Dude,

As I anticipated from your absurd caricature of ES, you have not grappled with any primary ancient texts and instead choose to rely on googled material from those who have no standing even among skeptics in the academic community that studies religion.   I can refute not only your premise that your mythical comparisons are valid and that Krishna and Horus mythology were konwn to first century Palestinian Jews who helped articulate the Christian faith, but also the nature of the comparisons themselves.  Obviously, you know nothing about comparative religion.  But before I dismantle this dreadful potpourri of New Age myopia point  by point, let me ask you a basic question.  You claim that Jesus never existed, that He is 100% a myth.   It is one thing to claim that the historical Jesus was subjected to mythical embellishment; it is quite another to ignore the evidence of his historicity and claim that He never existed.  Can it be that even this obvious distinction eludes you?

Don

P.S. I notice your refusal to acknowledge your source. Afraid to have me read yhour source?
*****************
I'll keep this short and sweet...
Where are the Roman records of Jesus, from the time
he was in Jerusalem?
Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, ect. are all well-documented
characters. But Jesus?
-Surely a man who very nearly caused a Jewish insurrection...
-Who was followed by throngs of common folk (surely this would
have caused consternation to the Roman provincial authorities?)
-Who was proclaiming a NEW KINGDOM...
Would have merited at least a passing reference in the Roman
records. (Romans were INVERTERATE record-keepers, BTW...)
But we see NOTHING! Why is that?
While we're at it, we might wonder about why the "slaughter of
the innocents" by King Herod has no records pertaining to it, or
what about that horde of saintly zombies who supposedly burst from
their graves following Jesus' resurrection and "appeared to many" in Matthew 27:52-53???
SURELY THIS would have caused a big enough flap for the Roman administrators to record. Think about it: "The bodies of those who not-so-recently died are returning to life and committing acts of preaching!!!" (from the local Jerusalem town-crier news service, or whatever was the equivalent of news back in those days..!) But as it is, it merits only a glancing, in-passing mention in ONE book of the New Testament (Matthew.)
What's up here, Don???

B-man

Dude,

As usual you are clueless.  First, I was one of Strugnell's students.  He and another Harvard professor, Frank Cross, collated the scrolls and their fragments with the help of their students.  The scrolls have been published and  thoroghly studied.  There is no problem with access to these texts.  In any case, the Dead Sea scrolls never allude to Jesus and are inrrelevant to the point at issue, whether Jesus existed. 

Sadly, Strugnell became an alcoholic and made the comments to which you allude in a drunken stupor.  His intemperate comments caused him to lose his jurisdiction over the scrolls.  It was a Mel Gibson type of moment.  In fact, John had great respect for Judaism and was the Harvard specialist on intertestamental Judaism.  In any case, once again you duck my questions: What do Old Testament texts composed many centuries prior to Christ have to do with Jesus' historical existence?   Since your are ignorant of both (1) the various ways Jesus' life can be connected with eyewitness testimony and (2) the first-century NON-CHRISTIAN allusions to His exisitence,  how are you even entittled on rational grounds to an opinion about His existence?  I'll give you a day to mull all this over and then reply in detail.   But i've already exposed the sad truth about your baseless assertions.

Don

Here is a compilation of very important quotes from several Proffessionals and Scholars in the subject of Religion:

"What Taylor [Robert Taylor 1784 - 1844] thinks of the testimony brought forward by the Church historians can be seen in the following passage:--'The historians of the first three centuries of Christianity have taken so great a license in this way (inventing incidents and names, etc.), as that no one alleged fact standing on their testimony can be said to have even a probable degree of evidence. The most candid and learned even of Christian inquirers have admitted that antiquity is most deficient just exactly where it is most important; that there is absolutely nothing known of the church history in those times on which a rational man can place any reliance; and that the epoch when Christian truth first dawned upon the world is appropriately designated as the Age of Fable.'"

