Jesus Christ (real or not?)

I can't help but see similarities with the modern day Gurus and Fakirs in India. Spiritual leaders. They achieve God like status among thousands of followers. They're believed to have mystical powers because they perform feats of levitation, walking on hot coals, etc. All tricks that today have been easily explained using modern science. Yet they still manage to get a pretty big following even in modern times. I imagine back in the time of Jesus an exceptionally charismatic and sly individual could really make it big by preying on the vulnerability of the simple people of that time. Before science people believed in wacky things like spontaneous generation.

 

Source? The Old Testament Bible, for the messianic prophecy about the messiahs hands and feet being nailed. Now if you want information about what time period, and who used crucifixion as a form of punishment, hopefully a quick google search would answer your question. But, I'll look it up for you in the book I read.

I remembered a little wrong. But here is what it says in the Book of Isiah in the OT:

But He was pierced for our transgressions he was crushed for our iniquities.

Now, I thought that I read in the Lee Strobel book that Crucifixion was only a Roman form of punishment. I looked in the book to find the source of information in there to tell you who said, it but it's not in there. I most likely read that in some internet article a while back and I was remembering wrong. However I found an article on the history and pathology of crucifixion.

The history and pathology of crucifixion.

In antiquity crucifixion was considered one of the most brutal and shameful modes of death. Probably originating with the Assyrians and Babylonians, it was used systematically by the Persians in the 6th century BC. Alexander the Great brought it from there to the eastern Mediterranean countries in the 4th century BC, and the Phoenicians introduced it to Rome in the 3rd century BC. It was virtually never used in pre-Hellenic Greece. The Romans perfected crucifion for 500 years until it was abolished by Constantine I in the 4th century AD. Crucifixion in Roman times was applied mostly to slaves, disgraced soldiers, Christians and foreigners--only very rarely to Roman citizens. Death, usually after 6 hours--4 days, was due to multifactorial pathology: after-effects of compulsory scourging and maiming, haemorrhage and dehydration causing hypovolaemic shock and pain, but the most important factor was progressive asphyxia caused by impairment of respiratory movement. Resultant anoxaemia exaggerated hypovolaemic shock. Death was probably commonly precipitated by cardiac arrest, caused by vasovagal reflexes, initiated inter alia by severe anoxaemia, severe pain, body blows and breaking of the large bones. The attending Roman guards could only leave the site after the victim had died, and were known to precipitate death by means of deliberate fracturing of the tibia and/or fibula, spear stab wounds into the heart, sharp blows to the front of the chest, or a smoking fire built at the foot of the cross to asphyxiate the victim.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14750495


Apparently I was wrong about only the Romans using Crucifixion.
But I ask you? have you researched about the other supposed self proclaimed christs that came along before Jesus? Were any of them crucified on a cross?? I doubt it. But if you can pull something up showing me that another self proclaimed Christ died on a cross, then I will stand corrected.

 

Jesus was and still is a common name in the part of the world. I'm pretty sure there will have been a jesus around that time. As Joseph is and was also a common name, and carpenter was a fairly common occupation, it's not hard to imagine that there was jesus, son of Joseph the carpenter

I once read that there is some vague historical reference to one such boy of that name accompanying his dad, Joseph, on a trade mission to what we now call England, although at the time I think it was still called something that the name Britain derives from, after the roman goddess Britannia, which incidentally is where the region of Breton in Northern France also takes it name, but I digress. ....

 

Nowhere doea it say died on a cross...it mentions piercing, sonits hardly unequivocal is it?

Anyone stabbed fits the bill quite happily

 

They take care of that argument as well as many others in the book I read a few years back, that I am being forced by a mob of people debating me on all sides to go back and refer to. lol. Since you brought that up, you most likely haven't read the book I read. I will tell you the name of it if you are interested. Although I have mentioned it several times in the other thread.

 

I guess you are right. Darn it. I hate being wrong. And let this be a lesson to myslef as well as everyone else here. Never trust random internet articles on the internet. Although I thought I read it in the book, with an interview with an expert, but when I reexamined the book I realized it wasn't in there.

 

Do you have a source Hannibal where I can read about all the other's that claimed to be the Christ before and after Jesus came along. I'm curious of how they died.

 

Do you mean the story of Jesus going to England with Joseph of Arimathea to get tin? And he knocked around with some druids and exchanged knowledge with them...or so the stories go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_years_of_Jesus#Claims_of_young_Jesus_in_Britain

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/8380511.stm

Edit: Strachan's documentary, And Did These Feet...?, is on youtube if you're interested.

 

That's the one, I think.

 

And that's always the problem with prophecies. Whether biblical, or Nostradamus, or any other they're written so vaguely so as to always be true by SOME interpretations. Give me one with definite specifics, as specific as we would write history, coming true and I'll be impressed; dates, times, etc.

