Workch:
I don't believe it, there is evidence that he did. I accept the evidence

22jumpstreet:


Provide one please...

HedwigesMaduro:


What's the evidence? Plato's writings. You don't see a problem with that?

HedwigesMaduro:


You confuse the spellings of Socrates and Plato? You're dyslexic or something?

FOLYKAZE:


Get your hand on Forged written by Bart Erthman, there you will find the whole New testament you depended on is wholesale forgery, deceit in service of truth. Read Christians

FOLYKAZE:


Had Christians know John Frum and Seraphis, they will understand that cobbling a new deity both in new and ancient age is norm. All these are done for political correctness and hopeful windbag. Jesus Christ is an invention of Roman Government. They succeeded in overthrowing James the just in the Jerusalem church and enthroned Peter the hypocrite in Rome church. Constantine established the Universal church to unite divided Western and eastern part of the empire.

I don't subscribe to Atwill's Caesar Messiah but his works opened me ancient conspiracy

FOLYKAZE:


Jesus Christ didn't exist. He is a personification of Jewish resistance movement, fashioned around The Egyptian, a zealot revolutionary leader; Jesus ben Sephat, second temple high priest; Jesus ben Ananus, second temple high priest; Jesus damneus, the brother of James; and so many other revolutionary leaders.

His birth is personified weaved around Judas the Galilean birth of the Zealot movement. This is why the Gospel writters fixated Jesus birth in 4BC.

Apostle Paul was an instrument in establishing Gentile Christianity, whitewashing Jewish community and killing James known as Stephen in Acts of Apostle. Herod Agrippa I and II had a hand in this. Vespasian saw the simultaneous uprising and escalating war in 66ADb and decided to create pacifist Jesus to counter the awakening Messiah motivational belief in Jewish community. He took Seraphis worship from Alexandra and coined Jesus with it.

Get James the Brother of Jesus written by Robert Einsmen, he elaborated the Jesus movement and how Paul, a Roman citizen hijacked it, creating what we know today as Christianity.

budaatum:


Very funny that you believe Robert Einsmen who at best was speculating. It's similar to believing Jesus walked on water and that he rose from the dead, but I'd expect you to argue you are not like people who believe that.

budaatum:


Funnier still that the Romans "succeeded in overthrowing James the Just" who is recorded to be a brother of Jesus.

Was 'James the Just' a fictional character too then?

FOLYKAZE:


He critically analysed the Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi, Damascus scroll, Pseudoclementine Holmilies and Recognition, Josephus' Antiquity and War, Writings of the first and second century Christians Elders and whole lot of documents. If you call his analysis speculation, you are welcome..

budaatum:


Funny. Here's about the same Bart.

Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth is a 2012 book by Bart D. Ehrman, a scholar of the New Testament. In this book, written to counter the idea that there was never such a person as Jesus of Nazareth at all, Ehrman sets out to demonstrate the historical evidence for Jesus' existence, and he aims to state why all experts in the area agree that "whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_Jesus_Exist%3F_%28Ehrman_book%29?wprov=sfla1

The Gospels may be fiction but that does not mean Jesus is fiction too.

