This means that Christian material and events after around 65ad is of little concern to me (except as it bears on questions of NT authorship perhaps), and does not count as evidence for New Testament authors' "borrowing" of mythic/pagan elements in their creation of the foundational documents of the church...

I am curious David, when do you date the book of Mark, which by all historical accounts was the first gospel written (mat, luke are synoptic, John was the last of the four)? The most consistent dating I have seen is around 70 AD, Paul's letters being written before that time. If those after 65AD does not count as evidence, then you must date them (all the gospels, or at least more than just Mark, I mean come one, if Mat, Luke are synoptic, John is mystical almost Gnostic in its depiction of what "the christ" is, "the" christ, or you must:

1. Have some evidence outside of Mark that tells the life and times of Jesus, earlier than 65AD which is 30 years (more or less) after his death anyway. Kind of odd it escapes notation by regional historians at the time around 33 AD. No, Josephus does not count. I don't know how anyone in there right mind can assume that that was not forged. Most all historians completely discount the passage you are dying to mention to me as a rank forgery probably done by Eusebius, a thorougly dishonest historian, if you want to call him that for obvious reasons. That passage is almost laughable.  I wonder if he had to erase text to find the space.

2. Completely rely on Mark as an authentic eye-witness account.

Or maybe you should raise your 65AD timeframe up a bit to include the Talmud, Pliny so forth. Even then, they are quite a stretch.

I do think you did a bang-up job on the copy-cat thesis rebuttal. I think the majority of these people have an obvious axe to grind, and probably just rehash others arguments without research. One thesis though you should really look into is Freke/Gandy's Jesus Mysteries thesis.

It always struck me as odd growing up a Southern Baptist (lucky me, my parents forced Calvinistic doctrine on me using conditioning and fear. They were the protypical model of the fundamentalist parent driven by an innate fear of the after-life and an inability to break their own conditioning) that sections such as the beautitudes were not taught in as much detail as the fire and brimstone. I now understand why, it is because "a son of god" is possibility for each and every one of us. Or sections like when Jesus tells his disciples that some of them would not see death before they reach the kingdom of heaven. So either it was beam me up Scotty for his disciples or heaven is a state of newly found spiritual awareness.

You should rethink the Jesus Mystery thesis in this regard, could the intent of the writer(s) of Jesus life, be to provide an archetypical model ( which makes sense given the extreme amount of coincidence between the Sun (light of the world, morning star, sun of righteousness) and Jesus. Could it be that Jesus, who by the way spoke in length about the function of parables and spoke in parables, was himself a parable whose death at "the place of the skull" was a graphical depiction of a principle. That our lower animal nature must be crucified in our minds in order to be aware of the spiritual.  Could the foundation of Gnosticism really have been the intent, and the passages which give external authority to the church fused in at a later date. That would account for the dramatic theological contradictions that occur in the new testament, how Jesus can state that being a son of god is a possibility for man, and the many references to the sons (plural) of god existing in direct contradiction to the belief that Christ was the only begotten son?

How about the strange fact that the Marcionites and Gnostics claim Paul as their pneumatic leader, yet Paul condemns them in NT. Could it be that Jesus is a model, not one of historic personage, at least not to the extent of the gospels. A model that is intended to operate in our subconcious on a deep symbolic level. Whose capitulation of the sun is intended to illuminate to us the most divine of principles? To that end I absolutely agree, there is no way to the father but through the son. Could it be that the real meaning of atonement is not cost-payment, but at-one-ment. The mystical union between god and man which occurs when we crucify (repent) of our sinfulness, and resurrect (being born-again)?

I mean really, if you really think it means cost-payment than you have a de-facto belief in the effectiveness of animal sacrifice. Because there would be no "lamb of god" without there first being a tradition of the sacrificial lamb. If you were somehow magically transported to 1 BC, would you go find yourself a sheep to blundgeon? There wouldn't have been an establishment of the new covenant yet. So you would need to if you believed Christ would come to die as cost payment for your sin. Christ is a personfication of a principle David.

It is no wonder then that Paul states Jesus came to him the likeness of flesh and not flesh (because Paul states that the flesh is evil), his "illuminating" description being close to that in the transfiguration, directly contradicting the later, forged statement that Christ's crucifixion was witnessed by 500 people. Or when he refers to "the Christ" in you.

What is Divine, David is the principle behind the story and its applicability on a personal level. When you worship the symbol you worship the meaning indirectly. Its intent to prime you for understanding its full meaning. Do you really think that God impregnated a virgin, whose offspring never sinned and died, rose, so that one day in 2005, we, having scant amount of evidence that he existed as a literal person, must believe that these events came to pass without much proof, and quite a bit of evidence that the Church who squashed Gnosticism, was a murderous and unethical institution at one point (the point in which Christainity truly flourished, through state sponsorship), and was chiefly responsible for the reproduction and altercation of the texts, or we will burn in hell?

