Religion
Related: About this forumCaesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
Interesting documentary/theory about who invented Jesus and Christianity and why. I'm not so sure I buy all of this but there's a lot of great information here and obviously someone invented Jesus we know in Christianity.
Here's a sinopsis.
Based on the best-selling religious studies book by Joseph Atwill, this documentary shows that Jesus is not a historical figure, the events of Jesus' life were based on a Roman military campaign, his supposed second coming refers to an event that already occurred, and the Gospels were written by a family of Caesars who left us documents to prove it.
rug
(82,333 posts)complete with spooky music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_conspiracy_theory
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1135
Dawson Leery
(19,348 posts)Have to read it later. Have you hit the pagan christs website?
rurallib
(62,406 posts)boomer55
(592 posts)rurallib
(62,406 posts)struggle4progress
(118,280 posts)Why Syzygy
Fri May 11, 2012, 02:54 PM
I guess I can repost my comment from back then:
Atwill is an entrepreneur with an undergrad comp sci degree. As far as I can tell, nobody with any significant knowledge of early Christianity regards "Caesar's Messiah" as worth any attention at all
madrchsod
(58,162 posts)not anywhere near the truth.
struggle4progress
(118,280 posts)This one can only be charitably be described as "way out there." It does have the endorsement of a credentialed scholar or two; albeit, those who are also regarded as "out there" by their peers ... It does exceed the credibility of the Piso theory by a razor-thin margin, inasmuch as it at least uses real people rather than inventing them out of nothing but semantics. But the virtues over the Piso theory stop there ... http://www.tektonics.org/books/csmessrvw.html
struggle4progress
(118,280 posts)... First, we are to accept a common, if committee, authorship of Matthew, Mark, Luke John, and Josephus The Jewish War. The whole idea seems, well, absurd ...
... only the most obtuse reader, the most tin-eared, can possibly fail to appreciate the sublime quality of so much of the New Testament (agree or disagree with it), which is necessary to do if one is to dismiss the whole thing as an elaborate joke on the reader. Rather, the joke is on Atwill, whose great learning has apparently driven him mad. Just think of someone advancing the same theory about, say, the Buddhist scriptures. The worst of them are far too tedious and turgid to have been composed to fill out a hoax (who would have gone to the trouble?), while the more readable and winsome (like the Dhammapada) are filled with a wisdom beyond the reach of a worldly-minded scoffer. As to Jesus teachings, Atwill declares that those who see spiritual meaning in his words are being played for a fool ... Such a statement is only a damning self-condemnation, revealing the authors own absolute inability to appreciate what he is reading. This is why one must not throw ones pearls before swine ...
Atwill claims he has learned to read the esoteric secrets of the gospels, whereby they are seen as black-comedic satires of events in the Jewish War. For instance, when Jesus offers his flesh for consumption at the Last Supper, it is really a wink to the reader who is somehow supposed to think of a passage in Josephus set during the Roman siege, when a woman eats the roasted flesh of her own infant. When Jesus offers to make his disciples fishers of men, the line is supposed to sardonically anticipate a wartime episode in which the Romans picked off fleeing Jewish rebels swimming in the Lake of Galilee. Thinking his method justified by comparison to the ancient practice of scriptural typology, Atwill gives himself license to indulge in the most outrageous display of parallelomania ever seen. He connects widely separated dots and collects sets of incredibly far-fetched verbal correspondences, from gospel to gospel and between the gospels and Josephus, then uses them to create ostensible parallel accounts. Then he declares himself justified in borrowing names, themes, and intended references from one parallel account and reading them into the other, thus supplying missing features. Triumphantly, Atwill defies the reader to call it all coincidence, working out the math to show such correspondences could never be the product of chance. Well, of course they are not. They are the product of his own arbitrary gematria in the first place ...
One hates to be so severe in the analysis of the work of an innovative thinker who gives us the gift of a fresh reading of familiar texts, but in the present case it is hard to euphemize. The reading given here is just ludicrous. There are indeed surprising parallels between Josephus and the gospels that traditional exegesis has never been able to deal with adequately, but surely the more natural theory is the old one, that the gospel writers wrote late enough to have borrowed from Josephus and did so ...
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/rev_atwill.htm
struggle4progress
(118,280 posts)According to Caesars Messiah, Jesus Christ is an entirely fictional character and the New Testament is nothing but pro-Roman, anti-Semitic propaganda. Thats quite a provocative premise for such a didactic, monotonous and unconvincing documentary. One doesnt have to be a true believer to find the films craftsmanship laughable, creating an unavoidable obstacle to taking any of its convoluted conspiracy theories seriously ...
A breathless narrator desperately tries to establish how explosive the ensuing talking-head theories are (Some of our Bible scholars are mavericks working outside the restrictions of mainstream religious institutions!), but aside from primary interviewee Joseph Atwills unwavering conviction that the gospels were self-servingly written by members of the Roman Flavian dynasty, theres nothing all that unusual or unexpected here. If everything werent so plainly humorless, it would be easy to mistake the film for a satirical interview package on The Daily Show. The crux of the argument: Since Christianity has been used to justify wars (cue gratuitous image of former President George W. Bush) and refute science, its important to understand its fictional foundations. The allegation needs a better advocate than this ...
http://variety.com/2012/film/reviews/caesar-s-messiah-the-roman-conspiracy-to-invent-jesus-1117948485/
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)In which one set of believers in tradional woo square off against an upstart revisionist woo. "Your woo is bullshit and made up nonsense" the traditionalists proclaim. "Your woo is bullshit and made up nonsense" respond the upstarts.
woo vs woo. Woo War II. Who will be the wooner?
rug
(82,333 posts)I can't wait for you to pick a side.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)After all they have had about 1700 years of practice defending their woo.