(September 22, 2014 at 3:09 pm)RobbyPants Wrote:(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.
That there are many plausible explanations for the Jesus cult that doesn't require any real Jesus to have existed is not in itself evidence that there never was a real Jesus. There are equally many plausible explanations for the Jesus cult which tales about a real Jesus dovetailing with pervasive gullibility to metastasize into the cult of Jesus.
One should not cherry pick the explanation that strengthens one's own point of view when equally good explanations in the opposite direction also,exist.
