RE: Why can't Christians Verify Exactly Where Jesus Was Buried?
September 3, 2016 at 3:56 pm
(This post was last modified: September 3, 2016 at 3:57 pm by Gemini.)
(September 3, 2016 at 1:19 am)Minimalist Wrote: It's not the man who they worship. It's the purported magic tricks.
Hercules did a lot of magic tricks, too.
As Richard Carrier notes:
Quote:Jesus began life as a celestial being whose suffering, death and resurrection
was known only through revelations (real or pretended) and secret messages
in scripture, and who only later became a mythically historicized person
as a model to follow and hang new dogmas upon.
The process is called euhemerism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism
There's clearly some mythological stuff grafted onto the person, but if he was made up out of whole cloth, why did Matthew and Luke invent convoluted stories to have him born in Bethlehem but end up living in Nazareth? Why involve Nazareth in the story at all?
Then there's the passage in Luke where he goes to Nazareth and gets rejected when the people there who know him don't fall for his miracle-working shtick. That seems pretty plausible to me. He was the charismatic religious-leader type and able to bamboozle people with his mystique, but that didn't get him very far with the people who knew him since he was a bawling brat.
A Gemma is forever.