And Josephus’ date is 93 CE sixty years after Jesus was supposedly crucified. LOL! What evidence is there that any of the New Testament existed before 100 CE? Name it and claim it™.
Now after crossing the sea the Israelites came to Shor, the Place of the Ox but couldn’t find any water. So they went to Elim or the Place of the Rams where there were twelve springs and seventy date palms. Here we have the clue that these are not actual places on Earth but rather based on celestial occurrences in the heavens. The first enemy the Israelites met were the Amalekites who like the sea the Israelites crossed and land they came upon cannot be found in the historical record. Their territory (also not on any maps) is called Havilah which extends from Shor the Place of the Bull and is a word for the concept of “circular motion.” So the Amalekites represent the zodiacal sign of Taurus. Their ways and traditions define them as a group who refuse to enter the new era of Aries therefore they must be annihilated. A battle ensues at Rephidim which means “supported.” The ridiculous nature of this encounter is not to be ignored. The biblical writers were well aware of their audience’s critical sensibilities. When Moses raises his staff which represents the celestial poles, the Israelites have the advantage but when he tires and the staff disappears from view the tide of the battle favors the Amalekites. Moses, Aaron and Hur represent Orion’s Belt which in turn represents accurate measuring. This battle is a metaphor for an intellectual conflict over the fallacious ideas of the past based on incorrect interpretations of the sons of God or the Watchers. In other words the stars.
Bibliography: Oedipus Judaicus: Allegory in the Old Testament by William Drummond. First published in 1811.
That might have been true a few decades ago but the Church of England survey found that four in 10 people did not believe Jesus was a real person. There’s a really good website that will bring you up to date on the non-historicity of Jesus: Jesusneverexisted.com
You’re the one who is desperately grabbing at any set of loose associations with the historical record to make your case that Jesus actually existed. You know very well that the golden paragraphs in Josephus are considered forgeries by your favorite human authoritarians - scholars of the New Testament. Yet you tried foisting that on me, which clearly illustrates the sheer desperation of your position.
I agree with the last two sentences. However, note that when you start talking about “hospitalization rates”, you are talking about rates that for children, teenagers, and youngish people were very low, even before the vaccines. Unvaccinated young people, taken as a collective (obviously there are always individual exceptions), were no more at risk of serious harm from COVID two years ago than they are now. It was evident by late 2020 that very few children or teenagers were getting seriously ill, and most were not showing any symptoms at all. But if anyone had said, look, there is no need to vaccinate the whole population, let’s just vaccinate the older and at-risk people, he would have been called a crank, a bad scientist, etc. But that’s exactly what they are saying in many European countries now. Thus, I’m merely making a comment about the “sociology of pandemic discussion” here.
I already conceded the weaknesses of stage debates. Nor was I suggesting that health policy should be based on the outcome of a single debate between two people. But if done properly they can be a useful educational tool. “If done properly” is the key phrase. The Tour-Farina debate was not done properly.
As for Facebook and Twitter, I don’t use them and never read them, and I never suggested that most of the writing on those sites was informed or useful.
Generally speaking, we find that those who favor the status quo on any issue, academic or social, don’t want debates, because they think THE TRUTH has been arrived at and anyone who questions it is a crank, insane, stupid, or evil. This is not a healthy development in a society like America, whose creative greatness has come from its openness to questioning the status quo.
I thought you were talking about “the earliest hearers and readers” of the Gospels. I never claimed that Josephus had read the Gospels. (He certainly could have heard stories about Jesus and John the Baptist and the early Christian movement without having read the Gospels, but that’s another matter.) Keep your examples to “the earliest hearer and readers” of the Gospels. So far, the earliest you have presented is Origen, and he’s very late. Which writers earlier than Origen are known to have read the Gospels, and do those writers vouch for your “mythical” interpretation?
You’re not responding to the point I was making, but to a different point. I made no statement about how many people did not believe a historical Jesus existed. I made a statement only about the “mythical Jesus” stuff you are pushing, with zodiac references and groupings of peoples under elements and solar mythology and so on. I said that almost no one is interested in such speculations, and almost no one talks about them. There are of course many people who would say that Jesus never existed, but you provide not a shred of evidence to support the conclusion that a large number of those people are into the “mythical Jesus” interpretation you are presenting. A good number of people who don’t believe Jesus ever existed simply think that the Church made up a pack of lies, nothing to do with solar mythology, but purely to create a power structure to control people. You can’t call all of those people your allies in your crusade on behalf of a solar myth of Jesus.
