Who was the historical Jesus?

[puzzleannie]

Peter_W.:

Well yes, it sounds absolutely crazy. But there are not that many (clear) references to Jesus in early historiography. -)

there is not a lot of historical reference to the criminals executed here in Texas every year, beyond the transcripts of their trials, some local newspaper accounts by witnesses (first, second, thirdhand or hearsay) and remembrance by their family and friends (if they have any left). Do you really expect to find evidence that the Roman empire did detailed biographical searches on every petty criminal among the hundreds they executed each year in Palestine?

 

[Peter_W]

puzzleannie:

there is not a lot of historical reference to the criminals executed here in Texas every year, beyond the transcripts of their trials, some local newspaper accounts by witnesses (first, second, thirdhand or hearsay) and remembrance by their family and friends (if they have any left). Do you really expect to find evidence that the Roman empire did detailed biographical searches on every petty criminal among the hundreds they executed each year in Palestine?

Talking of ‘criminals’…
An interesting note on the ‘crucifixion’ of Jesus. Did you know that the Quran among others also says that Jesus was not crucified?

carotta.de/subseite/texte/jwc_e/crux.html
“In any case, in the sequence of Marcion, who saw Jesus on the cross as a mere phantasma (cf. Tert. adv. Marc. 4.42), and Nestorius, the Koran also rejects the notion that Jesus was crucified and it says, that ‘a very similar figure appeared to them’ or more precisely ‘was shown’ (Sure 4.157). Hence it confirms that the idea of Jesus’ crucifixion was a later and contested one (as late as 325 ad, the Council of Nicaea in its creed, the Symbolum Nicaenum, does not say anything about crucifixion or Pilate). It even sounds as if it developed from a stage-setting that displayed Caesar’s wax-figure on the cruciform tropaeum. Was it the Passion play of the original Easter ritual? In actuality, Jesus is scarcely depicted dying on the cross throughout the whole of the first millennium (cf. also note 157 p. 384).”

Peter

 

[Trelow]

Peter_W.:

Why does the Quran say that Jesus was not crucified?

Because it blows a big ol’ fatty hole in their whole belief system.

 

[clmowry]

Peter_W.:

So you think all Christians worship a “nice jewish boy”.
But why then is everything about Catholicism so Roman?
Why was no Gospel ever written in Aramaic or Hebrew?
Why does the Quran say that Jesus was not crucified?
Why…?

What would change if Jesus was not a Jew?
Would he be less holy then, or what?

Umm…well if Jesus was not Jewish, then everything we beleive we know about him would be a lie, he wouldn’t be the messiah fore told of in Jewish scripture and not the son of God.

So yeah. He’d be less holy.

Chuck

 

[Peter_W]

clmowry:

Umm…well if Jesus was not Jewish, then everything we beleive we know about him would be a lie, he wouldn’t be the messiah fore told of in Jewish scripture and not the son of God.

So yeah. He’d be less holy.

Chuck

I don’t understand this. Why must the son of God be Jewish? Why must he be the messiah foretold in Jewish scripture? Why are you so fixated on a Jew, Jewish scripture, messiah…?

There have been scholars who doubted that Jesus was a Jew, e.g. Couchoud, see: carotta.de/subseite/texte/jwc_e/reorient.html
"Paul-Louis Couchoud brought attention to the fact that the very assumption that a person presented himself as Jahweh within a Jewish milieu and was worshipped as such, not after many generations, but—as rational criticism itself has demonstrated—only a few years after his disgraceful death, means ‘knowing nothing about a Jew, or forgetting everything’. Jesus would be the only Jew that the Jews have ever worshipped in almost thirty centuries of religious history."
[311] Couchoud (1924), p. 84-5: Dans plusieurs cantons de l’empire déifier un particulier était chose faisable. Mais dans une nation au moins la chose était impossible: c’est chez les Juifs. …] Comment soutenir qu’un juif de Cilicie, pharisien d’éducation, parlant d’un juif de Galilée, son contemporain, ait pu employer sans frémir les textes sacrés où Jahvé est nommé? Il faudrait ne rien savoir d’un juif, ou tout oublier.—‘In several regions of the empire deifying a particular one was feasible. But in one nation at least the matter was impossible: with the Jews. …] How could one assert that a Jew from Cilicia, educated as a Pharisee, when talking about a Jew from Galilaea, his contemporary, could have employed the sacred texts wherein Jahve is named without trembling? One would have to know nothing about a Jew anymore or forget everything.’ …]

Peter

 

[Strider]

I’ve got a great idea, Peter! You could write a novel mostly based on this stuff, call it The Caesar Code and make a bazillion dollars. They’d probably even make a movie out of your book and you’d make another bazillion dollars.
I mean no offense by this question, but why are you so hung-up on Jesus’ Jewishness? Are you anti-Semitic?

