Who do you think Jesus was?

Discussion in 'Religion Archives' started by dybyib, Dec 24, 2010.

  1. cennar Registered Member

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    19
    one name, one number, one face book application. Jesus was a fact, like my first red hatch back. yeah I got the clap, like done it in the back of the hatch back. like Jesus infact

    The jesus word:

    Did christians chose to be come catholic or are they born that way? does the chruch take them the second there warm? what does that mean?

    *Note the fetus is only alive 28 days after conception... almost a month fair game.

    science?
     
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  3. rjr6 Devout Theist Registered Senior Member

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    No analogy made, simply asking a question yet unanswered. Time past can be measured, does it exist?
     
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  5. Brian Foley REFUSE - RESIST Valued Senior Member

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    Yes most definitely, there is ancient graffiti to prove it.

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    "Alexmenos worships his God": Ancient graffiti mocking Christ Crucified

    First up, obviously Jewish, and judging by ancient descriptions of Jesus, was red haired and not very attractive.
    Jesus as a direct descendant of King David, through his mother, Jesus would undoubtedly have had the same "ruddy and of a fair countenance" of King David.

    Peter quotes a prophet who described Jesus - “And we saw him and he had no beauty nor comeliness ”
    Isaiah 53.3

    He was the Messiah, only someone with the human qualities that Jesus possessed could be the Son of Man.
     
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  7. John99 Banned Banned

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    Can you name\show instances where this has happened? Someone claimed to exist and shown not to have existed.
     
  8. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    mary poppins..

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  9. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    You have a cornucopia of myths and legends to choose from. Hercules, Odin, Zeus, Paul Bunyan, Dr Who...
     
  10. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    I miss Dr Who...
     
  11. John99 Banned Banned

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    They were always mythological though. If you want we can look into them further though. The first few are Greek Mythology meaning that they were fictional from the beginning and it is the equivalent of taking characters from Star Wars and saying they were actual people though they could very well have been based off of people by the author. Paul Bunyan or Dr. Who are not serious response so your answering the question right there. I was referring to people who were historical figures though.

    I am not religious and have never sat down and read any of the religious books. I find history interesting though.

    Like i said we can easily go by a case by case basis but then theres always google.
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2011
  12. John99 Banned Banned

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    and Santa Claus.
     
  13. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    5,902
    The Biblical god is no less mythical than Zeus. Many ancient Greeks obviously believed that their gods and goddesses existed. So it's historically false to simply dismiss them as "fictional".

    I think that it's true that the Greeks had a different understanding of their myths than the Hebrews did. Archaic Greek culture was very local, with each valley and town proud of its own local traditions. (Many of these areas were independent political units.) So what you saw were many different local variants on myths about the gods. A village might have a local story about Zeus and a nearby mountaintop, for example. Another town across Greece might havea contradictory local story about Zeus. So the Greeks came around to the view that their own religious myths were 'things said' about the gods. The stories were recognized as traditional and hallowed by time, and festivals commemorating the stories were often very important parts of local identity and patriotism. But intellectually, some of the things that were said might be literally true, while other things most likely weren't. That doesn't mean that the Greeks didn't believe in the gods and goddesses such as Zeus that were objects of their stories. It just means that they were kind of relaxed about the literal truth of the stories themselves. That attitude was one of the reasons why free-wheeling literary creativity arose and was able to flourish in ancient Greece.

    The Hebrews had a very different attitude towards their own myths. The Hebrews smeared history and myth together and interpreted their own past as if it was a religious revelation. Their myths were presented as if they were events that had actually happened to their ancestors, in particular places and at particular times. So the Hebrews were far more determined than the Greeks to insist on the literal truth of their stories and far less tolerant of divergent tellings and imaginative reinterpretations.

    But there are certainly figures in Greek lore that many (though perhaps not all) ancient Greeks believed were historical individuals but who may conceivably have been legendary. An example is Orpheus.