You need initiation. "Jesus Christ" while being divinely inspired, is not a real person as depicted in the gospels. Maybe a political revolutionary, as Pliny, others indicate, maybe a rabbi, as the Talmud would indicate, who knows, not much to go on. Its a tool, the vehicle. If you worship the symbol and not the message, you can't fully receive its benefits.

Curtis

Curtis,

Even if the Gospels were written later than what I’m claiming, even as late as near the end of the 1st century, I would see no reason to doubt the truth of the stories. I wouldn't say that pre-65 A.D. is accurate, but post-65 A.D. is not. I believe that John's Gospel was written around 80-90 A.D., yet don’t find it untrustworthy.

But I personally date Mark and Luke, and perhaps Matthew, to having been written prior to the death of Paul, which occurred around 67 A.D. My reasoning is this: We know that Mark was written before Luke. We know that Luke was written before Acts. And we have strong reason to believe that Acts was written before the death of Paul (67 A.D.) and the fall of Jerusalem (70 A.D.), since Acts, a history of the early church, fails to mention either of these important events. Thus Mark and Luke were also written prior to 67 A.D.

1. Have some evidence outside of Mark that tells the life and times of Jesus, earlier than 65AD which is 30 years (more or less) after his death anyway. Kind of odd it escapes notation by regional historians at the time around 33 AD.

What regional historians were writing around 33 A.D., and who are historians who we would expect to have mentioned it, and whose histories survived to this day? Almost everything we have from that era is lost, so we don't know that it escaped notation.

No, Josephus does not count. I don't know how anyone in there right mind can assume that that was not forged. Most all historians completely discount the passage you are dying to mention to me as a rank forgery probably done by Eusebius, a thorougly dishonest historian, if you want to call him that for obvious reasons. That passage is almost laughable.  I wonder if he had to erase text to find the space.

Which passage are you referring to? There’s Antiquities 18.3.3, the one that begins, “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man,”, which I agree was either forged or altered, likely by Eusebius. Then there’s Antiquities 20.9.1 which refers to James as being “the brother of Jesus the so-called Christ”, which I’ve seen no reasonable argument for it being a forgery or alteration. I have a page about the Josephus passages at http://www.KingDavid8.com/FAQs/Josephus.html

2. Completely rely on Mark as an authentic eye-witness account.

I don't rely on Mark as an authentic eye-witness account, at least not a first-hand account. Mark likely got most of his story from the Apostle Peter. It's likely that Mark was a witness to the resurrection, but he was almost certainly not a witness to most of Jesus' ministry, and thus most of the events he wrote about.

Or maybe you should raise your 65AD timeframe up a bit to include the Talmud, Pliny so forth. Even then, they are quite a stretch.

I don’t have such a timeframe. I would say that the longer it is between the events and the writing, the more doubt we can have about the accuracy of the depiction, but I wouldn’t say that even 50-100 years would make a writing highly questionable. We even have many ancient histories, written hundreds of years after the events, which historians believe are reasonably accurate. The Talmud and Pliny are, in my opinion, valid historical sources. I just don't use them in my understanding of Jesus since they wrote so little about Him.

Thanks for writing. I know you wrote more, but I won’t respond to it right now, except to say that I’m very skeptical of anything Freke and Gandy write, since I know that a lot of their work, such as their comparisons between Dionysus and Jesus, isn’t valid.

David

You know, I have read quite alot of your web site today (while I should have been working!) and I must say that I misjudged you. I had done a search for links between Mithras/Jesus and so forth in order to get some good info from the Christian side. After reading your section on the subject, I guess I stereotyped you with the Christians I have had experience with my entire life. So regarding the statement I made which presumed that you felt those who didn't believe in the historical/biographical nature of the cruc/resurrection would burn in hell, I was wrong. From reading your site more I see that you interpret "hell" the same as I do, and thus "heaven" probably the same as well.

You were also much kinder to me than I was to you, and you are a testimony to your faith. I am still not convinced that Paul had any clue about the Jesus of the Gospels, and didn't just consider Jesus to be a better adaptation of a perennial myth used to bring people in realization of their inner "Christ", "the Christ within".. But the more I open my mind to the possibility of a literal Jesus, the more I realize that a movement of that scale couldn't have occured through pure fiction. The answer is somewhere in between probably... I still think the belief in the spilt blood of a god-incarnate human providing payment for our innately sinful nature, if we only believe the event occured and for that function, is a really disgusting/primitive thought. Its so lazy in its basis. It renders people at the mercy of their conditioning and paranoia. I can't believe so many people believe that that was the intention of the story. I think Christianity really took a wrong turn at Calvin. DeHavilland's interpretation of the text makes much more sense. I think of what the world would be like had people viewed the meaning of atonement as DeHavilland did and not Calvin, and I see much more godly place.

Thanks for writing me back. Peace be with you.

Curtis,

Peace be with you, too. And thanks for the kind words. We can certainly agree to disagree on some things, and I believe that, no matter what our belief system, God does what's right and fair for each and every one of us.

David