Thomas_More
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Virgin births and resurrections are no doubt common everywhere and very old, but Jesus is not an African myth. He is a myth indeed, but one born amid the turmoil of the Jewish/Roman War.
However, Christianity very quickly gained a hold in North Africa, long before it won state protection. Now, Christianity, but from a modern colonial source, is so interwoven in Africa with ancient folk beliefs that believers may think it is African.
The Gnostics did not exist. In a sense, all early Christians fit the bill as Gnostics, but there was no sect known, by themselves or by others, as Gnostics. Even Christian persecutors of one another had no knowledge of Gnostics. (Pun intended).
The pre-Gospel epistles do not mention historicity and are solely concerned with a “spiritual” Christ, but by the time of Ignatius, that writer is frenziedly concerned with establishing an historical Jesus; desperately so!
I’ve been reading about the Mishnah in Robert Price: Deconstructing Jesus, and am awaiting his book on Paul: The Colossal Apostle.
There were no Pharisees, and no Synagogues, in Galilee in the supposed time of Jesus. There was also war between Jerusalem and Samaria, Galilee’s ally.
The Jews had no reason to want Christians killed. As Christianity developed, it shifted the blame for the crucifixion from the Romans to the Jews.
For some Christians Jesus escaped the cross and Simon of Cyrene was crucified in his place. Also, Barabbas means “Son of the Father” and some said he was Jesus and thus escaped.
Both football and rugby descend from ancient Celtic games (with Asian parallels – such as polo) whereby the head of an enemy was bound in leather and kicked/thrown about. In Mongolia the nomad clans still do a version of polo using the carcass of a yak, which would once have been the body/head of a human captive.
TM said his father had a passion for Rugby.
He was a founder member of the Grasshoppers rugby club in Twickenham. He made some SPGBers out of a few players there too.
As the churches grow and develop, in more settled communities, they warn their members against the very itinerant preachers of whom the Jesus of the Gospels is one. They adopt social cohesion (within each Christian cult) and their overwhelmingly urban organisation mirrors exactly that of Roman urban organization and administration. Do not tolerate the itinerant moochers becomes their watchword. In other words, Jesuses get lost.
Reading a number of academic writers on the possible origins of the Jesus myth, Kautsky’s analysis comes the closest and is the only plausible explanation of an historical person, or more accurately, persons.
Thirty years on from the supposed execution (c. 33 CE), during which time there is utter silence on the matter, we suddenly find Christians emerging. They write stories about a character they mould from a number of rebel leaders (by the time they begin to write, in the 60s CE, we are in the era of the Zealots and Rome’s military actions against them). The Christians set this composite leader’s acts and demise thirty years previously, in the reign of Tiberius.
The Christians, though, are not a uniform group, but many opposing groups with ideas taken from both Jewish and Hellenist traditions, as are the simultaneous cults emerging at the same time, incorporating other religious and magical stories from Asia. These elements coalesce into the sacrificial motif of the “Χριστος/Christ”, whose character can be whatever each cult wants.The Jesus of the Gospels is in fact the antithesis of community. Leave one’s family and community, one’work in that community, and follow an itinerant preacher? It is not only anti-community in a Judaean culture in which community and social responsibility are everything; it is 100% destructive of society!
The community, and the poor especially (until rich converts can be tempted), not only lose pairs of hands, sons, etc., but have to supply the itinerant drop-outs with the necessities of life. The itinerants are parasites.
The same with the holy itinerants and ascetics of other religions. The poor supply, daily, the sadhus of India and the monks of S E. Asia with their food bowls. And later in Europe the itinerant friars.
Which is why the community, in order to tolerate them, needs to be persuaded of reward after death.
