(September 22, 2014 at 12:51 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Can you summarize his main points?
I seem to remember them being something along the lines of:
- There are prior examples of religions where a god was originally spiritual, then was eventually retconned into being physical.
- There are prior examples of gods that got salvation cults attached to them.
- Taking various edits to the original texts into account and ignoring the Epistles that weren't penned by Paul, there is nothing in Paul's original writings that suggests Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human.
- He excludes the Gospels, although I don't remember all of the reasons (contradictory info and non-contemporary, but he may have had other complaints).
- There are some other writings of a spiritual Jesus that predate his alleged birth by a couple decades and talk about him fighting demons on the moon (or at least the celestial realm associated with the moon in Jewish cosmology), or some such.
So, I think the take-home is that he thinks YHWH had a salvation cult attached to him that later on turned the spiritual Jesus into a physical one to bolster their claims. These claims didn't happen until decades after Christ's alleged death.
