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Jesus: Truth Or Myth?

Saw a lovely Sky Arts programme in the week, 'Passions', about the artist Alison Lapper's admiration for William Blake.
Lapper is herself an inspiration and it was interesting to see how caught up with Blake she became at art school, as of course many artists have before and still do today.

I was going to mention Blake's vision of Christ's visit to England, as described in the poem Jerusalem, and how there arose a mediaeval myth about Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. In the programme Lapper meets a fellow Blake enthusiast who believes all this and claims to have met the man himself, while walking along the holiest street in London.

However, it all got a bit intense - too much to write down - so I'm going to watch the programme again later. I love Blake.
 
escargot1 said:
Saw a lovely Sky Arts programme in the week, 'Passions', about the artist Alison Lapper's admiration for William Blake.
Lapper is herself an inspiration and it was interesting to see how caught up with Blake she became at art school, as of course many artists have before and still do today.

I was going to mention Blake's vision of Christ's visit to England, as described in the poem Jerusalem, and how there arose a mediaeval myth about Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. In the programme Lapper meets a fellow Blake enthusiast who believes all this and claims to have met the man himself, while walking along the holiest street in London.

However, it all got a bit intense - too much to write down - so I'm going to watch the programme again later. I love Blake.
Click to expand...

Sounds great that :) I'm a big Blake fan as well :)


The below is a documentary I found very interesting and enjoyable, postulating the question - "Was Jesus a Buddhist monk?"

 
Coastaljames said:
Sounds great that :) I'm a big Blake fan as well :)
Click to expand...

It's on the Sky arts catch-up bit on satellite. If you can't get that I bet you can hunt it down online. WELL worth the effort.
 
Tablet thought to have guarded tombs after Jesus’s death may not be what it seems

Source: sciencemag.org
Date: 28 February, 2020

A marble tablet warning grave robbers away from tombs soon after the disappearance of Jesus’s body may not be what it seems. That’s the conclusion of a new chemical analysis of the marble, which finds that the object was quarried in Greece, not the Middle East. Instead, the famous “Nazareth inscription” was likely created to guard the grave of a Greek tyrant who died a few decades before Christ.

A former curator at the Louvre, Wilhelm Froehner, acquired the tablet in Paris in 1878, probably from an antiquities dealer from Greece or the Middle East, and kept it in his private collection until his death. He left behind a cryptic note that it “came from Nazareth.” That led the French archaeologist Franz Cumont to propose in 1930 that it was connected to Jesus’s disappearance.

Other clues come from the 22 lines of Greek inscribed on the 60-centimeter-tall tablet. These include an “Edict of Caesar,” in which he threatens capital punishment for anyone who robs the grave or “casts forth the persons buried there.” This suggested to some biblical scholars that the tablet represented the Roman emperor’s reaction to the news that Jesus’s body was missing from his tomb—and to the controversial claims of his resurrection. The tablet was considered by many biblical scholars to be the oldest physical artifact connected to Christianity, says epigraphist John Bodel of Brown University, who was not involved in the new study.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...-after-jesus-s-death-may-not-be-what-it-seems
 
More on the Nazareth Inscription's origins.

A mysterious tablet bearing a Roman emperor’s orders from around 2,000 years ago has long been thought by some scholars to refer to
early Christian claims of Jesus’ resurrection from a tomb in the Middle Eastern village of Nazareth. But new research has opened up an entirely different possibility —that the marble slab issued a general demand for law and order after Greek islanders vandalized the tomb of their recently deceased ruler.

For the Christian theory to be correct, the document bearing 22 lines of Greek text — known as the Nazareth Inscription — would probably have been written on a piece of Middle Eastern marble. That also would make the tablet the oldest object linked to early Christianity.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nazareth-inscription-origins-may-refute-ties-jesus-resurrection
 
ramonmercado said:
More on the Nazareth Inscription's origins.

A mysterious tablet bearing a Roman emperor’s orders from around 2,000 years ago has long been thought by some scholars to refer to
early Christian claims of Jesus’ resurrection from a tomb in the Middle Eastern village of Nazareth. But new research has opened up an entirely different possibility —that the marble slab issued a general demand for law and order after Greek islanders vandalized the tomb of their recently deceased ruler.

