OK, is there an argument against this historians arguments that have been compelling? I haven’t found any. On the other hand, there has been doubt for some time that the story of Buddha is historical, and as a Buddhist in Sri Lanka told me, it isn’t about a historical figure, but the teaching - the source of which must have been someone who had “awoken”. It is the encouragement not to believe others, but to follow the Dharma and see for yourself, that is missing in Christianity.
You are right, it isn’t conclusive and there are a lot of lines open. The most important thing is to be open about the fact that Jesus is said to act according to scripture that we can’t find in the Tanakh. Some othe source must be this “scripture” and that makes the neat little story we have of the nativity, ministry and death, as well as the resurrection and ascension, not all there is to know. The spiritual content of the message of Jesus, which is undoubtedly impressive, has some other source and we are trying to find out where it could have come from. There are the missing years in the Gospels, which may point to some hidden truth about the personage of Jesus, but it may also be all legend.
Can Christianity survive if Jesus was not a historical figure? The insistence by Christians about the historical content of the gospels is because it has been one of the arguments by which their critics sought to destroy it, from atheists to polytheists. I think that you are running a risk here, as a Christian, if that is left within you, by taking Carrier at his word perhaps to the point of erasing Jesus from the chronological record.
One thing that keeps bothering me is the assumption that it was Christianity that received these Buddhists influences, but as I see it, Eco would still be correct if is assumed that it was Christian ministers fanning out to the east that became an influence to Buddhist. This is specially relevant because unlike Christianity, Buddhism was naturally geared to receive influences. I don’t know if Mahayana Buddhism is not the effect of Christian influence, to any certainty, just as I don’t know if Christian gospels are evidence of Buddhist influence. The scarcity of text from the relevant time means that too much is inferential.
Was Jesus from Galilee? I believe that he was. The recurrence of uprisings would explain the appeal of his ministry, even if it was arguably misinterpreted. I consider the work of some “scholars” as zealous, meaning that their root belief, say their atheism, drives them to absolute conclusions that the evidence does not support. For example, as there are scholars who argue that Jesus did not exist, there are others, like Geza Vermes, who convincingly argue the opposite conclusion. I strongly disagree with the idea that legends are made in a span of a few years. We are talking about intelligent men choosing death for someone they invented. On the face of it, this is more incredible than Jesus existence.
Granted, Jesus has miracle stories that grew outside of history, in the love of his followers, but this was never the totality of Christianity. As much miracles as were kept many more were left out. At the center of Christianity is still the belief in a man who was put to death unjustly and whose body was lost. This much is historical as it is corroborated by outside literature.
I think that you have encountered some literalist Christians who insist on every word of the Bible as being free from error, but I think that these should not be the motive force for what we believe about Christians in General or Christianity in specific. The attitude of the Christian towards the nature of the next (literally true in every aspect or poetically true about the main aspect) is the effect of that person’s character rather than indisputable evidence.
I’m not sure Christianity can survive as the exclusive religion it is, but I tend to think more in terms of universal spirituality and of compassion as the basic requirement we need to survive as a species. The more exclusive we remain (or become?) the more difficulties we’ll have. Universal spirituality is my way of saying that we all have some relationship to the ineffable mystery and that our cultures shape that relationship. Some are agnostic and some are atheistic in their approach, but I believe all people have a certain “spirituality”, even if they wouldn’t use that word. Paul was curiously able to avoid speaking of a historical figure, but spoke of what he had been communicated, of scripture or of visions.
That would be true if the insistence upon historicity wasn’t older than the criticism of that statement. It was because Christians took it as a given that Christ was born a human being, that people started to look into it and found no historical evidence for it – they couldn’t find Nazareth so early on in history. In fact they began to find evidence to show that something was not hunky-dory and so they looked further.
I consider myself a spiritual person with my roots in Christianity, rather than as a Christian. I don’t identify myself with the term Christian because of its exclusivity. I haven’t done since I stopped working for the church and I threw off some of the shackles they had on me. I know of so many spiritual people who find it difficult to accept the confines of the church, or the fact that Christians tend to be either missionaries or watered down beyond recognition, and who would rather pursue the spiritual journey free of that banner.