FIVE YEARS LATER, I was a different human being. Everyone
changes in those late teenage years, of course, but I’d say my
change was more radical than most. Among other things, in the
intervening years I had become a born-again Christian, graduated from high school, gone off to a fundamentalist Bible college,
Moody Bible Institute, and had two years of serious training in
biblical studies and theology under my belt. At Moody we weren’t
allowed to smoke (“Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit,”
the New Testament teaches, and you don’t want to pollute God’s
temple!), drink alcoholic beverages (“Be ye not drunk with wine,”
says the Bible; it didn’t occur to me that it might be okay to be
drunk with bourbon)—or, well, do lots of other things that most
normal human beings at that age do: go to movies, dance, play
cards. I didn’t actually agree with the “conduct code” of the
school (there was also a dress code, and a hair code for men: no
long hair or beards), but my view was that if I decided to go
there, it meant playing by the rules. If I wanted other rules, I could go somewhere else. But more than that, I went from being
a fourteen-year-old sports-minded, better than average student
with little clue about the world or my place in it and no particular
commitment to telling the truth to a nineteen-year-old who was
an extremely zealous, rigorous, pious (self-righteous), studious,
committed evangelical Christian with firm notions about right
and wrong and truth and error.
We were heavily committed to the truth at Moody Bible Institute. I would argue, even today, that there is no one on the planet
more committed to truth than a serious and earnest evangelical
Christian. And at Moody we were nothing if not serious and
earnest. Truth to us was as important as life itself. We believed in
the Truth, with a capital T. We vowed to tell the truth, we expected the truth, we sought the truth, we studied the truth, we
preached the truth, we had faith in the truth. “Thy Word is
truth,” as Scripture says, and Jesus himself was “the way, the
truth, and the life.” No one could “come to the Father” except
through him, the true “Word become flesh.” Only unbelievers
like Pontius Pilate were confused enough to ask, “What is truth?”
As followers of Christ, we were in a different category altogether.
As Jesus himself had said, “You shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free.”
Along with our commitment to truth, we believed in objectivity. Objective truth was all there was. There was no such thing as
a “subjective truth.” Something was true or it was false. Personal
feelings and opinions had nothing to do with it. Objectivity was
real, it was possible, it was attainable, and we had access to it. It
was through our objective knowledge of the truth that we knew
God and knew what God (and Christ, and the Spirit, and
everything else) was.
One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute
commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer have led
many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads and
where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist
Christianity. So if, in theory, you can verify the “objective” truth
of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined
is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you? If you are an
evangelical Christian, it leaves you in the wilderness outside the
evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth. Objective truth, to paraphrase a not so Christian song, has been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know, I’m one.

Before moving outside into the wilderness (which, as it turns
out, is a lush paradise compared to the barren camp of fundamentalist Christianity), I was intensely interested in “objective
proofs” of the faith: proof that Jesus was physically raised from
the dead (empty tomb! eyewitnesses!), proof that God was active
in the world (miracles!), proof that the Bible was the inerrant
word of God, without mistake in any way. As a result, I was devoted to the field of study known as Christian apologetics.
The term “apologetics” comes from the Greek word apologia,
which does not mean “apology” in the sense of saying you’re
sorry for something; it means, instead, to make a “reasoned defense” of the faith. Christian apologetics is devoted to showing
not only that faith in Christ is reasonable, but that the Christian
message is demonstrably true, as can be seen by anyone willing
to suspend disbelief and look objectively at the evidence.

The reason this commitment to evidence, objectivity, and
truth has caused so many well-meaning evangelicals problems
over the years is that they—at least some of them—really are confident that if something is true, then it necessarily comes from
God, and that the worst thing you can do is to believe something
that is false. The search for truth takes you where the evidence
leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there.

The more I studied the evangelical truth claims about Christianity, especially claims about the Bible, the more I realized that the “truth” was taking me somewhere I very much did not want to go. After I graduated from Moody and went to Wheaton College to complete my bachelor’s degree, I took Greek, so that I could read the New Testament in its original language. From there I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with one of the great scholars of the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger; I did a master’s thesis under his direction and then a Ph.D.
During my years of graduate work I studied the text of the New Testament assiduously, intensely, minutely. I took semester-long graduate seminars on single books of the New Testament, studied in the original language. I wrote papers on difficult passages. I read everything I could get my hands on. I was passionate about my studies and the truth that I could find. But it was not long before I started seeing that the “truth” about the Bible was not at all what I had once thought when I was a committed evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute. The more I saw that the New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament, where the problems are even more severe) was chock full of discrepancies, the more troubled I became. At Moody, I thought that all discrepancies could be objectively reconciled. But eventually I saw that in fact they could not be. I wrestled with these problems, I prayed about them, I studied them, I sought spiritual guidance, I read all I could. But as someone who believed that truth was objective and who was unwilling to believe what was false, I came to think that the Bible could not be what I thought it was. The Bible contained errors. And if it contained errors, it was not completely true. This was a problem for me, because I wanted to believe the truth, the divine truth, and I came to see that the Bible was not divine truth without remainder. The Bible was a very human book. But the problems didn’t stop there. Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies. That is what this book is about.

budaatum:
"Critically analysed" texts, lol, as if those mythical texts themselves are not speculation, at best.

Fact is, whether Jesus walked on earth or not, quite a lot of that which it is claimed he taught is beneficial to society if properly understood. If you slap my cheek for instance and I turn the other cheek, your hand will tire of slapping my cheek long before you get to the 7 times seventieth slap, and if you critically analyse your slappings, you're bound to wonder if my cheek was made of iron, and that's if you are too heartless to wonder why you slapped my cheek so much. And there should be no doubt that everything we see before is, our understanding of it at least, was created by the words we read as you've show here. Though believing, which is what I'm finding funny about you, gets in the way of understanding what we read and claim to critically analyse.