But it's always like "the harold of doom walk hand in hand with the lady of elation" instead of "A president named Harold Johnson born 15 Aug 1963 will cause the downfall of the United States in the year 2023 by taking out a two trillion dollar loan to build the first space elevator which will structurally fail on 13 March 2022 due to a failing of a section on the fourth radial support because of bad calculations by an engineer named Bob Johnson. It will topple across the central United states causing a 75 megaton explosion, political and economic chaos will follow and the Russians will successfully invade in the disorder."

Even if it did have a specific prophecy in there that he would die on a cross, my points about editing and vagueness stand. I mean all the supposed end of the world prophecies in the bible, very vague. Why couldn't they even be as specific as the exact method of the end of the world?

 

But imagine if the prophecy actually said, "A president named Harold Johnson born 15 Aug 1963 will cause the downfall of the United States in the year 2023 by taking out a two trillion dollar loan to build the first space elevator which will structurally fail on 13 March 2022 due to a failing of a section on the fourth radial support because of bad calculations by an engineer named Bob Johnson. "

Then when the president Harold Johnson becomes president, he will most likely see the prophecy about himself. And when he does that, he will say, "you know what, I'm not going to take out that trillion dollar loan." Which would completely stop the prophecy from coming true in the first place. Meaning the prophecy wasn't really a prophecy, since it didn't come true. It was just a warning.

 

And now we're into temporal mechanics... I hate temporal mechanics, ever since I was lost in the delta quadrant trying to get my crew home.

But seriously, now you see one of the problems with actual prediction of the future instead of vague mumbo jumbo. And if the point was to help us avoid it, specificity does it way better as you showed. If the point was to harm us, no prophecy and allowing thigns to take their course does it far better, and same with wanting a neutral outcome.

 

Aww I was really looking forward to the completion of a space elevator. My daughter has a fascinating book that says the moon is made of cheese. Thanks Bob Johnson you careless buffoon!

 

And even putting aside those glaring mechanical issues why would a god who is supposedly all powerful need prophecy? If he wanted things to happen a specific way an omnipotent deity is more than capable of doing so by carefully setting the appropriate conditions at the start of the universe, but it sounds like his 1.0 release needs more patches than a Bethesda game.

And that's not even taking into account whether you should believe the prophecies. There's a slew of times in the bible when God outright lies to people so things turn out the way he wants, which as pointed out above the need to do so conflicts with his omnipotence, or he's just a mean kid with a magnifying glass. → http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.ca/2013/07/the-biblical-lies-of-god-and-jesus.html

 

In my day job as a software dev and DBA, on a contract once I saw horrendous maintainability problems. I did some calculations and estimations based on a combination of my experience and there forecasts for growth, and I went to the boss. I told him that unless we do a,b and c to proactively tackle this design flaw, with forecasted growth in usage, the system will fail in 3 months time. I explained how it would fail, why it would fail, what the end users would experience when it fails, an estimate of how long it would take to rectify if we did it before the event, and an estimate of how long it would take after the event, how much downtime there'd be, and approximate financial losses as well as reputation damage.

My prophecy was ignored. 3 months later the phone rang. System was down.

Bizarrely, I got bollocked for it failing. Talk about shoot the messenger.

 

The point of a prophecy in the bible is usually to tell us what WILL happen in the future, not necessarily help us to avoid something. In order for your arguments to have any validity, your going to have pick out specific prophecies on a case by case basis, in order to criticize them. No offense, but the points you are arguing just look like a bunch of word salad. You need to be more specific for one thing. Your doing the same thing that your accusing the bible of doing and posting a bunch of vague mumbo jumbo. Prophecies can serve different purposes. There could possibly be a prophetic warning for example, so people can avoid something. Or, a prophecy may just tell what the future holds so people can know what to expect. And then when it happens people can reflect on the prophecy and there you have it. Some more evidence that the supposed prophet was legit and not a sham.

 

Nope

 

hmmm. MAybe you should file a complaint with God's HR department. Let God know that you think you could do the job better, and maybe he will step down, and let you be God. Or maybe he is a little bit if not a lot more competent at the job of being God then you are and you are just looking at the way God works from an ignorant point of view. But we are all ignorant of how God works to a certain extent, since we aren't God could never be God and could never grasp his ways. I think God is a little bit smarter than we are.

 

Would you trust anyone else who said they were all compassionate but neglected to warn you of danger or intercede on your behalf? You can always say "god has her reasons!" but there's no reason to believe so. The universe is capricious and random, it is only when you try to fit it into a preconceived set of beliefs that someone says "Ah, but it's a GOOD thing that a child was born addicted to crack and infected with AIDS!" or "Yes, a plague did wipe out these crops and cause mass famine, but it's part of the plan."