Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Ho! Ha ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust! [Chat]!
Posts
as far as I know there's a very high likelihood - as in, little to say otherwise - that he wasn't an actual historical person.
humans 4 lyfe
go tall round-eared round-eyed or go home
It's nice when super heroes go all "I have super powers and it's awesome", because super powers are awesome, stop being so negative all the time!
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/user/Mort-ZA/
@MortNZ
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
so racist
I don't think that is at all accurate for the Historical Jesus no.
I mean compared to a lot of his contemporaries he was definitely on the pacifist side of things (because the end of the age was nigh). But I don't think he was at all revolutionary or unique in that.
I think his message very much was hijacked from being the teachings (soon made very obsolete by the fact of the world not ending) of a thoroughly Jewish teacher to being a religion about his death and resurrection.
Look through the NT and compare how much is about what Jesus said or did vs. how much is about his death, resurrection and what it means. Paul is almost wholly uninterested in Jesus before his death. And I think it is Paul and those like him who he represents (being the surviving writer) that created Christianity the religion.
Maybe not in the region, but I don't know.
You can probably find a Greek who thought anything.
-Lil Wayne
True words.
I think it is very likely he existed (a lot more than not) and did / said some of the things in canonical gospels. Some.
Mark in particular was written only about 35-40 years after his death. Though in a language he probably couldn't speak and motivated by an event that totally changed the world he had lived in (the Judean War).
edit: Mark has it's own preoccupation (trying to reconcile the combination of Jesus with the separate ideas about a Messiah - which he probably did not claim as his own during his life), but I think it also is by far the closest to presenting a glimpse of the real man.
"I can not save you.
I can't even save myself."
- Trent Reznor
There almost certainly was a Galilean preacher called Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Galileans, preachers, Jews called Jesus, and people crucified in the Roman Empire (especially under Pontius Pilate) are all such large sets than an intersection is pretty much a given. All those stories about him have to have started somewhere; all signs point to it starting around Galilee in the middle of the first century, and the idea of a historical person at that place and time is infinitely more likely than the idea that a bunch of Jewish editors cobbled together a bunch of pagan myths into a fake pseudo-Jewish messiah story as part of a four-hundred-year-long plan to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.
How much Jesus the historical Galilean preacher has in common with Jesus of the Gospels, well, that's a completely different debate.
If you were a Jewish preacher under Pontius Pilate, you had to bend over backwards to prevent getting caught.
Eventually, people adopted a practice of literally bending over backwards in respect to the sacrifices of those early teachers, which is where we get Pilates.
I'm not familiar with early Christianity, but my understanding is that Muhammad would've been in relatively close contact with (Maronite?) beliefs, which to my knowledge were far from the the centers of Christendom at that point (so Rome and Constantinople? this is ~the 600s). It was either the Maronites or the Gnostics that Muhammad would've been in contact with.
as an aside, yeah, they do, but they don't need to have started with something real at all.
also the latter thing is exactly what happened regardless of whether or not there was a person to start with.
Generally we know more than enough to tell if an important man ever lived or not from that time. Did Rome track down and burn a lot of information during that time?
DC creates heroic archetypes and bases their world largely in a black-and-white morality in which the moral dilemmas are seldom "what is good and evil" but rather "how much good should you do and how should you do it". Their heroes and villains tend towards larger-than-life figures on the scale of mythological Gods (ironic because Marvel is the one who literally has a God on their super team) who embody particular ideals or principles.
Marvel seems to strive much more for ambiguity and making their heroes more flawed characters. Good and evil is less often explicitly spelled out and they really focus on internal conflict and inherently differing philosophies between different heroes. Marvel heroes are infinitely more likely to be a douchebag at one point or another.
I find Marvel's general approach more compelling, personally, because it makes their heroes more vulnerable and relate-able, but they overdo it and generate contrived situations and character motivations incredibly often. That said, there are great stories to be told in either universe and I enjoy them both.
Heh, nerd.
Hey everyone, look, it's a nerd!
He who smelt it dealt it.
Marcionites? They were a very popular sect and probably the first Christians to create a Canon of scripture (the proto-orthodox did shortly after, possibly in response). They were nearly-Gnostic in their views (believing there to have been two totally separate Gods: YHWH the Creator and Jesus the Savior)
They were big time for a while. But I don't think they lasted past the 5th century as a living religion. Though certainly their writings survived (if nowhere else, the orthodox writers liked to quote them so they could argue) and ideas like their lingered.
Gnostic Christianity was also big, especially in Egypt, but even there it got stamped down pretty hard.
abolish the postage system @desc
why am I this excited for you to get it
make me a jaaaaam yo
I don't think I've ever really enjoyed a superhero movie other than Dark Knight the first two times
He was definitely a real person. The first century historian Flavius Josephus wrote a couple of passages about "Jesus, who was called Christ" though he himself was Jewish. Most scholars agree that these are not the result of mere interpolation by Christian scribes after the fact, as one passage refers to a brother of Jesus whom Christianity doesn't acknowledge, and the other is a historical account of the crucifixion that doesn't resemble the gospels very closely.
For what it's worth, I think Ironman 3 is a great movie, and way better than 1 and 2.
This does not seem to be the popular opinion, though.
Ironman 3 was made in such a way to be geared toward me, though. Any time a film subverts my expectations I become incredibly more likely to fall in love with it. (See: Inglorious Basterds)
callback troll!
To be perfectly honest, knowing the human past it's kind of easy to believe otherwise.
How common was the notion of "love thy enemy" prior to Jesus?
this is a pretty rad use of photoshop filters
http://imgur.com/gallery/i4GyF
Jesus was totally, completely unimportant during his lifetime. It would be strange as hell if any sources outside his followers recorded anything about him.
Besides the writings in the canon and maybe a couple writings by church fathers (edit: and Josephus but people have tried to forge a lot in his name), there is not a single reference to Jesus or Christianity surviving and no evidence of any having been deliberately covered up (by the Romans anyway)
From the early 2nd century you have one letter by Pliny the Younger and a reference by Tacitus. A couple other passages were inserted into their writing later by Christians who also thought it odd that no one in the 1st century was talking about their ancestors.
His brother was Isukiri, who took his place on the cross for him, while Jesus fled across Siberia to Japan to Shingo in Aomori where he became a rice farmer and had three daughters.
Also those twelve missing years of Jesus's timeline were spent in Japan pursuing divine knowledge.
(This is seriously a thing a town in Japan claims, but, these days, people pretty much only stick with it for the sake of tourism).
Ironman 3 was pretty crap in my opinion, but I can 100% see why its theme about scientists would have struck a cord with you in particular.
Was it after Jesus was in Japan that he crossed to the New World?
Dude got around.
Josephus, incidentally, says the guy's name was James.
Awfully close to Isukiri?!
what are you doing
stahp
Everyone wanted to host the host of hosts.
Dude could turn water into wine.
even the canon gospels in the NT says Jesus had brothers and sisters.
It took some major mental acrobatics for the orothodox to turn Mary into a perpetual virgin many hundreds of years later.