The very existence of a historical Jesus is debatable.
There is no need for one….since the Hellenized Jew Saul is the first Christian.
The mythos was used to seduce the masses with tales of salvation and hope..
You are all Paulines.
There is more evidence for the existence of Jesus than your failed cognitively biased religious + =- and -=+ philosophy science Silenus …..we know that much…..lol…who are you to say that there is no need for Jesus…you haven’t got a clue about anything at all.
You’ve got me wrong. I’m pro-God.
Mere theism is no good for you whatsoever Felix.About as much use as atheism in fact.
True. But, the majority of historical scholars agree that he existed. If you think otherwise, make your case.
That’s factually incorrect since Paul testifies to the existence of a church that was already in existence when Christ was revealed to him.
You make it sound bad. Why?
I’m a Pauline, Petrine, Ebionite, Christian, Jewish, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu,Gnostic, Quaker, Perennialist, Universalist. I identify with the universal light of consciousness in everyone.
The reality is though……who in their right mind is ever going to take the words of a psychotic atheist who exists and claims to be a misrepresentation of reality,seriously, as opposed to God’s words?
More. Everything has a divine source. That doesn’t negate the way things unfold historically which is what this thread is about.
Keep up the personal attacks and I will put you on ignore. You presume to know my position on issues on which I haven’t commented. That’s prejudice. Somehow you manage to weave your hatred for the Jews into almost every post. That makes it difficult for you to look at history dispassionately and objectively which is what I am attempting to do here.
The truth is Silenus you live in your head listening to binary nonsense.Inward only “head” meditation is not good for you.
It turns you into a psychotic atheist who exists but claims to be a misrepresentation of reality.
You do have a body you know.
The sense TOUCH is the interface between the in and out of the moment consciousness states.
You need to learn more about consciousness and then maybe you wouldn’t post nonsense.
Listen to what Jesus said about consciousness.
John 10:9
Dear @felix_dakat,
I think that after the long conversations we have had over many years, you know that I do not base my arguments on one quote or one source, but my position arises from the interaction with the faith from “within” or “in the midst of silence,” you could say.
I do not doubt that Jesus was a real person, nor do I doubt the impression that the Gospel writers try to express the disciples as having. The disciples’ impressions grew from their own traditions in context with intimate conversations they had with the man so cruelly taken from them, but the Gospel writers have the communities from which they write in mind as well.
For me, as we have discussed at length before, the true miracle of the world is life itself and the sentience that we are continuing to discover. If our religion “rebinds” with this fundamental observation, it is not a question of God “entering” his creation to put it right, but the discovery of God at the source emerging in our awareness as even being “behind our eyes” and in our midst.
Therefore, not only is Jesus God incarnate, but we all are, but we fail to realise it. Death thereby loses its “sting” and we suddenly realise this, and of course Jesus is risen, because he, like us, cannot ultimately be killed, but only his physical appearance is crucified, as horrific and tragic that is.
We must, however, hesitate when the poetic comes to the rescue to give us words to describe this incredible discovery, and not take its beauty away by declaring it historical or physically demonstrable, as though that were the only way truth can be ascertained.
The unity expressed in the Gospels and Paul’s letters obtained by emptying our being of the masks we wear and cutting back to the core, is an expression of God. When appearances are seen as the illusions they are, there is only the ground of being that remains.
This is also the source of goodness, which is sentient life minus the ego crying out for the survival of the body. It is service because we believe this is the nature of God, Shalom, or Agape. And this goodness, set free in the world, does things we see as miracles.
But the attempts to describe the encounter with this divine attribute in a narrative must take the forms we see in the NT or in the poetical, describing a love relationship, as we find in both the OT and the NT. Such heartfelt expression in Christianity and its mystical writings, as indeed in all mystical traditions, is an attempt to portray the discovery of such divine goodness at work.
