Copernicus is often described as a lone astronomer who definitely argued that the sun, not the Earth was at the center of the cosmos. Copernicus’ contributions to astronomy are so significant that they warrant their own term: The Copernican Revolution.
But … He didn’t prove his model. His math was too poor, astronomical data not good enough.
His book “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” was ridiculed and useless for about 60 years after his death.
Brahe was an accurate observer. Kepler was a great mathematician. Finally, Kepler’s “Epitome astronomia Copernicanae”, 80 years later, was a correct proof of Copernican Ideas.
Caesar’s Messiah is a 2005 book by Joseph Atwill which argues that the New Testament ** you do not have permission to see this link **. Problematic arguments, problematic book, but..
“Creating Christ” is a very professional line of defence of this idea, done by experienced prosecutor in cogent way. New historical method. It is a real challange for scholars IMHO
Well, I suppose in this context, Steefen would be Copernicus, but that’s not being very fair to Copernicus, since he was actually right, and everybody who came after, including Kepler, referred to him constantly, whereas nobody outside this forum knows what a Steefen is. 😉
The heliocentric theory existed for millennia before Copernicus, of course, and would have been proven with or without Kepler–nor was it considered conclusively established until some time after Kepler.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
What’s interesting to me is that it really was paganism that created and clung to the notion of the earth being the center, and Christianity was (as so often happpened) parroting pagan ideas in defending geocentrism–it was nonetheless Christian scientists and mathematicians who solved the problem.
To argue that the story of Jesus is derived from Caesar is, of course, pure nonsense. And constitutes a form of geocentrism itself. We could prove the earth went around the sun–it took time to develop the math andoptics to do so. We have likewise spent a long time developing the historical methods by which we evaluate the texts that come down to us from ancient times. And what they tell us is that Jesus was a real person, and that the gospels, while far from perfectly accurate, give us a pretty good picture of the core events that inspired the religion he unintentionally created.
Eppur si muove, ‘Jarek’
Godspell,
Just everything is wrong in your comment.
Heliocentrism is old as old is geocentrism. 3rd century BC. Math was simpler for geocentrism and that was the reason why Ptolemy was in use – wrong idea but good results. Correct idea was too complicated from the mathematical point of view.
Based on gospels we have 6 to 9 “serious” theories about historical Jesus with fine scholars attached to all of them. It is a bad joke to talk about pretty good picture. According to scholars attached to Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet he is an artificial figure in 82%(Bart) or 95%(Gerd).
One of those theories is Jesus as a failed revolutionary. Creating Christ is the best argument for this.
Jarek is a short form of Jaroslaw. What is your problem?
Obviously since I said heliocentrism is very old–much older than you indicated in your first post–you were the one whose post was wrong.
Jesus as failed revolutionary isn’t what you said. You said Jesus was war propaganda from court of Roman emperors–which makes no sense on any level. But it is something a guy named Steefen says here, so you’ll pardon people for thinking you might be him. Frankly, you write like him. Maybe you’re neighbors. 🙂
The serious theories about Jesus are the ones who assume there really was someone named Jesus, who came from Nazareth, who was a follower of John the Baptist, broke off to form his own group, preached a radical form of Judaism, and was crucified by the Romans. Knowing that leaves a whole lot unknown, and that’s where the theories come from. This is not a serious theory you are talking about, and no serious scholars propound it. Doesn’t matter how well it’s put together–well argued crap is still crap. There is zero evidence to back up any such claim.
Ultimately, people believed heliocentrism once it became possible to make accurate predictive statements based on it, as Halley did. That can’t apply to past historical events. So it’s ridiculous to bring up mathematics and astronomy in this context. We’re talking about past human behavior, and of course you can’t point to a single enduring religion known to have begun as court propaganda. Religions begin as grassroots movements, that in some cases are adopted by the governing power–from the bottom up, not the top down.
Grassroots? Good. Grassroots movement Solidarity. 9 mln people in 1980 in communistic Poland. With a heroic leader Lech Walesa. Nobel Prize winner. President of Poland after fall of communism. Known everywhere. For 30 years our hero.
Suddenly in 2008, a book. From two young historians. Based on copies of the copies, of the copies from many sources. With absolutely unusual picture of the hero – Lech Walesa as a agent working for money for communistic regime.
Public response – it is a crap based on falsified docs. Ok.
2016 – we have originals . 500 pages. The crap is proved
Creating Christ is a much shorter book. Maybe is a crap but it is better to read first and later decide .
Solidarity was never a religion, Walesa wasn’t worshiped as a god, and the movement (which was much more than one man) helped destabilize the USSR’s influence over its satellites, leading to its subsequent collapse.
You’ll just believe anything, won’t you?
Kind of a funny stance for an atheist.
