Originally Posted by Not Shallow Not Slim:
nash,
Let's stipulate that an eccentric rabbi named Jesus existed.
He was not the Jewish Messiah, that much is clear. The Messiah was to be a great warrior or judge. Jesus was neither in the Jewish community.
Jesus was a human sacrifice that stuck, only after decades of oral tradition and borrowed mythology. If it weren't for the apologetics of Paul, there would be no Christianity today. The Christians simply rolled a 7. The essential premise of Christianity, that of redemption from the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, is demonstrably false.
Now is the time to abandon the harsh, hateful, vicious God of Abraham and get on with progressing as citizens of a small planet orbiting an innocuous star. I say this to Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. It's all BS, and we're here to say so.
It's that simple.
DF
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A few things.
Messiah doesn't mean great warrior or judge. It means king. The word is derived from the Hebrew word for "anointed", which references the Jewish tradition of anointing kings with oil.
No, Jews do not accept Jesus as the promised Messiah. That part we agree on.
Christianity did not "stick" decades after the crucifixion. It began three days after. Basic knowledge of human nature shows that something very significant happened because suddenly everything changed.
Logically, Christianity should have died out almost immediately. No one wants to be tortured and die for a recycled myth. Besides, you missed a very key point. The Gospels include names of people, places, and events. They were written in the region where this all took place. So it would be very easy for the people of the time to tell if they were lies or fiction. The opposite happened, people drastically changed their beliefs despite threat of personal hardship, pain, and death. Why?
The fact that Christianity spread so rapidly when it should have been eliminated by the Romans very early on is a sign that something very significant happened. So what was it?