RE: Jesus Christ Probably Did Not Exist
September 16, 2013 at 10:09 pm
(This post was last modified: September 16, 2013 at 10:12 pm by Cyberman.)
Don't swallow the xtian pill that says it's too fantastic not to be true. It's all rather involved and I'm sure DP and Min can fill in the gaps, but the name Nazareth probably derives from Netzer (iirc), meaning root or branch. Basically an offshoot of an earlier sect (the Essenes?) of religious ascetics. Something like that anyway.
By replacing 'city of Nazareth' with 'small obscure hamlet' or similar, you run smack into the wall of JC being an infamous rabble-rouser who pissed off the Romans to the exent they conspired with the Jewish elders to break their own sacred traditions and have him tried and executed on one of their most holy days - pause for breath - while at the same time he was obscure enough to have completely escaped the notice of history.
Apart from which, Josephus never mentions the place yet writes about precisely those tiny hamlets barely a few miles away from the modern city. Didn't he wage a campaign in the area as well? Seems he ought to have noticed.
By replacing 'city of Nazareth' with 'small obscure hamlet' or similar, you run smack into the wall of JC being an infamous rabble-rouser who pissed off the Romans to the exent they conspired with the Jewish elders to break their own sacred traditions and have him tried and executed on one of their most holy days - pause for breath - while at the same time he was obscure enough to have completely escaped the notice of history.
Apart from which, Josephus never mentions the place yet writes about precisely those tiny hamlets barely a few miles away from the modern city. Didn't he wage a campaign in the area as well? Seems he ought to have noticed.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
