[alanjjohnstone]

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The mentioning of Jesus on Josephus works is an interpolation.( the bible has 2,700 interpolations )  He never mentioned him because he never existed.

There are interpolations in Josephus and the debate is about what and why, Marcos?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_JesusUsing it as proof of non-existence of Jesus is extending the value of the text to unsupportable.It is interesting to try to understand who became Christian in Roman Empire. It is a common belief that it was the poor. But others suggest at one period it was more a middle-class movement of the privileged. The word  Pagan, after all is related to Peasant, and they always being more conservative minded stuck to their old religions. Maybe though it was urban and not rural. I mentioned in an earlier post that despite the seemingly anti-feminist content, it was women, widows in particular, those women with property,  on the whole who converted as the early church provided protection for their wealth.As for christian communism i refer to the many Church Fathers and to the Middle Age rebel movements. St. Ambrose (3rd century): "You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his."Omnia Sunt Communia, comrades

[alanjjohnstone]

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Actually, "Adam" does have a religion significance in the context of Northern Ireland where my father was from. There it indicates a Protestant as opposed to a Catholic, not quite so much as Samuel, though

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And you'll be aware of the name "Tim" to designate a Catholic but it is in  a more friendly appellation of the Catholic community itself as commandeered as in the Celtic-supporting "Thai Tims"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljBbMJhEyPc

[alanjjohnstone]

But let us move on. Let's try again. This thread was begun by me because i came across a writer who had studied the early Christian movement and determined that the idea of common ownership was widespread. He endeavoured to use this information to convince present day Christians to be communists. Interesting enough, wouldn't you say, for socialists like ourselves to look into a bit more.The thread as threads tend to do spun off into a tangent about the existence or non-existence of Jesus. Not a debate about God and his existence or non-existence. But a discussion on the historicity of a human being. Having read a fair amount of specialist books on the Gospels on the balance of probability i think someone called Jesus, most likely a member a John the Baptist movement, itself a part of a general religious revival/revolution with the Essenes and part of the broad political division Sadducees and Pharisees and Zealots/Sicarri  in an occupied part of the Roman Empire thus religion was being reflected and driven by political and economic realities. (not so different from modern day Israel/Palestine)Now ALB weighed it up on his scales of probability and concluded that Jesus was a fictitious figure…a myth around which a religion developed.No-one has disagreed that Jesus the Christ is a myth but dispute is about Jesus the Man having lived.ALB and myself disagree. We put forth our case. I sought flaws in his argument. He searched for flaws in mine… that is what is called debating…. Neither of us can prove 100% if we are right and the other wrong…so we agree to disagree. Some may consider that ALB got the better. But neither of us have definitive proof of our views. They are opinions only. We comradely came to different conclusions. No acrimonious exchanges took place. None should have. I'm not alone on this thread, at least broadly agreeing are YMS and DaveB who i think share some of my scepticism about the argument that Jesus did not exist. Again no-one is denying that believers like Paul, and also organisationally later through the State – Constantine and the Nicea Council – chose to shape and mould Christianity which was not historically accurate of its early growth – the basis of Roman's book, i think.I say the real Jesus was lost in the mists of time and deliberate shrouded (no, not the Turin Shroud) but a few fragments of his original teaching can be detected in the Gospels. The Q source points to a core message, adopted by extinct Jewish Christian communities.Whether Jesus really existed for me is only of academic interest.More important to me was why and how the movement spawned from a local Jewish heresy turned into a world-wide movement that has existed for hundreds of years. The spread of religious ideas is an important part of the understanding how socialist ideas will spread. Was it all down to Popes and inquisitions and burning at the stake? Or were many Christian always searching for salvation – on Earth – not in some after-life but through common ownership. Secondly, with a audience in their millions, could we, to return to the author's hopes, can we use the early Christian beliefs on common ownership to our advantage.This depends on whether they existed in the first place, and i have not read the book to comment yeah or nay.Add to this summary as you wish if you think i overlook anything of importance. 

[alanjjohnstone]

Just try reading my posts, will you? The counter-arguments are all embedded in those….or as Jesus was reported to have said …seek and you shall find.Message #71, however, had no question in it …to refresh your own memory it was a challenge to prove you wrong that you "have an invisible pink monkey sitting on my shoulder and he delivers words of wisdom" and ….i don't have a lot of spare time to waste on such witless exchanges with someone who should know already the position of a Socialist Party member and adherent to historical materialism…unless you are saying that i am a crypto-christian infiltrator because i think on the balance of possibilities someone called Jesus actually existed…as a man who was turned into a myth and made into a god by his believers. So no, i will not indulge you with a reply. If i have been patronising it has been inadvertent and unintentional (except on this occasion)….you, on the other hand, have been deliberately and purposefully disrespectful. That is the big difference in our respective attitudes. 

