The Quest for the Historical Junior

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[Minimalist]

You're going to give Arch a stroke....oh, well. Every cloud has a silver lining.


Anyway.

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen048.html

Virtually all of the elements of Orthodox Christian rituals, from miter, wafer, water baptism, alter, and doxology, were adopted from the Mithra and earlier pagan mystery religions. The religion of Mithra preceded Christianity by roughly six hundred years. Mithraic worship at one time covered a large portion of the ancient world. It flourished as late as the second century. The Messianic idea originated in ancient Persia and this is where the Jewish and Christian concepts of a Savior came from.

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[Minimalist]

Josephus' account of J the B are far more convincing that the contrived jesus reference.

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[Minimalist]

I have to go find something for you.

It's a jewish treatise on the so-called Jesus.


BRB.

[Minimalist]

That didn't take long.

Enjoy.

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/nizrael/ ... ation.html

The Gospel of Mark is written in the name of Mark, the disciple of the mythical Peter. (Peter is largely based on the pagan god Petra, who was door-keeper of heaven and the afterlife in Egyptian religion.) Even in Christian mythology, Mark was not a disciple of Jesus, but a friend of Paul and Luke. Mark was written before Matthew and Luke (c. 100 C.E.) but after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., which it mentions. Most Christians believe it was written in c. 75 C.E. This date is not based on history but on the belief that an historical Mark wrote the gospel in his old age. This is not possible since the style of language used in Mark shows that it was written (probably in Rome) by a Roman convert to Christianity whose first language was Latin and not Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic. Indeed, since all the other gospels are written in the name of legendary characters from the past, Mark was probably written long after any historical Mark (if there was one) had died. The content of Mark is a collection of myths and legends put together to form a continuous narrative. There is no evidence that it was based on any reliable historical sources. Mark was altered and edited many times and the modern version probably dates to about 150 C.E. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 C.E. - c. 215 C.E.) complained about the alternative versions of this gospel which were still circulating in his lifetime. (The Carpocratians, an early Christian sect, considered pederasty to be a virtue and Clement complained about their versions of Mark which told of Jesus's homosexual exploits with young boys!)

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[john]

ummm yaaas -

seem to remember that there is about a half million years of identifiable human history - archaeology, to wit - out there.

and, no, dr x, i will not capitalize. to quote ee, "there is some shit i will not take" - an antiwar paean, by the way.

but back to the subject -


to all:
is it your acaedemic specialty which leads you to these endless iterations on this topic (the main reason i left organized education a long, long time ago)

or do you truly believe that the hysterical j is some

kind of rosetta stone for

a.) the yooman condition

or

b.) the archaeological record.


for my own part, i would say neither.

rebuttals are welcome.


john

[Minimalist]

Mark was altered and edited many times and the modern version probably dates to about 150 C.E. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 C.E. - c. 215 C.E.) complained about the alternative versions of this gospel which were still circulating in his lifetime.

I think that is the key. An initial date of 75 AD is no problem for the later gospel copyists...and the indication that there were assorted versions of it in circulation 75 years later certainly rings true. These were not documents of history....they were documents of faith.

[john]

and btw -

reductio ad absurdem (if i remember my latin)


so my question is, how many angels can you fit onto the

head of the hysterical j pin?


j

[john]

btw II -

if you really want to get into the physics of this kind of argument, hunt out the "uncle remus stories",

specifically,


the tarbaby.


j

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[Minimalist]

You know, I cannot remember where I saw this, it was a long time ago and may have been <shudder> in a book but supposedly the reason the OT was attached to the NT was that Constantine wanted his new religion to have a starting point. Much christian apologetics had to be expended to try to reconcile the psycopathic OT god with the wussy Jesus god.

I can kind of see God as Edward Longshanks throwing his son's gay lover out the window, just like in Braveheart.

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