I have not made any case that Jesus actually existed. I have only reported that the vast majority of trained scholars of Hebrew, Greek, classical history, ancient religion, etc. think that Jesus actually existed (though not necessarily exactly as described in the Gospels). These scholars may be right, or they may be wrong, but their judgment is based on a mass of philological and historical data that was completely unavailable to the 17th, 18th, and 19th-century cranks you keep citing, and their judgment has been arrived at in an academic environment completely unlike any earlier one, i.e., an environment in which Christian, Jewish, and unbelieving scholars work together constructively on archaeological digs, manuscript family reconstructions, translations, historical background, and textual interpretations. These discussions have taken place in places of advanced study like Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Heidelberg, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Melbourne, etc. So, while no scholarly conclusion is beyond criticism, the consensus that there was a man Jesus, upon whose life and teachings Christianity was built, is not one to be taken lightly.
If it’s rejected, it should be rejected only by people who know the languages, the primary texts, the historical background, and the scholarly methods as well as the main body of scholars. But instead of that, you offer us writers who spent their entire lives, not actively teaching and researching at universities, not interacting daily with real scholars and submitting their ideas to the criticism of those scholars, but sitting alone in their bedrooms at home, reading their books, and inventing theories about a mythical Jesus.
What is at risk is the number of hospital beds. From the beginning, the strategy for dealing with the pandemic was to slow the spread of infection until a vaccine was available so that sick people could be treated. If we had done nothing we would have had more sick people than the health care system could treat leading to unnecessary deaths. Keeping sick kids out of hospitals, even if relatively few, could help with this problem. Even with vaccinations the initial delta and omicron waves almost led to a situation of rationed care in some parts of the US.
India showed us what could have happened. They had a massive spike in infections, and the result were people dying at home because the hospitals were full. The scramble for oxygen tanks was a sad period in history for India.
What were those same European groups saying during the Delta and Omicron waves?
The Tour-Farina debate sounds like such a dumpster fire that I don’t feel any inclination to watch it. From the descriptions I have heard, it is exactly what I expected to see given the snippets of debates I had seen between Farina and flat earthers. He’s just way too toxic, even if he gets the science right.
It’s actually the reverse of that. Scientists would be absolutely ecstatic if someone had really come up with evidence that would overturn the consensus. The problem is that the overwhelming number of people who claim to have overturned the consensus are cranks. This isn’t because they disagree with the consensus, but because they are cranks.
Recently I heard a physicist use this analogy. Imagine that you are a chef who has worked for 15 years in a kitchen and has one of the top rated restaurants in town. Someone storms into your kitchen and starts screaming at you. They say you’re a fraud, and that after doing 3 years of research they have come up with the perfect recipes that the chef community is just ignoring. They slam a take out box on the counter and dare you to look at the food they have made. You open the box and start laughing. It’s play dough shaped to look like spaghetti and meatballs. It’s not even food. The guy who busted into your kitchen starts raving and claims you can’t stand his discoveries so you are just trying to cover them up. You stand in horror realizing that this guy spent 3 years researching how to make the perfect recipe, after which he came up with play dough that looks like spaghetti. And he’s serious.
But it was also evident that people who weren’t seriously ill, including asymptomatic people, still shed virus, and that vaccinated people shed less virus even when infected. In the main, vaccination was a public health measure to minimize spread, not just an individual health measure.
This article from two years ago explains the rationale behind recommending the vaccine for young healthy people. It’s not just to prevent them from getting seriously ill or dying:
But many say they don’t plan to get vaccinated – which has bigger consequences than they might think.
“We really need to get people 20 to 49 years old vaccinated because they are the ones driving the pandemic right now,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at Emory University School of Medicine.
Yet about 36% of young adults under age 35 say they don’t plan on getting a Covid-19 vaccine, according to an April poll by Quinnipiac University.
That’s a major problem because:
– Even if life is already starting to look more normal, the US will never reach herd immunity if young adults don’t step it up. Health experts say we need at least 70% to 85% of the US population immunized to reach herd immunity and get this pandemic under control.
The first writer known to have seen any of the New Testament was Marcion of Sinope in maybe 130 - 150 CE. Of course, he believed that Jesus was spirit entity.
