<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Apr 3 2007, 06:58 PM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Apr 3 2007, 06:58 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Husky, you have stated the conventional wisdom but you are forgetting the most important part that this entire region was under the greco-roman boot. I find it hard to believe that this ideology "meme" arose spontaneously among the jews but did not affect their blood brothers, the arabs, till seven centuries later ( despite all the arab desert heat, harsh conditions, blood feuding, and other such deprivations, which are typically touted as formative to this particular "meme"). Meanwhile, the entire greco-roman civilization had bitten the dust. There are parts of the story missing.Â
The two Eastern traditions of Zoroastrainism and Buddhism which verifiably intrude into this hectic space and have a formative effect on Judaism just happen to get labeled as monotheistic and atheistic, respectively (in addition to being ideological!) and the actual greco-roman oppressors of the Jews get off scot-free as non-ideological!!! Really amazing!!!!!!
Even from the purely practical standpoint of Hindu defense, it would pay to apply the equal equal tactic to both greco-romans and jews. Why acquiesce in the historical lynching of the jews as the deficient developers of this meme.
[right][snapback]66482[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->You misunderstand me. In my saying that the Greeks and mainstream Romans weren't the one's who started catching christianity in large numbers, I didn't imply that the Jews were the authors of this historical faux-pas.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I find it hard to believe that this ideology "meme" arose spontaneously among the jews
...
Why acquiesce in the historical lynching of the jews as the deficient developers of this meme.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->I don't know the facts of how christianity was created - as every historian says, the church has wiped out all the tracks, and the past can now only be pieced together from the mistakes in the babble and some archaeological inconsistencies. Most of which point to the fact that the religion itself as we know it today was manufactured by the Church mostly in or after the 3rd century. The ideology as it existed before then was thoroughly liquid: it had no shape, and barely had one uniform doctrine that the various jeebus sects believed in (the resurrection and miraculous birth were both unknown to all at that stage). All they had was 'jeebus, the saviour'.
But as far as the 1st century Jews are concerned, I suspect that they had very little, if anything at all, to do with the invention of christianity. (I don't fully believe that the modern Ebionite movement started as an original in the early 1st century. Rather, I think this was merely another early sect that caught the meme that was going around, like other small groups were catching it then and had done before them. For instance, the early Ebionites didn't know of any resurrection, whereas the modern ones refer to the tale of doubting thomas which is centred on the resurrection.)
None of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses. The gospel of Mark is the oldest. Mark's <i>original</i> contents - besides not mentioning anything about jeebus after any resurrection - was written by person(s) who had never been to Palestine, the region wherein jeebus was supposed to have lived and preached. And Luke and Matthew got lots of their content from Mark, John plagiarized/was composed from other documents and did not originally state that John was an eyewitness at all. See http://freetruth.50webs.org/B2c.htm#NotEyeWitnesses
Who are these people, if not entirely doctored characters. How Jewish could Mark have been if he'd never been to Palestine? (Besides, Mark is a Roman name). The name Matthew is the only one that can be considered Jewish, but how ignorant are the authors of the gospel of Matthew, when all its contents are from Mark?
There is no indication that the authors of the Gospels were Jews. Even Paul, of purported Jewish origin, has yet to be shown to have existed. There is so much evidence that he was made up. One school of NT scholarship thinks he was formed from Marcionite writings. The Marcionites were anti-Semitic non-Jewish christian 'gnostic christians' from Caesaria in Asia Minor (now Turkey).
The people who wrote the OT (or Greek Septuagint) knew such poor Hebrew that they mangled the original Jewish scripture to the point that the Jews had to tell them what a botched job they'd done. It all points to non-Jewish people wanting to start a new religion rather than jeebus converts from Judaism who wrote stuff down.
See here http://freetruth.50webs.org/B1b.htm#VirginBirth
That the Septuagint is Greek does not mean that the person who wrote it was Greek by ethnicity: many in that region knew Greek, including Syrians and Marcionite christians.
There were mutually exclusive christian sects with mutually contradicting doctrines all over the Roman Empire from the very beginning of christoism (not just in the 4th century and onwards). For instance, you've got the Gnostics who turned christian among the Syrians. The only clearly matching messiah-related movement one might possibly find in early Palestine would be the Ebionites and I already aired my suspicions about how authentic the modern variant is, and how original the old.
Who invented christianity? I don't know. My personal idea is that it was actually the pot-pourri of religions and ideas in the region of the whole empire that led to the unfortunate upstart religion. Lots of religions and religious characters got merged including from 'jeebus' sects: the non-corporeal saviour of Gnostic christianity, John the Baptist from the Mandaeans (sp?), the Messiah-idea from Judaism, the resurrecting saviour Gods from Greco-Roman religion. It feels like someone was really experimenting with a unifying religion for the empire, a religion that had a bit of everything already present within its borders. In any case, everything was mashed and smashed together to give one icky squash that is still being sold today.
