The mere fact that the Dallas Cowboys exist is proof that Jesus was a real person
What is the historical evidence that Jesus Christ lived and died?
- Thread starter OddTrader
- Start date
The mere fact that the Dallas Cowboys exist is proof that Jesus was a real person
It's a shame that Jesus can't perform a modern miracle and get the Cowboys in the playoffs without having to be a wild card contender.
Why do you feel this must be a binary choice?
One can believe Jesus to be as historical as anyone can be, but not believe everything partisans say about him or worse: everything partisans say he said. Tell me how the authors and archivists of the biblical collection of books were not partisan and how divine inspiration can flow through pens yesterday and not today...and try to make a case that way.
Meanwhile what % of the partisan collection is parable? And, can parables actually be believed? I say, parables are not for believing but for understanding. This is assuming you can even get a non-partisan retelling of a parable. If even 3% of the bible is a parable you simply cannot claim that the entire book is something to be believed.
I say there are more parables as well partisan interpretation of the parables than you realize including the death and resuscitation of the historical person...which are parables in actions rather than words.
Bigots suffer from taking parables literally to be believed rather than symbolically to be understood .
And how can you be so sure that more than 5% of the red letters attributed to Jesus are actually things he said? Why would you assume a zero percent chance of literary meddling toward an agenda?
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I actually doubt this happened as stated by Paul who is the only witness of the occasion that later took to pen to tell about it.%%
Good point; God knocked Saul[aka Paul] off his horse or knocked him to the ground + had a Word chat with him...............................................Sounds a little bit like my hard head bro LOL.
The story suggests that Jesus used force to change someone's mind. It would have us believe that someone able to open ones eyes...especially the eyes of the willing...is now making the eyes of the unwilling to go blind.
That goes against the method of working only with those whose hearts are willing whereas Saul was most unwilling. This goes against the idea of only doing good through miracles rather than use miracles to do harm (knock off horse and make go blind) when it would have been just as easy to force a change in Saul's belief system using the same power used to open the eyes of the physically blind .
As such Paul would probably be the first person in history who achieved enlightenment having not prayed for it...and whilst working so hard to avoid it.
We are not required to believe it even by Paul's own admonitions that deceptive forces may appear themselves as angels of light or by extension, as Jesus himself.
On the contrary it's quite possible a less than godly entity used its power to force Paul into an interpretation of Jesus' message that has served to defeat the message (Paul's original intention) but more effectively working from the "inside".
Probably James thought the same thing when he lured Paul to Jetusalem, convinced him to shave his head, and lured him into the temple only to be seized upon by partisans. Not that James faithfully represented Jesus message either.
This story changes the maxim ask and receive to dont ask and receive anyway by force. It does not have the signature of Jesus on it as much as it has the mark of the priest.
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Oh, the NCV bible?
"The New Century Version of the Bible is a revision of the International Children's Bible. The ICB was aimed at young readers and those with low reading skills/limited vocabulary in English. It is written at a 3rd grade level and is both conservative and evangelical in tone.".
Other versions suggest that those who don't believe are "condemned already".
This "already" state of being suggests that "hell" is man's status quo as current condition rather than a future prosecution of a guilty verdict .
Even so it is worth questioning condemned by whom? Judged guilty already by whom?
I suggest that he'll is a king of self condemnation that does result from a disbelief in God's only Son so to speak. For if you believe that Adam was also God's son then you believe in more than one son...especially if you were to call mankind and it's legions also the "children of God".
Hell can be described as a kind of insanity for not believing in reality. That's really the clearest explanation.
God's "only Son" is a euphemism for the only reality or the only kind of reality that God promulgates either by "creation" (progeneration) or by abidance (accepting and living within reality). One ceases to abide in that reality by "disbelieving" in it, even though it is not something to be either believed or disbelieved but rather known or disowned (per parable of prodigal son).
The phenomenon of believing or disbelieving is a mental trick that affords a path out of reality into a world of ones own imagination. That's how hell is made and how we condemn ourselves to abide in it. The prodigal son LEAVES (is not originally exiled). Hence the pig sty that is hell is a voluntary phenomenon driven by temptation rather than a prison for something done against the original "kingdom".
As such, believing is only a small step on the many step journey home. First you've got to believe in the right conditions of reality as they are...not as you wish them to be in your imagination. Then you've got to step over a chasm between the phenomenon of faith to the knowledge of reality .
As a rule of thumb if you believe in the "reality" of this world you don't believe in the reality of the only Son of God and the world he abides in: the ONLY REAL WORLD.