The religions that preceded Judaism and Christianity were based around veneration of the sun. Their myths about their gods and heroes were based on the stars. Similar Roman traditions and festivals of Bacchus place a greater emphasis on the seasonal cycle of cereals. The festivals of Dionysus are the most popular in antiquity, and the most popular themes are the drinking of wine as blood, the dying and rising of one who is half god and half man, the transformation of tears of mourning into gladness and singing, suffering transformed into the intoxication of new wine, the ecstatic meal, the fertility of spring and a new creation. And the response of New Testament scholars is “Oh but our religion is different because Jesus is real!” No, he isn’t. Christianity just rehashed the same old themes and motifs that were around for thousands of years before Christianity started to evolve from sun worshiping and agricultural salvation cults.
“Others with a greater show of reason take us for worshippers of the sun. …This suspicion took its rise from hence, because it was observed that Christians prayed with their faces towards the east.” CHAPTER XVI. 52 Tertullian’s Apology for the Christians. One has to consider that there was no Christian Bible at that time, no set dogma or doctrines and the people had different ideas about Jesus and the religion. Still today with the Bible there are two billion different ideas about who and what Jesus is or was. Gerald Massey wrote that December 25th for the birth of Jesus based on the birth of another solar deity Horus. Christian apologists respond by saying the Bible doesn’t bgive that date for the birth of Jesus so harumph, Massey has to be wrong - completely ignoring the fact that there was no Bible until the reign of Constantine - the true founder of Christianity.
Yeah no one has and no one ever will.
What mass of philological and historical data that was completely unavailable to the 17th, 18th, and 19th suddenly became available? Two or three examples. Name 'em and claim 'em™. The cranks are New Testament “scholars” not their critics. If you want to see real cranks look no further than Stephen C. Meyer and the other Christian apologists at the non-Discovery Institute.
Those “teachings” were present in other older religions and traditions and they were put in the mouth of the mythical Jesus by anonymous writers. The fact that we do not know who wrote them makes them the equivalent of Trump claiming “people are saying”. ‘’'Jesus has to be taken lightly because all the discussions and conclusions and beliefs will not make up for the fact that Jesus is a complete no-show in history. Without evidence historians can’t say anything about Jesus and the honest ones don’t. What has anyone found that could support the superstitions about Jesus or anything in the Bible in any archaeological digs, manuscript family reconstructions, translations, historical background, and textual interpretations? Two or three examples. Name 'em and claim 'em™. In “Unearthing the Bible: 101 Archaeological Discoveries That Bring the Bible to Life” by Titus Kennedy, there is not even one discovery that supports the historical, literal interpretation of the Bible. It’s biggest nothing burger ever. I should have known. What’d I miss?
Once again you step on a rake. The religion of Christianity came about from some anonymous author sitting alone in their bedroom at home and inventing theories about a mythical Jesus. “I received my message from no human source, and no one taught me. Instead, I received it by direct revelation from Jesus Christ.” - Galatians 1:12.
“Seen any” is an understatement, since he had seen a lot of it – his drastic elimination of NT books, for which he was excommunicated in 144, suggests that the canon was on its way to being established well before that.
Some phrases in the Didache (ca. 100) make it almost certain that the author had read the gospel of Matthew, and there is an expression in Barnabas, from about the same period, that many scholars see as referring to a specific verse in Matthew, 22:14. Also, Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 110) parallels “gospel” with “law” and “prophets” in a way that suggests he was referring to written documents, and he appears to have read Matt. 3:15.
So it looks as if written “gospels” were in existence by 100 at the latest, and that at least Matthew was in something like our present form by then. So Origen would not be one of the earliest readers of the Gospels; the Church had had them for several generations by the time he started studying them.
Which does not prove that he thought Christianity originated in solar religion (and in fact, Marcion did not teach that, as far as I know). And also, his teaching was condemned by the Roman church, meaning that the doctrine that Jesus was a “spirit entity” was not the standard doctrine of the church at the time. So the truth is the opposite of what you say: the “earliest readers and hearers” of the Gospel understood it in the way that you condemn, and it was not until heretics like Marcion came along that some people started reading it in the way that you champion.
Of course, if you can find other early discussions of the Gospels, that support your contention, you are welcome to produce them, but so far, you’ve produced only Origen, who is too late to count and whose views are an outlier among the Fathers, and Josephus, whom nobody counts as someone who had read the Gospels, and who never offered any interpretation of them, and Marcion, who did not represent but opposed the mainstream interpretation of the “earliest readers and hearers.” So right now, you have ZERO literary/historical evidence that the earliest readers and hearers of the Gospels understood Jesus as a solar deity, read the Gospels as a journey through the zodiac, etc.