 

[Peter_W]

Strider:

I’ve got a great idea, Peter! You could write a novel mostly based on this stuff, call it The Caesar Code and make a bazillion dollars. They’d probably even make a movie out of your book and you’d make another bazillion dollars.
I mean no offense by this question, but why are you so hung-up on Jesus’ Jewishness? Are you anti-Semitic?

I’m sorry, but I have to disappoint you. I’m not anti-semitic.
I’d really like to know why there is all that fuzz about the jewish messiah, however.
The Jews are only a tiny part of the Semites. One of my friends is a Syrian and another one is a Jew from Israel (of course, they don’t know of each other, perhaps I should tell them, but I fear I could lose both).

What I wanted to discuss here is the question of who the historical Jesus was. I think he was not a Jew but a Roman, so I must be an anit-semite, right? Maybe you’re just an ignorant?

If you have a little bit of brains you go read this website:
www.carotta.de
I’d like to have a discussion “ad rem” and not “ad hominem” if you understand what I mean.

Peter

 

[New_Heart]

As someone mentioned earlier Josephus also spoke and wrote about Jesus of Nazareth, but not only that, explain to some of us why there are many Jews who are turning to Yeshua ha Meshiach as their Savior today. There are many Messianic congregations that believe in Jesus, and trusting Him as their only way to the Father, and all of this from the Old Testament Scriptures, minus the apocrypha.

They now follow the writings of the apostles in the New Testament because they shed a broader light on the prophesies of Meshiach from the Old Testament. I hope this is clear.

With God all things are possible. Amen!

 

[Tom_of_Assisi]

Peter_W.:

Hi everybody!

Have you heard about the thesis that the historical Jesus actually was Caesar who was deified as Divus Julius?
I came accross this in another Catholic forum. The person claiming this is Italian scholar who says he has worked more than 10 years on this subject. He thinks the Gospel of Mark is a mutated story of the Roman civil war from the Rubicon to the Caesar’s assassination and apotheosis. At first it sounds absolutely weird but his proofs seem plausible. For more information see: www.carotta.de.
What do you think of this?

Take care

Peter

:whacky:

wow…Satan has enlisted a nerd

 

[Tom_of_Assisi]

Peter_W.:

I’m sorry, but I have to disappoint you. I’m not anti-semitic.
I’d really like to know why there is all that fuzz about the jewish messiah, however.
The Jews are only a tiny part of the Semites. One of my friends is a Syrian and another one is a Jew from Israel (of course, they don’t know of each other, perhaps I should tell them, but I fear I could lose both).

What I wanted to discuss here is the question of who the historical Jesus was. I think he was not a Jew but a Roman, so I must be an anit-semite, right? Maybe you’re just an ignorant?

If you have a little bit of brains you go read this website:
www.carotta.de
I’d like to have a discussion “ad rem” and not “ad hominem” if you understand what I mean.

Peter

No, I don’t think you’re crazy at all. Sure you can believe that Jesus was a Roman. I think he was an American. See, we’re both cra…I mean, we’re both such free-thinkers.

:whacky:

 

[Ghosty]

Peter: The Quran was written hundreds of years after the (non-biblical) accounts of Jesus’ execution, including those from the Talmud and Josephus’ “History of the Jews”. Everything from the time of Jesus and immediately afterwards that mentions him tells of a certain rabbi’s execution and the growth of a messianic cult around him afterwards that, among other things, swore on his resurection from the dead. You can disagree that this rabbi was the Messiah, but there is absolutely no historical grounds for denying his existance or his execution, unless you feel that there is no historical grounds for believing in ANY historical figure older than 1500 years.

As for why Muhammed would ignore centuries of diverse historical scholarship in composing the Quran, your guess is as good as mine, but being a Catholic I’d say it was because he wanted to spin a fresh idea (an idea that has proven to have legs, though its “freshness” has worn off despite fans of the Da Vinci Code claims to the contrary). The fact is that everything close to the source says that he lived, taught, and was executed as a criminal/heretic.

 

[Nate]

This book calls to my mind another so called revolutionary book “The Two Babylons” which *“proved” *that virtually all Church doctrine and practice originated as Mithraism or some other Pagan cult. A disciple of its author, Hislop, named Ralph Woodrow later debunked a lot of its content and showed that a lot of invalid techniques were used to establish relationships that were never really there. One of these is a technique, that seems to pervade the introduction I read of the Ceaser book, namely the merging of similar sounding names to be the same thing. Employing this technique we can “prove” that baseball does not exist, but is a mythical game. That is because “ball park”, the alleged location of this sport can be shown to consist of a slurring of the word “bull” and the word “krap” spelled backwards.

