JCC Jesus may have been married, according to new evidence

Well, LOTR was written by a devout Catholic, so in essence he poured the belief system of that faith (which as I sustain is based on a fiction based on a man who may or may not have preached plain common sense values of human decency way back in the 1st century) into that other work of fiction.

 

That's not the point I was making. Pick anything. The Golden Compass which I like very much and was written by an atheist. Whatever you want. I'm just saying, I don't think it's crazy to be morally influenced or even guided by art (in this case, fiction).

 

Oh, my, this news upset me ! I demand that the people that said this shut up, or I'm going to get angry and attack a random embassy.

 

I'm still waiting for uncontested evidence that Jesus ever existed.

 

Yeah, so am I and I wager a few hundred million people, even if they don't want to admit it to themselves.

 

What would constitute "uncontested" evidence to you? The historical method is far different from the scientific method. The fact that the early Jewish Jesus Movement got off the ground with a rabbi who was executed for sedition as its venerated central figure(who cried in desperation to Yahweh, as he died, at that) is itself compelling proof that he existed. If you were going to make up a Messianic figure out of whole cloth, why fabricate someone who was a total failure by terrestrial standards? Not only that, if you look at the dates of composition of the four canonical Gospels, an oral tradition about a historical figure that is becoming embellished and organically evolving over time is fairly obvious(the first Gospel composed, Mark, doesn't even depict the Resurrection). In fact, if you read the synoptic Gospels simply as they are written, you'll see that Jesus isn't even recorded as ever articulating anything like the Christian "plan for salvation". The Gospels are books by Jews about Jews meant to be read by Jews. Yeshua, the iconoclastic Jewish rabbi who was executed by Pilate, almost certainly existed. Just because the Jewish Jesus Movement evolved into contemporary Christianity and ascribed some absurd theological and dogmatic claims to his life doesn't make this any less so.

 

"There was some guy once."

I don't have a problem with that either.

 

You say point 1 as if you know for certain, and yet, all you have had is people telling you. It's blind obedience that causes you to say this. You haven't thought this through. You haven't waited for the evidence to be assessed by professionals. Faith for you is basically you taking the safer side of Pascal's wager. You're not different 99% of the rest of the religious world, but plus don't accept dogmatic slavery for factual insight.

 

Not exactly. From my experience, the historical method and the scientific method are largely the same. Simply replace the words "hypothesis" with "prospectus" and "experiment" with "research".

 

A scientific experiment and historical research are not even remotely the same thing. The former consists of designing a scenario that mitigates against all possible factors save the one being tested affecting the prior status of what's being experimented upon. The second is simply gathering as many sources that attest to an event as possible, and the conclusion you draw therefrom often heavily relies on common sense. Common sense has no place in any scientific conclusion.

 

It's on ABC evening news now.

 

That is why I said "largely" the same and not "exactly" the same. Science has the luxury of having its own Contra Code.

 

And archeologists and historians use scientific methods to verify their research, such as radiocarbon dating, etc.

 

Meh. I remain unimpressed by this "new" gospel. If Jesus were married, why wouldn't that fact be recorded in Mark, the earliest of the canonical gospels, which was written within living memory of Jesus' death? There was nothing in Jewish or Greek culture that would have granted extra credence to an unmarried Messiah. Rather to the contrary, Rabbis were generally married. True, this tiny scrap of an unknown (5th century?) gospel attributes a wife to Jesus, but then, the earlier Gospel of Thomas attributes superbaby! powers to him, and nobody pays any attention to that either.

 

Of course Jesus wasn't married - have you seen that neckbeard?

 

Your argument is flawed in two-fold fashion. In the first place, the Nicaean Council did not dispute the issue of Jesus's divinity. It was a debate about whether he, as a divinity, was of co-equal status with the Father or was subordinate to him. Secondly, in raising Arius, you point out your problem. Most things that were/are considered heresies are pretty well known. The belief in Jesus as a subordinate or demi-god, the Gnostic proposal that he existed only as a spirit instead of a physical human, that he boasted miraculous powers from the time of infancy, etc. Among all those, the question of marriage has never really emerged before. It's somewhat unlikely that this was true, and so much more thoroughly stamped out than literally everything else.[/quote]

Ghost: Your explanation doesn't seem to quite make sense. Perfect self-knowledge, per your description, seems to have necessitated the existence of an actual identical replica, this being the Son. Fine. But then, if the Son possess exactly the same traits as the Father, shouldn't his perfect self-knowledge also create a mirror image being? And shouldn't that entity's perfect self-knowledge produce another, in an endless loop? What keeps this from producing an infinite number of beings?

 

I attempted a conversation about this with some of my religious students whom constantly tell me if i don't accept Jesus I'm going to burn in hell.

One of their responses, and I quote: "I'm going to be believe the Bible, which says that Jesus didn't have a wife, rather than some old piece of paper written who knows how long ago."

I actually face-desked.

 

I don't think that's what we call "proof".

Because that fits into a typical mold of similar figures, dovetailing nicely with the death and resurrection plot? Because Jesus' achievement was supposed to be on a metaphysical level and thus not really about "terrestrial standards"?

On the other hand, the lack of mention of Jesus' various Gospel adventures on earth in the writings of Paul seems to tell a different story: a mythological figure later becoming "embellished" and "evolving" by being shoehorned into a historical framework.

 

What death and resurrection plot? None of the grafting on of Old Testament Messianic prophecies ("This was done to fulfill...") appear in the Gospel of Mark. It's a very prosaic account of his life and teachings. Reading it now with a Christian framework in mind completely misses the point; you've got to imagine yourself as a member of the Jesus Movement trying to convince other Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. Why on Earth would you fabricate this particular account? Remember, it has no mention of a Virgin Birth nor a Resurrection account. If it were made up out of whole cloth, the text would be far more explicit and didactic.

 

So do we get to hear about how Jesus wrote down gospels on gold tablets and hid them in the US?

Or how he started the Republican party?

Maybe the bit about how he said "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone... unless the stone is aimed at A Gay, in which case, thou shall go nuts."?

 

According to websters it is. Its rarely used, but its a word.

 

As someone who was taught from day one to accept primary sources as supreme and be very critical regarding their intentions and biases, I find the evidence for a historical Jesus to be pretty thin. Then again, I feel that way about much of history from that time and before. Everyone back then had very different concepts of fact and truth; to them, it wasn't lying to embellish or change their stories to make them palatable or more fun or contain some forced moral. It's just the way it was done. ...Well, okay, they also lied.

I'm not intimately familiar with all the apocrypha, but is it really that remarkable a gospel alleging that Jesus was married would turn up three centuries after his death? The author might as well be Dan Brown as removed as he was from the period in which Jesus actually lived.

 

Only A gay?! What about multiples.

 

Jesus hates all the Gays, but in the instance I think he was referring to an instance in which one Gay was in stoning range.

 

Apparently quite a few experts doubting the authenticity of the fragment.

Even if it is authentic, it's still hardly proves anything.