The tragic thing is that we often try to express this as power, but Jesus is quoted as saying that his realm and his sovereignty are not of this world. Nor are ours. Any attempt to wield power in his name only tragically turns the “magic” on its head. Our sovereignty, if we want to call it that, as children of God, is in service towards “the least of these.”
Our power, like his, lies in empowering others, lifting them up, feeding, clothing, caring and leading them to do likewise. It is comparable to the Jubilee Year, when things were meant to be returned to their former order, and people released from their bondage.
This is what I see as the source of our metaphorical and allegorical language, describing the sudden awareness that, out of the tragic and horrific event, the realisation of its true character arose. It is the miracle of seeing evil reveal the true nature of truth, beauty, unity and goodness, whilst trying to achieve the opposite.
Our words are simply struggling to describe how stunned the disciples were to see this hope emerge out of their defeat, as indeed it always has, even though following generations seem to corrupt it repeatedly. This is why this reality must continually “be born” in us, as Meister Eckhart wrote. But we must be careful not to reduce it to some material subversion or the overcoming of physical reality. It is rather the divine light shining through the cracks.
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Beautifully put, Bob. The problem is that given the history of misinterpretation one despairs of saying anything. Especially on a forum like this one. Reading scripture is a matter of spiritual insight without which the texts are dead superstition. Direct divine experience supersedes scriptural insight. And if one claims to see one comes off as an elitist like the Christian gnostics of the second century. India has a living tradition in which spiritual enlightenment is accepted. But even there Ramakrishna was seen as a madman but the “normies” of the 19th century.
Jesus was a spiritually enlightened being whose story comes down to us indirectly embedded in Hellenized texts. Normative Christianity chose to worship him instead of following him on the path to enlightenment. The church tended to condemn people who tried to follow his path as heretics or to venerate them as saints on pedestals. So these days people go outside to Buddhism and others spiritual paths because Christianity has obscured its own legacy. I hear though that more people are now turning to the Eastern Orthodox tradition which at least has a stronger tradition of theosis. Remember Uccisore? He had turned to the Orthodox tradition. I wonder how he’s progressing on his path?
Once one breaks with the dogma of the traditional church, anything is possible as far as how to interpret the Bible. The academic historical perspective on it at least has rigorous standards for establishing historical probability. So in the arena of public discourse on the subject where the goal is a consensus of probability that is a reasonable way to go.
In the 20th century Bultmann with his method of “demythologizing” was probably the foremost scholar in the field. Modern thinking has to demythologize the stories of antiquity to some extent. Even Swami Vivekananda, who brought Vedanta to the West in 19th century, and has become a spiritual hero of India, demythologized the Hindu classics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata somewhat. He notes, for example: “The Aryans did not know who were the inhabitants of these wild forests. In those days the forest tribes they called “monkeys”, and some of the so-called “monkeys”, if unusually strong and powerful, were called "demons”.” One of the greatest heroes of the Ramayana, Hanuman, is depicted as a semi-divine monkey. What does the modern mind make of it? Vivekananda says “His devotion to Rama was so great that he is still worshipped by the Hindus as the ideal of a true servant of the Lord. You see, by the “monkeys” and “demons” are meant the aborigines of South India.”
Vivekananda seems to be under the influence of the Aryan invasion theory, which is largely discredited in historical academic circles today. Most scholars now favor model of Indo-Aryan, migration and cultural interaction rather than a military invasion. This shift is supported by a lack of archaeological evidence for invasion such as new tools or weapons, and the large findings of DNA studies which suggest the continuity of populations in the link between the Harrappan and Vedic cultures.
