Welcome to the new-and-improved KingDavid8.com! I finally have all of the contents from my old site transferred here, so everything should be working properly. Please let me know if you find any "dead links". My pages also have boxes where readers can leave comments and criticisms, so don't be shy.
This website is mostly aimed at providing arguments and evidence for the non-Christian, the Christian who may be struggling with what he or she believes, or those Christians who are interested in reaching out to others.
My opinions may contradict what other Christians believe, but many of my arguments are also based on arguments given by a variety of Christian sources. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to the writings of Glenn Miller, J.P. Holding, Paul Maier, Grant R. Jeffrey, Lee Strobel, and Gerald Schroeder.
Please feel free to borrow ideas or arguments of mine (since many of them were not mine to begin with). I do ask that if you quote from my site directly, to please credit me.
Jesus And The Hero Scales
Someone wrote:
I recently saw your 1000 bet to disproving Jesus historically .Your list for comparing certain deitis to Jesus deliberately excludes other point based lists previously published. These other lists are called hero scales and can be used to compare heroes on a list of things they have done , for instance ancient Greek Oedipus has a higher score than Jesus while robin hood is lagging behind by 5 points simply because Oedipus kills a dragon and Jesus does not. You can watch te movie The God Who Wasn''t There and in this movie they use this point based scale as means to disprove Jesus through history and literature. Though I''m sure you may have already researched such scales and deliberately left out there lists so that yours is pretailored for belief in Jesus
--------------------------------
I responded:
Thanks for writing.
I've seen that list, and it's totally contrived to reach a nonsensical conclusion. Like #3 is "The hero is often a near-relative of his mother" - huh? Isn't everyone a relative of his mother? Can you give me one example of someone who isn't closely related to his mother? No doubt, this was added just to chalk up another point, forgetting that this point would go to *everyone who ever existed* and is nothing unique to the hero myth. "One or more sepulchers" is also an interesting one - why "or more"? If you have a sepulcher, then you have "one or more", so what's the purpose of the "or more"?
And the claims it makes for Jesus often don't fit the story. Like #1 is that is his mother is a "royal virgin" - while she was a virgin, she was hardly "royal". It claims Jesus' father tried to kill Him - no, that was Herod, not His father. Also, for #13, #14, and #15, Jesus never ruled as king during His ministry. Does Flemming know anything about Jesus?
It also gets the Oedipus story horribly wrong, as anyone who's actually read it can tell you. Right off the bat, Oedipus' mother was not a virgin. She and her husband had been trying to conceive for years prior to conceiving Oedipus. I'm also unaware of any version of the story in which Oedipus, or Theseus for that matter, dies at the top of a hill (of course, I'm guessing Flemming counts it anyways, since he did say "often" at the top of a hill, meaning he can count deaths that didn't actually occur at such a location).
He also claims Theseus "marries a princess". No, he dated Princess Ariadne, but dumps her on the island of Naxos without having married her. And his mother, Aethra, wasn't a virgin (Theseus was conceived sexually), and Theseus' father made no attempt to kill him. It's amazing how much mythicists get wrong about mythology. People really need to read mythology before believing this nonsense.
If you actually look at what a real "hero myth" is (and not what "God Who Wasn't There" claims it is), people like Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill fit the mold far better than Jesus does, yet no one claims they didn't exist.
David