For the Christian theory to be correct, the document bearing 22 lines of Greek text — known as the Nazareth Inscription — would probably have been written on a piece of Middle Eastern marble. That also would make the tablet the oldest object linked to early Christianity.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nazareth-inscription-origins-may-refute-ties-jesus-resurrection
Click to expand...

Speaking as a Christian archaeologist... the new research seems much more likely to me!

Attested provenance (sounds well dodgy) starts 1878, inscription first published 1930.

I'll go with the stone analysis I think.
 
Just a fake like all these kinda things, surely. Why would an edict be “in stone”? Vindolanda tablets which are military documents etc are on bits of wood.

The usual dodgy provenance for these things... a randomer “found” it in Paris in 1878? I’m surprised anyone’s even giving it the slightest bit of attention apart from as a fake and nothing to link it with the Middle East at all.

Also, zero evidence for Jesus and to convince me this was real, someone would have to find hard proof he was, too. Sorry no disrespect to Christians intended. But... come on! At best he has to be a conflation of various zealots who were a PITA to the Romans. Also why would it be in Greek if it was from Nazareth? Are there extant, provenanced tablets with similar functions? I’m guessing yer average grave pillager wouldn’t even be literate let alone in a foreign to them language. The average middle class European Victorian antiquarian on the other hand, would have a grasp of Greek probably but little likelihood of fluency in Aramaic...

I call poppycock.
 
rynner2 said:
We have a lot of Jesus threads - so, eeny, meeny, miny... Here!
Sir Elton John says Jesus was super-intelligent gay man
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8523538.stm
Click to expand...
Actually Jesus was also the product of the first sanctioned gay marriage performed in Judaism. This is because we know that the virgin Mary didn't tell lies, and so Jesus was the product of parthenogenesis (women getting pregnant spontaneously), which is extremely rare. We also know that in cases of parthenogenesis that the offspring is always female due to the mother having an XX chromosomal loading. For Jesus to come out male would require Mary to have a Y chromosome in her genetics, meaning that she was a mosaic hermaphrodite, which follows within doctrine, as Mary was born without sin, and Original Sin applies to both men and women, but not necessarily to hermaphrodites. This means that Mary was neither man nor woman, and therefore was effectively a Transgender woman, but Joseph married her, which makes him gay, and that means Jesus is the product of a gay marriage.
 
AlchoPwn said:
Actually Jesus was also the product of the first sanctioned gay marriage performed in Judaism. This is because we know that the virgin Mary didn't tell lies, and so Jesus was the product of parthenogenesis (women getting pregnant spontaneously), which is extremely rare. We also know that in cases of parthenogenesis that the offspring is always female due to the mother having an XX chromosomal loading. For Jesus to come out male would require Mary to have a Y chromosome in her genetics, meaning that she was a mosaic hermaphrodite, which follows within doctrine, as Mary was born without sin, and Original Sin applies to both men and women, but not necessarily to hermaphrodites. This means that Mary was neither man nor woman, and therefore was effectively a Transgender woman, but Joseph married her, which makes him gay, and that means Jesus is the product of a gay marriage.
Click to expand...
Amazing logic!
 
AlchoPwn said:
Actually Jesus was also the product of the first sanctioned gay marriage performed in Judaism. This is because we know that the virgin Mary didn't tell lies, and so Jesus was the product of parthenogenesis (women getting pregnant spontaneously), which is extremely rare. We also know that in cases of parthenogenesis that the offspring is always female due to the mother having an XX chromosomal loading. For Jesus to come out male would require Mary to have a Y chromosome in her genetics, meaning that she was a mosaic hermaphrodite, which follows within doctrine, as Mary was born without sin, and Original Sin applies to both men and women, but not necessarily to hermaphrodites. This means that Mary was neither man nor woman, and therefore was effectively a Transgender woman, but Joseph married her, which makes him gay, and that means Jesus is the product of a gay marriage.
Click to expand...

