Jesus Christ! Fact or fiction?

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 EddieRUKiddingVarese wrote:

 Tom Ozric wrote:

No human being can come back to life after being nailed to wood........sorry, I just can't buy into it.....

Very good point
Conspiracy theories abound to explain this, there are even some atheist ones that speculate on how a person who may or may not have existed in the flesh (whether divine or not) can 'return' from the dead. The simplest (and thus most logical) is that such a character didn't die on the cross but was taken down before death ensued, but there are many variants on that depending on how much anyone truly wants to believe. 

One that amuses me centres around the idea of jewish excommunication [herem] where heretics [minim] are excluded from the community and ignored as though they never existed or are dead (but not mourned). This particular conspiracy requires Lazarus to be an excommunicated heretic who was mourned by his family so Jesus (as a rabbi) returned him to the community (i.e., life) as an act of pardon (forgiveness - a strong theme in early christianity). This sets the precedent for Jesus' subsequent "resurrection" following his excommunication from the jewish religion by the local priests and elders. Much of what Jesus is reported to have been preaching was heretical to judaism so his excommunication (rather than execution) is not that fanciful. The crucifixion then becomes a symbolic execution rather than a physical one (the jewish tradition of placing a stone on the hearse if a heretic died parallels the stone on Jesus' tomb for example) and therefore the resurrection would also be symbolic rather than an actual zombie reanimation of a corpse. These conspiracies often uses the quran to support this view as the text referring to Jesus' resurrection says: "but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, ..." - in other words a cover-up.

Todd raised another point regarding ritual self-sacrifice as a means of martyrdom. Like in the christian religion, back then suicide was regarded as a sin in judaism so (while not heretical per se) it brings shame upon the families of those who take their own lives. Covering-up such suicides after the event, simply denying it was suicide, or proclaiming they were not of sound-mind is not uncommon now and wasn't then. In contrast, judaism had a somewhat mixed view of martydom but in general regarded it as mostly positive since it was an act that honoured the name of their god. Therefore the invention of a martyr scenario in such cases is a relatively simple way of denying a suicide (ritual or not). 'Suicide by Roman' (akin to the modern 'suicide by cop'), is something else to throw into the pot with regard to self-inflicted martyrdom as the gospels state that Jesus could have saved himself but chose not to. [Coincidentally, I was listening to a re-run of Andy Hamilton's Old Harry's Game (2002 Christmas Special) on the radio the other day where he (as Satan) posits that all the martyred saints were hastily covered-up suicides.]

Of course in fiction anything is possible.

Edited by Dean - January 20 2017 at 06:12

Poll Question: Jesus Christ! Fact or fiction?
Poll Choice	Votes	Poll Statistics
Yes Fact	28	[73.68%]
No Fiction	10	[26.32%]
This topic is closed, no new votes accepted