annoying jesus-freaks.
This is as good a place to start as any.
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articl...tory.htm#3
This is as good a place to start as any.
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articl...tory.htm#3
Quote:Many people ask, "If Jesus didn't exist, then where did these stories come from?" "How would these stories emerge if someone did not in-fact inspire them?"
Pretty much every detail of the life of Jesus as presented in the Gospels relates back to some prior Hebrew scripture, mostly from the scriptures that we now call the Old Testament, though some elements of the Gospels appear to be based on other non-scriptural works as well. The life of Jesus is a story that was created by combining elements from many other Hebrew stories to create a pseudo-proto-typical savior figure. Christians have traditionally used the parallels between the story of Jesus and the Hebrew scriptures to claim that Jesus fulfilled many prophecies from the "Old Testament", but there are several problems with this claim.
First of all, even if every parallel between the story of Jesus and the Hebrew scriptures related back to a genuine prophecy there would still be nothing to show that the authors of the Gospels didn't simply base their stories on the prophesies. They would have known exactly what to write in order to "fulfill" the prophecies and we have nothing independent of the Gospels to attest to any of this.
Secondly, many of the parallels between the story of Jesus and the Hebrew scriptures don't relate back to prophecies, they simply relate back to other stories about different people, or simply to songs and poems.
Thirdly, as we will discuss later, some of the key elements of the Jesus story are based on mistranslations of the Hebrew scriptures, showing clearly that the authors of the Gospels were basing their accounts of Jesus on other texts and that there is no way to call those accounts "prophesy fulfillment".
Lastly, I call the Jesus Christ character of the Gospels a "pseudo-proto-typical savior" because the story of Jesus is definitely based on the Hebrew scriptures, but it is based on a misunderstanding of them.