It is the historical record that shows that Buddhist were in the area and having audiences with various rulers, along with the widespread influences on monastic orders. There is no reason why Christianity shouldn’t have had influences here and there, as you say, but Thundy has found evidence which, if you read the full article, is quite interesting.
The uprisings proceeded long before Jesus came along until long after he had been killed. Carrier offers examples of legends in our time, despite widespread availability of information, and asks whether in a time when books cost a fortune, only 20% of the population was literate to some degree, and people casually carried stories by word-of-mouth over borders, it is probable that what is possible in our time was more possible in those times.
It isn’t just the fact that there were uprisings, it was the amount of charismatic leaders there were who were deemed “Messiahs” and the fact that with every smack-down the next uprising was even more violently extreme – even to the mass suicide at Masada (if it was the way Josephus described it, since he seems to have been a lackey to the Romans). Whatever, it was a violent age and full of extremism.
The problem is with these miracles is that there were such things going on all over, and still do – only for Christians the miracles of other sects are suspicious. One thing that is curious is that the biggest illnesses in the time are not what Christ heals, but more the ailments we would today call psychosomatic.
Agreed, but again, the spread of evangelical Christianity has its dangers, since it is very exclusive – although any exclusive religion is potentially dangerous, because it defines enemies. Loving your enemies hasn’t been the big strength of Christianity, but I’m not overcritical of that. I just think that, just as we all interact and communicate and influence each other without realising it, religions have been conclusively shown to do the same.
The attraction is anything and everything implied by salvation. Different people are attracted by different aspects. But, it’s not like it’s not a valid human experience, IMO.
Four years of liberal arts education.
The mytic traditions of the various big religions often have much more in common than the doctrines, rules and specifics of the religions. Jesus is supposed to have gone through mystical experiences and processes, so that his own stories - which may have contextualized his Life orally - would seem to connect to other religions may simply have to do with his experiences. He may also have come in Contact with people in other mystical lines and spent some time talkign to them. Ken Wilbur has done some nice work showing that the stages and steps and mystical states more carefully documented adn discussed in the East, are also present in the Christian tradition, but this tradition has not been maintained by the priesthood, at least for public consumption in the same way it has in the East - thinking mainly of Hinduism and Buddhism, thought also Sufism, Taoism and other traditions have kept this up more so that in the West. Judaism also, though this has been maintained most in the mystic Hasidic side.
Sounds about right to me, although traditionally history didn’t weigh so much as it does today, and seems to have been confined to knowing the names of various rulers - we could expand on that … 
Why would JESUS be a figment of imagination, when previous studies have involved many comparisons regarding the Jesus story in documented religious literature to earlier literature involving spiritual/creation aspects as a Philosophical Theosophy?
I think what should be asked is what does Jesus represent as a spiritual factor. This could involve the following scenarios.
- Religious teachings belonged to various sects and therefore different God quotas as an intellectual argument.
- As per Barbara Thierings observations religious leaders used Holy Titles from religious documentation as their own namesake, hence real human beings used the term Jesus Christ as their new personal holy title as new intellectual/spiritual observations.
- This sect proposed that their religious versions of Philosophy/Theosophy were correct and fought in the community for the Religious Laws to change.
- These Laws involved the High Priests of other religious sects, those who used the literature of the BOOK OF THE DEAD, the unholy spirits.
- In ancient times, human beings who were condemned by the High Priests (observed to be cruel and malicious) used public humiliation to prevent uprisings in the public forum, humans were placed on crosses, were tortured to prevent a new uprising and hence a real human situation involving the Christ could be historically correct as a human story of an innocent/s vying for a purposeful spiritual change in their community.
- Human beings in ancient times, just as today could demonstrate feats of magic, can heal possessions and they can also heal cellular damage. Therefore this is not a holy phenomena but true human ability that involves a spiritual purpose.
- This Theosophical information was secreted (proven by hidden documents in caves) because it involved human beings challenging religious belief and the High Priests.
- They hid this information because they thought that an UNHOLY ACT OF GOD, involving their spiritual Father was going to be re-enacted on Earth and everyone could be killed, and they placed these documents to be purposefully found in the future thinking everything was going to be destroyed.
- This would be substantiated via the evidence that above Giza/involving High Priests in Egypt UFO bodies today are photographed and witnessed.