My point is that modern historiography uses the tools all the scientific tools at its disposal. But, the picture it presents is always changing, and now more rapidly than ever. So, for example, now Robyn Faith Walsh’s thesis on the origins of early Christian literature challenges the idea the community model for understanding the productions of the gospels is receiving a lot of critical scholarly attention at the moment. Walsh proposes that gospel authors should be interpreted as elite, cultural producers, writing for other elite, cultural producers. These authors, according to Walsh established the narrative of Jesus‘s life with their idiosyncratic stylizations they were writing with influence from an in exchange with their cultural context. She points to the low literacy rates in the Roman empire at that time and the literary creativity of the gospels as evidence for elite authorship. She argues that the literary genre of the gospels as best described as subversive biography which depicts colorful events in the lives of the protagonists who outwit opponents and ultimately meet an early or tragic death. She asserts that the specifics of Jesus’s portrayal was not the product of an oral tradition, but instead, “reflection of the rational interests of elite imperial writers.” She notes that subversive biographies are typically largely fictional.
Walsh’s characterization of the gospels places them in the tradition of Greek and Hellenistic biographies rather than within Jewish folklore. She calls references to eye witnesses like that made in the prologue of the gospel of Luke as ”literary topoi” and proposes that the missing body of the crucified Jesus is a motif expressing divinity. She points to the somatic similarities with other Greco Roman literature, and specifically cites the “Satyrica” as evidence to emphasize literary exchange [Wikipedia]. The Satyrica typically has been interpreted as a parody of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection narrative. This hypothesis turns that reading on its head. Since the date the two texts were written is unknown so is the direction of the influence.
In any case, Richard Carrier lauded Walsh’s book “ the origins of early Christian literature”. She appears regularly on Bart Ehrman‘s YouTube channel. I think there’s considerable overlap in her work with that of David Litwa’s “how the gospels became history”, and Dennis McDonald in “the gospels and Homer: imitations of Greek epic in Mark and Luke-Acts” for example. What do you think of her thesis in relation to the community model, and the general trend towards mythologizing the Jesus story?
“Revelation” is short hand for a unexplained vision, due to psychological factors or intoxication…..a state of mental distress.
Ascribing such psychological events as the consequence of divine intervention, is how surreptitious needy minds deal with their own anxieties.
It is now clear that the pussy…aherm, the cat, is not really interested in an academic exploration of how Christianity developed out of per-existing dogmas and superstitions….but must have the answer he needs….God.
Plenty of academics out there theorizing how Christianity developed out of other dogmas…but this si never enough, for him and those like him. He needs the moment, the exact second, when god implanted the idea i some inebriated charlatan’s mind.
He needs the moment Jesus was implanted in Mary’s womb, by God’s penis…
He needs that divine spark…where and when did it occur.
Who witnessed it….other than the recipient…But no answers come because he’s already presupposed too much…..
Why this desire to distance Christianity from Judaism?
Given Nietzsche’s critique, I can understand why pseudo-intellectuals charlatans, want to distance Judaism from Christianity….but why this?
Is the slaughter of Palestinians by Zionists, using the Talmud and the Old Testament as justification, a possible reason?
Jewish mysticism, born of ancient-Egyptian, and Babylonian, and Zoroastrian, plagiarisms, coupled with Platonism, is Christianity.
Appealing to the world’s victims.
Saul was the carrier…agent one….the first patient.
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I also see a huge problem in the layers of misinterpretation that practically bury the intuition of the feminine. Aramaic theology naturally expressed God’s attributes through feminine forms. In Aramaic and Hebrew tradition:
- Rū ḥa (Spirit) is feminine
- Shekhinah (Divine Presence) is feminine
- Ḥokhma / Ḥokhmetha (Wisdom) is feminine
- Divine mercy (ra ḥamim) comes from the word for womb (reḥem)
This means that when Jesus spoke about the malkuta (reign) of God, it would have resonated in a feminised conceptual field: Spirit, Presence, Wisdom, Compassion, all feminine in Semitic thought.
Notice how often Jesus associates the reign of God with feminine images, which makes more sense in Aramaic than in Greek, like the woman hiding leaven in flour, or the woman searching for the lost coin, or a hen gathering her chicks, and the dynamics of birth, new life, and nurture, which all harmonise with the feminine semantics of malkuta , meaning reign, rulership, dominion, sovereignty, not “kingdom” in a spatial sense but rather more tending towards “queendom”.
