Laurens
New Member
leroy said:Laurens said:Hallucination or lies is a false dichotomy.
I'd say the resurrection is a myth. I won't lay out the entire argument in this thread, but I would recommend looking into Richard Carrier's arguments. He states that 1st Century Jews needed a theological solution to the Roman control of their temple---
So basically the “theory” is that Peter, James, Paul, John etc. decided to invent their own myth about a guy named Jesus who resurrected, and then they somehow fought and died in the name of this myth that they themselves invented?
People invent myths all the time and people fight and die in the mane of myths all the time, but nobody fights and die as a martyr, in the name of a myth that they themselves invented.
So confirming my point above. If this is what happened 2,000 years ago then something extraordinary and unprecedented occurred
Not to mention that according to the gospels Jesus was pacifist, and even encouraged people to pay their taxes to the Romans.
So if the goal was to invent a myth to free people from the roman empire, Jesus was certainly not the type of character that someone would have invented.
Not at all, as I said read Carrier's book or at least watch some of his lectures to get a more complete picture of his argument.
The Dead Sea Scrolls show rampant mysticism and messianism in 1st century Palestine. Extracting a dying and rising messiah called Yeshua from the scriptures.
The Ascension of Isaiah describes Christ going down into the firmament to be executed by Satan and his minions. A text so problematic that later Christians inserted a mini gospel into it.
The authentic writings of Paul do not mention Christ as a man who recently died at the hands of the Romans in Jerusalem. He talks about Christ revealing himself through scripture and visions, not as a recently dead preacher. Paul pre-dates the Gospels.
Mark---the basis of all the other Gospels---bears the marks of an elaborate work of fiction based off some Old Testament myths and Homer's Odyssey. The rest of the Gospels appear to take this and make theological changes to it based upon variants in their theology.
It wasn't one guy coming up with a character in the same way that Stan Lee might, it was a gradual process of development. This is why anyone can say anything about Christ, he was a proto-Marxist or a radical conservative or whatever---people find what they want within him, because there is so much contradiction in his character, because he was a fictional development over time. Nobody sat down and invented Christ and then decided to die for him, by that time people probably already believed he was a real person.