"The determination of the dates of the various books of the N.T. is beset with difficulties and uncertainties. In the first place, none of these works is explicitly and definitely dated by its author. Nor does any writing contain unmistakable references by which it might be accurately dated. Further, it is highly probable that most of the authors are unknown to us, save for Paul, for apart from his letters the books in the New Testament are almost without exception either anonymous, or, what is worse, pseudonymous. Finally, the external attestation to their authorship and date is meager and as a rule unreliable. " ["save for Paul"? No! Another pseudonym!]. "

"What possible reason could there have been for Paul and James and the other writers to ignore practically the whole earthly career of Jesus? Does it not raise a presumption that there was no such earthly career? What other possible reason could there have been?"

"It is odd that the Jews have always [Not in my researches. Much fear, collusion, etc.] classified Jesus as a myth, yet his crucifixion allegedly took place in Jerusalem....Apart from the Gospels which cannot be regarded as either historical or objective since they were written for the sole purpose of fostering the faith of Christians--what other documentary evidence exists to prove that Jesus ever existed at all?"

"apart from the gospels, not a single work belonging to the early Christian period gives us any intimate detail about the life of this personage? Examine Paul's Epistles! As we shall show in the next chapter, they do not tell a single special fact about the life of Jesus. Read the other Epistles of the New Testament--Peter, John, James, Jude, and the Epistle to the Hebrews--and the letter of Clement to the Corinthians, the letter of Barnabas, the Pastor of Hermas, the Acts of the Apostles, etc. Nowhere in any single one of these early Christian documents do we find even the slenderest reference to the mere man Jesus [see 388.], or to the historical personality of Jesus as such, from which we might infer that the author had a close acquaintance with it. His life, as it is described in the gospels, in all its human detail, seems to have been entirely unknown to these authors."

"["THE NON-CHRISTIAN WITNESSES"] 'As early as the first few centuries of the present era pious Christians searched the Jewish and pagan writers for references to Jesus, convinced that such references ought to be found in them; they regarded with great concern the undeniable defects of tradition, and, in the interest of their faith, endeavoured to supply the want by more or less astute "pious frauds," such as the Acts of Pilate, the letter of Jesus to King Abgar Ukkama of Edessa,1 the letter of Pilate to Tiberius, and similar forgeries. Greater still was the reliance on the few passages in profane literature which seemed to afford some confirmation of the historical truth of the things described in the gospels.' "

"Just as there is a Christ myth, there is a Jesuit legend. Just as the Christ did not exist, the biblical Jesus did not exist. There is absolutely nothing contemporary with the Jesus of the Gospel that confirms the validity of his being. No sculptures, no drawings, no markings in stone, nothing written in his own hand; and no letters, no commentaries, indeed no authentic documents written by his Jewish and Gentile contemporaries, Justice of Tiberius, Philo, Josephus, Seneca, Petronius Arbiter, Pliny the Elder, et al., to lend credence to his historicity. "

"Historical investigations have revealed to us the origin and growth of the Bible; we know that by this name we designate a collection of writings, as radically unlike in origin, character and contents, as if the Nibelungen Lied, Mirabeau's speeches, Heine's love poems and a manual of zoology, had been printed and mixed up promiscuously, and then bound into one volume. We find collected in this book the superstitious beliefs of the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, with indistinct echoes of Indian and Persian fables, mistaken imitations of Egyptian theories and customs, historical chronicles as dry as they are unreliable, and miscellaneous poems, amatory, human and Jewish--national, which are rarely distinguished by beauties of the highest order, but frequently by superfluity of expression, coarseness, bad taste and genuine Oriental sensuality. As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas; as a work of literary va lue it is surpassed by everything written in the last two thousand years by authors even of the second rank, and to compare it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe, would require a fanaticized mind that had entirely lost its power of judgment; its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality revolting....And yet men, cultivated and capable of forming a just estimate, pretend to reverence this ancient work, they refuse to allow it to be discussed and criticized like any other production of the human intellect, they found societies and place enormous sums at their disposal to print millions of copies of it, which they distribute all over the world, and they pretend to be edified and inspired when they read in it. "

And finally, this quote is for Berserk:

"they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

Hi outofbodydude   Jesus was cruxified and people have the stigmata,as St Francis of Assiss had the stigmata ,he had the wounds of  Jesus which bled,so how do you explain that?
******************
Two words...
Collective Unconscious!!!
People in western society have an image of the stigmata you
mention in their minds. Perhaps if we are all connected at the
level of the subconscious, various psycho-somatic symptoms
might manifest as wounds in the hands and feet? (Perhaps in
response to subconscious feelings of martyrdom, or what
have you.)
As I understand it, stigmata are a WESTERN phenomenon,
and very seldom (if ever) seen among non-Christian peoples.
(This would be easy to explain, if you consider that non-
Christian nations, tribes, ect. don't have the crucifixion motif as part
of their culture!)