- 8000 years ago an Indian community were nucleated in an UNHOLY ACT OF GOD that involved the use of sound levitation/sound lightening procedures.
- This could be substantiated by the Tibetan Monks who demonstrated to a common day Scientist that they could levitate stone boulders using sound.
Therefore the Theosophical JESUS could also be identified to involve a Philosophical calculation that was taught as a hidden secret in the High Priest echelon as acts in Creation itself.
If you apply hidden meanings then the following may prove this fact for you, as an alteration from the Books of the Dead in Egypt as the ISIS version into JESUS.
THISISJESUSKINGOFTHEJEWS
TH
ISIS
JE
SUS
KING OF THE JEWS
TH O TH The ancient God of of Egyptian learning and magic, the measurer of time and numbers
O = the measure used for time and for calculating numbers as a Scientific observation in Philosophy/Theosophy
TH used as a symbolic reference for forming ordinal numerals, ordinal = denoting the order, the meaning of THOTH itself as a Theosophy rewritten into a Roman verSION
I = symbol for Hebrew yodh (hand)
ISIS = hand of God as a double value - the double value used for squaring the O circle
S = 70,000
2 HANDS OF GOD = 140,000 as ISIS
SUS hidden meaning in the Philosophy term is pig, wild boar, the ANCIENT God terms found expressed as -
Gullinbursti (meaning “Gold Mane or Golden Bristles”) is a boar in Norse mythology. Likewise, in most European pagan traditions, the wild boar is associated with male solar deities, such as Endovelicus, Freyr and Apollon,[61] due to the nature of death and rebirth attached to the boar’s connection to the earth and necrophagous behaviour.[62]
In Hindu mythology, the third Avatar of Vishnu was Varaha, a boar (Wikipedia)
SUS from Medieval Latin m sellum, diminutive of m sus, snout, from Latin m sum thefreedictionary.com/muzzle
Varaha is depicted as a half/half function as a boar’s head and human body. His consort, Bhudevi, the earth, is often depicted as a young woman, lifted by Varaha.
Varaha slew the demon and retrieved the Earth from the ocean, lifting it on his tusks, and restored Bhudevi to her place in the universe.
The Hebrew OX is Written as ا, spelled as ألف and transliterated as alif it is the first letter in Arabic.
Together with Hebrew Aleph, Greek Alpha and Latin A, it is descended from Phoenician ʾāleph, from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite ʾalp “ox”.
In the Sefer Yetzirah, the letter aleph is king over breath, formed air in the universe, temperate in the year, and the chest in the soul.
Aleph is also the first letter of the Hebrew word emet, which means truth
Aleph in Jewish mysticism represents the oneness of God. The letter can been seen as being composed of an upper yud (Yodh),
when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 1000 (Wikipedia)
As JESUS is given 1000 in value as was SATAN given 1000 in value it demonstrates the Varaha meaning hidden secretly in the Roman version.
^ nose point, depicting the A value association to the 1, therefore an overview establishes that Jesus as the Christ does represent
the term for OX - OXYGEN spirit breath or spirit life as the rising outcome of a healing/cooling Earth stone, returning the Law of God to the Earth stone burnt on her face (hence Mt Sinai burnt stone face as this holy archaeological proof)…
what would be observed as the Healing Event after Earth had been nucleated?
In an ancient discussion involving the Adam/Eve information it states that human beings in a first Earth life caused the atmosphere/Heaven
to fall because of Satan. This would suggest that archaeological evidence should demonstrate that we lived as a human being in a
pre historical Earth before the evolution theory existed…archaeological evidence already suggested this by the finding of jewelry in a coal bed. This would quantify that
the Earth stone had been nucleated and turned into charcoal from a Sun attack/nuclear event as a natural outcome caused by humans
using transformation processes involving STONE BONDS.
Hi, I’m a bit tied up at present, but I’ll be back in a short while to answer your questions …
Have patience
You ask if Christianity can survive if Jesus is not a historical figure…why not, if literature simply displays that it is only involved in a discussion of Creative Philosophical reckoning regarding Theosophy, it also relates to spiritual evident fact.
The teachings are not just about Philosophy, they also have spiritual moral purposes involved in their teaching.
If human beings are made aware of the Philosophical intent in the religious literature it would only allow them a greater peace involved in their own spiritual self awareness.
