Jesus was a puppet.

Bebelina

Bebelina

kospla.com
Valued Senior Member
Hey! I remember reading about this theory, don't remember where though, but maybe some of you heard about it. That Julius Ceasar created the legend about Jesus to use it as a tool to control his people? Ring a bell anyone?
 
Bebelina said:
Hey! I remember reading about this theory, don't remember where though, but maybe some of you heard about it. That Julius Ceasar created the legend about Jesus to use it as a tool to control his people? Ring a bell anyone?
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Never heard of it. I would guess that even a casual examination of the time line of spead of christianity vs. Julius Ceasars rule would debunk this though.
 
Questions:
Why would Julius Caesar (who, btw, had no trouble controlling his people; guy was a rock-star) put his puppet's birth 25 years after his own death?
Why would he invent a figurehead from an obscure minor subject territory instead of Rome? and Why did it take another 300 years for the new religion to be endorsed by a Roman emperor?
Or did you mean invented by Constantine? Even so, the other problems remain.
 
No Julius Ceasar died On the Ides of March (March 15; see Roman calendar) of 44 BC. 44 years before Jesus Christ was supposedly born, so he could have had nothing to do with Christ.
Christ lived under two Roman emperors. He was born during the reign of Augustus, and from 14 AD to his death, he lived under the rule of Tiberius.

Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire primarily through Saul of Tarsus, also called Paul around 64 A.D.
Nero blamed Christians for the great fire that broke out in Rome, Paul mainly preached to the Gentiles, the people who were not Jews. Christianity continued to spread throughout the Roman Empire,and became an officially supported religion under Constantine I. All religions except Christianity were prohibited in 391 A.D.

Or maybe you mean Jesus was literally a puppet?

puppet.jpg
 
Jesus is just one of hundreds of similar figures. If not Jesus, then Mithra. Gaius Julius Caesar was Pontifex Maximus - - which is what we'd call the Pope today. I suppose what I'm saying is that Christian religion (and Judaism as well) didn't *pop* into existence and in reality developed out of, Roman among others, previous religious practices.
 
Yes, religions are not godsent ideologies, but manmade social guidelines imo. But anyway, it was a theory I remembered, or some other connection between Jesus and Julius.
Can we be sure of their date of birth etc? Science has moved forward and if we can accurately figure out the time of birth of ancient egyptians etc , then Jesus would be easy.
I really do not believe he was the person the Bible portraits him as, and therefore it would be interesting to find out why he was described this way and by who?


(I know I could google this stuff and find out for myself, but that would be less fun.)
 
Bebelina said:
Yes, religions are not godsent ideologies, but manmade social guidelines imo. But anyway, it was a theory I remembered, or some other connection between Jesus and Julius.
Can we be sure of their date of birth etc? Science has moved forward and if we can accurately figure out the time of birth of ancient egyptians etc , then Jesus would be easy.
I really do not believe he was the person the Bible portraits him as, and therefore it would be interesting to find out why he was described this way and by who?


(I know I could google this stuff and find out for myself, but that would be less fun.)
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For the purpose of fulfilling a prophecy.

We have no real historical evidence for Jesus' life (contrary to the quackings of the faithful) but there is some reason to believe he--or someone the Christ character was based on--was born around that time in Nazareth. The best evidence is found in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, each of whom provide vastly different accounts of the nativity. In Luke, Joseph and Mary begin their journey in Nazareth, and it is there Jesus is "conceived" by the Holy Spirit. They go to Bethlehem for a "worldwide" census, which took place in 6 or 7AD and required the population of the Empire to return to their ancestral hometowns to be counted for taxation purposes.

The first problem here is simple: The census never happened. There is no historical record of such a census taking place. One would think that an upheaval such as requiring every citizen in the Roman world to return to their ancestral homes would have left an indelible mark on history. And yet, there's nothing.

The second problem is that this simply is not how Roman censuses were conducted. Luke claims this occurred under the reign of Augustus, but it is known that the censuses taken during his reign only included Roman citizens. Nor was there any practice in which citizens were required to return to their hometowns, for obvious reasons, as separating a landowner from his land would have defeated the purpose of a census for taxation.

