(August 15, 2021 at 5:23 pm)Ahriman Wrote: Jesus might've been the first schizophrenic person in history.......

highly doubt that.   but he was probably the most outrageous joke ever perpetrated by schizophrenia upon mankind in all of its history.

There may have been an historical basis for the Jesus character, but you won’t find him in (or anywhere near) the Gospels. It’s not terribly far-fetched that some radical Judean rabbi got into trouble with the authorities, and elements of his stories were incorporated into the god-man mythos we read about.

As an aside, there are some not unreasonable arguments that both the Heracles and Odysseus myths incorporate bits of the life of an actual individual from pre-history.

Boru

(August 18, 2021 at 11:54 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: I actually forgot that Ehrman thinks there was a historical Jesus.

The point I was making was, there are so many layers of obscurity, why even bother? And that applies to the historical Jesus and the legendary Jesus.

Well don't just give up.......

(August 18, 2021 at 12:08 pm)Ahriman Wrote:

(August 18, 2021 at 11:54 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: I actually forgot that Ehrman thinks there was a historical Jesus.

The point I was making was, there are so many layers of obscurity, why even bother? And that applies to the historical Jesus and the legendary Jesus.

Well don't just give up.......

(August 18, 2021 at 12:19 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

(August 18, 2021 at 12:08 pm)Ahriman Wrote: Well don't just give up.......

(August 18, 2021 at 11:54 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: I actually forgot that Ehrman thinks there was a historical Jesus.

The point I was making was, there are so many layers of obscurity, why even bother? And that applies to the historical Jesus and the legendary Jesus.

Richard Carrier picks up where Earl Doherty left off and makes some very solid points through deep textual analysis and attempting to apply Bayes' Theorem.

(August 18, 2021 at 11:54 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: I actually forgot that Ehrman thinks there was a historical Jesus.

The point I was making was, there are so many layers of obscurity, why even bother? And that applies to the historical Jesus and the legendary Jesus.

Exactly. There’s about as much chance of proving an historical Jesus by reading the Gospels as there is of proving an historical King Arthur by watching the musical ‘Camelot’.

Boru

(August 18, 2021 at 12:46 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: ‘Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson

BTW, great quote, by a leading theologian, philosopher and abolitionist activist from the 1800s.  He was Unitarian - and still considered an important part of my UU church's roots (though the UU is no longer Christian).

Emerson believed in something called "The Oversoul" - an idea that we are all mystically connected, and this connection is his concept of God.  Complete nonsense, but far more progressive than the Christianity of his time.

(August 18, 2021 at 12:24 pm)Ahriman Wrote:

(August 18, 2021 at 12:19 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

Did you know that the Skeptics conceived of human Logos as a piece of a universal fire? You're digging through a mass of muddled and confusing signs trying to locate the divine in the mess.

(August 18, 2021 at 1:04 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

(August 18, 2021 at 12:24 pm)Ahriman Wrote:

Did you know that the Skeptics conceived of human Logos as a piece of a universal fire?  You're digging through a mass of muddled and confusing signs trying to locate the divine in the mess.

Well yeah, of course. And that's exactly what the scientific method is, as well......a process of trial and error. Trying different things until something works.