MYTHICISM REGARDING THE POSSIBLE NON-EXISTENCE OF JESUS IS A SPECTRUM

WAS THERE A JESUS? 

Mythicism is the notion that much or all of what is reported of Jesus was reported of an invention.  To claim Jesus is an outright lie or myth upsets people.  Part of the reason is that supporters seem to be saying that as Jesus was not corroborated by anybody independent and that sounds too much like an argument from silence which seems rather weak.

Yet it is true that the gospels themselves as good as validate mythicism for they have stories that just cannot be true.  For example, Jesus riots in the Temple and is still free to roam.  The healings look more like a substitute for the fact that Jesus did nothing for anyone.  He never gave away his dinner.  Magic is a lazy way to help people. 

Jesus violates the strict Unitarian solo God theology of the Jews and gets away with it.

JOHN 10:30. “I and the Father are One”. When Jesus said this after promising to bestow eternal life the Jews tried to kill him by stoning for making himself God.

When one studies the context it is made plain that their response may not have been caused by this utterance but by the promise that he would give eternal life which seemed to make him God. The cited utterance itself is no proof that he claimed to be divine. A man and his wife are one (Genesis 2:24). It is silly to argue that they would have lifted the rocks to stone him before he got a chance to say he was one with the Father if it was the everlasting life promise that bothered them. Maybe they just wanted to hear what else he had to say and let him finish before they grabbed the stones?

The cited utterance on its own was inoffensive for it was biblical as Jesus explained later so what the Jews were disgusted by was his saying that he gives eternal life and nobody can take it away which seemed to be claiming that God made him the saviour and the boss but not necessarily God.

Some scholars say the most accurate translation of the text is, “I and the Father are one essence or nature.” This is because the word for one is hen which is neuter. If they are right then Jesus said that he and God were of the same substance to show how intimate they were though they weren't literally the same substance. Jesus said that a man and his wife were one flesh. He didn’t mean that literally so why should we take this verse literally? It is most reasonable not to. Jesus never said that his relationship with God was beyond our understanding. When a person says something that could be interpreted in a simple sense or in a paradoxical and incomprehensible sense we should veer towards the first sense. Even if Jesus said he was one substance with the Father we have to take him as not meaning one being for we can’t make sense of that.

Jesus asked the Jews what good work they were going to stone him for. In other words, he had no offensive meaning in what he said so he did not mean he was God for he could not blame them for wanting to stone him when their creed told them to stone anybody that said he was God. They said that it was not for good but for saying he was God. The passage does not say that they were telling the truth. But John stresses Jesus’ infallibility so good works were the real reason. Jesus was saying there was nothing in what he said that could justify the ignorant stoning him. A person who thought Jesus blasphemed would be entitled to but he is nobody could think that.

Psalm 82 speaks of gods or elohims meaning judges and verse 7 says they will die so they don't seem to be very divine.  This is like Exodus 22:9 where it mentions human judges.  The implication is that they are like God for they have his sanction to judge.  This is a hidden affirmation of the Bible's ban on gay sex.  Jesus then told the Jews that if he claimed to be divine it was in the sense that the Scriptures called anyone who heard God’s word divine or gods. He clarified that they could not accuse him of blasphemy when the Law called them gods. They could if the Law meant it symbolically and he meant he was literally divine so if the Law was symbolic so was his claim. This is proof that John’s gospel is not the great book that was written to say that Jesus was God that many scholars think it is. Jesus is saying that he is as much God as those who hear God’s word is. There is nothing else he could have meant. He claimed to be divine but not literally divine. He called himself God as a symbolic way of saying he was God’s supreme representative.

We must add that as the Psalm complains about the sins of the judges, Jesus is saying, "It calls sinful men godlike judges so why can't I call himself the godlike judge too and indeed the ultimate one?"  Jesus denies that he means he is divine in the way God is, he says he has human divinity and even more so than any of those men.

