So – lawyers for both the priest and the atheist have had their say, and a judge is now deliberating on whether the priest should stand trial for criminally misrepresenting a fictional Jesus.
Was Jesus of Nazareth actually John of Gamala? Intellectually, it’s a fascinating question, but it’s meaningless in the larger scheme of things.
How on earth can this matter to anyone? The only religions that should be in a tizzy are those that interpret the Bible literally (which has always confounded me). The Catholic Church has long-since admitted that the Bible was put together from a host of choices, selected for inclusion based on their own agenda. So this won’t be a problem for them.
Myself, I still see the entire situation as identical to ideological reactions to the Da Vinci Code. People are getting stuck in the details, and missing the larger message. If the point was to set a moral compass for society, does it really matter who said things?
Not to me – but it sure makes for some interesting discussions! I can’t help but feel sorry for the priest, though.
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Very interesting thoughts!
John of Gamala is a fictitious person. He is found nowhere from any historical source, including the Talmud. He is found ONLY in a fictional book written in 1888. It is called “For The Temple” and was written by GA Henty, an English storyteller. How did the founders of Christianity get Jesus mixed up with someone who never existed? Also, if Jesus was a myth, then why didn’t an historian or rabbi from the first century say so? None did.
“Harold” is a fictional character from the movie “Harold and Maude” so obviously you don’t exist and I need not reply. But for everyone else…. To ask “how did the founders of Christianity get Jesus mixed up with someone who never eixsted” is a little like asking “how did all those little elves at the North Pole get mixed up with Santa Claus, given that he’s not real?” Cascioli’s book “The Fable of Christ” claims that Jesus is a composite character based in part on the son of “Jude the Galilean” who was a very real Jewish revolutionary character. Cascioli calls this person “John of Gamala”. John was a very common Jewish name and Gamala was the revolutionary stronghold where Jude the Galilean lived, so it would appear that Henty and Cascioli have drawn from the same historical sources. Whether or not Cascioli’s character was actually named “John” is completely irrelavent. If you read his book in it’s entirely (not just the selections found on-line) you will understand that Jesus was not “invented” as you would have it. He was a natural consequence in the evolution of Judaism that grew out the legends srrounding very real historical events. There were plenty of early historians who said that the Jesus of the Gospels didn’t exist. Most of their writings were destroyed. We know about them only from fragments quoted by the early Church Fathers in constant apologetic works as they tried to defend Christiantiy from it’s many critics.
Keeping the facts straight, the church has always been founded upon lies, we call ourselves roman catholics, thus we are the followers of the murderers of christ…how can a religion be based on the followers of murderer stories ?…..tomorrow if some one is murdered in our neighbourhood we would like to know the fact wouldnt we ?….it’s the same thing if some one was murdered 500 years ago or 2000 years ago… y arent we called the jewuish christians /….if jesus was the king of the jews he died for their sins not the sins of the romans….thus concluding the fact that we are the decendents of a roman murders of christ…thus provoking the church to rething it’s litterature that people follow…..people today are becoming wizer not dummer, we need hope and believe in some higher entity. we all accept that god exeist, but we search for a physical entity to relate him with, thus we have jesus, mohomahd, buddha, i’l be publishing a book out soon on the same facts of these man made beliefs, and blind faith. believe in God, we all have blind faith, but our blind faith is towards the wrong entity, which is given to a person, a physical entity, and this entity went out preaching gods words, told us to follow God, and we built a religion out of these people…and follow them instead of god, we make preists, powerful, economicaly and politically, so that we can have security’s of faith, on a person that they have never met personally, and they make money of it…..think of it as a royaly fee being paid for a book that was published 1986 years ago…..isnt that alot of money to be giving out ?…..we are becoming practical, and practically speaking God doesnt need the money, if you really want to be a good human, give that money to some one who needs it. like orphans, and let the divine, the righteous, and the real God, sort out the rest in heaven.