(March 4, 2013 at 11:19 am)EGross Wrote: It just gets weirder and weirder.
No, he didn't exist.
What gets even weirder is that Christianity is supposed to have developed from an original Jewish sect in Judea. The mythicists aren't very helpful when it comes to the question of why a group of Jews should want to invent a non-existent Messiah. The other opinions just take it for granted that Jesus existed such as in the article about the Jewish-Christians.
Quote:Jewish Christians, also Judeo-Christians, were the original members of the Jewish reform movement that later became Christianity.[1] In the earliest stage the community was made up of all those Jews who accepted Jesus of Nazareth as a venerable person or even the messiah, and was thus equivalent to all Christians.[1] As Christianity grew and evolved Jewish Christians became only one strand of the Christian community, and were characterised by combining the confession of Jesus as Christ with continued adherence to Jewish practices such as Sabbath observance and observance of the Jewish calendar, observance of Jewish laws and customs relating to sexual purity, circumcision, and synagogue-attendance, and a direct genetic relationship to the earliest Jewish Christianity.[1]
Maybe Hellenistic Judaism can provide a clue.
Quote:The reasons for the decline of Hellenistic Judaism are obscure. It may be that it was marginalized by, absorbed into, or became Early Christianity (see the Gospel according to the Hebrews).
The opening verse of Acts 6 points to the problematic cultural divisions between Hellenized Jews and Aramaic-speaking Israelites in Jerusalem, a disunion that reverberated within the emerging Christian community itself: “it speaks of "Hellenists" and "Hebrews. " The existence of these two distinct groups characterizes the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem. The Hebrews were Jewish Christians who spoke almost exclusively Aramaic, and the Hellenists were also Jewish Christians whose mother tongue was Greek. They were Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, who returned to settle in Jerusalem.
Some historians believe that a sizeable proportion of the Hellenized Jewish communities of Southern Turkey (Antioch, Alexandretta and neighboring cities) and Syria/Lebanon converted progressively to the Greco-Roman branch of Christianity that eventually constituted the “Melkite” (or "Imperial") Hellenistic Churches of the MENA area: “As Jewish Christianity originated at Jerusalem, so Gentile Christianity started at Antioch, then the leading center of the Hellenistic East, with Peter and Paul as its apostles.
Both Early Christianity and Early Rabbinical Judaism were far less 'orthodox' and less theologically homogeneous than they are today; and both were significantly influenced by Hellenistic religion and borrowed allegories and concepts from Classical Hellenistic philosophy and the works of Greek-speaking Jewish authors of the end of the Second Temple period... before the two schools of thought eventually firmed-up their respective 'norms' and doctrines, notably by diverging increasingly on key issues such as the status of 'purity laws', the validity of Judeo-Christian messianic beliefs, and, more importantly, the use of Koine Greek and Latin as sacerdotal languages replacing Biblical Hebrew[13]...etc
So could the Hellenised Jews in Jerusalem have adapted pagan religions and ended up with a non-existent Messiah? Paul then took this to the Gentiles who invented a biography for Jesus and the Hellenised Jews in Jerusalem accepted the inventions? I suppose it would depend on which biographical details they were presented with, though, because they wouldn't have accepted everyone waving palm leaves at Jesus just before Passover.
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?
