mps said:
Seems a bit complex to me; and unnecessary. I mean, given your position, how does one account for the Council of Nicea? Did the emperor call it to settle the divinity of an imaginary person; or was that too a work of fiction?
The Christ cult would have been over 300 years old by then, and administered by men who did not suffer heresy lightly. The Council of Nicaea was nothing more than an agreement by the different sects of Christianity to develop a believable story so as to sell their religion to the masses. Constantine saw in the church the chance to unite Eastern and Western Roman Empire. Unfortunately it was too little too late, but the effect of that support was to be seen in the rise of Christianity.
mps said:
By all accounts, a man names Jesus, or Iesus, lived around 2000 years ago, but what is entirely deniable is his supposed divinity. He was a man, and it was a council that elevated him to something else.
By what accounts? The accounts of Christian historians? Or of the 2nd century apologists?
mps said:
I just don't understand the "He never existed at all" position. So elaborate, if you feel the need to.
I have explained this position many times, but it won't kill me to do it once more.
There is no contemporaneous evidence that a man named Jesus had a ministry in Jerusalem, or that he was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate. Any reference to Jesus in 1st century writings was written by authors that had not even been born yet during Jesus' life.
The writings of Josephus Flavius have a very short passage that makes reference to Jesus, and apologists love to use this reference as proof of a historical Jesus, for the fact that Josephus was a Jew. However, historians have proven the particular passage referencing Jesus to be an addition and a forgery, most likely by the apologist Eusebius, as it does not follow the context of the preceding or succeeding passages.
Not one historian, poet or scholar of any sort wrote one jot about Jesus during his lifetime. It's not like there were none there, there were Jewish, Roman and Greek scholars throughout the region during Jesus' life and yet none of them saw fit to pen his name in any of their observances.
Did a Historical Jesus Exsit?
Take, for example, the works of Philo Judaeus who's birth occurred in 20 B.C.E. and died 50 C.E. He lived as the greatest Jewish-Hellenistic philosopher and historian of the time and lived in the area of Jerusalem during the alleged life of Jesus. He wrote detailed accounts of the Jewish events that occurred in the surrounding area. Yet not once, in all of his volumes of writings, do we read a single account of a Jesus "the Christ." Nor do we find any mention of Jesus in Seneca's (4? B.C.E. - 65 C.E.) writings, nor from the historian Pliny the Elder (23? - 79 C.E.).
Many apologists used the Acts of Pontius Pilate as proof of the existence of Jesus, but it has been proven that the Acts are a forgery, written in the 4th century.
...and the Rev had it pretty much right, in that the mythical figure of Jesus was a mish mash of many Middle Eastern mythological heroes, many of whom shared identical qualitied, such as being born of a virgin, performing miracles and being resurrected from the dead.
How then is it that the stories of Jesus should be taken as true, and the others should not?
There is a thread called "Vanni's Challenge" where I show quite clearly that, among other things, Moses was most likely a mythical character, based upon the life of an Egyptian pharoah, and the Hebrew enslavement by the Egyptians and the exodus are fiction. If you're interested, that's really where the story begins...
