Posted on 10/11/2013 9:53:50 AM PDT by Idaho_Cowboy
On Oct. 19, self-professed Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill is planning to make public some very flammable allegations. At a day-long symposium called "Covert Messiah" in London, England, he's set to unveil purported evidence that Roman aristocrats manufactured Jesus Christ - a claim that, if substantiated, would devalue the core of the Christian faith.
The only problem? Most Biblical experts disagree with the scholar's pronouncements.
A press release announcing the purported new evidence claims that Atwill has discovered "ancient confessions" that purportedly prove that Romans invented Jesus Christ in the first century. He has long argued that the faith system was used as a political tool to control the masses -- something he says is still going on today.
"I present my work with some ambivalence, as I do not want to directly cause Christians any harm, but this is important for our culture," he said of the alleged debunk - one that he believes will eventually be universally accepted.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
There we go with that "the common people are natural atheist egghead intellectuals until the Elite makes fundies of them" line again. Ridiculous.
Now if he'd said that the Romans created chrstianity to destroy Judaism or to compete with the Jewish Mashiach I'd listen to what he has to say.
Maybe not most atheists but many do in my experience insist that there is no evidence he ever existed.
Subsistence for the atheists. Proving the negative... blah, blah, blah.
>> “I present my work with some ambivalence, as I do not want to directly cause Christians any harm, but this is important for our culture,” he said
We don’t care, Atwill. But I suggest you try your strategy on the Muslims.
C. S. Lewis said it well in Mere Christianity:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great
moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." This is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of
things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or
else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.
Lewis then adds the following comment:
You can shut Him up as a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us
not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Excellent read.
The Gospels primarily, the Pharisaic outlook prevalent throughout Jesus’ message and the strong suspicion that Pharisees had been often flipped from Sadducees during the gospel writing processes.
Hyam Maccoby, “Revolution In Judaea: Jesus And The Jewish Resistance”
Atwil has a huge problem with his theory. If he really believes the Roman government was running a Psyop campaign to pacify Judea, he must admit it was a miserable failure. Judea was not pacified, in fact it got worse leading to open war and genocide with the eventual destruction of Jerusalem.
Another consideration is this Pysop campaign spread and eventually brought down the empire.
Finally, any good Pysoper knows to never kill your key figure and create a martyr.
This “press release” is a paid for venue to promote the book and dangle a carrot to the MSM. But the atheist Dawkins already grabbed the bait and posted the promo link on his Twitter account.
The Pharisees was a diverse lot, and Jesus had more in common with them, doctrinally, than the Sadducees, or the Essenes, but he was too severe a critic of their “tradition.” to be included in their number.
Then why was he referred to as rabbi throughout his career? The Pharisees were the only sect then ordaining rabbis through semikhah, or the laying on of hands.
The word means teacher. We have no evidence than he HAD a teacher of his own, to lay hands on him. That is certainly one point of telling the story of the finding in the temple, that even as a youth he was a sage. In Nazareth, his fellow townsmen were astonished to hear him speaking with such authority, which would not have been the case if he had spent time at the foot of someone like Gamaliel. at his baptism, power descended on him from one high.
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