Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:

[RoadRunner79]

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It seems that you are going with the story you simply like better...

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Any natural explanation is infinitely more likely than any supernatural explanation.  That is reality whether you like it or not.


Are you as open to stories of Apollo striding down from Mt Olympus and shooting arrows at the Greeks around Troy?  Or are we simply being treated to xtian special pleading?

How did we get from the Jesus myth nonsense to Apollo and Mt Olympus?   Any way...  yes, I am open to evidence outside of my subjective knowledge.

[Minimalist]

We got here because you were vaguely suggesting that anyone who disagrees with your jesus fantasies is merely "picking the story they like best."  I wonder if you can look in a mirror and ask yourself the same question, or, is your stuff "different?"

Hence the mention of special pleading.

[RoadRunner79]

We got here because you were vaguely suggesting that anyone who disagrees with your jesus fantasies is merely "picking the story they like best."  I wonder if you can look in a mirror and ask yourself the same question, or, is your stuff "different?"

Hence the mention of special pleading.

That's not what I am saying at all.... I think you are mis-interpreting.
You posted your "once upon a time story"
And I suggested that you prefer a made up story to historic evidence. Which you appeared to confirm. As you don't back up your claims.

However I'm not going to go back and forth on this. If you would like to discuss serious things, I'm happy to oblige. If not you can continue to make my arguments for me.

[Minimalist]

I don't think it is possible to misinterpret this.

It seems that you are going with the story you simply like better...

In case your forgot what you wrote.

[Minimalist]

I don't think it is possible to misinterpret this.

It seems that you are going with the story you simply like better...

In case your forgot what you wrote.  Speaking of the story you "like better."

[GUBU]

You're wrong on this, because all Lucian of Samosota does is confirm that the christian cult existed at a date after 125CE. Nobody disputes this. What he categorically does not do, and what christian apologists essentially lie in portraying him as doing, is show that Jesus existed, started a religion, and that that religion is based off the "one true" god.

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Bringing up a "witness" claiming christianity existed in 125 CE is as useful for christians claiming it existed in c33CE as a defence team in a murder case where the defendant said he was dining in Restaurant X on 12:15 on the 15th September (the time of the murder) bringing up a witness who says "yeah he was there on that date, I saw him with my own two eyes, eating there on 12:15 on the 24th September". About as useful as shit on a stick frankly.

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Yes, I believe that is what I had said.  I find it interesting that I'm wrong, but you seem to agree with me.  The usefulness is in dispelling those who would claim late dating and legend.  It can be reliably shown that the Church was fairly well established early in the 2nd Century and prior across a large geographic area.  Lucian of Samosota was only born in 125 A.D.  and I'm unsure what time he wrote this, so it makes him specifically less useful for this purpose (and is probably why it is the first I have heard of him).  Others can be used more successfully to place Christianity as established earlier in the 1st century.  This goes to show that these events are reported during the time they are claimed, and unlikely the result of legend.   (Legends must distance themselves from the facts necessarily).  We have a number of accounts from multiple sources of Jesus.  And these are also backed up by others in the early 2nd century who quoted them, and attributed their Church founding to the Apostles and Jesus's disciples. 

However, if you have evidence or reason to believe that this is all myth or conspiracy theory, please do share!

My point is, which you seem to be so intent on missing despite it being obvious (I wonder why?), is that Lucian in no way proves the existence of Jesus, he only proves the existence of a cult of Jesus extant in 165CE. This is spectacularly bad evidence to be pointing at if you want to argue the existence of Jesus, equivalent to pointing out the existence of Jedism for the truthfulness of the Star Wars story, or the creation of neo-paganism for the reality of Thor. Cults have always existed around fictional people (including the biblical Jesus) and they probably will for a long time yet.

[Minimalist]

the existence of a cult of Jesus extant in 165CE.

No.  It does not.  All it shows is that is that a group known as christians worshiped some guy who was crucified.  Lucian never mentions the name "jesus."  Neither did Pliny or Suetonius and even Tacitus...assuming that the comment in Annales 15:44 is legitimate which is a hell of an assumption.  The earliest Roman source who mentions the name "jesus" is Celsus, c 180 AD and he thinks the story is flat-out fucking absurd.

The other thing that we can take out of Lucian's work is that in the 160's AD, xtians were considered to be easily conned simpletons.