For the most part, the Romans, Greeks, <i>and</i> Jews are not the ones amongst whom this new 'idea' caught on greatly in the initial stages. Syria, Asia Minor and Armenia are the places it really took root according to McCabe. (Of which, it is known that Armenia was forcibly converted.)
I know the christian version of The Glorious Events says that christianity started amongst Jewish followers in Palestine who then spread The Good News all over. But then, modern christians need to say that: they require that at that earliest stage of the religion, a significant number of Jewish people 'realised the truth' of jeebus being the messiah and so ceased to wait for anymore messiahs. This story is also important to christians because it allows them to continue to undermine Judaism: "Jews even in Jesus' time realised that he was the messiah. Why would you doubt now?" (After all, from the christian viewpoint, Judaism must be undermined to prove the truth of the new religion. The fact that some Jews didn't convert to christianity means some didn't recognise the non-existent jeebus as the messiah. The continued existence of Judaism continues to disprove christianity in that way. Why then did the Jewish people continue to identify new messiahs for many decades after the death of the purported messiah: the jeebus of the gospels? Christians have a predictable but unsatisfactory explanation ready for this one)
Why is it that only in the christian babble do the 'Jewish' characters hear of jeebus and accept or deny he is the messiah, whereas in Jewish literature no one even mentions this guy. (Their literature and that of the Romans of the time do mention many messiahs, some of them called jesus, and none matches jesus of the gospels.)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->greco-roman oppressors of the Jews<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The Romans, yes. I do agree.
From Roman records, some Greeks in parts of the empire quarreled bitterly with the Jews there and vice-versa, but then they didn't elsewhere.
And when it came to sticking up to the Jews against christians, only the Greeks and Romans of the Ancient Religion did so consistently. So it has to be taken in context. The Romans did not persecute Jews elsewhere in their empire; their oppressive dealings were against the Jewish nation in the Jewish heartland rather than their religion.
Also, the Roman Oppression has to be put in a timeline to get the appropriate perspective, because in 300+ ce the unconverted Romans (as too the Greeks) were much better vis-a-vis Jewish people.
There are sites that discuss Roman and Jewish history from only a couple of selected centuries, ignoring the events just a few centuries after, because at that point the empire had finally absorbed (through violence) the Jewish heartland - which was the whole goal of Rome anyway. From that point onwards the Romans were no longer oppressing the Jewish population in the empire. Unfortunately the intermission of freedom was brief, as christianity gained power and even more extreme persecutions against Jews started and did not cease for over 1.5 millennia.
The two Eastern traditions of Zoroastrainism and Buddhism which verifiably intrude into this hectic space and have a formative effect on Judaism just happen to get labeled as monotheistic and atheistic, respectively (in addition to being ideological!) and the actual greco-roman oppressors of the Jews get off scot-free as non-ideological!!! Really amazing!!!!!!
Even from the purely practical standpoint of Hindu defense, it would pay to apply the equal equal tactic to both greco-romans and jews. Why acquiesce in the historical lynching of the jews as the deficient developers of this meme.
[right][snapback]66482[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->You misunderstand me. In my saying that the Greeks and mainstream Romans weren't the one's who started catching christianity in large numbers, I didn't imply that the Jews were the authors of this historical faux-pas.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I find it hard to believe that this ideology "meme" arose spontaneously among the jews
...
Why acquiesce in the historical lynching of the jews as the deficient developers of this meme.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->I don't know the facts of how christianity was created - as every historian says, the church has wiped out all the tracks, and the past can now only be pieced together from the mistakes in the babble and some archaeological inconsistencies. Most of which point to the fact that the religion itself as we know it today was manufactured by the Church mostly in or after the 3rd century. The ideology as it existed before then was thoroughly liquid: it had no shape, and barely had one uniform doctrine that the various jeebus sects believed in (the resurrection and miraculous birth were both unknown to all at that stage). All they had was 'jeebus, the saviour'.
But as far as the 1st century Jews are concerned, I suspect that they had very little, if anything at all, to do with the invention of christianity. (I don't fully believe that the modern Ebionite movement started as an original in the early 1st century. Rather, I think this was merely another early sect that caught the meme that was going around, like other small groups were catching it then and had done before them. For instance, the early Ebionites didn't know of any resurrection, whereas the modern ones refer to the tale of doubting thomas which is centred on the resurrection.)
