What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[DeistPaladin]

You should have a chat to Minimalist then. Though I'll admit it is pretty hard to work out exactly what his incoherent thesis is through all the shouting.

I admire his posts and find him quite eloquent. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't suggested someone just made up Jesus one day. That's a straw man used by historists and apologists.

The Jesus stories, on the other hand, are written down between 40 and 90 years and seem to depend on material written down as early as the 50s or even 40s AD. By ancient standards, that's very close to the events. That's why this approach has more validity here.

The time of publication isn't my point. My point is that religious propaganda is to be viewed with greater suspicion than even the most sleazy of political propaganda.

Consider, let's say I'm stranded on a desert island and my only source of information on what was going on in the world was Fox "News". How that works, I'll leave to the imagination but, for some reason, I have a functioning and fully powered cable TV that only tunes into Fox. My information is going to be, to say the least, heavily biased and laced with lies and spin. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be completely uninformed. I would know that Obama was President. I would know our consulate was attacked in Benghazi. I would know conservatives were outraged, outraged I tell you, about it but I wouldn't quite understand why.

Bottom line: Even the most sleazy, deceptive, spin-happy political propaganda is based, however loosely, on actual events.

Let's say on my desert island, I get to change the channel and now I can get the 700 Club. Oh joy. I'm now watching one of Pat Robertson's stupid videos on how some guy's life was a mess and then Jesus worked miracles in his life. Frankly, I'm not even going to believe what the guy in the video tells me is his name, never mind put any stock in anything he claims in the video.

Is that "pig headed" of me? I don't think so. Why? To put it kindly, "consider the source".

Religion, by its nature, is about magical, invisible, undetectable agents that supposedly are doing things but all that needs to be believed without evidence and defended against all evidence. It's a con job. The whole thing. Lock. Stock. Barrel.

Bottom line: Religious propaganda is about supernatural bullcrap. While political propaganda must, by its nature, be about real world events, religious propaganda has no such limitation.

Therefore, the Bible could tell me "water is wet" and I'd need outside confirmation. If you want to call that "pigheaded", then it may be time for us to agree to disagree.

The fact remains, as I have to keep reminding people when they want to sweep the gospels aside completely, that these texts tell us something very useful and highly pertinent: what their writers believed about Jesus.

Wrong. It only tells us what we think that they claimed to have believed about Jesus. There's no reason to trust they weren't flat out lying. There's little reason to assume that what we have is faithfully preserved from its originals.

We know of at least one major alteration to Mark and pseudo-epigraphy and interpolation abounded at that time with theological writings. Theological writings are even more prone to these problems because, once again, religion is a con job.

Matthew, or whoever wrote that Gospel, is a known serial liar. He makes numerous claims about what the OT says that turn out ridiculously false.

Luke, the "historian", couldn't even get straight when Herod the Great was ruler of Judea, or else Mary had a 10 year pregnancy with Jesus!

John was obviously such a late addition with its advanced theology and reference to "the Jews" as a separate group. The nature of the propaganda is so over-the-top that were he writing a Jesus fanfic, he'd be accused of creating a Marty-Stu story. Jesus kicks John the Baptist. John the Baptist replies, "thank you, Jesus, may I have another." This is to say nothing of its inconsistencies with the Synoptics. You and I can agree to disagree on whether or not it constitutes a complete rewrite.

Paul I have deep suspicions about. Scholars believe that half of his letters are "inauthentic". I've already expressed my questions why Marcion would promote a prophet that preaches a Jesus directly opposed to what Marcion believed. And let's not forget the man claimed to be seeing things and hearing voices and believed he was on a special mission from God. Either he was a liar or he was schizophrenic.

As much as I like that movie, that's a worse analogy than your Illiad one.

Well, we may be at the stage where we need to agree to disagree. I think anyone who holds up the Bible and think that it proves anything needs to be laughed out of the room. That may not happen now but I hope some day that will be the standard.