[alanjjohnstone]

And, of course, your own post was not patronising or an attempt at facetiousness to tderail some upfront discussion and debate that doesn't meet your interest.I can happily engage in banter while trying to exchange opinions with comrades…and that is all they are…opinions to be defended or attacked…as been pointed out,  definitive proof is not available….either way.I have taken some time in posting several contributions to this thread and linking to a number of sources. Some content were trying to focus on our present attitude towards religion and how to confront it. So i stand corrected — it was not all about history.You own post is simply an assertion that my case is bull…your opinion has been noted… and duly discarded for the value it possesses. 

[alanjjohnstone]

This is a history debate with a touch of theology thrown in, not a debate on the existence of God, Vin. No-one on this thread has suggested that Jesus is God. His followers may believe that…he himself might have believed that…but if he existed he was executed as a political figure…someone who claimed to be King of the Jews…a subversive who railed against the Temple bureaucrats as collaborators with an occupying foreign army. The myths came later often from other religions adding on to it and they got bigger as time passed….Archaeology and history is always full of debate and often stemming from a personal bias of the participants. Socialists try to use historical materialism to look beneath the surface

[alanjjohnstone]

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there's more evidence for his existence than there is of Jesus,

 I looked at wiki and there seems an equal dearth of material to show of John the Baptist existence. 

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That he is claimed to be the son of a god.

The claim that Jesus made these claims are disputed by a number of theologians. Son of God..son of man..son of adam…as i said in previous posts all were literary expressions of the day. That his followers choe to accept them as literal is an entire different issue. Many of the early Jewish Jesus movement didn't …ie the EbionitesSee Geza Vermes trilogy Jesus the Jew

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The name "Jesus" means saviour and christianity originated as a saviour religion

not so sure about that. There were on record many Jesuses from that period so not quite a satisfactory defence.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(name)"The archetypal Jewish hero was Joshua ) otherwise known as Yehoshua (Yeshua) bin Nun (‘Jesus of the fish’). Since the name Jesus (Yeshua or Yeshu in Hebrew, Iesous in Greek, source of the English spelling) originally was a title (meaning ‘saviour’, derived from ‘Yahweh Saves’) probably every band in the Jewish resistance had its own hero figure sporting this moniker, among others."[so saviour or freedom fighter?] "Josephus, the first century Jewish historian mentions no fewer than nineteen different Yeshuas/Jesii, about half of them contemporaries of the supposed Christ! In his Antiquities, of the twenty-eight high priests who held office from the reign of Herod the Great to the fall of the Temple, no fewer than four bore the name Jesus: Jesus ben Phiabi, Jesus ben Sec, Jesus ben Damneus and Jesus ben Gamaliel"http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/surfeit.htmWere they all fictitious because of their name?Should i endow your own name with some religious significance Adam = hebrew "man" or my own =  either "little rock" or "handsome"

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Paul, the earliest christian to write about Jesus, portrays him as such a saviour-god and not at all as a historical person.

What Paul wished to convey was what Paul wanted to convey. He was even according to his own account, challenged on his beliefs by the Jerusalem church and James the Just, Jesus brother …(the word brother is admittedly debated but more by those who wish Mary was Virgin adherents) and with Peter, too and Paul also fell out with other congregations.A.D. 55 and 59 for Acts but Q is dated earlier …if such a book existed…and evidence is in favour that it was.I suppose , now as a euhemerist, i have to defend the existence of Robin Hood, William Tell, Captain Swing and King Ludd 

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As to the early christians, there would have beem more like today's Jehovah's Witnesses, expecting that the "end of the world is nigh" and not interested in changing the world down here, than communistic revolutionaries.

I'll have to read Roman's book to help come to a decision on that Maybe they might have been more like the Mormons…or the Amish…But i grant you this…Jesus – if he existed – was one in a long run of Jewish eschatology prophets and with the 70 AD fall of Jerusalem and Masada,  i think many believed the world was indeed coming to an end….bit like me, in a way…doom and gloom

[alanjjohnstone]

As i said and it is reinforced each week on Time Team – absence of evidence does not equate with proof of absence.  Your citation showed that for a quite a senior provincial Roman official, there was no hard proof except hearsay and Josephus until 1961 so a very much younger ALB could easily have been on this forum asserting he did not exist. Do you dispute the existence of John the Baptist, another only mentioned by Josephus and the Gospels yet lacking artifact proof?If so…a theological question ….Why is such a person's appearance in the stories necessary?But as i have said….the intriguing thing about Jesus is its development as a ever-changing movement and the presence within it, not of the Holy Spirit but challenges to the prevailing private property system. Not having yet read Roman's book, it is this that he concentrates upon and which DaveB is also focused upon understanding, (bringing up the Roman tax laws becoming a cash burden for many in the region)My point is that we have members who are happy to endorse the slogans of Thomas Muntzer and espouse the ideas of Winstanley but seem to be shying away from fear of guilt by association with a religious current that still runs through Christianity. Maybe we should delegate the task to ex-comrade Cox If Roman is correct in his analysis, it provides the ammunition to take the battle into a section of the population that expressed its still potent poitical force in 2005 in Make Poverty History, turning their places of worship into de facto Occupy spaces. 