🙂
Jarek said
Grassroots? Good. Grassroots movement Solidarity. 9 mln people in 1980 in communistic Poland. With a heroic leader Lech Walesa. Nobel Prize winner. President of Poland after fall of communism. Known everywhere. For 30 years our hero.Suddenly in 2008, a book. From two young historians. Based on copies of the copies, of the copies from many sources. With absolutely unusual picture of the hero – Lech Walesa as a agent working for money for communistic regime.
Public response – it is a crap based on falsified docs. Ok.
2016 – we have originals . 500 pages. The crap is proved
Creating Christ is a much shorter book. Maybe is a crap but it is better to read first and later decide .
This analogy is somewhere in the universe of applicable if you’re suggesting Lech Wałęsa never existed, was never part of the Solidarity movement, and was never elected President of Poland.
And isn’t still alive.
‘Jarek’, could you answer two questions?
You seem to be saying that the Roman Empire invented Jesus for purposes of its own.
1)Why would they do that?
2) And why wouldn’t any of them SAY that, when confronted with these troublesome Christians who believed he was a real person? They just forgot?
Or is this even what you think? The Lech Walesa analogy seems to be suggesting you think Jesus was on their payroll, or under their control somehow (which frankly, I think is dubious even when applied to Walesa, who simply wasn’t as heroic as his public image suggested, but wasn’t trying to overturn the movement he became a symbol of).
If the Romans had such great secret police in the Jewish community, how come they never seemed to understand what was going on there? It was more like “Okay, this might be a problem, better crucify some people.” It took them generations to even figure out that Christians weren’t exactly the same thing as Jews.
Or have you just given up on this thread, and are currently working on some other name to keep hitting us with the same recycled conspiracy crap?
Going to get expensive, after a while.
Biblical criticism is based on fact that Jesus CV is artificial in more then 80%. You can ask anybody.
My statement was:
“Caesar’s Messiah is a 2005 book by Joseph Atwill which argues that the New Testament ** you do not have permission to see this link **. Problematic arguments, problematic book, but..
“Creating Christ” is a very professional line of defence of this idea, done by experienced prosecutor in cogent way. New historical method. It is a real challange for scholars IMHO”
It is about gospels, letters. Documents created after first Jewish War.
It is not about the existence of Jesus or Lech Walesa.
In fact, the Bible Geek said that Creating Christ is the best argument for historical Jesus.
So, I don’t have any idea what you are talking about.
This book is done by prosecutor and representing different way of analysis. I am recommending a book as a file of cogent arguments. Is it true? Who cares. It fascinating for sure and it will be fun to uncover weaknesses.
I first knew of Robert Price as a writer and scholar of fantastic fiction. It was years before I realized he had religious training. It was subsequent to that I realized he was a kind of mythicist. Alas, he has the same problem that C S Lewis detected in the work of his friend Charles Williams. Lewis said Williams put things in his theology that should be in his fiction and things in his fiction that should be in his theology. I think this is an apt and perceptive diagnosis for both Williams and Price.
Of course some enterprising young scholar (or some crochety old one) might try to invent a theology of the fantastic. To interpret the writings of the NT through the lens of fantastic fiction. Imagine Mark as a horror story about fighting demons. One need not even become a mythicist. One can do literary criticism on the speeches of Lincoln without historical questions coming into it at all. And many literary techniques apply to both fiction and non-fiction alike. I would be surprised if something like this had not already been attempted.
As far as the claims of Caesar’s Messiah, well…to quote physicist Niels Bohr, your theory is crazy but not crazy enough to be true.
Ah, you’re in a more creative mood this morning. And getting psychological. Well, two can play at that game. (Technically, everyone plays at that game, sooner or later–our earliest ancestors played at it–being able to imagine what’s going on in the mind of another person is a survival trait when that person has a stone knife, or a flint-tipped spear).
My interest in H.P. Lovecraft far predates my interest in the gospels, and I question whether Price understands either very well, but he’s got a right to his opinion. The problem with mythers is that they forget that even the wildest fiction is always based on fact–Lovecraft was influenced by things he read, things he experienced, just as the gospel authors were, but one major difference is that he was getting paid to write that stuff–by the word, even. He may have gotten more into it than your average pulp author, but he still knew there wasn’t any Cthulhu (Robert E. Howard occasionally imagined there had been a Conan who was telling him stories from the great beyond, but he probably had even less sex than Lovecraft). So he made very sure to convince his readers by being consistent as possible in his invented mythos, but also by just alluding to it most of the time, staying mainly around the fringes, letting the reader imagine the lurkers at the threshold. He did such a good job that some people to this day imagine his extradimensional demons are real–as a game. Nothing more.
It wasn’t a game when you could be tortured and killed for playing it. And what makes Mark feel real is that he shows us an identifiably human figure, with identifiably human traits, who has something otherworldly about him (and you know, some people do). And with some conflicts in his story, indicating that Mark was struggling to reconcile conflicting elements in stories he’d heard and read. It’s a very different process, and entirely different from other cults of that period, which tended to emphasize the non-human traits of their mythic avatars, all of whom invariably lived in some distant mythic past–not the very recent past. And they didn’t end their stories the way Mark ended his.
