For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

I thought that including "Spaniards" and "Jews" would have been a hint about forced conversions. It was the Spanish Inquisition and the period that proceded it that I was speaking of.

I've never really looked at the history of the Spanish Inquisition so I wasn't sure what you meant by -

A later story, many centuries later, do the who supernatural polemic with him flying into the sky and some other rabbi has to fly up and piss him down (gotta love those Spaniards and their bathroom humor). At the time, forced conversions were going on, so they fought back by lampooning the enemy. Interestingly enough, it may have helped the conversion cause more than hinder it.

Does that mean Yeishu ha-Notzri was invented as a way if mocking Christianity? Sorry about all these questions but it's very difficult to find any real information on the internet. The wikipedia article is labelled 'neutrality disputed' and 'may contain original research' but all it really says is that people have been arguing about him for centuries. Yeshu According To Wikipedia.

There are also many discussions about this article - Refuting Missionaires by Hayyam ben Yehoshua . The article isn't very helpful because the author just provided a short list of books for further reading without saying which book he got the following information from -

it is clear that the first century Christians in Israel considered themselves to be a continuation of the Notzri movement which had been in existence for about 150 years. One of the most notorious Notzrim was Yeishu ben Pandeira, also known as Yeishu ha-Notzri. Talmudic scholars have always maintained that the story of Jesus began with Yeishu. The Hebrew name for Jesus has always been Yeishu and the Hebrew for "Jesus the Nazarene" has always been "Yeishu ha-Notzri

One of the authors in his reading list must have come up with the idea that the Notzri movement had been around for 150 years but I haven't the faintest idea who it was. Some of the internet discussions also refer to Allegro's idea that Jesus originated with a psychedelic mushroom cult.

Anyway, on to Paul -

Well, if Paul believed in a "son of David" and he knew someting about Judaism, then he must have held that Jesus was (1) human and (2) had a human father. To have a non-Jewish father (god is not Jewish) creates a lot of legalisting problems.Unlike David, where they could retroactively validate him as being a proper leader, having a non-Jewish father tosses the entire premis into the can. So I would suggest that Paul would have not held with the virgin birth story (which he never mentions) or a non-Jewish supernatural father.

It's unlikely that Paul taught about the virgin birth if he never mentioned it but how far can we rely on him where the beliefs of the original sect are concerned? If he decided to start his own religion, could he have adapted some things to appeal to pagans? It's unlikely that pagans would have cared about legal problems any more than the Christians who invented the virgin birth did.