[alanjjohnstone]

"Buying" through leasing with so many clauses to the contract on the "sell-back" to the company…Or that house purchases are done through borrowing (as it always was even in Marx's time) rather than renting as is the prevalent method of housing in most of Europe i'm not so sure are fundamental differences to capitalism which in any way undermine the basics.In fact, i doubt if they even influence the price of either a car or a house in any effective way.My recollection of buying a house is that it is not so much the building that determines the price of it but the cost of the land it sits on…  You are over-egging the pudding, i believe by giving cosmetic appearances something much deeper meaning and declaring that it makes Marx dated. 

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Capitalism we live in now is opaque, confusing, odd, seemingly irrational and unscientific, without order and sound judgements.  And the only logical principle I have been able to extract from this nonsensical capitalism is the logical principle: "To maximize profit by any means necessary, at the lowest financial cost, as soon as possible".  From this logical principle, stems all the nonsense the post-industrial, post-modern capitalism generates.

 No-one on this forum and certainly not Marx who did not describe capital as " ordered economic universe, understandable, rational and scientifically sound "Where on earth did you get tht idea. He spent his life trying to sort through all the contradictions and mysteries of capitalism and came up with the conclusion that the only way towards  society that is " an ordered economic universe, understandable, rational and scientifically sound" is by replacing capitalism and establishing socialism…a system where people themselves and not economic laws rule.You seem to expect capitalism to possess a power it does not have, MB.And you appear disappointed that it doesn't. So you try to make the round peg go into the square hole. Not as others would …chuck the damn thing away in its entirety as no longer fit for purpose.  Here on the forum, espite Steve's plea that we should give credit to capitalism where it is due – which we do – we say it is a social system that has out-lived its use…a redundant mode of production. It holds back social progress and shackles the potential of technologyCar washing…i recall every filling station had an automated car-washing machine…very complex piece of machinery…cost of labour fell …and hey…back to the man with the sponge…It is as you state very rightly " a free-for-all, where "whatever one can get away with in the market-place" is valid and legitimate, once normalized. And things can get very chaotic, alienated and violent, because its a free-for-all. " and can't be anything other…No Sanders regulation, no Keynesian legislation, no central planning of the State or invisible hand of the market is going to change things. Only people taking control and making decisions over what, where, how and when things are produced will do this.Socialism is simple idea…So is the bare bones of capitalism easy to understand once the veils is pulled off….why do you persist in over-complicating things, MB?The cost of something is the social time put into its creation…and around that cost…all the small and temprary variations is due to advertising and monopolies and intellectual ownerships  and fashions ….little bits of elasticity to the human labour that goes into building a product.Limited land is less determined by supply so house prices tend not to fall…unless you make swamps into solid ground as Florida did and wasn't the great boom in the early 20thC the low cost in Florida of houses.Anyways, i prefer my politics straight-forward where a PhD is not required to understand it …i'm robbed by the wealthy who parasitically live off my and my co-workers blood sweat and toil (so to speak –  in reality we dodged as much labour as i possibly could without being caught and sacked) Whether a prices is low or high – that is the fact we rebel, isn't it?

[alanjjohnstone]

A Guardian article related to this threadhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/02/socialism-young-americans-bernie-sanders

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“Young people who say that they’re socialists, or look favourably on socialism, they’re thinking about a kind of New Deal government or democracy against markets,” said Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of a widely debated radical plan in the 1960s to alleviate poverty and create a basic income, and more recently the targetof a vilification campaign by Fox News. “What the New Deal represented was government efforts to regulate an unbridled capitalism and to supplement the distribution of income under markets with government programs.”

