Is Christianity based on older myths?

[robvalue]

Right. It is very sad that we all know a heck of a lot more about the bible than the christians we debate. I almost feel bad that I know other stuff he would not want to hear. There's not much point even bringing it up though when the very fundamental ways in which evidence is assessed can't be agreed on.

[Minimalist]

They are trapped by dogma.

[Mister Agenda]

I don't know if you genuinely can't understand this point, or are being deliberately difficult because you desperately want to cling to your beliefs.

You seem to think that the initial reporting of events was absolutely especially totally true. The people who saw it not only told the absolute truth, but also understood everything that was happening, including correctly attributing supernatural causations. And not just that, but that the reports were passed on entirely accurately.

We wouldn't give anyone even today such credibility, why are you giving it to superstitious warmongers with an agenda? People make stuff up, people get deluded and people make up explanations. So what someone believes happened, and why it happened, is entirely irrelelevant if it cannot be independently demonstrated.

That is, if you care at all about the truth of the claims.

You seem to think that Paul was a generation removed from the events. He was not. He would have been a child or young man when Jesus died. He didn't get his info from the telephone game. He knew, met with, and corresponded with actual disciples of Jesus. So for your theory to work, the actual eyewitnesses to Jesus' life would have had to lie to Paul who passed it on in his letters. The eyewitnesses also wrote letters (at least John, Peter, and James' survived) where they lied.

It's amazing the detail of people's thoughts you get from their general statements. Nothing was said about Paul in particular at all, yet here you are telling robvalue what he thinks about that specific writer.

So your claim is that Paul had special access to second-hand knowledge of Jesus. That puts him ahead of the Gospel writers, so what are we to make of Paul's apparent ignorance of nearly every story about Jesus the Gospel writers recorded but the resurrection?

And Paul doesn't claim to have gotten his information from witnesses, he claims to have gotten it by direct revelation (Galatians 1:12).

[robvalue]

I have to keep reminding myself about the book we're actually discussing. I mean... Harry Potter is still more likely to be true, even though the author intended it to be fiction.

[SteveII]

It still remains that if Christianity is based on recycling old myths (including the Teacher of Righteousness):

1. The eyewitnesses of John, Peter, and James lied (with or without Paul's help). There has yet to be a plausible reason for such involved and far reaching deceit. Seeing the problem with that, some of you say, "Well, not so much as a lie...as...". Sorry, the deceit had to be intentional.
2. John, Peter, and James (with or without Paul's help) had access to all the myths mentioned (from Egyptian, Sumerian, Roman, Greek, eastern religions, etc.) and cleverly used them to be compatible with not only monotheism, but the monotheism of the OT.

I have yet to hear any scenario that is more probably than the disciples ALL believed what they were saying was true; and since some of them were eyewitnesses, they believed they saw these events (most important being the resurrection of Jesus). It is important to note that it does not matter what you believe about the events of Jesus' life or if you think their belief rational.

If the disciples all believed what they saw, wrote and spoke of, then the hypothesis of this thread, that Christianity is based on recycled myths, fails.

[FatAndFaithless]

Good fuck I think you might take the intellectual dishonesty title from Drich.

[robvalue]

Holy shitting shit bastards on a stick from China with added whiff of utter fuck pants.

Have we gone that far people? Where did it go wrong?

[Mister Agenda]

I don't care if you believe the events of Jesus' life actually happened or not. But the consequences of rejecting the gospels is that a significant number of people intentionally lied.

That's your claim. Our claim is that none of it is verifiable and even if they were sincere they may well have been wrong.

Then the question is to what end?

No end is needed unless you think intentional fabrication is the only and entire explanation. There are LOTS of possible reasons for information in the Bible to be wrong, possible lying is just one of them.

This all goes toward the probability assessment of whether the first Christians believed in the actual key events in Jesus' life.

Then your first step would be to establish what they believed those key events were prior to the Gospels being written down.

[Minimalist]

Nothing was said about Paul in particular at all, yet here you are telling robvalue what he thinks about that specific writer.

Then it is time to understand that before Marcion came along, no one ever heard of any fucking 'paul.' Marcionism is the key to the political dispute which led to orthodox jesusism being invented. It has nothing to do with any resurrected godboy or other such inane shit.

Religion is about politics and power. Always was. Always will be.

That it finds gullible fools to advance its 'truths' is the whole fucking problem with humanity.

[Mister Agenda]

Sure I understand that. But at some point in the causal chain of belief, someone had to start the lie.

That's your claim, and you haven't supported it well at all.

After reading the epistles you would have to assume the lie started with the actual disciples (with or without Paul's involvement).

Would you please stop telling us what we have to assume? Your record so far is poor enough that a little humility concerning your own ability to deduce our thoughts is in order. We don't have to assume any such thing. We don't even have to assume there were disciples. A good rule in reasoning is to assume as little as possible.

Relevant to this thread, that would mean the Galilean fisherman borrowed from ancient myths (with or without Paul's help) to concoct the story they would tell as true.

Given the time between the fishermen and the Gospels, the original story of Jesus could have been utterly myth-free and accurate beyond any reasonable expectations when they told it. Given that, decades of retelling would still certainly profoundly corrupt the original tales.