This is shown by Bart Erthman whom you say claims "the whole New testament you depended on is wholesale forgery", but who concluded that "whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist."

The New Testament was not forgery. It is however quite a lot of fiction, but that does not invalidate whatever truth is therein just as tales of the story of the tortoise in Things Fall Apart does not invalidate the truth of the lesson is sets out to teach, which is, don't be greedy and selfishly think of yourself alone.

FOLYKAZE:
That question should be directed to Eusebius who invoked the ' discredited' Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus antiquity to prove the existence of historical Jesus.

Unknown to him and the church, Josephus was only referring to Jesus ben Damneus the high-priest whose brother - James the Just was reportedly killed by Ananus ben Ananus.

It however came out that what Origen, Eusebius, and church fathers hold to their chest as a secular evidence of historical Jesus is forgery.

Historically, James existed and his brother who was elected as high priest is Jesus Damneus, not Jesus christ.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_son_of_Damneus

budaatum:

"Critically analysed" texts, lol, as if those mythical texts themselves are not speculation, at best.

budaatum:
Fact is, whether Jesus walked on earth or not, quite a lot of that which it is claimed he taught is beneficial to society if properly understood. If you slap my cheek for instance and I turn the other cheek, your hand will tire of slapping my cheek long before you get to the 7 times seventieth slap, and if you critically analyse your slappings, you're bound to wonder if my cheek was made of iron, and that's if you are too heartless to wonder why you slapped my cheek so much. And there should be no doubt that everything we see before is, our understanding of it at least, was created by the words we read as you've show here. Though believing, which is what I'm finding funny about you, gets in the way of understanding what we read and claim to critically analyse.

budaatum:
This is shown by Bart Erthman whom you say claims "the whole New testament you depended on is wholesale forgery", but who concluded that "whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist."

The New Testament was not forgery. It is however quite a lot of fiction, but that does not invalidate whatever truth is therein just as tales of the story of the tortoise in Things Fall Apart does not invalidate the truth of the lesson is sets out to teach, which is, don't be greedy and selfishly think of yourself alone

BassReeves:

FOLYKAZE:


That question should be directed to Eusebius who invoked the ' discredited' Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus antiquity to prove the existence of historical Jesus.

Unknown to him and the church, Josephus was only referring to Jesus ben Damneus the high-priest whose brother - James the Just was reportedly killed by Ananus ben Ananus.

It however came out that what Origen, Eusebius, and church fathers hold to their chest as a secular evidence of historical Jesus is forgery.

Historically, James existed and his brother who was elected as high priest is Jesus Damneus, not Jesus christ.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_son_of_Damneus

budaatum:


The following is from your source.

"In the Antiquities of the Jews (Book 20, Chapter 9) first-century historian Josephus states that Jesus ben Damneus was made high priest after the previous high priest, Ananus son of Ananus, was removed from his position for executing James the brother of Jesus of Nazareth (James the Just)."

Does that, upon critical analysis, not imply that Jesus ben Damneus is not the same person as the brother of James whom Ananus he replaced was written to have executed?

Or perhaps your argument is that Jesus Christ is not Jesus of Nazareth?

Festus was now dead; and Albinus was but upon the road. So he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James: and some others; [or, some of his companions.] And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned. (27) But as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done. They also sent to the King [Agrippa,] desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more: for that what he had already done was not to be justified. Nay some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria; and informed him, that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent. Whereupon Albinus complyed with what they said; and wrote in anger to Ananus; and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done. On which account King Agrippa took the High Priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months; and made Jesus, the son of Damneus High Priest.

FOLYKAZE:


I am disappointed in you Budda. You have a lot to read please.

Take sometimes off here
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-20.html

budaatum:


So, I ask again. From what you posted, is Jesus ben Damneus the same person as the brother of James whom Ananus he replaced was written to have executed?

FOLYKAZE:

Keynotes, Festus there was the procurator who interviewed Paul, second year after he was imprisoned by Felix. How could Jesus Damneus of 62AD be the same person as Jesus of Nazareth of 33AD?

You have anlot to answer sis!

budaatum:


Oh good! So Jesus Damneus of 62AD is not the same person as Jesus of Nazareth of 33AD.

Could you kindly tell me who the brother of James the Just was?

budaatum:
Meanwhile, note that I did not provide Josephus as evidence for Jesus Christ.

