BookTalk.org

From the intro it does not look like anything resembling academic scholarship.
Just another atheist trying to capitalize on the "Jesus myth."

There is no hard evidence for the existence of a plethora of people from antiquity. Jesus has a bulls-eye on his back for obvious reasons.

Move along yet again, I'd say.

There is no hard evidence for the existence of a plethora of people from antiquity.

Such as Hercules or Perseus or Poseidon? You're correct! Or is there evidence for Perseus...?

"Jesus has a bulls-eye on his back for obvious reasons.

Motive has always been more plentiful on the side of those promoting a belief. What is the "obvious reason" Jesus is being targeted? What is the fundamental motive? Who benefits? Jesus, real or not, has been claimed to have existed for a thousand years for all the wrong reasons. That is clear evidence of an extraordinary amount of motive on the side of believers.

ivrydove wrote: My new book The Jesus Myth: A Quick Study is now up on Kindle and will be made free Sept. 10 and 11.

Thanks for the suggestion.

thought i should point out a typo in the link

What am I going to do is to identify the most egregious falsehoods masquerading as facts.

obviously should read

What I am going to do is to identify the most egregious falsehoods masquerading as facts.

i read jesus as a metaphor for an aspect of all of us.

for example when i read of christ stumbling down the street carrying the cross with a crown of thorns biting into his brow it seems an obvious metaphor for me stumbling through life carrying the means of my slow death (the body) with lies and misconceptions causing mental anguish as they bite into my psyche.

when i read of death and resurrection i easily relate to it because i observe aspects of myself dying and being reborn all the time sometimes on a daily basis, ergo "i die daily"

it's all a metaphor.

obviously to literalise the metaphor is to be a dunderhead, this is what has happened and done unspeakable damage to so very many people, and i've been one of those dunderheads as well, and i have more water that needs to be turned into wine yet and of course metaphorically expressed christ in me is mighty to do just that as "he" has done for so many years now already.

literalism and ignorance are the enemy i seek to destroy in myself through death and resurrection.

good luck, and may all your humiliating deaths be followed by glorious resurrections! (i know mine have)

ant wrote:Move along

ant, that is a rude and baseless thing to say about Dov, and you should apologise to him for trying to warn off readers just because you find his book summary doesn't match to your dogma. But you are just a Jesus fundie anyway, as anyone who has read your comments here knows.

Believing in the historical Jesus means (a) never having to say you are sorry, and (b) you can assess a book without having read it, based just on ideology rather than logic or content.

Robert Tulip wrote:

ant wrote:Move along

ant, that is a rude and baseless thing to say about Dov, and you should apologise to him for trying to warn off readers just because you find his book summary doesn't match to your dogma. But you are just a Jesus fundie anyway, as anyone who has read your comments here knows.

Believing in the historical Jesus means (a) never having to say you are sorry, and (b) you can assess a book without having read it, based just on ideology rather than logic or content.

You are right. That last comment to move along was inappropriate. I apologize for that.

What I do not apologize for is not giving weight to unscholarly works by pseudo scientists that author works for the sake of selling books.
That and defending their shallow "research" with stories of secret societies, plots, motives, and conspiracy theories that gullible people who despise religion just for the sake of despising it are willing to soak up like sponges.

I'm sorry, Robert..., I just don't buy into that kind of garbage. That's my stance.

ivrydov wrote:If this myth had been set in Uzbekistan I wouldn't care. They set it in our country. We don't have a right to ensure that our history is written accurately without mythical characters being injected in it?

unquestionably and without argument, you do have that right, however i think mythology may have been injected into your history long before the christian mythos with it's characters came along.

the sun and the 12 zodiac signs
the temple and the 12 tribes
christ and the 12 disciples

hmmm i'm spotting a pattern here.

Ivrydov, I wonder if you could help me out with a problem I always wonder about when the historical Jesus question comes up. I see in the Gospels such a clear picture of the genesis of the hatred for Jews by Christians, a hatred which seems to center in allegations of the Jews' responsibility for rejecting as savior a man named Jesus and then encouraging his murder. This has appeared to me as at least possible evidence that Jesus existed, and certain evidence that the Gospel writers believed he did. Pardon me for not going to your book to find the answer, but could you tell me how you deal with that issue?

Edit: Isn't 3.5 million murder victims a low estimate, if you consider the Nazi murders to be those committed by a historically Christian country?

I don't think you need to think of the Gospels as historic documents to consider that they might reflect the historical origin to the hatred of Jews. Of course they're not historic documents at all in our sense, and for nonbelievers like me they depict impossible things that didn't happen. But--it's puzzling, isn't it, that Christians would create an origin story that indicts them as the purveyors of a destructive meme that infected 20 centuries of history? Why did they do that? It seems that these writings are different in character than other myths we know.

Can the solution lie in a division among the Jews that created, if not Christians, followers of a Jesus (even one who didn't exist?), and these two groups became at violent odds with each other? Then, when Christian group identity emerged much later, the writings reflect back on this enmity, having by now the quality of legend and very skewed history.

I'm only speculating here. I can appreciate the perspective your book takes. I can't recall that we've considered the Christian myth from the standpoint of Jews who had their own traditions and myths (if you like) stolen and repurposed to suit another emerging ideology.

ivrydov wrote:When there are wars, then as now there is war propaganda. If you are too young to remember Radio Hanoi check it out.

The Kitos War was fought circa 115 between the Jews and the Romans. It enflamed much of the Roman Empire outside of Europe, from Carthage all the way over to Iran. Millions were killed. In areas where Jews and Greeks were living side by side it took on the character of a race war. The Jews killed a quarter million Greeks in Cyrus and nearly wiped out the big Greek cities in Libya. Egypt was a complete slaughterhouse. The war propaganda was fierce.

The New Testament is a Greek book written by Greeks for Greeks. It was put together around that time. The tone is directly from the war propaganda of that war. It's as if an American history had been written by the writers at Radio Hanoi,.

There were no Jews in Israel involved in the creation of the myth or the movement. Paulus seems to have been a Jew, but that's it. He was an assimilated outsider. Some of the characters in myth are traceable. Peter was the gatekeeper at the Egyptian heaven and is found in the Book of the Dead and other places. He got the same job in the new movement.

I'm assuming you're serious about being factually correct.

"The New Testament is a Greek book written by Greeks for Greeks. It was put together around that time."
You may want to explore the subject of ostraca from the period in question. My assumption is that it will challenge your hypothesis, though I may well be wrong. My knowledge of ostraca is relatively weak.

There's more, but that would be an interesting area to begin study.

Ivrydov, I do want to hear your ideas about how there came to be hatred between Jews and Christians. The two groups must have clashed badly at some point. Regardless of the historical unreliability of the NT, what is the historical explanation for this?