and our history that aren't anything like what we actually know and have experienced, and when we beg to differ people tell us, Jews, that we got our own documents and history wrong.
This here is my opinion: I find that more than a little weird. While it doesn't matter in the long run to most Jews if Jesus were real or not, our history does imply the historical man existed. And I'm talking our secular history. While Gentiles feel authorized to tell us that we Jews made up this part of secular history about the man Christians call "Messiah" is beyond me, but we have a list of historical Messianic hopefuls that go back further and up to present times. Why this one Jesus from Nazareth is the only myth in the bunch and how you Gentiles know "beyond scientific doubt" is a really weird thing to claim.
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15
JOB 42 : 16
by brandnew inanybody tries throwing that overlapping / generation bullshiiiii down your throat.......you tell em to explain that.!!!!!!.
"and job saw his children, and grandchildren.......4 generations".
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CalebInFloroda
Overlapping,
Could you make up a chart of all these overlapping "chillin"? If I see it as a chart and you make up years that are just examples but show us how they nevertheless prove urgency of the times, I think I might believe you if I look at the chart for long enough...
That is till you have to make a new chart.
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15
JOB 42 : 16
by brandnew inanybody tries throwing that overlapping / generation bullshiiiii down your throat.......you tell em to explain that.!!!!!!.
"and job saw his children, and grandchildren.......4 generations".
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CalebInFloroda
Psalm 95 has YHWH count a generation as "forty years." And the Torah explains that this was all that was needed to have the generation of those who witnessed the Exodus die out in order to have their offspring inherit the Promised Land. -
74
That's it! The Jesus stories are most reasonably explained as myth. History makes this obvious.
by Island Man ina careful examination of the historical pagan religious context existing at the time of the genesis of christianity leads any reasonable person to conclude that jesus is just another one of several similar myths.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn7teoa9ark.
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CalebInFloroda
And I did more than see Carrier's video. I am quite familiar with his work as a whole. -
74
That's it! The Jesus stories are most reasonably explained as myth. History makes this obvious.
by Island Man ina careful examination of the historical pagan religious context existing at the time of the genesis of christianity leads any reasonable person to conclude that jesus is just another one of several similar myths.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn7teoa9ark.
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CalebInFloroda
This discussion reminds me of something.
I remember a discussion with a friend that got into a heated argument until he broke down. He was trying to convince me that Jesus was nothing more than a myth. I told him it was irrelevant to Jews whether Jesus was historically real or not.
This seemed to his aggravate him. The more he kept saying that "this and that" proved Jesus could be nothing more but a made-up story, the more it seemed that my repeated reply that it didn't matter to Jews made him furious.
I mean he got red eyes, to-the-point-of-crying furious. I tried to calm him down until he was practically sobbing.
A moment or two of trying to regain himself and he explained, much more calmly:
"I can't be like you, Cal. [My friends call me "Cal," not Caleb by the way.] I can't reject a Jesus that exists on any level."
"I don't understand," I said. "Do you believe that the prophet Muhammad was a real person? What about Siddhārtha Gautama, the person that came to be known as the Buddha?"
He thought for a moment. "I guess so. It doesn't really matter, I suppose."
"Why not?" I asked my friend.
"Well," he began, "I don't believe in Islam or Buddhism. And it stands to reason that someone had to start those religious movements. So they can be as real as necessary."
"Okay," I said. "Then why all the fuss about Jesus."
"I don't know. I guess it is because I was raised a Christian. And for me I just can't reject him if even on some level he existed. I can't do it. I don't think I want to. I need him to be a myth."
I think for some of us who leave the Watchtower, like my friend here, we need Jesus to be completely false. It might be very hard for some people to reject what they once embraced as the Savior of the World. As I've stated before it takes no courage to reject a made-up character.
This doesn't mean I am saying people who want Jesus to be a myth are lying to themselves or cowards. No. What I am saying is that this might, in some cases, be part of a healing process. It can be difficult to learn to say: "No, I won't accept you or believe what you say" to someone who is real. It can be very, very hard, especially having had it ingrained in us for so many years.
While not all atheists or non-Christians do this, for some G-d and Jesus have to be myths. I'm not saying that all who come to this conclusion are doing so because they have emotional issues, of course not--no. But some do have emotional issues that must be lived through, that must be healed, that might like my friend need Jesus to be a myth.
We may not be able to see it in ourselves if that is the case, and it really isn't for others to judge them or call them out on it as if to say: you are weak, you are a failure, etc. Healing often causes us to learn to live with limitations and even fears for a while until we can get over them.
I once choked so badly on my own vomit that I scared myself out of throwing up for years, even when it was medically necessary. I got over it. If I need to vomit, it's no big deal. But the choking experience from the past made it impossible for me to allow myself to up-chuck for a while. Trauma sometimes gives us little choice.
Jesus may not have been the actual trauma, but those who taught us about him probably were. The JWs often leave us little recourse to get back at them in our need for justice, so we take it out on Jesus, the Bible, even G-d. We tend to blame what we can get our hands on when the perpetrators of evil are out of reach. Think about it, if G-d and Jesus and the Bible are such myths, why do we spend so much time putting them down? Do we do this with all myths too, spending as much time as debating about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, etc.?
In some cases, not all--and I stress NOT ALL--we have little recourse but to take it out on the myths. And we might need them to be myths.
If they are myths, okay. Cool. Let's move on. Pay no attention to them.
If they are not myths, it's also okay. You don't have to follow every Tom, Dick, or Harry who can make water stand on end or cause bread to fall from the sky.