The interpretation of the Gospels you are calling “early” does not appear until very late in the game, and in the form you present, is actually a modern interpretation, from the past few centuries, not an ancient one. It appears to come from academically unemployed autodidacts with neo-pagan sympathies, eager to read into the Bible their own astrological and mythological conceptions.
One of the most familiar symbols of deity in Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion is the winged solar disk. Notice portraits of Jesus especially from antiquity picture him with a solar disk behind his head. In detective work that is a called a clue. In the crucifixion mythology the crown of thorns represents the solar corona. The cross is what you see when you squint at the sun. This disk symbol also represents Shamash the Mesopotamian god of the sun. Adam, Noah, Moses and Solomon were all modeled after other solar deities. Shamash’s consort was Ishtar. In Judaism Shamash is the sun of righteousness, a solar deity and of course Ishtar was transformed to Easter by the Christians. The shammash is the candle that is used to light the other candles of the menorah during Chanukah. Even though we’re not religious my family had the menorah during Chanukah. In Malachi we read: και ανατελει υμιν τοις φοβουμεωοις το ονομα μου ηλιος δικαινσυης (sun of righteousness) και ιασις εν ταις πτερυξιν αυτου, και εξελεθσεσθε και σκιρτησετε ωε μοσχαρια εκ δεσμων ανειμενα. Christians switched the order of the Old Testament books in the Christian Bible so that Malachi and the reference to the “Sun of Righteousness” would come right before the New Testament.
Solar cults were still quite popular during the second, third, and fourth centuries. Sun-worshippers formed one of the biggest groups in the religious world in which Christianity was fighting for a place. Converts and their money and property which was often willed to the Church meant wealth, political power for the churchmen of Christianity. So, for the first few centuries’ people worshiping Jesus as a solar deity were welcomed in Christian churches. We do know of analogues between Christ and the sun. Like Shamash he was designated the “Sun of Righteousness” and Christmas falls on the date of the Saturnalia, an ancient Roman festival honoring the agricultural god Saturn. The complaint of Pope Leo in the fifth century that worshippers in St. Peter’s turned away from the altar and faced the door so that they could adore the rising sun is not without its significance in regard to the number of Christians who were adherents of some form of sun-worship.
You call yourself a scholar of religion yet you know absolutely nothing about sun worship, solar cults or the evolution of religion. In your creationist worldview nothing evolves, things just pop into existence all at once. There’s no Christianity then poof a magic man appears and all of a sudden, he’s followed around by thousands of people. Then he dies and resurrects and his disciples make an emotional speech and 3000 more people all convert in one day! In a city of no more than 10,000. Then Peter and John were arrested by Jewish religious leaders who did not have the authority to arrest anyone. That just doesn’t happen in the real world, a world Christians admit they want nothing to do with and even claim they’re not from here. I’m not at all surprised you and other New Testament “scholars” know less than nothing about sun worship in antiquity. When Christians do find out about the true roots of their religion, they always end up rejecting it.
News flash: Sarah Huckabee Sanders flips out over request to remove Cross drawing at Governor’s Mansion. You seem to think you’re an expert on the subject of religion yet you know absolutely nothing about sun worship, solar cults or the evolution of religion. The only reason we have Christianity as the dominant religion in the West is because the emperor Constantine had a vision of a cross and I’d be willing to bet he got it from looking directly at the sun. That is if Eusebius didn’t make the whole story up like everything else he wrote about Christianity.
The solar cross is a cross inside a circle that represents the sun. The solar cross is a symbol of cultures that date back to the Neolithic Age. Of course, this symbol could not have been borrowed by Christianity because Christian writers, who we must always trust implicitly as you obviously do, concocted a story in which Constantine’s mom went to Palestine had a temple to Venus or perhaps Jupiter torn down and replaced with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and low and behold the true cross Jesus was crucified on was discovered! She also found the nails Jesus was impaled with and even the tunic he was wearing! For this she was granted sainthood and her bones were divided up and sent to various Christian churches for their relic collections. Once Christianity became the dominant religion and the money started rolling in and the church could fabricate, I mean search for all kinds of relics. Every church had them. If you wanted to see some of the straw from Jesus’ manger, vials of his, a martyr’s or even a disciple’s blood, a piece of the crown of thorns, one of the 26 burial shrouds of Jesus the church “discovered” even a piece of the sancta camisia that Mary was wearing when she gave birth to Jesus, and even pieces of the swaddling cloths she put Jesus in right after he was born, they were all available to see! The Church also had part of the robe Jesus had on right before the crucifixion. And get this a Catholic website called Treasures of the Church has over 150 relics that prove Jesus existed including some from Joseph, the Twelve Apostles and Mary Magdalene and even the veil won by Mary at Jesus crucifixion! Now you might ask me how can I deny that Jesus existed in the face of all this scientifically verified evidence.
