Tarquin Rees
Member
per yr earlier post, I think there's reason to be a little more motivated :)
of course, for any of us raised in the Christian junior-MK-ultra tradition this stuff triggers instant cognitive dissonance. that's why I think it's such a great topic to drill into.
naa... read carefully... or better yet do the research for yourself. look for the forest, not the trees. this is really the main point of this episode... i.e. how to analyze complicated stuff that pushes a lot of cognitive dissonance buttons.BOOM!
Mic Drop ;)
agreed... we wind up somewhere in between. with a lot of giant holes left by the incomplete history.This is the false dichotomy I'm hearing:
1) The gospels and Jesus were invented out of whole cloth as a propaganda tool to crush the Jewish identity and religion (as Atwill proposes).
2) The stories in the gospel are 100% lilterally true and Josephus' history is 100% true and all parallelism is 100% synchronicity/prophecy fulfillment and a "barcode" of the divine rather than a "Flavian barcode" (blind faith in the miraculous viewpoint).
There's a lot of room for nuance in between!
too much to pull all this apart, but the main rub is that the Gospels want us to believe the sacking of Jerusalem was a prophesy of Jesus. it's hard to maintain this given the historicity (as limited as it may be) of Josephus's War of the Jews.[So here's some additional possibilities:
1) Josephus (or others working for Flavians) wrote both - taking existing stories and bending or fabricating certain parts of them to establish parallels.
2) the gospels came first and Josephus bent the history of Titus' campaign to fabricate parallels.
3) the gospels came second and the Jewish authors bent the stories to establish parallels. Why? They assumed guilt and saw destruction as fair judgment and retrospectively looked back at the warnings and saw some parallels and/or imagined others as an act of repentance and self-flagellation for not following God and crucifying the messiah... the same thing that happened dozens of times throughout the OT.
4) some parallels actually did occur as real synchronicities. Key figures in history (especially military history) sometimes become convinced there is a hidden hand at work in significant events due to synchronicity and pre-cognitive experiences. It isn't beyond the realm of possibility that synchronicities and pre-cogs actually occurred and that as a result, Titus actually became convinced that he was an agent of the Jewish god's wrath sent by their god to punish them. I don't believe Atwill claims the book of Daniel was written by the Flavians... and Daniel lays out a 490 year timeline that seems to have been followed and fulfilled by Jesus and Titus... synchronicity or pre-cognition?
Alex's point #2 above: "Look at all the trees!" ("evidence" for Josephus' history being reproduced in Mark)
Me: "Didn't I just prove there aren't any trees?"
the main rub is that the Gospels want us to believe the sacking of Jerusalem was a prophesy of Jesus. it's hard to maintain this given the historicity (as limited as it may be) of Josephus's War of the Jews.
watch the vid... read the book. the sequencing is unmistakable.Again, there were probably lots of prophecies about the sacking of Jerusalem before it actually happened... I mentioned Daniel as one of the earliest ones. Today (and for the last 69 years since Israel became a nation again) there are thousands of Christian preachers prophesying the sudden destruction of America and the "beast system" (citing many scriptures including the Babylon of Revelation which falls in 1 hour). There were probably many preachers in Jesus' day preaching the fall of Jerusalem citing Daniel's 70 7's and pointing out the oppressive corruption of the Pharisees. It is probably rooted in the biology of some individuals to be focused on an impending doom, so there are probably always people saying these things and since destruction DOES come periodically... like the broken clock that is right twice a day, the prophets of doom are right periodically... but then there's the synchro-mystical pre-cog aspect which we all believe is real, so add that in the mix... and further add to the mix the fact that during periods of general instability and warfare, people are worried about the increasing chaos and predictions of destruction abound.
So, it is entirely likely that there were a host of prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem for decades and that after the fact, they all got condensed down into slightly more accurate prophecies of doom and attributed to Jesus, and all the inaccurate prophesies were forgotten.
watch the vid... read the book. the sequencing is unmistakable.
this is a non-starter. I've covered it many times with Atwill critics they all ultimately acknowledge the point.
Try this on for size: we are all developing towards a goal - call it enlightenment or whatever - and we're all at varying stages. These stages are finite in number and various figures are personifications of these stages. They embody the stage we are at and the attitude we need to have to transcend that stage.
Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad are all various metaphors and archetypes for an inner state. When we die we find ourselves in a realm which corresponds to the state we have achieved in life and the figure that represents that stage is encountered as the guide at that point in order that one can fully realise the 'Christ nature' or 'Buddha nature' or 'Muhammad nature' in order to transcend and move on to the next level.
Which is why reports differ. They are reports from people of differing levels of being receiving differing lessons.
This proves you aren't Jesus... ;)
Maybe because people have not been trained on how to analyze symbols and abstract their meanings and relationships, and also because NDErs often report everything seems "hyper-real" and not at all like a dream, but more solid than this reality.
"Psychopomps" ...new vocab for me... I like that word :)
Whenever a boundary is crossed, the trickster is nearby...
Jesus, I believe, is the archetypal good trickster who opposes corrupt hierarchy while the devil is the archetypal evil trickster opposing benevolent hierarchy.
I like chess, but don't get yr point.It is typical for a beginner chess player to resolve pawn tension immediately, this is known and it is because leaving the tension increases complexity and stress....but it causes stress in your opponent as well and you won't be successful if your goal is to dismiss or resolve the conversation rather than finding the truth about the best move.
I am skeptical about philosophers who want the problem to go away. This is a tell of their bias, no? Unfortunately there are not rules for checkmate in philosophy. At least not generally accepted rules which could function in a forum.
Precisely!Alex: (posts Atwill video) "Look at all the trees Atwill has found!"
Me: "These are actually weeds. Look, I just pulled them up."
Alex: "Hey man, it's all about the forest!"
Me: "But the forest is made of trees...so, if there really aren't any..."
Alex's point #2 above: "Look at all the trees!" ("evidence" for Josephus' history being reproduced in Mark)
Me: "Didn't I just prove there aren't any trees?"
Alex: "You're just stuck in cognitive dissonance!"
Me: "Looks like psychological projection to me. Anyway, where do you want me to put these weeds?"
???Precisely!
Try answering Chotki's points. More good advice is to read the New Testament for yourself and ask yourself if it appears pro-roman when you read everything in its proper context. I was a teenager at a time when there was no shortage of books claiming to know about the real Jesus and in the end they produced a huge "YAWN" from me. I wasn't a Christian then, I was an avid New ager with a toe in the dark side of the occult as well. I got to thinking that the motives of these writers was probably not so much scholarly as emotional knee-jerks against religion. I feel the same about Atwill. Granted, my goalposts have moved a little concerning direct historical evidence since I read a little Atwill (I couldn't stomach much more conspiracy theory before giving up) but like Chotki, I still think the evidence overall is very much in favour of the reality of a historical Jesus. Both Chotki and Gabriel have made some excellent points in this thread which have remained unanswered. I for one would like to see an intelligent refutation if you have one.
seems to me like he's denying parallels between Josephus and Mark. this is a non-starter. even the experts he sites don't agree with this position.Try answering Chokti's points.