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Jesus: Truth Or Myth?

Hugo,

couldn't agree more. That's pretty much they way I understood it too. If Da Vinci's allusions were so well understood, why was he not prosecuted as say Gallileo was?

LD
 
One of the things I've often wondered, and has never been properly addressed by Picknet and Prince in their sequence of books, unless I missed the point somewhere, which is entirely possible :D
 
lorddrakul said:
If Da Vinci's allusions were so well understood, why was he not prosecuted as say Gallileo was?
Maybe he'd kept hold of the negatives? ;)
 
Da Vinci

Do you know the references hidden in goth-punk music, or the abstruse allusions made by scholars quarreling behind a façade of good will, or any of a number of other in-group codes? Of course not. Is the Vatican even now hip to the nuaces of rap culture or for that matter even aware that it's the 21st Century and not the 10th?

That's how.
 
Re: Da Vinci

FraterLibre said:
Do you know the references hidden in goth-punk music, or the abstruse allusions made by scholars quarreling behind a façade of good will, or any of a number of other in-group codes? Of course not. Is the Vatican even now hip to the nuaces of rap culture or for that matter even aware that it's the 21st Century and not the 10th?

How often we disregard or fail to notice what is right under our noses.

Witness Tresham Lodge .

Not such a subtle signal there!
 
Good

Good example, yes. Gematria and suchlike are everywhere back then, and one is forced to wonder what we are even now missing eve as we gave with eyes that cannot see?
 
Best place to hide is plain view, I would agree. The Johanite heresy wasn't really that much of an unknown sub-culture though, since a goodly number were peeled, spiked and burned for it. Gloria Dei, of course :D

The waters have become a bit muddied since dear Helena B threw her had into the ring with 'Isis Unveiled' (Pt 2 Ch 8 for those who have it ) and the accretions of pseudo-freemasonry.

So, back to my question. Who got nailed to the tree; Loon monkey troublemaker or rich woman's husband?
 
If

If either was, 'twas the loon, as the bloodline of the annointed one supposedly lingers still.

And we don't know but maybe his full name was Jesus "Lee" bin Harvey-Oswald, hm?
 
Indeed... the qi'ran asserts that Jesus was either not crucified, an imposter taking his place, or he survived the crucifixion. either way, we have a living man rather than a died-risen god.

If Jesus, rich woman's husband, did get crucified and died, potentially his bloodline could have continued via any offspring, hence the nice little earner that Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh have had since 1976, with sundry other pale imitations down the years.

I like the idea that the essenses were a buddhist offshoot and Jesus survived and went back to India, with wife et al. Unlikely I know, but it just appeals :)

In the end, Jesus is still a legend, rather than a myth, like Arthur Pendragon, possibly based on one man, several men, or no-one. Its hard enough to get a clear picture of Kennedy or Hitler or Mother Theresa, all of who lived in living memory, let alone one poorly documented (from a historic POV) individual who died nearly 2000 years ago.
 
Projector Blues

And of course each of us projects onto the image or notion of Jesus the Christ what ever we want or need this image to be and thus, even if he was not real in any physical or historical sense, he/it can still be real in a godly or spiritual sense, insofar as fulfilling the needs and wants of those who choose to conjure him.

"This myth of Jesus hath served us well," as Pope Pius IX wrote.
 
Why must Jesus have been more than one person? It's a rather odd assumption, which is as hard to 'prove' as the obverse. If he was a single man, there's no reason he couldn't have been of royal blood, a rabble rouser and a mystic at the same time - perhaps you find that hard to believe (which is what all this is about anyway), but it's just as possible.

If you take the theory that the gospels are all taken from a single source to be true (the Q gospel) then it would make no sense that the gospels are describing different men.

It's kind of odd that this crackpot theory I had at Uni is beiong taken seriously (if that's the right word ;)) by academics and journalists - the "Jesus goes to India and is trained by Yogis, returns, battles Rome, fakes his own death and disappears" theory.