[RoadRunner79]

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Yes, I believe that is what I had said.  I find it interesting that I'm wrong, but you seem to agree with me.  The usefulness is in dispelling those who would claim late dating and legend.  It can be reliably shown that the Church was fairly well established early in the 2nd Century and prior across a large geographic area.  Lucian of Samosota was only born in 125 A.D.  and I'm unsure what time he wrote this, so it makes him specifically less useful for this purpose (and is probably why it is the first I have heard of him).  Others can be used more successfully to place Christianity as established earlier in the 1st century.  This goes to show that these events are reported during the time they are claimed, and unlikely the result of legend.   (Legends must distance themselves from the facts necessarily).  We have a number of accounts from multiple sources of Jesus.  And these are also backed up by others in the early 2nd century who quoted them, and attributed their Church founding to the Apostles and Jesus's disciples. 

However, if you have evidence or reason to believe that this is all myth or conspiracy theory, please do share!

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My point is, which you seem to be so intent on missing despite it being obvious (I wonder why?), is that Lucian in no way proves the existence of Jesus, he only proves the existence of a cult of Jesus extant in 165CE. This is spectacularly bad evidence to be pointing at if you want to argue the existence of Jesus, equivalent to pointing out the existence of Jedism for the truthfulness of the Star Wars story, or the creation of neo-paganism for the reality of Thor. Cults have always existed around fictional people (including the biblical Jesus) and they probably will for a long time yet.

I feel as if we are carrying on two different conversations.  I'll agree again, so you can tell how I am missing it.

[Minimalist]

Back to history:

Luke is eager to give his Gospel the respectability of a genuine historical account, but he exhibits none of the qualities of a real historian – not even by the standards of historians from his own time. His “research” appears limited to picking scenic period details from other writers and using them to spruce up a re-write of Mark’s Gospel based on his own theological slant.

 

Jesus’ Trial on Trial

 

And was Mark’s account a historical one to begin with? His frequent mistakes about the fundamentals of Judaism and Judean geography betray that he is no early first century eyewitness on the scene. And several of the most basic elements of his story don’t hold up to historical realities. For instance, modern Jewish scholars have listed problems with the trial of Jesus since at least the 18th century.2 The proceedings described by Mark and company go against everything we know about the Judaic legal system. Jewish legal authority Haim Cohn (Attorney-General of Israel and later Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court) scrutinized the different Biblical accounts of Jesus’ trial with a fine-toothed comb in The Trial and Death of Jesus,3 and his verdict is harsh: even where the Gospels do agree with each other, on point after point he finds that the Gospel writers get their facts wrong, sometimes ridiculously so.

 

The trial is incompatible with multiple well-established provisions of ancient Jewish law; in fact the violations of Jewish law in Jesus’ trial dog-pile on each other so fast it’s hard to keep up. All of them are virtually inconceivable, and of course highly improper: neglecting Passover, meeting by night, holding trial in a private home, conducting a trial in secret, the High Priest acting as interrogator himself and even striking the defendant with his hand, the failure of the witnesses to agree, mocking and beating the prisoner, and many more, any of which should have resulted in a mistrial. Even worse, they appear to have deliberately misrepresented certain aspects or the trial to paint the Jewish religious leaders as stereotypical villains.

As the gospels progress the depiction of the jews becomes ever more strident.  But the question of when is such abject hatred of the jews likely to have arisen.  Yes, the Great Revolt took 4 years to suppress but that was mainly because Vespasian took two years off watching political events in Rome.   And why not?  He had the city effectively cut off by controlling the roads in and out and the desert to the south would have been crossable but not by large numbers.  He could afford to let them rot while seeing who emerged on the throne and finally took his chance and won it himself.  But the jews were crushed and their city sacked and burned and the Romans had bigger fish to fry with a new dynasty on the throne.  This is one of the reasons that I can't take Joseph Atwill's theory (Caesar's Messiah) seriously.  Aside from the generally shitty scholarship the Romans had crushed that revolt the same way they crushed every other revolt.

But, by the time we reach the mid-2d century the jews were definitely on the shit list.  There had been two more revolts and the second one may well have been a Parthian-inspired 5th column movement to divert the Romans from their attack on Mesopotamia under Trajan.  Again, it is around this time that we begin to see the Romans noticing a group called "xtians."  Not before.  Which is odd considering their whole "multitudes of xtians" in Rome itself in the first century bullshit story.