Reply to What am I if I think Jesus was the best moral teacher ever but am indifferent re his divinity?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, there are no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus, who was after all a poor carpenter from a humble family. History in that era was, as we know, about emperors and heroes. Jesus' own followers were by and large illiterate. Until a few decades later when Jesus and his message became "important" enough for officials like Josephus and Pliny to write about.

I wonder that 12/25 10:21 wants to toss out all four gospels and Paul, which together show that Jesus' teachings and the movement around him were strong and vibrant just 2-3 decades (Paul and Mark) after his death. Sure, if you disregard the several major narrative documents that appeared a few decades after Jesus' death then you're forced to rely on accounts from 80-90AD and later, and th historical links become more tenuous. But simply tossing out the earlier sources seems disingenuous.

It's also odd that some of you are trying to claim that all religion is about "controlling the masses." Who exactly created this fundamentally anti-Roman, anti-Temple ideology with the purpose of "controlling the masses"?  If anything, more historians would say that Christianity developed in revolt against the Roman conquerors, instead of as a tool used by them. But then there's also the tricky question around how Jesus was also opposed to the logical alternative leaders, the Temple lawyers and priests.

So who, exactly, developed this supposed "controlling ideology"? And how did it suddently appear as a significant movement, seemingly out of nowhere, by 55 AD?[/quote]

I should add that Jesus' followers thought, in the early years after his death, that the world was going to end soon. It was an apocalyptic view. So they saw no reason to write anything down during his mission (which after all was only during the last 2-3 years of his life) or right after his death. It was only a few decades later that they began to think the second coming might not be on their lifetimes, the original witnesses started dying off, et centers. Then they started making records.

And as I mentioned, Romans weren't writing about carpenters no matter how outlandish the tales that reached them, until a particular carpenter's movement starting being an actual political threat.

So believe or don't. I for one, as a history major, am not troubled by the lack of evidence until the AD 50s. And I don't agree that we should just toss Mark or Paul out the window because....why should we toss them out? And while I can accept that the Early church grew into a means of political control, that wasn't until centuries later--centuries later, folks.[/quote]

Polytheistic cultures used gods to control, too.  This isn't simply a Christian "thing.'  But one god made controlling the masses a little easier.  Prior to that, you had smaller groups of people who idolized smaller gods. That made it difficult to gain control over larger masses of land. But make many gods into one, and you're set.

Religion is all about control.  Scientology is no different from specific sects in Christianity, for example.  Adherents grab onto a system of beliefs, and some will even die for those beliefs.

These beliefs are MAN-made - unless you're Wiccan, of course.[/quote]

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