B-man

You guys are all claiming that these experiences disprove the facts that I have presented.  However, they do not!!!  Every experience you claim has proven Jesus as real can be easily explained in several different ways.  Even in Bruce Moens articles, he says he was with a guide who, in order to trick some people out of their Hollow Christian Heaven where they were trapt, the guide took upon the image of Jesus to get these silly worshipers out of their eternal damnation of constant church going!  Like I have said, I have seen Borat in the nonphysical!  If I worshiped him as you worship Jesus, then perhaps I too would have felt much love and inspiration.  However, we are talking about projections of the mind here.

About stigmata... first of all, there have been historical stigmatics that were known to have faked wounds, such as Magdalena de la Cruz (1487–1560), who admitted the fraud!  Similarly self-inflicted wounds can be associated with certain mental illnesses. Some people who fake stigmata suffer from Munchausen syndrome which is characterised by an intense desire for attention.  I also point out that stigmata have appeared on hands in some cases, wrists in others, and the lance wound has appeared on different sides of the body. This suggests some form of internally generated phenomena, based on the victim's own imagination and subjective in character, rather than something of external divine origin. It is unknown, either through the gospels or other historical accounts, whether crucifixion involved nails being driven through the hands, or wrists, or what side the lance pierced Christs body, and this would appear to be reflected in the inconsistent placement of stigmatists' wounds.  Similarly, no case of stigmata is known to have occurred before the thirteenth century, when the crucified Jesus became a standard icon of Christianity in the west.  This shows just how strong the power of the mind is.  There have been claims that non-religious people under deep hypnosis, when told that they had a crown of thorns on their heads cutting into their flesh (in the manner similar to Christ), have had bleeding welts appear on their foreheads even when nothing had come into contact with the skin!  Its all in the mind!  Stigmatas result from exceptional poignancy of religious faith and desire to associate oneself with the suffering Messiah.  However, this in noooo way proves the authenticity of Jesus' life OR Christianity.

Hi outofbodydude I just want to ask you this one question,how do you know that Jesus did not exist,if you was not around when he walked the earth.

I ask because you think that what you print on here about Jesus not existing is the truth and nothing but the truth.

But you cant say that its the truth he did not exist because you dont know that.

Love and God bless      Love Juditha

Don't worry about it Juditha. I know that there is an ancient highest conciuosness and always has been. What ever name he has many many people in this world have experienced Him. There is no reason to believe anyone that claims anything against it.
Because I believe firmly that war did break out in heaven and I believe that the war will end. I do not believe that we are ever going to be lost back in time in this crisis of this world again. Its not going to happen again. We are moving forward and continue to do so.
I believe that there are those that want to continue to keep what is rightfully his here, while they continued on. So it will reverse they can have that place. We will start another. Thats what I believe and no one can take what I have seen take place in my life from me.
I have so much more to share but do not believe in the writings of Mr. Moen from what I have read on this board. You have no need to travel out of the body, when heaven can reach you itself. The very thought of a being trying to trick others to believe he is Christ is absurd. I'm sorry but I truly know better. I have encountered things you would never imagine and I never had to leave my body or well perhaps I did a few times but I came back.
Good luck to you all hope you find your true selfs.
Om nahma shiva ya.

I Am Dude wrote on Jan 7^th, 2007 at 5:45pm:


 Personally, i don't think the existence or non existence of Jesus can be totally and completely objectively proved beyond a shadow of a doubt on either side.

 Yet personally, i do believe he existed, and even did many of the things attributed to him in the N.T.   I am not, nor have ever been involved in a religion, and haven't ever limited myself to one major spiritual belief system.   Belief systems weren't pushed at all in my home and childhood environment.  I started studying metaphysical subjects, and really leaned to Eastern concepts and philosophies since age 13.  