The powerful will naturally undermine such ideas, because English “kingdom,” is tied to monarchy, masculine power, territorial rule, imperial politics, whereas Jesus’ malkuta sounds much more like a womb-like environment where new life grows, a nurturing presence that permeates quietly, a Wisdom-led order, or a gathering, healing, sheltering reality. This is far closer to Sophia, Shekhinah, and Ruḥa than to a throne or empire.
If our reading of scripture using spiritual insight (without which the texts are dead superstition) doesn’t return to this aspect, the church remains a power structure. The Older Eastern languages and religious cultures also tended to preserve a balance or interplay of masculine and feminine principles, whereas later Western systems became more exclusively masculine, hierarchical, and abstract.
In Hinduism, Śakti is the dynamic, creative, transformative power of God and is always feminine. The male deities (Śiva, Vishnu, Brahma) are incomplete without their feminine counterparts (Pārvatī, Lakshmi, Sarasvatī). We see that the feminine is not subordinate; it is the essential energy of the divine. Sanskrit, like the Semitic languages, marks feminine forms in ways that carry theological meaning.
In Buddhism, Prajñā (wisdom), the central liberating insight, is grammatically feminine in Sanskrit and personified as a female bodhisattva. The union of prajñā (feminine) and upāya (masculine) is the classic Mahāyāna image of enlightenment — wisdom and compassionate action. And we have Tara, Kuan Yin (Guanyin), and other feminine figures embodying compassion, mercy, and liberating presence.
What I am pointing to here is the fact that our Christian tradition has become caught up in deeply masculine ideas, which, we must see in the present day, are destined to bring down a society with divisive, stubborn and destructive tendencies, because they lack the feminine. All of the Christian males I know have problems asserting their “male roles” when their wives are more outgoing and involved in social interaction. Many of them have addictive problems and depression.
It is, therefore, no wonder that people go abroad in search of wholesome and more complete spiritual teaching. You mentioned Uccisore (which curiously means “Killer”), but Greek Orthodoxy might preserve more of the feminine than Western Christianity, but it is less than the Semitic/Aramaic or Syriac traditions. Its alignment is theological, liturgical, and symbolic rather than linguistic. In Orthodoxy, Sophia (grammatically feminine in Greek) is not marginal. It saturates hymnography, liturgy, iconography, and mystical theology.
The problem is that Bultmann, for all his brilliance, also inadvertently reinforced the modern suspicion that the whole Christian narrative is merely a mythic construction. His programme of Entmythologisierung (demythologising) was never meant to strip the gospel of its spiritual power, yet that is precisely how it was received in much of the twentieth century. By insisting that the “mythical world-picture” of the New Testament had to be interpreted existentially, he unintentionally encouraged the view that the stories themselves were dispensable, or worse, fabricated.
What was lost was not the historical scaffolding but the spiritual imagination and the sense that symbolic narratives can be true in ways deeper than literal description. And this loss contributed to a wider cultural impoverishment. In a society already drifting towards materialism, secular rationalism, and a flattened understanding of the sacred, Bultmann’s demythologising, though noble in intention, further weakened the mythic, archetypal, and transformative dimensions of Christianity that once nourished the soul.
In the vacuum that followed, various cultural forces rushed in. Instead of recovering the divine feminine embedded in Jesus’ Aramaic and early Christian symbolism, Western culture tended toward sexualisation rather than sanctification of the feminine. The countercultural imagination of the late 1960s, for all its creativity, often reduced the feminine to the trope of the “Witchy Woman” — alluring, mysterious, erotic, but fundamentally objectified. Simultaneously, it rejected what it saw as the “masculine”: order, structure, commitment, transcendence, discipline.