I have proposed that the Christian Jesus relates to a Philosophical astronomical informed state of the Creative Act, but it does also involve real human beings in the time era 0AD when a new form of Philosophical/Religious teaching was being introduced in the ancient community.
That it was possible for a historical brotherhood of loving, kind, caring Teachers to have performed miracles that involve magic, the ability to clear self possession and the ability to heal another human being through herbal and also spiritual hands on healing. This is only because there are many current day human beings who can and have and do demonstrate those SAME ABILITIES.
That as Barbara Thiering demonstrated Holy Orders took their Holy Names as self Titles from their own religious instruction…and therefore a human being who was murdered by the High Priests during this period could have been called Jesus Christ. That during these times the High Priests who instituted the Law would ridicule their victims in the public arenas, they would place them on crosses, they would torture them.
Hence real human holy victims could have been historically involved in a NEW TEACHING of religious intent and the High Priests were trying to stop this new teaching from being accepted in the public forum.
Therefore the religious historical intent would involve actual creation overviews as a Theosophy along with human historical events that were written in the Bible documents as the reason why this new instruction was eventually accepted by Rome itself. It would then quantify why Rome then sought the death of those same High Priests involved in the murder of the Christ Brotherhood in their religious pursuits to save humanity that involved proven unholy acts against the human spirit.
As what happened to me regarding my own psychic/spiritual awareness, it altered when I was spiritually attacked by atmospheric changes caused by Scientists.
Who were the Scientists in our ancient past? The High Priests were, because it is historically documented that they were involved in alchemical transformation, and stone levitation as lightening of the stone. This is why the term LEVI - LEVIS in the Bible is discussed as the meaning applied to levitation.
Anyone who is trying to establish why a new religious Order was implemented during this period should observe what it would involve, as ancient astronomical data has already been established to be involved in religious documentation, along with disaster dates and also archaeological discovery. Why? should be the question, and what would be obvious would be new spiritual advice that could only come about through spiritual awareness and this was who the new Christ Brotherhood involving Jesus were.
Tibetan Monks proved to Scientists that they could levitate huge stone boulders with sound, implying that stone bonds were altered to cause this situation to occur. If the Priests were using sound levitation in their building practices and caused the atmospheric disturbances just as we witness today (UFO bodies) and human beings began to gain STIGMATA and also SELF COMBUSTION, just as today incidences prove… then this would be what this spiritual situation involved in our past.
Why would we eventually evolve an order who called themselves STONE MASONS from the segregated Christian/Egyptian teachings if the secret religious documentation did not involve a HOLY INTENT regarding building practices? It is obvious that the building practices involved PHI calculations and also harmonics in the actual architect, but it is also obvious that the ancients could manipulate massive monolithic stone structures, the means of which has been argued over by many new age Philosophers.
I am missing a connection to the OP, but OK …
I think there is a difference between Jesus being a figment of imagination and the Gospel accounts not being historical. What Jesus definitely does represent is a spiritual but also tragical hero in a cosmic battle scenario. The battle for the world or rather for the souls has been exploited greatly by evangelical Christians, which however, is portrayed as a historical rather than a mythical conflict. The reason is that myth is regarded as something fictional by modern people and not, as has been in the past, as the description of a real perception of human experience in the midst of forces and powers, which would otherwise be indescribable. Even today, we are aware of multiple influences in our lives, which would perhaps describe using language taken from psychology and psychiatry or other academic sources, but all the same, it is symbol language and could therefore be described as “modern myth” - even if it isn’t quite as pictorial.
Seeing Jesus as a figure, whether historical or legendary, through whom this cosmic battle shifts and a new balance is produced, bringing hope and faith and promoting charity, is part of a real experience of human existence, whether it is shared by all humanity over 2000 years or not. It can be the analogy we use for the human dilemma, but it isn’t the only one.
This all seems to be another form of creating myth, using aspects of conspiracy theories and a mixture of cultural and spiritual traditions, in order to explain what people perceive as having happened on a different plane but reaching into our lives. Some of these descriptions are older, but this doesn’t change the fact that they are only another attempt to explain historical experience by projecting it onto a mythical backdrop. It is all acceptable as long as we know what we are doing and we don’t start mixing things up.
