For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

[Minimalist]

So, we can't really be sure that Paul not being mentioned is significant.

Well, then you must ask yourself WHEN paul became significant to the story? Because if he brought the story to the Gentiles and the Gentiles know fuckall about it there is a hole in the story.

This idea means accepting that Jesus really existed.

Quite the opposite. It means that the idea of some jerkoff coming back to life 3 days after being killed pre-dates "jesus" by 30+ years at least and because no one wrote about them we have no idea how widespread this particular cult idea may have been.

It does not require a real "jesus" anymore than the Prometheus myth requires a real Prometheus. People willingly believe all sorts of stupid shit.

[Confused Ape]

[Minimalist]

I've been having a look at Justin Martyrs Writings to see if there's any reason why he should have mentioned Paul.

You've never heard of the fallacy of the pre-determined outcome, I see?

[Confused Ape]

I've been having a look at Justin Martyrs Writings to see if there's any reason why he should have mentioned Paul.

You've never heard of the fallacy of the pre-determined outcome, I see?

What do you mean?

The key information I discovered about Justin by looking around was that -

1: Justin quoted and paraphrased the letters of Paul.

2: Marcion, who was alive in Justin's time, regarded Paul as Jesus's chief apostle whom Marcion considered the correct interpreter and transmitter of Jesus' teachings

3: Justin regarded Marcion as a heretic because he says so in the First Apology.

This indicates that Paul's writings were very important to the story even though Marcion doesn't mention Paul by name. The only people he did mention by name are Marcion, Simon the Magician, Menander, Peter and John. If we're going to take Justin's writings as the only proof that someone was known about we'll have to assume that only two of Jesus's disciples were known about because he doesn't refer to the other ten by their names.

Does any of this prove that Paul actually existed? No, but it appears to indicate that people of the time could have believed that he existed.

[Minimalist]

The Fallacy of the Pre-Determined outcome goes something like this...

There is a baseball game and late in the game one team is losing by a run. They get a runner on base who tries to steal second and is thrown out. On the next pitch, the batter hits a home run. One announcer notes that if the runner had not been caught stealing they would now be in the lead.

The problem here is that it assumes the result would have been the same.

If the runner had not tried to steal the pitcher may have thrown to first, he may have thrown a different pitch in that situation or he might have pitched out in an effort to anticipate the runner stealing. And what of the batter. With a runner on first the manager could have signaled him to sacrifice bunt? Or try to hit behind the runner to advance him to third? The batter may have even taken a pitch to give the runner a chance to steal. There simply is no way to know what would have happened next. However, with no one on base the entire situation changes and the batter is free to swing away and the pitcher is not distracted by the runner.

The is a guy over at FRDB who wrote this extensive list of ancient writers and came up with a reason why none of them mentioned Josephus' TF. Very impressive except all he showed is that none of them knew about it. You can always make up reasons why someone did not do something but Occam's Razor suggests that had the TF existed someone, particularly a xtian writer, would have mentioned it.

Similarly here. IF Paul was an actual person who lived a century before Justin and wrote these critical epistles it simply boggles the mind that Justin never heard of him and used the name. This is very close to the "Great Christian Paradox." Jesus was so fucking dangerous that the powers that be had to break every rule in their own book to deal with him YET at the same time he was so inconsequential that no one noticed him? If Paul was this towering figure in the first century bringing this semi-jewish shit loaf to gentiles then the Gentiles should have known all about him and revered him, shouldn't they? Instead, we find "his" epistles being trotted out by Marcion and, it would seem, only later being adopted into the growing xtian bullshit story of the day.

Call me suspicious.

[Confused Ape]

[EGross]

Now, there is a censored section of the Talmud (well a couple of words that make all of the difference), where Rabbi Eliezer is recalling to Rabbi Akiva a time where he (Rabbi Eliezer) had sinned by enjoying a conversation with a min, who was mocking the High Priest in the Temple for being a Pharisee, while this person was a Jew who had converted to Christianity. (The joke was the chutzpah of the one mocking the other).

Now, in the pre-censored form, the term min had replaced talmid Yeshu, meaning a student of importance who was not just a person who accepted Jesus as his master, but was a teacher of his teachings, a representative of his. This was, based on the context, prior to 70CE. Now there has been debate as to who this person could have been. But being that the story has no real date, nor is the person actually named, it just makes for a lot of conjecture. One thought was a traveling preacher who was trying to get followers and was leading the movement. Another was the man who would have created the cult (who we refer to as Paul, which is an odd name. While it sounds like "Saul" there is no real connection between the two). There are other conjectures as well. But if you look up Rabbi Eliezer on Wikipedia, you see that the lack ofscholarship causes Christians to believe that Rabbi Eliezer was a secret Christian, while ignoring that he openly disputed and denounced them in other places.

So was there a real Paul? Was his name "Paul", or was that the Greek name he took or was born with.

Oh, one more fun Jewish tradition: Paul was really a Greek, a convert, who converted to marry a Jewish woman he was in love with from afar. After converting, he asked for her hand, but she said that since she was the daughter of a Kohen, she was not allowed to marry a convert. And so he got pissed, cursed the Jews, and went on his evil rampaging quest.

It's probably a polemic, but it's a fun one!

[tokutter]

The Fallacy of the Pre-Determined outcome goes something like this...

There is a baseball game and late in the game one team is losing by a run. They get a runner on base who tries to steal second and is thrown out. On the next pitch, the batter hits a home run. One announcer notes that if the runner had not been caught stealing they would now be in the lead.

The problem here is that it assumes the result would have been the same.

If the runner had not tried to steal the pitcher may have thrown to first, he may have thrown a different pitch in that situation or he might have pitched out in an effort to anticipate the runner stealing. And what of the batter. With a runner on first the manager could have signaled him to sacrifice bunt? Or try to hit behind the runner to advance him to third? The batter may have even taken a pitch to give the runner a chance to steal. There simply is no way to know what would have happened next. However, with no one on base the entire situation changes and the batter is free to swing away and the pitcher is not distracted by the runner.

The is a guy over at FRDB who wrote this extensive list of ancient writers and came up with a reason why none of them mentioned Josephus' TF. Very impressive except all he showed is that none of them knew about it. You can always make up reasons why someone did not do something but Occam's Razor suggests that had the TF existed someone, particularly a xtian writer, would have mentioned it.

Similarly here. IF Paul was an actual person who lived a century before Justin and wrote these critical epistles it simply boggles the mind that Justin never heard of him and used the name. This is very close to the "Great Christian Paradox." Jesus was so fucking dangerous that the powers that be had to break every rule in their own book to deal with him YET at the same time he was so inconsequential that no one noticed him? If Paul was this towering figure in the first century bringing this semi-jewish shit loaf to gentiles then the Gentiles should have known all about him and revered him, shouldn't they? Instead, we find "his" epistles being trotted out by Marcion and, it would seem, only later being adopted into the growing xtian bullshit story of the day.

Call me suspicious.

Well my day has not been a waste. Another lesson well learned from Min. Thank you sir.

[Confused Ape]