Interesting, perhaps, to note that Jesus is the only religious leader to get this kind of attention, oh actually I suppose Moses gets the same treatment in the Akhenaten=Moses debate, but Mohammed, Gotama Siddharta, Guru Nanak etc don't recieve the same attention. Is this because we live in a post-faith society, or because somehow we take pleasure in undermining Christian beliefs? I for one have been fascinated by the character of the Christ since a young age (and believe it or not I went to sunday school!), what do others think?
 
Off Thread Comment

I think the money on the Id of Moses is now Akenaten's brother
Thutmosis, rather than the man himself.
Moses isn't actually a name, at least in that period of hebraic history, and is more correctly Moshe in hebrew, literally meaning 'son'. In ancient egyptian, as far as we can tell, the 'sh; would be tansliterated as 's' so it becomes 'Mose' and again the word 'son'. 'Son of' is 'Mosis'.
There is every sign that somehow Thutmosis fell from favour and vanished from the patchy history in the period prior to the reign of Akenaten. He certainly was not buried in the tomb that was being made for him. He is the only missing 'royal pince' figure in a time of egyptian disaster (the explosion of Santorini would spoil most of the area's day for some time. Imagine living in the South East of England and Paris explodes leaving nothing but a crater, and you have the jist) I find it unlikely that, if Thutmosis had converted to the Aten cult of then Apiru slaves in the south (Upper Egypt), he would have simply dropped Thut from his name without adding Aten, which is the argument I have seen naming Thutmosis as Moses.

However, take that for what its worth.

On Thread comment

If Jesus is a legend, rather than a myth, why shouldn't the figure described in the Gospels be an accretion of a number of Teachers, attributed to a single historic figure?

As to Q being the single source of the Gospels. Q contains a lot of what happens in Matt and Mark, but Luke and John both contain diversions from Q, indicating that it was a source, but not their primary one
 
dot23 said:
Interesting, perhaps, to note that Jesus is the only religious leader to get this kind of attention, oh actually I suppose Moses gets the same treatment in the Akhenaten=Moses debate, but Mohammed, Gotama Siddharta, Guru Nanak etc don't recieve the same attention. Is this because we live in a post-faith society, or because somehow we take pleasure in undermining Christian beliefs? I for one have been fascinated by the character of the Christ since a young age (and believe it or not I went to sunday school!), what do others think?
I see dot23's point on this one.

I wonder if one of the problems is that 'St' Paul seems to have had a great deal of influence in re-shaping the beliefs surrounding the original Jesus (as known to Peter and the other contemporaries know to Paul), in such a way that he seems to be two different people. One radical Jewish, and one more 'Universal' with a message palatable to a wider Roman World?

Given the anti-Jewish slant that's also been slipped in, apparently also by Paul, seemingly to allow the Romans to feel better about themselves, then you can get a very distorted message.

Nonetheless, I do get the impression that originally, there was a man called Jesus (or similiar), who was inspired by a kind of Divine Insight and whose personal effect on those around him was very profound.

I don't think he was alone, Siddharta (the Buddha), Mohamed, and others (I'd include Martin Luther King and Bob Marley) have been inspired in a similiar way. What's different about the Christian religion, is that none of the others claim that there prophet was actually, 'God.'

Now, making mortals Gods was very fashionable in the Roman Empire at the time. The Cæsars, Augustus, Caligula and Claudius all got promoted to divine status, around about that time, so the idea a man could be mortal and a God was not unusual.

The former 'Saul of Tarsas', Paul, was a 'joiner' par excellence, he firstly became a Roman citizen through and through. Then he became an Apostle and brought a lot of the Roman belief system with him and remoulded his new God's image, as an amalgam of Jewish and Roman/pagan beliefs.

What was new (or reinvented after the previous attempt by Pharoah Akhnaten) was coupling such a concept with the belief in a single God. Powerful medicine. Hard to lay on the shoulders of a mere bolshy, Jewish mortal prophet, like Jesus, for whom such a concept would have been anathema, and the joins show.
 
