And yet the Roman Catholics believe Mary lived and died a virgin.

Which if you think about it is less plausible than the hocus pocus of turning water to wine.

Back then, the life expectancy was around 35. People had LOTS of kids, and they started pretty much on the first day they could breed. An only child would have been ludicrous.

Of course, the notion of Jesus having no children, and being a bum, and somehow surviving as a bum and leech all the way to 32, is equally strange and would have made him quite the weirdo. But we already know that he was a weirdo, so in a weird way it fits.

 

My understanding of Mary Magdalene is that she appeared in a text that was very badly damaged and that the church basically filled in the spaces where The text was missing and decided to make her a prostitute .

Actually Tori Amos made an interesting comment when she said that we are all told the Jesus never had a sexual relationship with a woman and that was part of his great purity. She then added but what if he did? Would that be that bad and what does that say about women ?

 

I think it's strange that for so many centuries there was this cult around the idea that Mary lived and died a virgin. The Mary Cult was so popular that the Church absorbed it and even altered the Bible to accommodate it.

But think about it. Why is her chastity such a big deal? Is there something glorious about it?

Jesus is supposed to be literally the Son of God, and partly a God himself somehow, due to the whole Trinity business. So maybe the Roman popes decided it's just not right to say that God was pushed out of a hole that's had some animal's sperm in it.

 

Passover was a very difficult time in Jerusalem and pretty much the only time that Pontius pilot had to be there . Because there was so much nationalist fervor The Romans had to keep a tight rein on things so if somebody came along and called themselves the Messiah who would deliver them from Rome the Romans weren't about to be very patient with that. For someone to taunt the Romans at that time well for me it seems kind of suicidal

 

I know at this point not to get in an argument about what anyone wants to believe or not believe....

I do believe the Catholic Church maybe all of them are like our Govt...just out for themselves...
I feel they have played a lot with history.....to benifit them....

Merlin had a lot of neat magic also...

 

Well, let's see...according to the Gospel of Thomas, he cursed a couple of playmates and caused them to die, blinded several people, and was disrespectful to Joseph.

Oh, wait, that was an apocryphal book, one the church didn't let in because it made Jesus look bad...probably had KellyAnne Conway giving out the alternate facts for him...

 

From what I understand there was almost a sort of Messiah fever going around during the time of Jesus with many individuals claiming to be the Messiah. How does one man in the crowd set himself apart and rise above all of the others and claim this title. How does his claim stand up for 2000 years when he could have easily just been lost to history. Think about all of our recorded history and there is just a tiny percentage of people to make a name for all time, and even fewer from this era.
How did he do it?

The Bible may in fact be the word of God, but it has been edited and rewritten by the Church and by Man so often that everything must be taken with a grain of salt.

 

I think in my studies I once thought the first Christians where GNOSTICs and the Church overtook them and built their entire story how they wanted it.....

Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός gnostikos, "having knowledge", from γνῶσις gnōsis, knowledge) is a modern name for a variety of ancient religious systems, originating in Jewish milieus in the first and second century CE. These systems taught that the material world was created by an ignorant emanation of the highest God, trapping the Divine spark within the human body. This Divine spark could be liberated by gnosis of this Divine spark.

The Gnostic religions flourished in Mediterranean in the second century CE, in conjunction with other early Christian movements. After the second century a decline set in, but Gnosticism persisted throughout the centuries as an undercurrent of western culture, remanifesting with the Renaissance as Western Esotericism, and taking prominence with modern spirituality.

 

King James version one of the most common took the Bible and changed it to suit King James of England...

 

Pretty hard to analyze the oldest fairy tail , specially as its been adulterated by so many depraved holy men for so many centuries , for so many different reasons.
Be interesting to know what version is locked away in that little church in the remote Ethiopian highlands.
It could be one of the oldest.

 

I'm far from a religious scholar but Do have some knowledge on the subject. I also know that the "Church" has often looked out for its own interests not only in ancient history but today as well. The Church is occupied by Man, so it is naturally at times flawed, imperfect and dishonest.

 

On a more serious note, last week I read a news article about researcher Timothy Freke. He is a co-author of a book Jesus and suggests that the Jesus Christ of the Bible was a myth originating years earlier in ancient Greece. I quote from Wikipedia:

The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? is a 1999 book by British authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. The Jesus Mysteries is an investigation of early Christianity prior to the 4th century CE, when direct political intervention by the Roman Emperor Constantine forced various competing Christian sects to unify under a statement of faith (the Nicene Creed).

Freke and Gandy claim to have examined evidence from ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilisations, and to have found important parallels of Jesus' divinity with a number of mystery religions, such as those of the ancient gods Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras, apparently manifestations of a single cult of a dying and rising "godman" myth, known to classical scholarship as Osiris-Dionysus.

The authors propose that Jesus did not literally exist as an historically identifiable individual, but was instead a syncretic re-interpretation of the fundamental pagan "godman" by the Gnostics, who were the original sect of Christianity. Orthodox Christianity, according to them, was not the predecessor to Gnosticism, but a later outgrowth that rewrote history in order to make literal Christianity appear to predate the Gnostics. They describe their theory as the "Jesus Mysteries thesis."

 

There you go as I posted earlier in this thread about the Gnostics.....

 

One thing about the bible , is that it has been so bastardised and sanatised by so many so often ,
that we really can not discount any possibilities , from any old source , unless it can actually be proved to be a more recent forgery ,
no matter how unlikely it might seem nowadays.
All we can be sure of , is that a similar story has existed under the name of Christianity for about 14 - 1600 years.

I know there is at least one bible that exists in Britain , from the 11th or 12th century. (I don't remember if it was written in the 11 hundreds , or 11th century)

 

or the retelling of older stories...

The Horus Mythology

What if I told you there was once an ancient religion whose God was conceived by a virgin named Meri and had a stepfather named Seb (Joseph)?

What if I told you this God was born in a cave and his birth was announced by an angel, heralded by a star and attended by shepherds? He attended a special rite of passage at the age of twelve (although the ancient texts describing this God are silent about His life from the age of 12 to 30).

At 30 years of age, this God was baptized in a river (His baptizer was later beheaded). He had 12 disciples, performed miracles, exorcized demons, raised someone from the dead, and even walked on water. They called Him “Iusa”, the “ever-becoming son” and the “Holy Child”. He delivered a “Sermon on the Mount”, and his followers recounted his sayings.

2350 bce Egypt

======================================

There is so much shit floating around one has to just come to grips with what suits them best.....

 

Oldest .
Hebrew
Dead sea scrolls , incomplete fragments.
250 BCE - 68 CE

Greek
Codex Sinaiticis
4th century ?
interestingly , this bible has 27,000
corrections noted in margins etc.
So I guess there was to be a next version/edition.

Ethiopian


Claimed to be the oldest most complete.
around 500 AD.
but also seen it aged as 4th century.
Carbon dating 330 - 650 AD

like everything to do with the bible , you takes sure pic

 

Imaginary

 

Barack Obama.

 

They played fast and loose with the four gospels that made it in. The others couldn't be salvaged even with a full rewrite.

The cool thing I've always liked about the gospels is that Christians deem them infallible, to be taken literally, yet there are two separate geneaologies of Christ from Abraham, and the geneaologies differ.

 

That is cool. The Horus Mythology. Never heard of it. And nearly 2 1/2 millenia before Christ? Is this for real?

Fuck. Most of what we now "know" about Jesus Christ comes down from Counsels that took place in Egypt.