None of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses. The gospel of Mark is the oldest. Mark's <i>original</i> contents - besides not mentioning anything about jeebus after any resurrection - was written by person(s) who had never been to Palestine, the region wherein jeebus was supposed to have lived and preached. And Luke and Matthew got lots of their content from Mark, John plagiarized/was composed from other documents and did not originally state that John was an eyewitness at all. See http://freetruth.50webs.org/B2c.htm#NotEyeWitnesses
Who are these people, if not entirely doctored characters. How Jewish could Mark have been if he'd never been to Palestine? (Besides, Mark is a Roman name). The name Matthew is the only one that can be considered Jewish, but how ignorant are the authors of the gospel of Matthew, when all its contents are from Mark?
There is no indication that the authors of the Gospels were Jews. Even Paul, of purported Jewish origin, has yet to be shown to have existed. There is so much evidence that he was made up. One school of NT scholarship thinks he was formed from Marcionite writings. The Marcionites were anti-Semitic non-Jewish christian 'gnostic christians' from Caesaria in Asia Minor (now Turkey).
The people who wrote the OT (or Greek Septuagint) knew such poor Hebrew that they mangled the original Jewish scripture to the point that the Jews had to tell them what a botched job they'd done. It all points to non-Jewish people wanting to start a new religion rather than jeebus converts from Judaism who wrote stuff down.
See here http://freetruth.50webs.org/B1b.htm#VirginBirth
That the Septuagint is Greek does not mean that the person who wrote it was Greek by ethnicity: many in that region knew Greek, including Syrians and Marcionite christians.
There were mutually exclusive christian sects with mutually contradicting doctrines all over the Roman Empire from the very beginning of christoism (not just in the 4th century and onwards). For instance, you've got the Gnostics who turned christian among the Syrians. The only clearly matching messiah-related movement one might possibly find in early Palestine would be the Ebionites and I already aired my suspicions about how authentic the modern variant is, and how original the old.
Who invented christianity? I don't know. My personal idea is that it was actually the pot-pourri of religions and ideas in the region of the whole empire that led to the unfortunate upstart religion. Lots of religions and religious characters got merged including from 'jeebus' sects: the non-corporeal saviour of Gnostic christianity, John the Baptist from the Mandaeans (sp?), the Messiah-idea from Judaism, the resurrecting saviour Gods from Greco-Roman religion. It feels like someone was really experimenting with a unifying religion for the empire, a religion that had a bit of everything already present within its borders. In any case, everything was mashed and smashed together to give one icky squash that is still being sold today.
For the most part, the Romans, Greeks, <i>and</i> Jews are not the ones amongst whom this new 'idea' caught on greatly in the initial stages. Syria, Asia Minor and Armenia are the places it really took root according to McCabe. (Of which, it is known that Armenia was forcibly converted.)
I know the christian version of The Glorious Events says that christianity started amongst Jewish followers in Palestine who then spread The Good News all over. But then, modern christians need to say that: they require that at that earliest stage of the religion, a significant number of Jewish people 'realised the truth' of jeebus being the messiah and so ceased to wait for anymore messiahs. This story is also important to christians because it allows them to continue to undermine Judaism: "Jews even in Jesus' time realised that he was the messiah. Why would you doubt now?" (After all, from the christian viewpoint, Judaism must be undermined to prove the truth of the new religion. The fact that some Jews didn't convert to christianity means some didn't recognise the non-existent jeebus as the messiah. The continued existence of Judaism continues to disprove christianity in that way. Why then did the Jewish people continue to identify new messiahs for many decades after the death of the purported messiah: the jeebus of the gospels? Christians have a predictable but unsatisfactory explanation ready for this one)
Why is it that only in the christian babble do the 'Jewish' characters hear of jeebus and accept or deny he is the messiah, whereas in Jewish literature no one even mentions this guy. (Their literature and that of the Romans of the time do mention many messiahs, some of them called jesus, and none matches jesus of the gospels.)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->greco-roman oppressors of the Jews<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The Romans, yes. I do agree.
From Roman records, some Greeks in parts of the empire quarreled bitterly with the Jews there and vice-versa, but then they didn't elsewhere.
And when it came to sticking up to the Jews against christians, only the Greeks and Romans of the Ancient Religion did so consistently. So it has to be taken in context. The Romans did not persecute Jews elsewhere in their empire; their oppressive dealings were against the Jewish nation in the Jewish heartland rather than their religion.
Also, the Roman Oppression has to be put in a timeline to get the appropriate perspective, because in 300+ ce the unconverted Romans (as too the Greeks) were much better vis-a-vis Jewish people.
There are sites that discuss Roman and Jewish history from only a couple of selected centuries, ignoring the events just a few centuries after, because at that point the empire had finally absorbed (through violence) the Jewish heartland - which was the whole goal of Rome anyway. From that point onwards the Romans were no longer oppressing the Jewish population in the empire. Unfortunately the intermission of freedom was brief, as christianity gained power and even more extreme persecutions against Jews started and did not cease for over 1.5 millennia.