Pardon my bad typing from memory. Its Tuthmosis. Tuth=Thoth, and is therefore an old god that Tuthmosis is symbolically renouncing by truncating his name. As I say, I find the argument unconvincing, since, like Akenaten, the Pharoah formerly known as Akenamun, he would have dropped 'Aten' in to replace Tuth, becoming 'Son of Aten'. I can concieve, however that such an idea would have been an anathema to the hebraic teachers down the line, and when they made Moses a 'local boy, done good' they quietly edited his name...


*edit*
Have I gone slightly mad, or has Dot posted a reply about Tuthmoses after Andro's comment?

*second edit*
This is now very odd. Apparnetly I replied to Dots posting before he made it.
 
Your not goin mad Hugo, I just deleted my previous post so I could add this one in the correct place (which you done mess up good ;))

Androman - Indeed, and commentators (don't ask me to name names it was a long time ago!) have floated the idea that the threat to roman rule posed by an alernative god-king to their own emperor was at the root of his crucifiction, all that stuff about freeing one guy a year at passover and the Sanhedrin baying for his blood is just crap, basically, and was neither a tradition or an invention which lasted (otherwise there would have been queues of crazy heads lining up for crucifiction on the basis that you were transformed into the living god, "one cross each, line on the left" :)).

Indeed, I blame Paul for almost everything that followed, him and St John the "so called" Divine, as it is the acts of the apostles and letters which are most often used to create the stultifying, morally dubious Christianity of Catholicism (no insult meant to catholics, just see it that way). If Paul had stayed Saul, Mirianism (as in Magdelen) would have flourished, and Chrisitianity may have remained an obscure mystery cult, or become something utterly different. I too consider Jesus to have been a historical man, probably leader of the Essenes, and probably his brother James was the rabble rousing one. As to conflating leaders, perhaps, but in a region like Palestine (especially at the time) having anyone espousing the same ideas was enough to stand out in the crowd, yet no other name is brought forward as a suggetsion about who we might be conflating with - either that, or their were a lot of religious loonies all called Jeshua ;)

Hugo - Interesting about Thutmosis - been to his tomb, ya know ;) And very beautiful and, as you say, empty it was too (I felt as though the painter had just left the room, not that thousands of years had passed!). I think it highly plausible that he could have been Moses, as the political turmoil resulting from the relocation of the capital as well as the religious uproar caused by the Pharoah changing religions could have lead to a mass exodus. Actually, reading that paragraph I'm not so sure now...

if Thutmosis had converted to the Aten cult of then Apiru slaves in the south (Upper Egypt), he would have simply dropped Thut from his name without adding Aten, which is the argument I have seen naming Thutmosis as Moses.

Don't quite get that bi tho' - Thut has a specific meaning, and why remove it from your name. Also if you've joined a cult, why not add the name of your new god to your name, as in Akhenaten (the living Aten, I believe the tranlation runs)?
 
As to Dot's comment. Giving Mohammed that kind of treat ment would
a) wind up with someone trying to kill you
b) not get mainstream coverage since we are, for better or worse, a judeo-christian society.

IIRC there has been a book recently reviewed by the FT espousing the idea that Mohammed didn't exist in the form claimed by Islam, but as a central figure for crowd control. I've not seen the book but that was the jist.
 
one thing really annoying about editing posts is you cannot see what other's have written whilst trying to do so - aaargh :rolleyes:

Anywaay, just to try and get my head on straight, Jesus is not the only spiritual leader who is both revealer of truth and a god, two quick examples, both of which are entangled in this whole web someplace or other (no pun intended, but feel free to look up those as search terms anyway ;)): Krishna and Osiris.

Krishna* is accused by some revisionists of being a thinly-veiled version of the Christ due to the similarity of names and the time frame in which the BG (see below) appears. However the moral lessons he teaches are very different from Christs, being as they are arguments for tradition, duty and family over individual enlightenment. He is, however, a moral arbiter, a man, a prophet and a god in one man, so there ya go.