    Orpheus was associated with the region north of Mt. Olympus and he was traditionally depicted in Thracian dress. Thracians had in fact lived in that area, but at an early date. Some stories placed Orpheus in Mycenean times and there were tales that he'd lived for 9 (or 11) generations. His parents were sometimes said to have been divine, his mother the Muse Calliope, his father the Thracian wine-god Oeagrus (but some accounts have Apollo as his father). He is supposed to have sailed with Jason and the Argonauts as their coxswain and been a musician, magician and spiritual guide. The major story told about him involved his descent into the underworld in hopes of rescuing his dead wife Eurydice. This journey supposedly gave him first-hand knowledge of post-mortem realities that he passed on to his Orphic followers.

    The Greeks might have thought that Orpheus' literal historicity was a bigger issue than was the case for most legendary figures such as their gods and goddesses, because Orpheus was the founder of the Orphic religious movement. This was one of the earliest of the Greek mysteries and indirectly it was a significant influence on Greek literature and on philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato. What is known is that by classical Greek times a large corpus of poems existed that Orphism attributed to Orpheus himself.

    Aristotle was of the opinion that Orpheus never existed and speaks of the "so-called Orphic epic". Herodotus argued that the historical Orpheus had actually lived later than Homer and Hesiod, based on literary evidence that some of the Orphic poems were probably later compositions. Other ancient opinion (and much of modern scholarly opinion along with it) was that the historical Orpheus was indeed pre-Homeric, but that later and at times anachronistic legend had subsequently accreted around him and was piously attributed to him.
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2011
  14. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    You're looking at it from the vantage point of current knowledge. Do you really think the ancient Greeks thought they were fictional?
     
  15. John99 Banned Banned

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    Obviously but current knowledge of these people is not much different than what was known at the time the stories were written. The Greek wrote plays and stories in the same way that we do today. Obviously there were various characters but you want us to believe they they thought these people were actual beings who existed but its no different than someone a thousand years from now picking up a book by Stephen King and viewing the book as a source of actual historical content with characters that, since he wrote about them then the people at the time (us) actually believes they existed. It isnt up to me to show you where people believed in these stories and perceived them to be actual events, that is your job and saying "Do you really think the ancient Greeks thought they were fictional?" does not offer any proof.

    Yes. Part of entertainment at the time and creative writing>

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemean_lion

    According to one version of the myth, the lion took women as hostages to its lair in a cave near Nemea, luring warriors from nearby towns to save the damsel in distress. After entering the cave, the warrior would see the woman (usually feigning injury) and rush to her side. Once he was close, the woman would turn into a lion and kill the warrior, devouring his remains and giving the bones to Hades.

    http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Mi-Ni/Nemean-Lion.html

    Reading these stories we know they are fictional because these things dont happen in real life and are so far beyond the realm of possibility they cant be anything more than creative writing. The Greeks would obviously know that no lions like that existed nor can anyone thrown one up into the air to make a group of stars. They are good stories though.

    But of course it is up to you to show that they or anyone else did believe them and your not doing that.

    Now if you said "Hercules was based off of an actual person" This is very different and he may have been based off of an actual person because many character are BUT they certainly dont have to be and i think that is more the exception to the rule.

    Many of these characters are no different than the character spider man, as an example, and does anyone believe he really existed?

    The burden of proof is on you and you are not giving any evidence except that it fits the point your trying to make. In that case you are re-writing history to suit your needs but we are dealing in reality here.
     
    Last edited: Jan 3, 2011
  16. John99 Banned Banned

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    22,046
    We are talking about separate issues here. You are focusing on things\stories entirely supernatural or just focusing on the supernatural aspects. Weather any of these people existed as humans or based off of real people is certainly possible. I cant say one way or another.
     
  17. Adstar Valued Senior Member

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    3,782
    Jesus exists.

    The name of Jesus in Hebrew transates to God With Us. Jesus was God With Us.

    In the beggining He was with God and Was God. Jesus is the Almighty,the Alpha and the Omega. God made flesh. Anyone who has seen Jesus has seen God. Because Jesus and God are One.


    All Praise The Ancient Of Days
     
  18. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    5,902
    My point is that I believe that it's false and anachronistic to treat Greek (or any other people's) myths as if they were the same phenomenon as contemporary fiction.

    Fiction writers today are fully aware that they are making up stories and never intend that their readers believe that they are true. The vast majority of readers know that the fiction that they are reading shouldn't be taken literally as fact. It's a free exercise of the imagination.

