baptism

mmmmm now there's a thought ;) x

I hesitated for a time to enter this dialogue, at least so Anna could respond in her own way. Personally, I have a great fondness for scholarship and argument. I am not one who goes so far as to deny a history to Jesus, but the scholarship does contain a dispute, with the preponderance favouring his existence. However, the authorities you direct us to are overplayed. Paul, Clement of Rome, Papias and Polycarp did not know or cannot be documented to have known Christ personally. The best that can be said of Paul was that he met the idea of an "arisen" Christ on the road to Damascus and later met James, Jesus' brother. Clement's documentary legacy is a single letter which does not shed light on this issue. Papias probably wrote many of the sayings of Jesus but via the mediation of the Disciples, not through personal contact with Jesus. Polycarp died circa 155 A.D. in ,Smyrna, and is not thought to have been born long before 70 A.D. In fact, I know of no credible account that any of these persons met with anyone closer than Apostles of Jesus. Philip of Hieropolis, has no surviving papers of his own and is so thoroughly confused with Philip the Evangelist that few writings concerning him can be trusted. The only non-biblical account of Jesus' life written by a somewhat contemporary of that life is contained in Titus Flavius Josephus' (originally, Yosef Ben Matityahu)"Antiquities of the Jews". Unfortunately, the passage on Jesus has been altered, probably by a Christian enthusiast, somewhere down the years (compare the passages on Jesus and on James for a simple test). I have given my copy of Josephus to my son. And I noted, of course, that you did not refer to Josephus in your proofs. We are left with this much contemporary documented accounting of Jesus: 0, none, zilch. Thus the controversy which you take pains to deny. What is clear, if we are to follow the Gospels closely, is that Jesus began to challenge Judaic law in secret: that is in the privacy of a home, without much of an audience. He did little things at first, such as breaching the instruction against work on the sabbath. When we hear these stories, our ears typically absorb only the account of the small miracle. However, a rabbi of the time would say: "Why couldn't you wait to Sunday?" As time went on, Jesus' challenge to Judaic law became braver, and flowed out into public places. So he turns over the coin changers tables on the Temple Mount and makes much of their contaminating the Synagogue. However, the money changers were there for the benefit of the Synagogue and outside the entrance to the Synagogue. The rabbinical father's would not accept Roman coins as sacrifices of the faithful, so money changing was necessary to allow the faithful to convert their day-to-day money into the acceptable rabbinical coinage. Do you think that Jesus did not see where his challenges were leading? Of course, eventually he refused to disclaim to be the Messiah, which if wrong was the highest form of blasphemy. I think that he did know what he was doing. I think he was very much the author of his own unfolding. And as such, those that got him to where he wanted to be were aids not demons. But then some people like the idea of demons. Brian