Osiris is credited with the introduction of agriculture, had a mystery cult surounding him which is, I believe, still pretty mysterious :D He also gets chopped into itty bitty pieces, only to be reborn after he is saved by his sister/wife Isis. The possibility that the rebirth section of the Jesus legend comes from this is a strong one, and ties in with Akhenaten - if the jewish people were indeed formed, in part, from freed Egyptian slaves, it stands to reason that the faith of their old masters would run underground and emerge somewhere later on (or at least it's feasible). So to conflate Jesus with the reborn Osiris (whether he came back from the dead or not) was a smart move by the early church - no one wants to die, and to hear that someone has come back to life, like the world famous Osiris, becomes more plausable in a region and to a people who are used to that legend. However the myth about Osiris was powerful in part because he was murdered by his brother, Seth, so you'd have to conflate Judas with Seth, which is more problematic.

To return to the Thutmosis thing - what confused me as I was writing before is that one of the main reasons one could compare Akhenaten with Moses was because of their shared monotheism. Now whether in fact Thutmoses was the brains in the family, I don't know, but it was Akhenaten who had the temples built, who changed Egyptian art, etc (unless he was down in name only whilst his brother really ruled). Plus, Hugo, you say that he basically disappears from the scene as though that means he was the one that fled persecution (.'. Moses leaving Egypt) although in fact I imagine all of Akhenaten's followers were either killed or fled when his rule collapsed. The violence can still be seen today, all around Luxor any building with reference to him has been methodically scratched out, few examples of art relating to him remain and he was excised entirely from official Egyptian history. It seems more likely to me that the names of the two men were confused by Jewish scholars in the period afterwards, and the two brothers became one man. Opinions?

And finally, Mohammed (peace be upon him) - as you say fatwah's have been released for less, and the pontiff, as far as I'm aware, has not issued a death threat for some time, so your probably right on that count. Plus he's more recent, more documentary evidence, and the Qu'ran is meant to be the exact word of Allah, and thererefore it would be a very foolhardy Imam or Caliph who edited the words of the Qu'ran, as he'd suffer an unpleasant fate. Plus he's just the messenger, a pawn in Allah's game, and his personal contribution is not really interpretted much. I'd still be very interested to read any information about the origins of the Qu'ran and the motivations of Mohammed (PBUH) if you have any.


*footnoterphone: (for those not in the know, Krishna is an 'avatar' or Vishnu, the god who maintains the cosmic order and appears in the Bahagvad Gita - Oppenheimer quoted him when he said "I am become death: the destroyer of worlds")

OT alert - Thelemic references in the Star Wars trilogy has a mention of Osiris, plus is pretty funny reading...
 
I have to agree here, there is ample evidence for "Jesus" being a conglomerate of several characters. All you have to do is look at the entire Barrabas episode. Which one was the rablle rouser and which was the "Jesus" of Catholocism?
 
One more Tuthmosis post and we should get our own thread :)

Basically, he disappeared before Akenaten took the throne. He never was a follower, the implication being he went native the slaves.
 
lorddrakul said:
I have to agree here, there is ample evidence for "Jesus" being a conglomerate of several characters. All you have to do is look at the entire Barrabas episode. Which one was the rablle rouser and which was the "Jesus" of Catholocism?
There's also a possibility that Jesus Ben Rabbi and Jesus Barabbus, are one and the same. Some revisionist may have split him into two, because one's called for by his followers and the public and one's crucified by the Romans.

The whole episode might have been, either dreamed up, or adjusted, to show that the Jewish locals rejected Jesus and that it wasn't really anything personal on the part of the Romans. ;)
 
dot23 said:
*footnoterphone: (for those not in the know, Krishna is an 'avatar' or Vishnu, the god who maintains the cosmic order and appears in the Bahagvad Gita - Oppenheimer quoted him when he said "I am become death: the destroyer of worlds")

Sorry to be pedantic but Oppenheimer was talking about Shiva (the destroyer) who along with Vishnu (the maintainer) and Brahma (the creator) make up the Hindu "trinity"
 
