Was Jesus real or the Creation of Roman powerbrokers?

[Cheshire Cat]

Here is a view and article that is likely to shake up the christian community and will probably result in believers and non believers digging in to one side of the argument or the other and probably scare the bejeezus out of others.  I am fascinated by the theory this man has come up with.  Read and decide for yourself what you think about this.  Could lead to an interesting dialog if folks will speak with a degree of calm and openness. 


http://uk.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11201273.htm  (click link for full story as well as links to other discussions and backup information

Was Jesus based on a real person from history? "The short answer is no," Atwill insists, "in fact he may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there's simply nothing left."
Atwill's most intriguing discovery came to him while he was studying "Wars of the Jews" by Josephus [the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea] alongside the New Testament. "I started to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts," he recounts. "Although it's been recognized by Christian scholars for centuries that the prophesies of Jesus appear to be fulfilled by what Josephus wrote about in the First Jewish-Roman war, I was seeing dozens more. What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus. This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern. The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar."
How could this go unnoticed in the most scrutinised books of all time? "Many of the parallels are conceptual or poetic, so they aren't all immediately obvious. After all, the authors did not want the average believer to see what they were doing, but they did want the alert reader to see it. An educated Roman in the ruling class would probably have recognised the literary game being played." Atwill maintains he can demonstrate that "the Roman Caesars left us a kind of puzzle literature that was meant to be solved by future generations, and the solution to that puzzle is 'We invented Jesus Christ, and we're proud of it.'"
Is this the beginning of the end of Christianity? "Probably not," grants Atwill, "but what my work has done is give permission to many of those ready to leave the religion to make a clean break. We've got the evidence now to show exactly where the story of Jesus came from. Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history. To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East.

[jcjohnpaint]

The truth is probably more closer to Reza Aslan's Zealot

[Cheshire Cat]

Interesting point JC. Lets add it to the thread discussion.

http://www.tampabay.com/features/books/review-zealot-an-unorthodox-fascinating-look-at-jesus-life-and-times/2143409

It is probably fair to say that around the time an overachieving baby supposedly was being born in Bethlehem, the hills were alive with the sound of messiahs.

And if any part of that above paragraph offends your theological sensibilities, you probably don't want to wade into Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan's provocative exploration of the short but compelling life of one of the best known, but perhaps least understood religious and political figures in history.

Chances are, had not Aslan agreed to appear on Fox News to discuss Zealot, he might well have still sold a fair number of books. After all, Aslan is an admired and respected scholar and author. But after he was grilled by Fox bobblehead figurine Lauren Green, who questioned Aslan's lack of the stigmata-seal-of-approval for having the gall to be a Muslim writing about Jesus Christ Superstar — well! — Zealot shot to the top of the bestseller listsGreen asked the wrong question of Aslan. It is not his Muslimness she should have inquired about. But given Aslan's steady disassembling of one Christian cornerstone of the Jesus narrative after another, it's more appropriate to ask the author if he really isn't one of those intellectually troublemaking Jesuits.

To be sure, fundamentalist Christians view the Bible literally. Seas actually parted. The world was created in six days. Jesus walked on water and rose from the dead — messiahs are supposed to be able to do those things, you know.

But Aslan, like many theologians, comes to the New Testament more as a pragmatic thinker. Or put another way, for Aslan and his contemporaries the Bible, and especially the New Testament, was as much the handiwork of the Judean version of Mad Men carefully shaping, rewriting and reimagining not so much their Christ, but their client.