I see this as a play on language, which has been done at many times throughout human history, and is born out by the nature of ancient language, whether Pali, Hebrew and languages which derived from them or other ancient sources. However, when it comes down to playing on modern words, it doesn’t work. Equally, there are lots of older and newer conspiracies written in there, which takes theosophy off into fantasy in my view.
Secondly, the syncretism with Greek culture provides us with many examples of translation of other cults into the Greek and Isis is one of them. Basically it is also the same story that is being told with different characters in the leading role, the classic spiritual hero with similar tasks and fates, which Joseph Campbell picked up back in the 1940’s in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”.
Yes, thats true. I haven’t read Wilbur on that subject – can you suggest a reading?
The thing that seems to becoming clearer is that the claim that Jesus is purely a continuance of Judaism and the fulfilment of Jewish scripture is wishful thinking. There are clearly “scriptures” to which the Gospels and Paul refer, which we do not find in the OT. JC’s fulfilment of scripture works only when we compare with other religions, especially as Thundy did, with Buddhism.
Another point is that Christianity, before it was the Christianity we know, had a different beginning to what we had been told. It was diverse, it was mystical and it was more of a gnostic movement than the later church fathers wanted us to know, which speaks for the composition of Gospels to withstand that and put Christianity on the map as a hellenised religion with jewish background. The heretics always accompanied the development of the Roman Church and became martyrs to their cause as the Church gained status and power.
Of course the Jews developed independently from Christianity and moved away from the Temple cult they had been and developed the mystic Hasidic variant and the Kabbalah as well as Rabbinic Judaism. This all speaks for continual development and adaption, which is something the fundamentalists in all religions are opposing.
A play on language? Theosophy was never fantasy it was an applied thought, an applied calculation, an applied theory, an applied cause and effect situation that then caused the theory to be altered regarding the overall Creative story as an Act. Conspiracy…who said anything about a conspiracy? There is no conspiracy implied, the implication is human nature, greed, intent and also power mongering and Law conditions…human life without involving any fantasy.
ISIS as the main character is demonstrated in the Roman Literature to have been DESTROYED, implying that the Sirius/Orion calculations no longer related to the Sound Body of our Sun or our Planet.
They factored by their observations that the GENE of SIS quantified that (I) was destroyed and ISIS no longer factored through this system. This was why they re-wrote the historical Law regarding the EYE OF OSIRIS.
The Roman values for a newly formed language proposed new angles as LETTERS quantified to a numerical value…why they gave letters numbers, as ANGLES-ANGELS.
I in the Roman evaluations factored from the Greek iota as a very small quantity was renamed from the Hebrew version of timed events as HAND OF GOD (yodh) as the value for 1 (one) being the One God reference. The logic of its symbolism stated affirmative proposition, which implied that the review factored that in TIME via the HAND OF GOD the atmospheric condition which they caused would HEAL.
Therefore the female who was proposed to be the HEALER was altered into the male as the HEALER Jesus, whose 1000 Christ against 1000 Satan would allow Life to return in the future by the Year End 2012.
This is an obvious CALCULATION for those of you who try to imply that it has no reference beyond a mythical application.
2000 = the value of both bodies
12 = the value of Time as a calculation.
As Hand of God was given to the value of 5 as we have 5 fingers on a hand, and 5 is the increment to count time between each Number, I gave the Value of the Christ as VI (6) as implied in literature to God healing through the 1 or the (I) value of the Son Christ via the HANDS OF TIME.
Therefore the Philosopher understood that the PHI bodies that had been enlarged through the calculation observed called JAPETH that caused the burning in the atmosphere to cause the O pi body to explode as ORIGIN sound would have removed from its cell the accumulated radiated signals of SATAN by 2012 and that we would have been healed returning the OXYGEN MASS to a higher body state.
Therefore it demonstrates that Scientists DESTROYED the Act of Christ Healing in the 1900s by re-radiating the Earth’s atmosphere to create the signal that BROKE the BONDS of OXYGEN (OX) of the Christ that held Uranium in its SEALED AND FIXED STATE. They burnt the upper atmosphere proven by the HOLE IN THE OZONE that they created when they EXPLODED the OXYGEN SOUND/STRING to break into the URANIUM SIGNAL.