AndroMan said:
The former 'Saul of Tarsas', Paul, was a 'joiner' par excellence, he firstly became a Roman citizen through and through. Then he became an Apostle and brought a lot of the Roman belief system with him and remoulded his new God's image, as an amalgam of Jewish and Roman/pagan beliefs.
According to what I've read, he could hardly have avoided being a Citizen if he came from Tarsus: in that period, the city was thoroughly Greek, with just a hint of the Levant and a smidgin of points further East. Roman norms would have been readily assimilated by anyone from Tarsus after the Roman occupation of Judea, and Saul would almost certainly have been born into it, rather than having had to 'join'. You also neglect to note the period when he joined Herod's Tax Collectors/Secret Police (same thing in those days) prior to the whole (IMO) hilarious 'Road To Damascus' thing.

Sidebar: I noted during my mid-80s 'psycho-babble' phase that Saul/Paul's entire history prior to -and possibly including- becoming an apostle reads like a deeply insecure, possibly disturbed, person's search for (externalized) self-acceptance and inner-peace, in the form of approbation from those in authority (Rome, Herod and Rome, and then God). :)

Cap it with an episode of hysterical blindness and a subsequent stay at Qmran (which according to some ref. I heard on some TV documentary about the Judean Rebellion, a contemporary -Roman- commentator described as a "place of refuge for those worn down by life" (IIRC: some phrase very much like that) -ie. a Resthome for the Acutely Nervous and Terminally Bewildered), and he sounds very much like A Man With Issues... :D
 
Zygon said:
According to what I've read, he could hardly have avoided being a Citizen if he came from Tarsus: in that period, the city was thoroughly Greek, with just a hint of the Levant and a smidgin of points further East. Roman norms would have been readily assimilated by anyone from Tarsus after the Roman occupation of Judea, and Saul would almost certainly have been born into it, rather than having had to 'join'. You also neglect to note the period when he joined Herod's Tax Collectors/Secret Police (same thing in those days) prior to the whole (IMO) hilarious 'Road To Damascus' thing. [/size]
I've always been under the impression you had to apply to join.

The tax collector and coat holding period of his life, I was taking as a given.

The bottom line is that he seems to have been a fully paid up Roman Citizen of the flag waving, and Jew baiting, variety, before his conversion.

And then he spent the rest of his life trying to bring Rome kicking and screaming into the First Millenium and give it a human face.
 
HI

thought i'd just mention Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man" in this thread.
It's just as believable as the biblical stories
sadly i can't quote chapter and verse from it as I no longer have a copy.

MF
 
Vidal

Aside from Moorcock's excellent book there is Gore Vidal's hilarious Live From Golgotha is pertinent to this thread, too, as it depicts the farcical events surrounding the fat, pimply Jesus and his oily followers, as is Anthony Burgess's Man of Nazareth, which depicts the marriage and children angle in a more serious way. And then there is Vidal's old rival, Norman Mailer, who weighs in with a light read called The Gospel According to the Son, which is a very good view of J. Zeus as a man.

Oh, and the reason we hear more about them Jesus dudes than other god figures is simply that we are dominated by a Judaeo-Christian mind-set. If we lived in India we'd hear about Vishnu or whomever. If we lived in Texas we'd hear about Mammon and the Bush Family. Etc.
 
lorddrakul said:
REFUTING MISSIONARIES by Hayyim ben Yehoshua

Very interesting article here by a Jewish Scholar, as an armoury for Jews in the face of Christian Evangelism.



LD

From the second paragraph of that link:

Arguments based on incorrect facts can easily backfire and end up strengthening the arguments of the missionaries.

Boy, I'll say. ;) :rolleyes:

PS-Am in complete agreement with Hugo C., Hospitaller, PLEASE come back to the board.
 
Re: Projector Blues

FraterLibre said:
And of course each of us projects onto the image or notion of Jesus the Christ what ever we want or need this image to be

Robert Powell
 
Yeah, I know what you mean: I remember thinking to myself,

"Jesus Christ -that's Robert Powell!!!" :eek!!!!:
that time I caught an ep. of that sit-com The Detectives with Jasper Carrott... :hmph:
 
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