Not true I’m afraid. Parthenogenesis can produce male offspring. Mind you, you have to be a Komodo dragon to do it.
 
escargot said:
Saw a lovely Sky Arts programme in the week, 'Passions', about the artist Alison Lapper's admiration for William Blake.
Lapper is herself an inspiration and it was interesting to see how caught up with Blake she became at art school, as of course many artists have before and still do today.

I was going to mention Blake's vision of Christ's visit to England, as described in the poem Jerusalem, and how there arose a mediaeval myth about Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. In the programme Lapper meets a fellow Blake enthusiast who believes all this and claims to have met the man himself, while walking along the holiest street in London.

However, it all got a bit intense - too much to write down - so I'm going to watch the programme again later. I love Blake.
Click to expand...

Me too, but I bet he was a bit punchable in real life.
 
AlchoPwn said:
Actually Jesus was also the product of the first sanctioned gay marriage performed in Judaism. This is because we know that the virgin Mary didn't tell lies, and so Jesus was the product of parthenogenesis (women getting pregnant spontaneously), which is extremely rare. We also know that in cases of parthenogenesis that the offspring is always female due to the mother having an XX chromosomal loading. For Jesus to come out male would require Mary to have a Y chromosome in her genetics, meaning that she was a mosaic hermaphrodite, which follows within doctrine, as Mary was born without sin, and Original Sin applies to both men and women, but not necessarily to hermaphrodites. This means that Mary was neither man nor woman, and therefore was effectively a Transgender woman, but Joseph married her, which makes him gay, and that means Jesus is the product of a gay marriage.
Click to expand...

And was Syrian with a Greek name. Versatile!
 
Frideswide said:
Do note that many of us wouldn't give this the time of day! If we knew about it; it's hard to describe how unimportant stuff like this is to us :)
Click to expand...

I just didn’t want to come across as rude. But yes. Dodgy nineteenth century antiquarians are very, very interesting!
 
tuco said:
Maybe viruses are the new lightning bolts ?
Click to expand...
More true than you might suspect. A number of Christian miracles have involved cities being saved thanks to divine intervention via disease during sieges.
 
My daughter came to visit me last weekend. She works in a school for chilldren with Special Needs, and was telling me about some of the awful medical problems some of the chilldren suffer -particularly a rare brain illness that makes the child want to hurt itself, really badly.
My daughter said (very firmly) "I don't believe in God".

I've given it a lot of thought.
If humans were given (or have developed) Free Will -i.e. the ability to make their own decisions, we can't expect "God" to be a magician who makes everything come right. We either have control, or we don't.

I still have every respect for Jesus , and I reckon he did exist. I believe he could heal, and the simple non materialistic life style he advocated really makes sense to me.
BUT he referred to God as his "Father". I find that difficult!
Jesus prayed just like any other human ,that his imminent suffering might be taken away -but it wasn't!

I was mulling this over earlier, and wondered how I would feel if I substituted the word 'Father 'for 'Source'.
I definitely believe that Jesus WAS seen by Mary on Easter Sunday, but if, as I've mentioned elsewhere, he said "Don't touch me- I haven't yet returned to the Source" that makes more sense to me.
(No don't believe Jesus was a sacrifice for our sins, but he may have felt that he was! He grew up in a culture that belived in sacrificing living creatures to atone for sins)

Sorry for the long and possibly boring post!

p.s. All stories get exaggerated in the telling -did Jesus walk on water? Who knows!
 
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Who would have been writing the contemporary records?
Not the Romans -Jesus was nothing to them -just a nuisance! (I did Latin A level and my ex husband went on to do a university degree in it.)

The Jews who held any sort of position simply wanted him forgotten and removed as a trouble maker.

We've only got the Bible to go on, and that was probably written a long time after the actual events. (With the views / and maybe exagerations that had been passed on word of mouth)

If you read the letters of St Paul (carefully!) Paul had a great following, and in some factions was considered more important than Jesus.

I'm not really trying to argue - I certainly see things differently from, say, 50 or 60 years ago.
I'm just saying "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!" :)
 
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