The literary and the literal are not enemies. They contradict and complement each other at the same time. If nothing interesting had ever happened, nothing interesting would ever have been written.
Considered as a story, it doesn’t matter whether a David McCullough Presidential biography is historical or not, and frankly, given the way I see people who only know Harry Truman from McCullough’s book rant about him like he was some kind of god, act like he was somehow the greatest President of all time (he was okay), I think you could make the case he’s as much of a mythmaker as Mark ever was. (And he got paid for it.)
History is not all dry facts and figures–if it was, nobody but historians would know any. We do have to reach deeper to get at the truth, which is not the same thing as the facts. We have to give something of ourselves. Mark did that, but he also passed on a great deal of real historical information, which is more than most of his contemporaries in the Roman world did, which is why we’d be arguing about what that world was like if Jesus was never born, and why historians who study pagan-era Rome make use of the gospels as primary sources.
Biographers in particular have a lot in common with the gospel authors, because the whole point of a biography is to focus in on one person who is treated as the center of his or her world. In a biography, however well-researched, there’s a tendency to tunnel vision. There has to be. Which is why all history can’t be biography, but biographies are often the most popular historical works, because they make history seem more real, more alive to the casual reader. If you’re telling a story, it’s good to have a protagonist. And all historians tell stories. And no historian can ever be sure his or her story is 100% true.
Jarek said
Biblical criticism is based on fact that Jesus CV is artificial in more then 80%. You can ask anybody.My statement was:
“Caesar’s Messiah is a 2005 book by Joseph Atwill which argues that the New Testament ** you do not have permission to see this link **. Problematic arguments, problematic book, but..
“Creating Christ” is a very professional line of defence of this idea, done by experienced prosecutor in cogent way. New historical method. It is a real challange for scholars IMHO”
It is about gospels, letters. Documents created after first Jewish War.
It is not about the existence of Jesus or Lech Walesa.
In fact, the Bible Geek said that Creating Christ is the best argument for historical Jesus.
So, I don’t have any idea what you are talking about.
This book is done by prosecutor and representing different way of analysis. I am recommending a book as a file of cogent arguments. Is it true? Who cares. It fascinating for sure and it will be fun to uncover weaknesses.
Yes, Steefen, we know the hypothesis. You’ve posted it in multiple threads.
You don’t seem too keen on responding to flaws in the argument, however.
He just likes the attention. Enough, apparently, to pay for another membership (I hope to hell he didn’t get a gift membership! That’s not what those are for!)
It’s amazing how desperate some people are to erase Jesus from history–but they’ve never been able to stick to one story, and he goes on, and they die off, are replaced by others with equally wacky theories, that ultimately fail as well. It works about the same way with Shakespeare.
Jarek
“Caesar’s Messiah is a 2005 book by Joseph Atwill which argues that the New Testament Gospels were written as wartime propaganda by scholars connected to the Roman imperial court of the Flavian emperors: Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Problematic arguments, problematic book, but..
“Creating Christ” is a very professional line of defence of this idea, done by experienced prosecutor in cogent way. New historical method. It is a real challange for scholars IMHO”
Steefen
The New Testament gospels were not written by Domitian. The New Testament gospels are propaganda of the First Jewish-Roman War generals Vespasian and Titus with Josephus and others. In Atwill’s 2014 book, “The Secret Messiah,” The Book of Revelation seems to be a rebuttal response by Domitian who could not add the Jewish Revolt to his military resume. Did Josephus work with Domitian as he countered the glory of his father and his brother? Maybe that is how Josephus could count Domitian and friend.
Why would Domitian diminish the glory of his father and brother when Jewish rebels attacked and defeated a Roman legion? Maybe Josephus got in his head. History does have assertions that Domitian did not champion his brother 100%.
Jarek, one other thing, I saw a video about Creating Christ. I was not about to make time to back out of the argument flow of Caesar’s Messiah (2005) and Secret Messiah (2014) to put Creating Christ first and then 1) add on that of Atwill with which I find convincing which the authors of Creating Christ left out and 2) argue with those authors (Valliant and Fahy). Maybe there is panel discussion and should be a panel discussion including Valliant, Fahy, and Atwill, with or without Price. I can look for that or suggest that.
I have many other things occupying my efforts to reach life goals. It is a forensic shame how you have been treated in this thread.
The noun forensic, meaning “an argumentative exercise” derives from the adjective forensic, whose earliest meaning in English is “belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts or to public discussion and debate.” The English word was derived from a Latin word forensic meaning “of the market place or form, public,” which in turn comes from the Latin word forum, meaning “market place, forum.”
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