    In ancient Greece, we see archaic Greece emerging from the Greek dark age with many local stories being told in different places about traditional gods and heroes. The stories emerged from out of folk-legend and most likely were many centuries old even by that time. They didn't have living authors or anyone that people could point to as having imagined them. The myths were 'things said' about the gods and heroes, often things said in a particular place, that had been told and retold for many generations and were highly traditional.

    A local polis' sense of identity and patriotism was often shaped by the local stories, its civic temples were erected to the gods of the stories and its holidays and religio-patriotic festivals commemorated them. That's why we find such impressive temples to Athena upon the Athenian acropolis.

    I think that it's true that as Greek society became more sophisticated, people started to realize that these traditional local stories weren't always consistent one with another. They also started to realize that the behavior of the gods and heroes as told in the old stories didn't exactly meet the newer classical Greek standards of ethics and deportment. So a new and more skeptical attitude towards tradition made its appearance, in which the myths started to be treated more as we treat fiction today, in a more literary manner, as the 'things traditionally said' about the gods and heroes in some particular place, but without anyone necessarily having to fully commit to the literal truth or the ethical appropriateness of what was said.

    The Greeks had always had a much more relaxed relationship with their myths than some other contemporary peoples, like the Hebrews, had with theirs.

    Finally we see the appearance of Greek literature and drama, which moves much closer to what we think of today as fiction. But in the classical period that was still fiction with a very serious purpose, typically based upon the traditional material and then retelling the stories in imaginative new ways so as to communicate important new ideas. It wasn't really until the Hellenistic period several centuries on that Greek literature and drama were telling stories simply for the purposes of entertainent, often taking the form of comedy and light diversion.
    That's why I used the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus as an example. This is a figure that might very well have originally been a real flesh-and-blood individual. Most of the ancient Greeks believed that he was. They even had scholarly arguments about his date and about whether he had actually written all the poems attibuted to him. But some Greeks, including Aristotle, questioned his historicity and argued that he was entirely legendary. Certainly by classical Greek times the memory of any real Orpheus had been almost totally obscured by legend -- his divine birth, his extraordinarily long lifespan, his adventures, his descent to the underworld and his supernatural skill at playing entrancing music. That was kept alive and embroidered by the religious sect that existed in his name, teaching his Indian-style doctrine of reincarnation. (Both Pythagoras and Plato accepted it.)

    The analogy with Jesus should be clear. Jesus probably was a real individual, but just like Orpheus, we don't have access to any objective historical descriptions of the man and his activities. What we have instead in both cases is the legend, the stories that pious individuals subsequently told about their religious founders, about his supernatural exploits and about his trancendental purpose and meaning.

    The legends that accreted around the historical Buddha are yet another example of exactly the same phenomenon.
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2011
  19. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    3,522
    Same could be said for turning water into wine and rising from the dead.
     
  20. Kapyong Writer Registered Senior Member

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    159
    Gday,

    Why do you believe graffiti from centuries later is proof of Jesus himself?


    Oh dear.
    Publius Lentulus is FORGED !


    Neither Jesus nor David existed in history.
    Just STORIES about them.


    An OLD Testemant prophet is evidence for Jesus?
    What are you smoking?


    There is NO historical evidence for Jesus.
    Just STORIES and CLAIMS.


    K.
     
  21. Kapyong Writer Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    159
    Gday,

    There are many such examples -
    Osiris & Isis
    Odysseus
    Romulus
    Hercules
    Noah
    Krishna
    Adam and Eve
    William Tell
    Ebion
    Don Juan (of Carlos Castenada)


    K.
     
  22. Kapyong Writer Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    159
    Gday,

    Wrong.

    Ancient people BELIEVED in Zeus, Hercules, Isis and Osiris, etc etc.

    Later they were shown to be myths.

    Same with William Tell.
    Same with Noah, Adam and Eve etc. etc.
    Same with Ebion.

    It happens all the time.

    Some people even BELIEVED in Sherlock Holmes !
    Did you know that ?


    K.
     
  23. Kapyong Writer Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    159
    Gday,

    Yes,
    they DID exactly that.

    The evidence is clear - they DID believe these beings existed. Do you seriously not realise that?


    K.
     

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