If Christianity is the one true religion, and didn’t just get lucky that Constantine picked it for his universal religion why would they have had to fabricate “evidence” to prove its truth? Suppose Constantine had a vision of the rock Mithras was born in, Apollo, or the tree Attis was tied to. The Christians of the past and today would still be pagans but would not be called Christians. Religious scholars and apologists would have written lots of scripture borrowing miracle stories from other cultures at will and calling these writings sacred and the Word of God. The death and renewal of Attis would be celebrated by drinking wine as blood and eating bull flesh. His birth would be celebrated on December 25th and his death or the Hilaria, on the 25th of March. We would likely be using the Zoroastrian calendar instead of the Gregorian. Zeus would be the father God, not Yahweh. Some guy named Paul on the road to Damascus or somewhere would claim to have had a vision of the resurrected Attis on his way to persecute His followers and had a complete 180 and became a follower of Attis. And call me crazy but if I told you Attis was not a real person and he never existed you would call me crazy. The entire religion of Christianity would not exist but for someone’s vision of a cross. You don’t know how close you came to being an avid defender of the religion of Attis or some other God instead of Christianity.
If you think that @John_Harshman is an “avid defender” of Christianity, then you really haven’t been paying attention. Do you believe that everyone who disagrees with your bullshit is a Christian apologist?
Misterme987 raises a good question. There is an unfortunate tendency of people to assume that if A agrees with B in criticizing C, A must agree with B on other things. Boris assumes that because John Harshman agrees with “Christian apologists” that Boris’s “solar religion origin of Christianity” is without foundation, that Harshman must be a Christian apologist.
This has happened elsewhere. Some people have assumed that because David Berlinski criticizes Darwinism, and because Christian creationists criticize Darwinism, David Berlinski must be a Christian creationist. To this unwarranted assumption, made by a writer named Baccus in the pages of Commentary (March 2003), Berlinski wittily replied:
“No LESS perplexing is that S.L. BACCUS should believe that I- of all people- have written a brief for
the existence of the Christian God, and that my ultimate aim “appears to be getting Christian beliefs taught in our schools.” I urge Mr. Baccus to consider my name, my devotion to Zion, and my dark Semitic good looks.”
And lest such an indirect statement should prove too subtle for some readers, Berlinski is more explicit in the opening of The Deniable Darwin:
“The Discovery Institute does not propose to inaugurate a form of theocratic kingship in the United States, and far from being a Christian fundamentalist, I am myself a secular Jew, one who has faithfully maintained since the age of 13 a remarkable indifference to the religious life.”
One of the marks of the crank is that he is unable to make subtle distinctions. The crank sees all opposition to his views as coming from the same blind, evil opposition. Boris lumps together everyone here who opposes his views in any way, and for whatever reasons. And now that he has demonstrated such complete obliviousness to his environment as to charge John Harshman with defending traditional Christianity, it’s clear that he is so far off the rails that no further conversation with him here will do any good. He did not come here to exchange ideas or to learn anything. He came here to preach his secular sermon about the “real” history of Christian religion. The only way to respond now is for everyone to file out of the church building, leaving the preacher speaking to an empty space.
That David Berlsinski is sometimes mistaken for a “Christian Creationist” is hard surprising, given (i) he is most-well-known for associating with a bunch of expicitly-Christian ID-Creationists, and (ii) the lack of any obvious competing motivation for his ill-informed (given that his sole scientific experience was once being a research assistant at a Biology Department) criticisms of Evolutionary Biology.
I suspect that a better explanation for his criticism is towering egotism. Berlinski seems the sort whose inflated opinion of his own intellectual skills is such that he would have a tendency to believe that any explanation that he cannot comprehend must be false. This would probably predispose him against the Theory of Evolution. Add to that the fact that his criticism garners him the sort of uncritical praise from the ID echo-chamber that he has failed to garner elsewhere – his academic career has been very mediocre at best --and decidedly nomadic, and his literary career has garnered him at best mixed reviews, with Publishers Weekly describing one of his books as containing “ostentatious erudition and metaphysical pseudo-profundities”.[1]
Like so many in the DI, he is a complete-nonentity outside the ID echo-chamber.
I gave evidence that Judaism and Christianity evolved from sun worship. I asked what more evidence you need. You employed the Ham Hightail. I guess my case stands.