For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[EGross]

As I said, the distressed are more easily duped. Perhaps "suckers" is a bit strong for some.

Example: years ago my stepdayghter in the USA had a boyfriend dying of luekemia. Someone gave her the address of a scam atrist who promised to cure or you get your money back (there is enough of a percentage of people getting better or dying quietly that this scam becomes profitable). Normally, she would have dismissed this, but because of her distress, she considered it. And the day she gave in and left his side to pay the scammer, the boyfriend died. She felt bad for quite some time. Maybe if she had gone to the healer earlier. Maybe.

Where is the messiah? Oh, you say he came? Will he be back soon? What do I need to do? It's my fault he hasn't arrived? I am sorry? What can I do?

I would say that today is no different than 2000 years ago. People mourn and are easily manipulated when they do. Hence my story about Rabbi Birnbaum and his fear of scammers taking advantage.

[Confused Ape]

I am not saying Paul did exactly that. I am saying it only would take someone with a bit of ambition to take advantage of the feelings of that day, and to bring a messiah that they could buy. And if the Jews would not come in droves, or felt really weird about some of the miracles, well, the other downtrodden are just waiting.

It looks like very few Jews of the time bought Paul's messiah because the new religion didn't really take off until the pagans got hold of it. Maybe they thought that Paul's invented character was very exotic because he wasn't a Greek or a Roman.

As a side point about Antoninus, the Talmud has him as a great person because he was best friend with Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (Rebbi),

I'm a bit confused here. Antinous was supposed to have been Hadrian's lover.

I wonder what a religion based on the magic and marvels of the Alexander Romance would have been like. I think the orthodox version would have taught that Zeus was his father, though.

[Minimalist]

Yes, there probably were a lot of them but not all of them got associated with Christianity.

But we don't know how many steps there were in that process. Ignoring the xtian writings ( biased and edited as they are) we seem to go from chrestus to christus to "jesus" itself a derivation of yeshua meaning "god is salvation."

Mormonism has a literal founder. Joseph Smith, con man, liar, swindler, and murder victim. How much better for them if they did not have to overcome the unsavory personality of their founder?

[EGross]

If we are talking about Antoninus Pius, then he had a really weird relationship with a lot of different people.

I think he was the emperor who gets killed at the beginning of "Gladiator" IIRC !

[Minimalist]

No, that was Marcus Aurelius.

Antoninus Pius was emperor when "Justin Martyr" wrote his first apology c 160.

[EGross]

Ah, ok. Wrong Antoninus, then.

[Minimalist]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinuous

Hey, he got "deified" too. Happened a lot back then!

[Confused Ape]

But we don't know how many steps there were in that process. Ignoring the xtian writings ( biased and edited as they are) we seem to go from chrestus to christus to "jesus" itself a derivation of yeshua meaning "god is salvation."

This just leaves a couple of references by pagan Roman historians which may or may not be genuine. The main reason why Christians are supposed to have got up Roman noses is their refusal to worship other gods etc. If they hadn't been so obstinate, nobody would have cared about their beliefs because what was one more deity associated with Bacchus/Dionysys and Osiris?

Once the Christians really got going they wanted everything - divine father, virgin mother, sacrificial king, resurrection, anything they thought fitted from the cult of Mithras plus a biography which fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. If there ever was a real man buried under that lot it's impossible to find him now.

If we are talking about Antoninus Pius, then he had a really weird relationship with a lot of different people.

He wasn't the same person as Antinous, though. Hadrian adopted Antoninus who became the emperor after Hadrian's death. Antinous was a Bithynian youth who was Hadrian's favourite and he was drowned in the Nile. I'm guessing that the only reason why he's remembered at all is because he happened to die while Hadrian still fancied him.

Will end with three more humans who were given divine status - there's more but I can't be bothered looking up further details about them.

Prince Philip is lucky because he wasn't required to die first.

Just how the tribe even began to think in terms of Prince Philip being a God is lost somewhere in the mists of time, but it is believed the legend started in the early 1970s when, as a simple warrior, Chief Jack was one of the paddlers in a war canoe that greeted the Royal yacht Britannia when the Prince and the Queen visited the New Hebrides.
'I saw him standing on the deck in his white uniform and I knew then that he was the true Messiah,' Chief Jack told the Mail in the months before his death.

Imhotep became a medical deity.

(born 27th century bce, Memphis, Egypt), vizier, sage, architect, astrologer, and chief minister to Djoser (reigned 2630–2611 bce), the second king of Egypt’s third dynasty, who was later worshipped as the god of medicine in Egypt and in Greece, where he was identified with the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius. He is considered to have been the architect of the step pyramid built at the necropolis of Ṣaqqārah in the city of Memphis. The oldest extant monument of hewn stone known to the world, the pyramid consists of six steps and attains a height of 200 feet (61 metres).

George Washington got adopted by Shintoism.

George Washington has been included in the pantheon of kami (saijin) worshipped at Hawaiian shrines, and some shrines even fly the Stars and Stripes, but that does not necessarily mean that the orientation of Hawaiian shrines' itself has been Americanized.

[Minimalist]

The main reason why Christians are supposed to have got up Roman noses is their refusal to worship other gods etc.

And yet Pliny tells us that they cursed christ and sacrificed to the emperor. We have definitive dates for Pliny ( 110-112 AD).

[Confused Ape]

And yet Pliny tells us that they cursed christ and sacrificed to the emperor. We have definitive dates for Pliny ( 110-112 AD).

Maybe they were the sensible ones who didn't want to be punished.

The Romans had a different definition of superstition.

Once distinguished from Judaism, Christianity was no longer seen as simply a bizarre sect of an old and venerable religion; it was a superstitio (a superstition).[21] Superstition had for the Romans a much more powerful and dangerous connotation than it does for much of the Western world today: to them, this term meant a set of religious practices that were not only different, but corrosive to society, "disturbing a man's mind in such a way that he is really going insans" and causing him to lose humanitas (humanity).[22] The persecution of "superstitious" sects was hardly unheard-of in Roman history: an unnamed foreign cult was persecuted during a drought in 428 BCE, some initiates of the Bacchic cult were executed when deemed out-of-hand in 186 BCE, and measures were taken against the Druids during the early Principate.[23]
Even so, the level of persecution experienced by any given community of Christians still depended upon how threatening the local official deemed this new superstitio to be. Christians' beliefs would not have endeared them to many government officials: they worshipped a convicted criminal, refused to swear by the emperor's genius, harshly criticized Rome in their holy books, and suspiciously conducted their rites in private. In the early third century one magistrate told Christians "I cannot bring myself so much as to listen to people who speak ill of the Roman way of religion."[24]

I don't think this reported attitude is too fanciful when viewed against later history. Once the Roman faction got into power, other Christian sects were branded heretical and all other religions were false.