Yet this rejection was not the same as the integration or union of masculine and feminine that characterises genuine wisdom traditions. It was simply inversion and a rebellion against one pole without embracing the other. Instead of a sacred marriage of energies, there was a kind of cultural divorce.
Women who resisted the sexual revolution, who sought dignity, depth, or chastity rather than liberation defined purely in sexual terms, were quickly labelled “unsexy,” “prudish,” or “uncool.” Their resistance was interpreted as repression rather than as a desire for a more meaningful integration of identity. Meanwhile, Christianity, already feeling threatened by the rapid cultural changes, doubled down on its patriarchal instincts. Instead of rediscovering the feminine dimension of Spirit, Wisdom, and divine compassion present in Jesus’ teaching, it clung more tightly to hierarchical structures that were already out of step with the gospel’s original imagination.
In doing so, the Church further obscured the Sophia-dimension of Christ’s message and the nurturing, healing, and generative aspects of divine life that had been central in his Aramaic speech. The divine feminine, once present in early Jewish and Christian thought through the Spirit (ruach), Wisdom (ḥokhma), and the indwelling Presence (Shekhinah), became almost entirely invisible.
It is striking that the fundamentalist movements of our own day, whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or otherwise, consistently produce “strong man” ideologies, marked by rigidity, aggression, and a distrust of nuance or compassion. Such movements elevate an exaggerated, brittle form of masculinity that is, in truth, profoundly insecure and profoundly inhuman. They mirror each other across traditions, clinging to a distorted idea of order that suppresses the feminine rather than integrating it.
What we see, then, is not simply a theological misstep but a deep cultural wound: a failure to recover the union of the masculine and feminine that ancient traditions held as the foundation of wisdom, creativity, and spiritual awakening. Without that integration, we oscillate between domination and sentimentality, repression and rebellion, never arriving at the wholeness that Jesus’ teachings, rightly understood, quietly point toward.
And yet, Swami Vivekananda’s relationship to the divine feminine is far richer and more nuanced than his occasional demythologising language might suggest. In fact, among modern Hindu teachers, he is one of the clearest exponents of Śakti, the Mother, and the feminine dimension of the divine as an indispensable aspect of spiritual realisation. His wider project was making Hinduism intellectually acceptable to a Western-educated audience, demythologising externals while preserving spiritual truths, showing that the epics convey psychological and philosophical realities, not literal zoology. But this modernising tendency does not translate to a downplaying of the divine feminine. Quite the opposite.
When going off to explore his background, I discovered that Vivekananda began as Narendra, a rationalist disciple of Ramakrishna. But after Ramakrishna’s death, during his wandering monk years, he underwent a deep Shakta transformation. He repeatedly said, “It is the Mother who has done everything. I am only Her instrument,” and “Without Her grace, no spiritual life is possible.”
He had profound mystical experiences of the Divine Mother Kāli, particularly during his time at Dakshineswar and later at Kashmir. Although he resisted initially (finding Kali’s imagery fearsome), he surrendered utterly. This surrender became one of the defining experiences of his life. This seems to be the way of visionaries, and Vivekananda taught that Śakti is reality in its dynamic aspect, that Brahman and Śakti are not two, spirituality without the feminine is incomplete, and no nation or culture can be spiritually healthy without reverence for woman and the feminine principle.
When Vivekananda taught that Śakti is reality in its dynamic aspect, it sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit as part of the trinity, and this is one of the most fruitful and illuminating cross-cultural parallels. Vivekananda’s teaching on Śakti aligns remarkably well with how many theologians, mystics, and Eastern Christian thinkers understand the Holy Spirit, even though the traditions use different metaphysical languages.