Matthew's story is quite different, and reverses the order of events. Here, Mary and Joseph already live in Bethlehem, so there's no need to travel there. Jesus is born, and they flee because Harod wants the baby dead. They eventually wind up living in Nazareth, which is how Jesus, according to Matty, ends up being called a Nazarene.

Nothing glaring about that, except that the two stories take place about ten years apart, because Harod died in 4BC, and the ascension of Harod's son to the throne following the father's death is what prompts the flight to Nazareth in the first place. This disparity alone is difficult to reconcile, and there are plenty more to be found (no mention of the census in Matthew, the addition of the dreams, the Magi, and the star, etc).

Modern Biblical scholars tend to believe that Luke is mistaken, but closer inspection of Matthew tells us that the gospel is really just a patchwork of older stories (the Slaughter of the Innocents story is too similar to the peril an infant Moses found himself in upon his own birth to be a coincidence) and misunderstandings (the mistranslation of Hebrew "almah" (young woman) to the Greek "parthenos" (virgin)), so their "accurate" gospel is really just folklore.

The point here is that great lengths were gone to by Luke and Matthew to ensure certain criteria were met so that a man from Nazarene could somehow also be born in the City of David. If he were a wholly fictional character, they would have done away with the Nazarene bit and simply made him of the line of David. This subterfuge implies that the authors were trying to ret-con a real man's history so that he may fulfill a prophecy.
 
Thank you JDawg. Since their date of birth is not certain then there could be some truth in the theory, and the stories, when are they written? If they are like you say written for the purpose of fullfilling a prophecy, who would benefit from this prophecy being fulfilled? At the "time" being that is.
 
How sure are we that Luke and Matthew were real disciples, or that they wrote anything? An awful lot of gospels seem to have been made up centuries later, to reconcile the stories that had been spread among the various Christian sects, Paul's doctrine, and ancient prophesies, to give the new cult some "roots".

ETA - the prophesies were for (and from) the Hebrews, but they didn't want a messiah - or, not that kind; maybe a soldier-king who could liberate them from Rome, but not another preacher.
Nobody benefited right away, which is why the sects were small and powerless the first few centuries. Once Christianity was made the official religion of the empire, documentation became important, and was promptly produced. Main beneficiary of the bible: popes and bishops.
 
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Jesus wasn't a puppet. Jesus was a man, a philosopher, a preacher; whose words have been twisted and interpreted by men according to their specific bents at any given time. I think Jesus would probably have been a very interesting guy to talk to. But believing he is the son of god (I always thought the deeper inference was that we are all sons and daughters of god, isn't that what he was getting at?) is a bit of a leap without proof.
 
Yes, well of course the churches would benefit from these stories, more money from the governments etc. The government also benefits from the churches having control of the people? If the churches has religions opposing to the ideology of the government they wouldn't get any money.
Since there is no real proof of Jesus or any of the prophets actual existance then the stories could have been written long before they happened according to the book?
 
In those days, it wasn't so much about money as it is now.
But it was just as much about power and control. All religion supports the idea of inevitable - divinely inspired and sponsored, no good even thinking about trying to fight it - rulership. Christianity is particularly good at teaching acceptance, resignation, knowing your place, obedience, working hard, letting people kick you and hoping for a reward after death.

The stories were written long after Jesus is supposed to have lived - about three hundred years after. But they deliberately refer back to obscure and not very specific Hebrew prophesies from many cnetureies earlier. (They do not refer to the prophecies that didn't fit.)
 
universaldistress said:
Jesus wasn't a puppet. Jesus was a man, a philosopher, a preacher; whose words have been twisted and interpreted by men according to their specific bents at any given time. I think Jesus would probably have been a very interesting guy to talk to. But believing he is the son of god (I always thought the deeper inference was that we are all sons and daughters of god, isn't that what he was getting at?) is a bit of a leap without proof.
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We are all sons/daughters of God, but Jesus was the Son of God.
 
There are no sons of God, only sons of Bitches.

So who would gain what from writing about Jesus 300 years after his death and what does this have to do with Julius Ceasar?
 
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