Sorry for chiming in here, but a couple of points. One, this is a very nice sentiment that Jesus was a groovy, hip, make love not war kind of guy that became misrepresented. I like that. However, point 2 is that he is and has always been a myth.
I am reacting to all of the pontificating as to what Jesus was, said, did and how and why he was crucified.
It never happened. I read in a post that the reference to paying taxes to the Romans were added after the original gospels. The original gospels were not begun till the 2nd century and they were written as teaching tools for certain communities of Jews that presented lessons from the torah that were not threatening to the Romans.
On a conspiracy list I am truly surprised by the amount of post's that I read from the point of view that any of this Judeo/Christian history is representative of real people and events.
Also a little understanding of Roman history and legal procedures is in order. The events of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus is nothing more than a fabrication of events that allowed "Jesus" to achieve this resurrected status.
The local establishment would not have heard a case at night from a mob of Jews, whom the Romans despised, and allowed the unruly proceedings to go forward with chants and accusations by the Jews in the courtroom. That would not happen. He would have cooled his heels in the local gray bar until the matter could be heard in an orderly fashion. Also, the claiming of being the messiah was quite in vogue so this claim of being the "king of the Jews" would not have been too impressive from the point of view of the local magistrate.
Now, when we look to validation of Jesus's existence as a physical person, one will find a complete lack of contemporary texts or documents that concur, support or even misrepresent Jesus and his words and deeds from this time period.
I will gladly try to field challenges to this claim. Please do not start with the two entries in the Works Of Josephus as they are blatant interpolations. And in fact, Josephus is one of the strongest testaments to the lack of a historical Jesus is his complete and utter ignorance of the man and his deeds. This is why the two interjected paragraphs are so obviously added later.
The only validation comes from the bible itself.
Paul wrote the letters of Romans, Corinthians, Galations and Ephesians starting from around 50CE and wrote till about 90CE. Acts was written long, long after and is presented before the epistles to obfuscate by embellishing on Paul with information that he does not present in his epistles. Paul seems totally unconcerned with Jesus and his life and ministry. He never teaches using Jesus on earth examples of his lessons. No, "Well Corinthians, when I went to the mount where he was crucified" or, "Well, as Jesus preached in the sermon on the mount..." He seems to be either ignorant of his life, family, ministry miracles and gospels, or somehow while trying to bring these groups of peoples into the folds of Christianity, he just doesn't think it is relevant.
This is the argument from silence and it is a powerful one. A man who was sought out by Kings to confer with and did miracles on a daily basis, no one seems to know about him. None of the contemporary historians, miscellaneous documents, deeds, court records, Roman protectorate correspondence, nada.
The transformation of a spiritual Jesus to an historic man took place over time and was the joining of many different perceptions of Christianity. The new testament did not drop out of the sky. It was the result of a process that occurred over time and with much debate and deceit. There was forgery of texts, documents and letters to support the historical Jesus legend in an attempt to be superior to Paganism by having a real live man turned God that was on earth instead of some wimpy Dionysus.
The church fathers in the 3rd century took myth and midrash, a few letters and "gospels" and brought them together, under Constantine, and formed what we know as Christianity.
db
<...they would if they could convince them that the same individual was
also somehow a threat to the state, which is exactly what the sanhedrin did
simply because he happened to refer to himself as the "king of the jews"
from time to time.
now, it's true that the popular view of the messiah at the time was that he
was going to be a warrior king, and it's true that the romans didn't like
large groups of people crowding around "revolutionaries"; but....jesus was
neither a potential warrior king nor a revolutionary. he was just a crazy
hippie pushing brotherly love and not a real threat to rome at all. i've
never seen any evidence stating that the romans really even took jesus
seriously; pilate certainly had nothing against him. it wasn't for years
after that all of a sudden christianity emerged as a problem for the romans
after all.
*shrug*.