Look very carefully.....
Jesus not real
True bit the historical Jesus was as real as any human being...which is not real at all.
The difference is that Jesus pointed to a reality _"kingdom of God") using things that were unreal such as parables and actions regarding bodies (miracles) including the unreal spectacle of crucifixion. It's the unrealness of crucifixion that enabled him the courage to set it up (volunteer) and endure all the misinterpretations of the parable that it is. It's the unrealness that enabled him to get through it without pain...and it was the unreal aspect of death that enabled him to break the laws we peoples ("sinners") maintain in regards to death.
Contrary to Jesus' own examples it is ironically Christians who are the ones trying to maintain the myth of Jesus reality by making him a man-god hybrid with no conflicts of interest in the most untenable of compromises.
Contrary to that myth, Jesus is currently teaching that you are either man or God but not both...simply by no longer appearing as a man. The next step in understanding is that you cannot even be a man as the very idea of it competes with the fact that only Good exists and everything else is made from the dirt of a null and void imagination and will return from whence it came (the null void).
The reason Jesus is made to be real is because such believers are trying to make themselves real. It's THEIR OWN "reality" (as people) that they consider to be salvation.
By contrast Jesus is currently showing that salvation is about the complete abandonment of the human condition and the beliefs that conceive of and birth it's condition...with the corollary acceptance of ones "godly" condition as a matter of fact. This is being taught by over two thousand years of disappearance from the face of the earth and will continue until the die hard believers in dualism get the hint.
Historical yes. But history isn't real .
Correction:
I suggest that hell is a kind of self condemnation...
And to be clear, i believe that what man faces day to day as status quo...is hell.
The bible, in its telling of two different gospels, lets slip [in one of Peter's letters] that Jesus came and preached to those in hell. Occam's Razor suggests that because we know he preached to us here in this world [whatever you want to call it], and don't really know what he did during some time in the tomb [why would he go to hell?], we should be able to make the logical link between our condition and the proverbial hell of lore.
Even if you did deduce that Jesus went to hell during the time he was "dead" and preached to them there [preached what? what is the purpose of preaching?] you also might get the clue that the death of Christ is something very different than the death of Jesus, such that only a "dead Christ" would appear in hell to preach.
Indeed, the death of Christ is not what you think. It is the changing of reality to unreality. If Christ is the actual totality of reality, then all changes (to make an imaginative world built on unreal principles) are changes made to Christ, and result in a condition that cannot be called "life", but rather something of a "living dead"...a kind of oxymoronic existence that does not make sense. And this would explain why Jesus saw all peoples, whether walking above their graves or lying below them, as "dead" (let the dead bury the dead).
What is our world? It is all that changes. There is so much change in this world that the only thing that remains the same, they say, is change. As such, our world conflicts with any world or any reality that does not change. Even Christians have deduced that Christ does not change, so i don't see why the conflict is not obvious to them. It's not possible to make something that does not change into something that changes constantly (man and his environment). Anyone who believes this participates in the experience that tries to prove this: hell. The belief pre-dates anyone's appearance in hell as a man or as a woman. And this is why those who don't believe in Christ are "condemned already". There was a prior dis-belief...before the foundations of the world as we know it...known otherwise as "hell". In other words, the thing or entity that makes this world ("the god of this world") is something or someone that DOES NOT BELIEVE IN CHRIST, as the only total reality of all that exists. And we are it's ideological offspring.
Once you come to the philosophical maxim that change is death and that all death is change, you might be able to understand that in coming to a world that is built on constant change, Jesus did indeed preach to those who are "dead", but who "live" in hell as some strange hybrid that is always dying but is always dead. If you could view this from the vantage of a world where all was always alive, you could easily see that the "cross" is an eloquent symbol for all man's conditions.
The death of Christ begets the "life" of this alternate universe where what appears to be alive is really "dead" (changing). What causes the death of Christ? Disbelief. Disbelief is a mental mind game that invites in ignorance and replaces knowledge with a fake alternative called "faith". And by this "faith" does the substance of this alternate universe (the material worlds) take shape according to the imagination of it's maker.
The good news is that our unbelief is not actually able to harm Christ, but does make Christ "dead" (non existent) to the denizens of a world that lives on constant change (and will end because of change). We only harm ourselves when, as we lay claim to the title "reality" and presume to "live" ourselves, we SUBSTITUTE for Christ, and become the target of all that would destroy a living reality (Christ): imagination fueled by faith.
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