 

[puzzleannie]

Peter_W.:

I
There have been scholars who doubted that Jesus was a Jew, e
Peter

yes, they are called Marcions, one of earliest heresies in the Church, join the club

 

[Peter_W]

puzzleannie:

yes, they are called Marcions, one of earliest heresies in the Church, join the club

What if Marcion and the Marcionites were right?
Of course, for you that can’t be true since they were heretics.
But I don’t think “heresy” is a useful concept for doing research on the historical Jesus (i.e. Divus Iulius).

 

[Grolsch]

Peter, for your theory to be true one must look at the ancients as being incredibly stupid and unable to do any reasearch themselves. But of course we know that isn’t true.

Yeah, Christianity is just a corruption of the cult of Julius Caesar. They just decided to throw in all that jewish mumbo jumbo just to dress it up a little because…well I don’t know. Maybe a jewish peasant who was shamefully crucified would be more appealing than a widly popular emperor.

That whole theory is an affront to the intellect.

 

[Peter_W]

Grolsch:

That whole theory is an affront to the intellect.

Well, I quess that depends on the respective intellect.
If you have questions or reasonable objections why don’t you pose them to the author in the Forum Divi Iulii carotta.de/forum.html

 

[Strider]

Peter_W.:

I’m sorry, but I have to disappoint you. I’m not anti-semitic.
I’d really like to know why there is all that fuzz about the jewish messiah, however.
What I wanted to discuss here is the question of who the historical Jesus was. I think he was not a Jew but a Roman, so I must be an anit-semite, right? Maybe you’re just an ignorant?

If you have a little bit of brains you go read this website:
www.carotta.de
I’d like to have a discussion “ad rem” and not “ad hominem” if you understand what I mean.
Peter

Peter,
The only reason I asked if you were an anti-Semite was because you seemed to be so bothered that Christians believe Jesus was the fulfullment of the Old Testament prophesies.

You wrote:
“I don’t understand this. Why must the son of God be Jewish? Why must he be the messiah foretold in Jewish scripture? Why are you so fixated on a Jew, Jewish scripture, messiah…?”

It’s not we Catholics who are “…fixated on a Jew…”
We see the evidence that God chose the Jewish people as the race from which the Messiah would come…Biblically, historically and actually. We see the historical Jesus as a Jew, but we don’t dwell on it. It’s just a fact of our Redeemer.
I guess I “have a little bit of brains” because I went to the website even before I made my first post.
Let’s just say I wasn’t convinced. I could say more, but I don’t want to make ad hominem attacks. You seem to be hyper-sensetive about that.

 

[Peter_W]

Strider:

…] It’s not we Catholics who are “…fixated on a Jew…”
We see the evidence that God chose the Jewish people as the race from which the Messiah would come…Biblically, historically and actually. We see the historical Jesus as a Jew, but we don’t dwell on it. It’s just a fact of our Redeemer. …]

So you think “God chose the Jewish people as the race from which the Messiah would come.” ? Yeah right, that’s why the world looks so redeemed, that god is quite active in Palestine again, btw.
“Saul killed thousands, David however ten thousands…”
How nice, what a lovely god that is. Since you are a “good Christian” I don’t have to tell you who he really is, let’s hear what the “messiah” said about him, Jn 8:44:
“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

And now let’s here the Christian God Divus Iulius:
“Haec nova sit ratio vincendi, ut misericordia et liberalitate nos muniamus.” (can you read this?) Do your homework before posting nonsense, please.

Peter

P.S: When posting here I sometimes have to think of Matt. 7:6

 

[Tom_of_Assisi]

Peter_W.:

So you think “God chose the Jewish people as the race from which the Messiah would come.” ? Yeah right, that’s why the world looks so redeemed, that god is quite active in Palestine again, btw.
“Saul killed thousands, David however ten thousands…”
How nice, what a lovely god that is. Since you are a “good Christian” I don’t have to tell you who he really is, let’s hear what the “messiah” said about him, Jn 8:44:
“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

And now let’s here the Christian God Divus Iulius:
“Haec nova sit ratio vincendi, ut misericordia et liberalitate nos muniamus.” (can you read this?) Do your homework before posting nonsense, please.

Peter

P.S: When posting here I sometimes have to think of Matt. 7:6

Switch to decaf, little one. ok…ok…Jesus was a Roman…and so was the Holy Spirit…can you relax now…

 

[Peter_W]

Tom of Assisi:

Switch to decaf, little one. ok…ok…Jesus was a Roman…and so was the Holy Spirit…can you relax now…

Switch to Harry Potter, ridiculous one. ok?
Are you a Jew or what is problem with the truth?

P.S: No offense against honest Jews!