Christians argue that Jesus was being ironic, "If you call those dying creatures gods why can't you see I am fully God for they don't compare to me?"  But a poetic psalm cannot be used to make that point and the Jews did not call anybody gods.  The logic does not follow.  Men being called gods cannot mean that Jesus is God.  In reality as a creature who was to die, Jesus was putting himself in their own league.  He was just another "god".

Contrary to The First Letter of St John you can love the child and hate the father. John says that you cannot because if you love God you will love God’s Son and the other children of God for he who loves the daddy loves the child the daddy makes (5:1). Some reason that this could only be right if we are all incarnations of God as much as Jesus was meaning that to hate the persons who are God is to hate God the Father for they are all one God. That could be taken in a pantheistic sense. But my view is that John was just manipulating logic to trick his followers so that they would think they hate the father when they hate the child.

The Christian idea that Jesus means he was more entitled to be called literally God than they were to be called symbolically divine makes no sense and is blatantly incoherent. Everybody and everything is symbolically divine. The verses that deny that Jesus was God come before the ones that seem to say that he was because it is more reasonable and respectful to God to deny that he was God.

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The WWW

Who is GA Wells? Rev Dr Gregory S. Neal
www.errantskeptics.org/G_A_Wells.htm

The Silent Jesus
www.askwhy.co.uk/awcnotes/cn4/0325SilentJesus.html#Justin

Apollonius the Nazarene, The Historical Apollonius versus the Historical Jesus
www.apollonius.net/bernard1e.html

Why Did the Apostles Die? Dave Matson,
www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4Why97.html

The “Historical” Jesus by Acharya S
www.truthbeknown.com/historicaljc.htm

How Did the Apostles Die?
www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/4/4front97.html

History’s Troubling Silence About Jesus, Lee Salisbury
www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=102

Steven Carr discusses the Christian and apostolic martyrs
www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs.htm
www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs2.htm

Challenging the Verdict
A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsOne.htm
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsTwo.htm
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsThree.htm#Twelve

The Martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, Peter Kirby
http://home.earthlink.net/~kirby/

The Martyrdoms: A Response, Peter Kirby
www.bowness.demon.co.uk/martyrs3.htm

A Sacrifice in Heaven,
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/supp09.htm

The Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/partthre.htm

The Jesus of History, a Reply to Josh McDowell by Gordon Stein
www.infidels.org/library/modern/gordon_stein/Jesus.html

Josh McDowell’s Evidence for Jesus – Is It Reliable?, by Jeffrey J Lowder www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/chap5.html

A Reply to JP Holding’s “Shattering” of My Views on Jesus
www.infidels.org/secular_web/new/2000/march.html

Robert M Price, Christ a Fiction
www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html

Earliest Christianity G A Wells
www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/earliest.html

The Second Century Apologists
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/century.htm

Existence of Jesus Controversy, Rae West
www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/gm1_jesu.htm

Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story by Richard Carrier
www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/index.shtml

Jesus Conference,
www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_hall.html

Jesus Conference,
www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_sd/jconf_stuckenbruck.html

The Testament of Levi Concerning the Priesthood and Arrogance
www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-07.htm#P378_53868.

Sherlock Holmes Style Search for the Historical Jesus
www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/bp/890/history.html

The Ascension of Isaiah
www.earth-history.com/sacred-ascension-Isaiah.htm

Apollonius of Tyana: The Monkey of Christ? The Church Patriarchs, Robertino Solarion www.apollonius.net/patriarchs.html

What About the Discovery of Q? Brad Bromling
www.ApologeticsPress.org

Wells without Water, Psychological Buffoonry from the Master of the Christ-Myth, James Patrick Holding
www.tektonics.org/JPH_WW.html

Critique: Scott Bidstrp [sic] on The Case for Christ by James Patrick Holding
www.tektonics.org/bidstrup02.html

GA Wells Replies to Criticism of his Books on Jesus
www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/errant.html

The Ossuary Scam: A Critical Analysis of the “James” Ossuary
http://www.atrueword.com/index.php/article/articleprint/15/-1/1/

The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Acharya S
www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm



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