This brings me back to my first point: that our greatest difficulty lies in the layers of interpretation that have accumulated over the centuries and have all but buried the intuitive sense of the feminine at the heart of Jesus’s vision. We begin with the prophetic and imaginative Jesus himself, a teacher whose insight was shaped by Aramaic language, Jewish mysticism, and a lived intimacy with the divine. Then comes the layer of oral transmission, the stories told and retold by followers trying to preserve what they had seen and felt. After that, we encounter the recording of those memories, already filtered through fallible recollection and through the concerns of communities struggling to survive.
A further layer emerges when educated elites, those with the rare ability to write in Greek, shape these memories into the Gospels. They are sincere, but their literary imagination is inevitably influenced by the symbolic world of Hellenistic culture, including its myths and rhetorical conventions. The result is a text that conveys the essence of Jesus’s teaching yet also bears the imprint of a culture already distancing itself from his Aramaic roots.
Upon this foundation, we then find the interpretative traditions: debates with more mystical or esoteric strands of Christianity that retained distant echoes of the original Aramaic intuition, and the long history of theological speculation that followed. Over twenty centuries of councils, controversies, metaphysics, dogmas, polemics, and power struggles have produced a doctrinal edifice that is often brilliant, but frequently remote from the immediacy of Jesus’s spiritual experience and especially its feminine dimension.
Given all these layers, I see only one path forward: a return to informed spiritual intuition, grounded in serious scholarship yet open to the depths of mystical experience. This involves following Jesus not only through textual analysis, but through contemplative practice, inward transformation, and renewed sensitivity to the divine feminine that shaped his worldview.
At the same time, we must remain open to the resonances between Jesus’s insight and the wisdom found in other traditions. The parallels with the Bodhi tree are not accidental: Jesus’s own “wakefulness” mirrors the enlightenment sought in Buddhism, the union aimed at in Vedanta, and the divine intimacy spoken of by the Sufis. To recover the fullness of his vision, including the feminine aspects long obscured, we must be willing to learn from these shared human intuitions.
In this sense, we must figuratively sit beneath the Bodhi tree ourselves: awakening, listening, and allowing the spiritual truths that converge across traditions to illuminate one another. This is not a rejection of Christianity, but a reclamation of its deepest mystical heart—the heart Jesus himself lived from, long before the layers settled over it.
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The historic contribution of women to emergent Christianity tended to be minimized or suppressed by proto-orthodox church authorities. Traces of it can be seen in the “Marys” in the gospels. They tend to be conflated. We have Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary of Bethany who is an exemplar of devotion and Mary Magdalene the first witness of the resurrection and others. Mary Magdalene was a financial supporter of the movement who witnessed his crucifixion and brought aromatic spices for his dead body. In the gospel of Phillip, the Gospel of Mary and the Pistis Sophia she is portrayed as the disciple closest to Jesus (lover?) with the greatest spiritual insight who evokes rivalry in others including Peter most particularly. In the gospel of Luke she is said to have been exorcised of seven demons. In the Gospel of Mary she describes a vision seven psychological layers that the soul must ascend through. Her ascension is similar to Mercabah mysticism and is comparable to Paul’s (“whether in the body or out of the body I cannot say”) . These texts were suppressed by what became the mainline church and resurfaced archaeologically only in recent centuries sometimes in fragmentary states.
Women traveled and worked with male counterparts to spread the faith. The apostle Junia, for example, is mentioned by Paul as being prominent and having been imprisoned for her work. Many early communities met in private homes, and women like Lydiaand Nympha were crucial in hosting, funding, and leading these congregations, as described in Acts 16:11-40 and Colossians 4:15. Paul suggests that these leaders held significant authority. Women like Perpetua and Blandina were martyred for their faith, with Perpetua’s story being particularly well-documented.
Marcellina is the only known woman to have independently led a Christian group in Rome during the second century CE. In fact, outsiders apparently called her group “Marcellinians.” Celsus mentioned Marcellina’s group around 175 CE. Irenaeus discussed the group about 180 CE. Possibly Marcellina was still alive and active at the time. Irenaeus reported that Marcellina’s group called themselves “gnostics.”