  I do find it rather interesting that some of the most verified, studied, and prominent psychics in our history, have supported the reality of Jesus and his unusual life.    

  The likes of Edgar Cayce, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner, Rosiland McKnight's Guides (or specifically Ah So?), and Eileen Garret all talked about Jesus and indicated that he indeed was murdered without just cause, and resurrected his physical body.  

  With this in mind, let's briefly examine Robert Monroe's info, specifically his last book, Ultimate Journey.   In this book, Bob relates asking his Inspec friend if he could get some info on the most mature (spiritually evolved) human living in his then time/space.   He was told, yeah ok, but indicated that Bob would probably be quite surprised by the truth.  

  Then we meet "He/She", someone around 1800 years old or so, who has not incarnated in that time period, but has continuously stayed in the body and kept it young and healthy.  He/She does not need to eat, does not need to sleep, and works many various jobs during its physical linear time.   Essentially He/She spends self in complete service to others.

 If you read this account very carefully, you will see clues that Monroe eventually learns the real identity of this person, and is one 1. quite surprised by this just like Inspec said he would be, and 2. subtly but certainly seems to indicate that other people know about this person in some kind of way, and that He/She is "occidental" i.e. western in origin, not asian.  

 Now keep in mind that Edgar Cayce, Rudolf Steiner, Rosiland's McKnight's psychically relayed info, etc. all say that Jesus lived as a man, died, and resurrected his physical vehicle.   When we compare Monroe's experience with a some 1800 year old living immortal, is it simply just coincidence?

 Edgar Cayce, perhas the single most verified and studied psychic on record, not only affirms the basic message of the N.T., but goes farther in connection with Jesus.  His source talks about Jesus's lost years, his other lives in the Earth, and seems to strongly indicate that Jesus's Total Self/Spirit, is literally the Co-Creator with Source of this Universe.   In other words, Christ was the first returned to Source spark, who became the first Creator God out of all the children of Source.  

  Notice in Bruce's 4th book, when he and his partner Denise explore the Planning Intelligence, Denise gets strong connections of the Planning Intelligence to the concept of Christ.  

  Indeed, in some general respects, Bruce's info about the Planning Intelligence parallels Cayce's overview of Creation and of the fact that there was one Spark who returned before any others, and who became a model, a pattern of other Souls, and who became a full Co-Creator with Source before the Earth was ever physically formed.  

  Cayce's source said that Christ incarnated in early Atlantis as a guide, a teacher, and Retreiver and that he wasn't born, but manifested a physical vehicle.  His name then was Amelius, which Cayce said translates to mean, "Light".  

 Interestingly enough, even though you can find elements of all major world religions and belief systems within the bulk of the Cayce material...this very much echoes the claim of the New Testament and specifcally that of the John material which claims that Christ was and is the Logos, the Light and Word of this Universe.  

  Yeshua's Total Self, is pure Light.   What is Light?   Isn't Light the manifestation of Love energy?   What is Love energy?   Fusion.   What did Bruce say about the beginning of Creation?  That one Spark returned completed and when Consciousness the Creator examined this particular Spark, it realized why this particular Spark was able to fulfill its purpose perfectly whereas the other Sparks either disintegrated or went out and never returned...  What was the main "ingredient" in this Spark which came Home and fulfilled its purpose?   Bruce says Love was the ingredient; that this Spark had a base of Love energy within its consciousness which allowed for the bonding of different and sometimes non harmonious parts within a Whole.  Bruce of course gives the analogy of the particles of a dry cake mix which are "separated", and Love is like the water which flows around, through, and bonds all these separate particles together allowing it to exist as both a Whole and as individual parts.  Incidentnally enough, Cayce oft said that this is the great gift of the Creator to us, to be able to become aware of and One with the Whole, yet as a individually aware and freewilled being.

   Sure, don't believe in Jesus or his Total Self, He only just created you and loves you more than any Mother/Father you ever had could ever.  

  All those psychics whose abilities could probably blow your novice abilities and awareness out of the water are just plain wrong, all historical mentions are fabrications and a giant 2000 year old conspiracy, etc.