I hate to agree with TTA even a little bit but you are missing the point. Dying/resurrected gods were a dime a dozen in the ancient world. Like assholes, everybody had one. The concept far predates Judaism.
The Gabriel Revelation Stone indicates that the concept of a 3-day resurrection was already known to some group(s) by the end of the first millenium BC.
The so-called epistles of "Paul" know nothing of Mary, Joseph, Pilate, Calvary, miracles, etc. This shit was yet another tradition which was incorporated into the system which emerged.
Marcion used the "Jews" as the bad guys in his story and yhwh as a sort of primeval scumbag. But because xtians burned all his writings we don't know his motivations...only what his enemies have told us.
If you are going to be skeptical about this stuff you have to be skeptical of all of it.
Xtianity seems to be a mid-2d century creation...or at least that is the time that someone pulled together various disparate themes and started what Ehrman calls "proto-orthodoxy." By the mid 2d century there had been 3 serious Jewish revolts and they had been crushed and scattered by the Romans. They were the perfect bad guys for this little story.
But we have no archaeological or historical evidence for xtians in Palestine in the first century. The earliest actual reference is Pliny the Younger, in the early 2d century, in friggin' Bithynia-Pontus which was on the Black Sea coast of Turkey and his report of them does not bear much resemblance to the later variants of xtianity.
The only tale we have which supports the story is the one which the proto-orthodox championed and that, frankly, is not worth the parchment it is written on.
The Gabriel Revelation Stone indicates that the concept of a 3-day resurrection was already known to some group(s) by the end of the first millenium BC.
The so-called epistles of "Paul" know nothing of Mary, Joseph, Pilate, Calvary, miracles, etc. This shit was yet another tradition which was incorporated into the system which emerged.
Marcion used the "Jews" as the bad guys in his story and yhwh as a sort of primeval scumbag. But because xtians burned all his writings we don't know his motivations...only what his enemies have told us.
If you are going to be skeptical about this stuff you have to be skeptical of all of it.
Xtianity seems to be a mid-2d century creation...or at least that is the time that someone pulled together various disparate themes and started what Ehrman calls "proto-orthodoxy." By the mid 2d century there had been 3 serious Jewish revolts and they had been crushed and scattered by the Romans. They were the perfect bad guys for this little story.
But we have no archaeological or historical evidence for xtians in Palestine in the first century. The earliest actual reference is Pliny the Younger, in the early 2d century, in friggin' Bithynia-Pontus which was on the Black Sea coast of Turkey and his report of them does not bear much resemblance to the later variants of xtianity.
The only tale we have which supports the story is the one which the proto-orthodox championed and that, frankly, is not worth the parchment it is written on.
