Robert Tulip wrote: My view is that Nazareth was invented to provide plausible deniability for Gnostic Christians who were under persecution from Rome, in order to deny membership of the proscribed Nazarene Gnostic sect. The archaeology of Nazareth strongly supports this claim of its establishment well after Christ.
One wonders why the writers of the gospels would invent an imaginary town for Jesus since they seem very familiar with well know towns and villages of the time and this accuracy of geography is a striking aspect of the gospels.
In fact Rene Salm's claims are disputed publicly by Israeli archaeologists and others and while there is not a lot of evidence there is some for Nazareth being a small town at that time. Salm himself is not an archaeologist.
Even Richard Carrier while sympathetic to the mythicist cause is reluctant to endorse this claim. I could provide the stronger positive case from such as the Israeli archaeologists but here is Carrier from an atheistic website.
http://www.debunkingchristianity.blogsp ... ce-of.html
Robert Tulip wrote:Even Jesus the Nazarene is almost certainly an ideal myth, an invented fictional character designed as avatar of the Age of Pisces, as argued especially by Frank Zindler and DM Murdock. This ideal makes complete sense of the pre-existent Logos, given that astronomers could see the movement of the spring point towards Pisces for hundreds and probably even thousands of years before Christ.
Here Robert claims that this thesis of D.M.Murdock's a.k.a. Acharya S.makes a lot of sense and is what he himself thinks is the true explanation in astrological terms of the gospels.
However this is a hopelessly worthless thesis by Murdock and here Mike Licona demonstrates why.
http://www.risenjesus.com/a-refutation- ... conspiracy
I would also ask Bishop where his divine spark comes from if there is no divinity.If you utterly invert the concept of divinity to mean human I think your divinity has no real meaning.And in evolutionary terms did the "Hobbit" have this divinity?
Finally in comparative terms how do the four gospels shape up in terms of accuracy of language.Since all scholars seem agreed they were written outside of Israel and by different authors in different places how accurate were they in the matter of names for example.
And how do the gnostic writings fare in this category?
Here's a talk by Peter J.Williams on this topic.New evidence for eyewitness accounts in the gospels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ylt1pBMm8