If they are something in between, or real even in a little way, it's still okay. You are not obligated to be a follower of anybody, no matter how real they are. You can say no to your parents, tell off Geoffrey Jackson to his face, and even argue with a real G-d and tell that G-d you don't like the way things are run. You can reject very real things and still be okay.
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74
That's it! The Jesus stories are most reasonably explained as myth. History makes this obvious.
by Island Man ina careful examination of the historical pagan religious context existing at the time of the genesis of christianity leads any reasonable person to conclude that jesus is just another one of several similar myths.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn7teoa9ark.
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CalebInFloroda
I am not arguing that a Jewish response to Jesus is proof that Jesus existed. I am asking how does a mythological, never-existing mythical person cause writings by contemporaries to speak against someone who supposedly was never there in the first place.Second Temple era Responsa is older than the New Testament. It takes time for myths to be created and accepted. The idea that a mythological, non-entity so quickly governed such a reaction among Jewish society and continued into the Diaspora before even the Gospels were canonized would have to be demonstrated.
The Responsa alone proves little, but claiming there was no Nazarene by the name of Yeshua who taught people is hard to demonstrate in the face of how quickly this same person became part of the Jewish schema that rejected his claims of being the promised Messiah even before the Second Temple fell in 70 CE.
Jesus could be a myth. But for that to be so we have to explain a whole lot of something caused by someone who was supposedly never ever there. I'm not saying Jesus is real, but I am saying we have to also supply a verifiable explanation for what seems to be a cause-and-effect paradigm.
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Does Jehovah control the weather? (Pharaoh's dream - 7 years of famine)
by truthseeker inaccording to the scriptures, jehovah makes his sun rise upon wicked people and good and makes it rain upon righteous people and unrighteous.
- matthew 5:45. in that case, if we look at the account in genesis, god is shown to give pharaoh a dream that he will cause seven years of famine.. genesis 41: pharaohs dreams.
25 then joseph said to pharaoh, the dreams of pharaoh are one and the same.
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CalebInFloroda
Forgive the misspellings in my previous post. I am fighting the idiotic auto-correct feature. -
13
Does Jehovah control the weather? (Pharaoh's dream - 7 years of famine)
by truthseeker inaccording to the scriptures, jehovah makes his sun rise upon wicked people and good and makes it rain upon righteous people and unrighteous.
- matthew 5:45. in that case, if we look at the account in genesis, god is shown to give pharaoh a dream that he will cause seven years of famine.. genesis 41: pharaohs dreams.
25 then joseph said to pharaoh, the dreams of pharaoh are one and the same.
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CalebInFloroda
Truth is not the same thing as fact.
Facts about human history have since antiquity been preserved and transmitted by performance, art, and music. The modern Rice-Lloyd Webber opera, "Evita," is a perfect example. It's not just a powerful and moving production, it is a true story.
But the details are not always factual. And the narrative device is music. Almost every single word in sung. Does the fact that the story of Evita Peron is performed via the narrative device of opera make it any less true? Of course not. In fact were it not for "Evita" most people would never have learned of her.
A narrative device is a means to carry a point across. It isn't the same thing as a fabrication. For instance, in Luke 1.46, the Virgin Mary breaks out in song, the canticle known as the Magnificat. Did she literally sing this song in front of her cousin Elizabeth?
No. It is a narrative device because Luke wrote the first two chapters of his gospel not in Koine Greek, but in Jewish Greek, the type found in the more ancient Septuagint. He wrote his Infancy Narrative as a cantor's liturgical reading that people would hear chanted from the lectern on a Holy Day at the synagogue. Why? Because only the inspire dhistory of the Jews ever got this kind of treatment. Luke did this throughout the first two chapters because he believed the birth of Christ was a continuation of this history.
It did 't really occur in song or in Septuagint Greek, but like a film maker using black-and-white as means to show that something is historical before switching to color to mean we are in the present, Luke employed a writing technique to teach a point.
The point of the Genesis story is not that G-d caused a literal famine (G-d might have), but that G-d was saving people from disaster through Joseph. In Hebrew idiom of the time both good and evil were ascribed to G-d, so it is not clear whether the writer was being literal or merely employing idiom about G-d being the true cause of this particular famine.
In ancient Jewish writing, when an author skipped details or even made the details impossible to reconcile with reality, it was a narrative device that meant: "The details or setting is irrelevant to the story."
The important details of the story are the facts that Joseph is given the ability to interpret dreams and that this elevates Joseph into a position to save the lives of his family, preserving the seed of Abraham. In the end that is all that is important.
Was it really a dream about cows and grain? Exactly what are the details of the famine and why was on,y the storing of grain sufficient? We can hypothesize all day if we want, but the Bible writer breezes past these details. That is generally the ancient earmark to move along. It is just a technique of writing. It doesn't mean the device is false or true, it just means it is a device, a manner of telling a story.
This goes for the words "mythos," "mythology," and "legend." Legends are generally real. American history, for example, is transmitted mostly by legend ( like George Washington chopping down a cherry tree or Paul Revere's midnight ride). Legends aren't the factual story, but they are used to transmit truths.
Even when details are fictionalized, these fictional devices don't make the story false. Just because Evita Person didn't really sing "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" doesn't mean the haitorical person didn't feel such things or proclaim them over her very brief life.
The Bible is not a collection of news stories. It is a collection of religious explanations. Like he parables of Jesus, the stories themselves are not always factual, but the lessons are intended to transmit truths.