Quote: A fair-skinned white man with feathery hair (wtf?).

Quote:Don't forget the british accent!

(June 11, 2012 at 2:15 pm)teaearlgreyhot Wrote:

(June 11, 2012 at 2:12 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: Seriously? Dan Brown? He wrote fiction and labeled it as such. That's moving past poisoning the well and strawmanning and into outright lying.

Well, they say he was making a real argument through the use of fiction.

DeistPaladin Wrote:Seriously? Dan Brown? He wrote fiction and labeled it as such.

(June 11, 2012 at 4:01 pm)Faith No More Wrote:

DeistPaladin Wrote:Seriously? Dan Brown? He wrote fiction and labeled it as such.

When Dan Brown was being sewed for copyright, I saw a television show about it, and one of the central issues was the copyright infringement was only possible because he wasn't labeling it fiction. He had taken the idea of Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene from another book in which the author claims it to be true. The story goes that he only labeled his story fiction to avoid the lawsuit.

Take this for what it is, however, which is me recounting what I saw on a television documentary. As to the truth of the documentary, I don't know, and I'm too damn lazy right now to verify it through an internet search.

(June 11, 2012 at 9:09 am)Justtristo Wrote:

(June 11, 2012 at 3:04 am)Minimalist Wrote: How many ways are there to say it? The dying/resurrected vegetation god was a common motif in the Ancient Mediterrranean. "Jesus" was nothing special. In fact, the only thing that sets xtianity apart from the other cults was the viciousness of their followers in stamping out earlier religions.

http://www.denverseminary.edu/article/th...urrection/


( I deliberately put Professor Hess' position at the Denver Seminary in the quote so that xtians can shit bricks.

I like that even more than muffins.

I will add a opinion I express of how the Jesus story we read in the gospels got first written. Jews around turn of the first millennium CE had messianic expectation, which were main cause of three major wars against the Roman Empire. In the aftermath of the third and last one (Bar Kochba) some decided that the Messiah had already arrived, just that few noticed he had arrived.

Using some interpretation from the book of Daniel, they decided that this Messiah lived around 30AD. So they combed through the Old Testament to determine what such a Messiah would have done, the result being a lot of the stories we read in the Gospels. Also they cribbed a lot from the Historian Josephus in order to make the story sound historically credible.

(June 14, 2012 at 12:52 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Rome in 1,000 bc was a small collection of neolithic mud huts on the Palatine Hill. Five centuries later they threw out the Etruscans ( but kept a lot of their technical knowledge ) and began to grow by absorbing ( not destroying ) other Latin communities in Central Italy. Any actual empire building begins with the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BC where the Romans defeated Gauls in addition to various Italian tribes and came into contact with the Greeks of Tarentum and Crotona.

None of this has anything to do with Josephus, of course.

(June 15, 2012 at 3:31 am)cratehorus Wrote:

(June 14, 2012 at 12:52 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Rome in 1,000 bc was a small collection of neolithic mud huts on the Palatine Hill. Five centuries later they threw out the Etruscans ( but kept a lot of their technical knowledge ) and began to grow by absorbing ( not destroying ) other Latin communities in Central Italy. Any actual empire building begins with the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BC where the Romans defeated Gauls in addition to various Italian tribes and came into contact with the Greeks of Tarentum and Crotona.

None of this has anything to do with Josephus, of course.

So Josephus invented the myth? Josephus...... Joseph.... coincidence?