BassReeves:


FWIW, a full list of all the Jesuses in Josephus would include the following:

War (18)
2:566 Jesus, son of Sapphias – Governor of Tiberias.
2:599 Jesus, son of Sapphias – Governor of Tiberias.

budaatum:
As in, Jesus was a rather popular name and there were many Jesuses.

Thanks for pointing it out. Pity Foly does not see this as buttering his position somewhat.

FOLYKAZE:


Ananus killed James the Just, the brother of Jesus ben Damneus.

budaatum:


Oh! So James the Just was the brother of Jesus ben Damneus.

You'd need to provide a source for this please. Its interesting at best. While I wait. Here again is from your own wiki source.

The works of Josephus refer to at least twenty different people with the name Jesus, and in chapter 9 of Book 20, and scholars agree that Jesus the son of Damneus is distinct from the reference to "Jesus called Christ", who is mentioned along with the identification of James. John Painter states that phrase "who was called Christ" is used by Josephus in this passage "by way of distinguishing him from others of the same name such as the high priest Jesus son of Damneus, or Jesus son of Gamaliel" both having been mentioned by Josephus in this context.

FOLYKAZE:


John Pointer is a christian theologian. What do you expected him to say?


Read the full passage yourself.

budaatum:


Might one not as well say Josephus was a Jew, and thereby discount whatever he wrote about Christ?

budaatum:
Anyway, please provide a reference for "James the Just was the brother of Jesus ben Damneus". It would be interesting to see.

22jumpstreet:
I read somewhere that the gospel stories comes from ancient tales about Marduk. Marduk was the son of Enki. Marduk according to the Enuma Elish is the creator of the universe, the creator and saviour of man. It was at the council of Nicea that Athanasius said he was both God and man to end the argument that was lingering for almost 11 years. .

A human history was forged for him by possibly Eusebius..

I am still researching on this line of enquiry....

FOLYKAZE:
You went and copy gibberish content off the internet like you are discussing with some kids.

FOLYKAZE:
Can you cite the passage where Josephus mentioned Jesus, no patronym – Condemned to cross by Pilate. He was [the] Christ.?

FOLYKAZE:
I am disappointed in you Budda. You have a lot to read please.

Take sometimes off here
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-20.html

An excerpt from that page

Keynotes, Festus there was the procurator who interviewed Paul, second year after he was imprisoned by Felix. How could Jesus Damneus of 62AD be the same person as Jesus of Nazareth of 33AD?

You have anlot to answer sis!

budaatum:
I'm glad you are disappointed, though your thoughts of me are rather inconsequential. I've refered to your own evidence provided above and asked you a simple question, but see as you "You went and copy gibberish content off the internet like you are discussing with some kids". Or do you think pointing me to stuff is any different to copying and pasting it here?

My question was one of simple understanding of a short text from what you provided, and if we can not settle simple things in one single paragraph, I do not really see the worth of me engaging in the contents of an entire book with you!

So, I ask again. From what you posted, is Jesus ben Damneus the same person as the brother of James whom Ananus he replaced was written to have executed?

FOLYKAZE:
Ananus killed James the Just, the brother of Jesus ben Damneus. Not Jesus the Nazareth as been taunted in the Testimonium Flavianum by church fathers.

Wetin you no understand here? You can read books to help yourself understand na

budaatum:
Oh! So James the Just was the brother of Jesus ben Damneus.

You'd need to provide a source for this please. Its interesting at best. While I wait. Here again is from your own wiki source.

The works of Josephus refer to at least twenty different people with the name Jesus, and in chapter 9 of Book 20, and scholars agree that Jesus the son of Damneus is distinct from the reference to "Jesus called Christ", who is mentioned along with the identification of James. John Painter states that phrase "who was called Christ" is used by Josephus in this passage "by way of distinguishing him from others of the same name such as the high priest Jesus son of Damneus, or Jesus son of Gamaliel" both having been mentioned by Josephus in this context.

BassReeves:
Be disappointed in yourself from not being apt enough in separating in all you read, the wheat from the chaff

BassReeves:
Reiterating like I previously advanced, as for Jesus, son of Damneus – Deposed as High priest, (i.e. Jesus ben Damneus) that's a story for another day

FOLYKAZE:


Cesare Borgia, a fifteenth century Roman
Catholic cardinal and a son of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) was quoted as saying, "It has served us well, this myth of Jesus."