[alanjjohnstone]

MB, I wonder if we are simply just ideologues, as you seem to accuse us of.Or are we those "impossiblists" that still maintain the ideas of socialism that have travelled through the generations from the early ACTS 2:44 followers of the Jesus movement to the peasants of the Middle Ages and Omnia Sunt Communia of middle age peasant rebels like Muntzer to the Diggers and Levellers who endeavoured to turn the world upside down to create a common treasury for all to the Chartist socialists and Kropotkin anarcho-communists and then the  IWW-ers who strive to end the wages system who like Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law..seek the revolutionary demand – The Right to Be Lazy or the Situationists of the 20th C who likewise sought the Right to be Greedy…Or would you prefer to associate with the non-organic, non-social evolution "system-builders" with their pre-conceived projects who dismiss the role of people as the vehicle for change by imposing upon people their blueprints of "new worlds" who are indeed the ideologues and the doctrinaires.If we are to be accused, let it be because we stick to basic principles and defend those. rather than seeking short cuts in every turn and twist of the road that stray from the road-map to the cooperative commonwealth, sign-posted by many who started taking the path before you or i chose to join the movement.Sorry for the bit of crusading campaigning language there…but i think you get what i am trying to say…I sign off with a Debs quote…but it was a choice of him of Joseph Dietzgen 

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" If a worker wants to take part in the self-emancipation of his class, the basic requirement is that he should cease allowing others to teach him and should set about teaching himself." 

[alanjjohnstone]

Jesus the Preacher and Jesus the Christ, are indeed two different people.The first we have but hearsay evidence of, as someone on the thread pointed out but on the balance of probability, someone who existed and had a core message (the Q) which he delivered to the Jewish people and was punished by the State and the Temple for it.And the second, we have as you say, the myth that developed around this preacher which absorbed and assimilated influences and rituals and practices from other religionsIt began very early with the jettison of Judaic laws and the merging of Mithraism beliefs to facilitate the establishment of a unified state religion for the diverse Roman EmpireWhy it succeeded in becoming dominant was its ability to adapt to new situations and circumstances…to evolve with the society around it. We see today's religions reflecting the ideas of its congregations such as in gay clergy and gay marriages. Can we say that today's C of E is as socially reactionary as in past times in it campaigns for social justice and equality?It is as James Connolly said of the Catholic Church. 

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Just as in Ireland the Church denounced every Irish revolutionary movement in its day of activity, as in 1798, 1848 and 1867, and yet allowed its priests to deliver speeches in eulogy of the active spirits of those movements a generation afterwards, so in the future the Church, which has its hand close upon the pulse of human society, when it realises that the cause of capitalism is a lost cause it will find excuse enough to allow freedom of speech and expression to those lowly priests whose socialist declarations it will then use to cover and hide the absolute anti-socialism of the Roman Propaganda. When that day comes the Papal Encyclical against socialism will be conveniently forgotten by the Papal historians, and the socialist utterances, of the von Kettelers, the McGlynns, and McGradys will be heralded forth and the communistic utterances of the early fathers as proofs of Catholic sympathy with progressive ideas. Thus it has been in the past. Thus it will be, at least attempted, in the future.

[alanjjohnstone]

Our comrade from across the water, has posted an article from 1938 Socialist Standard about the Basic Income.http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/09/notes-by-way-will-forty-fall-for-it-1938.html

[alanjjohnstone]

I think i have on this thread already confessed my weakness in understanding either Marxian or bourgeois economics…but i try my bestI wonder if either of you took the time to follow the links in the posted article that cast much doubt about the validity of it.http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-market-power-story.htmlIt also contains further links of criticism of the original paper for yourselves to follow up.But as i said, i'm no economist, (much less a physicist) but i always go by the axiom there is more to things than meets the eye. 

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"In 1980, average markups start to rise from 18% above marginal cost to 67% now." That sounds like big news, and probably it is.  But I don’t think the authors are doing enough to interpret their results.  There are two ways these mark-ups go could up: first there may be more outright monopoly, second there may be more monopolistic competition, with high mark-ups but also high fixed costs, and firms earning close to zero profits.  The two scenarios have very different distributional implications, and different policy implications as well.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/08/rise-market-power.htmlI leave to others more well-read and better versed in the subject to respond. 

[alanjjohnstone]

While walking the dog i had a thought – yes, wonders will never cease.And it was this…Why did the early non-Christians try to associate Jesus with being the illegitimate off-spring of a Roman soldier? Why not simply deny Jesus existed and apply the arguments for his non-existence as being done on this forum? Why did these anti-christians accept that he was real and not a made-up person and resorted to accusations about the circumstances of his birth.Was it because the Virgin Birth and the Christian movement's absorption of various of religious miraculous birth myths require a put-don?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Julius_Abdes_PanteraIt was in Justin's 150 AD writings that we first hear Trypho indicate the non-existence of Jesus “But [the] Christ—if indeed he has been born and exists anywhere—is unknown, and does not even know himself, and has no power until Elijah comes to anoint him and make him known to all. Accepting a groundless report, you have invented a Christ for yourselves, and for his sake you are unknowingly perishing.”Or was he referring to The Christ persona of Jesus being pure invention?

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