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I didn’t say that they were originally *spoken* for propaganda purposes. I said that they were *written* for propaganda purposes. I’ll revise that to propaganda or subjugation purposes, if there’s a difference.

It seems more likely to me that it appeared first in the Quran, referring to Jesus breathing a new life into the apostles, and after that found its way into Christian storytelling. (later) Unless that metaphor came from Jesus Himself.

I'm fantasizing a first encounter between some believers in the man from Galilee and some Diaspora believers in a savior king that they know only from scriptures, visions and his work in their lives. Galilee: You speak of "Lord Savior King." You've heard of Him already?" Diaspora: Heard of Him...

I've salvaged something from the train wreck in the book "On the Historicity of Jesus": What is falsely called "Bayesian Theorem" (not discovered or invented by Bayes, no more a theorem than d = vt), can be used to improve reasoning processes, if it's used for that purpose. Only, that was...

Even the actual theorem that no one is using hardly deserves to be called a theorem. It's like calling "distance = velocity x time" a "theorem." Just applying some algebra to a definition.

As I said here or somewhere else, I've been browsing through the book "On the Historicity of Jesus," by Richard Carrier. I got interested in it because I thought that I saw some logical fallacies in what people were saying that it said, and I wanted to see if it actually said that. I was...

I'm not trying to prove the existence of either one. My point is that even if Carrier's mythicism were true, it would not be an argument against historicity. As a friend of my said, it might be possible that the first Christians believed in a Jesus who never walked the earth, but it fails the...

Random thoughts: Adam was created from dust. This looks like the same metaphor to me, God raising up life from the earth, breathing life into forms created from it. Jesus said that the only sign would be three days in the earth and rising again. Then he breathed the Holy Spirit into the...

Some of the confidence of people thinking that Jesus did not exist might be a result of thinking that a low probability for his existence has been proven mathematically, in a range of near zero to no more than 1/3. If I'm understanding correctly, that was largely how the idea of his nonexistence...

So that's where the bird story came from! Thanks!

Thank you. I think I remember now what I was thinking, but my brain was scrambled.

One argument against the existence of Jesus has been to say that a mythical origin for Christianity is more likely, for example that some diaspora Jews had visions of a divine figure mostly modeled after some Greek and Roman gods, which they read into Jewish scriptures. That isn't actually an...

Actually, maybe all that I really want to say is that *if* some diaspora Jews believed in a figure something like an archangel that one or more of them saw in visions, thinking that he was the promised king but also Hellenized, even without knowing anything about the teacher from Galilee, it...

The ones with 48,000 words might include line-by-line commentary, multiple interpretations, annotations and footnotes, and appendices

Random thoughts.: I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, and that God's purpose in the world is a real thing. The teachings of His Son grew and spread because that was God's purpose, and it happened through the power of His Spirit. Also, John's teachings were not a way of life. They were a...

I don't remember why, but for some reason I thought that diaspora Jews would have used the Greek word for anointed. What would you think would be most likely?

I'll be trying to explain a kind of Jesus mythicism that seems plausible to me, inspired by Richard Carrier's book "On the Historicity of Jesus," but different from his and probably from any other mythicism, and different from what I actually think. What I actually think is that there was a...

After looking into it some more, it looks to me like there are two things that are called "Bayes' Theorem." One is an actual theorem in probability theory that has been proven mathematically under certain special conditions, and which is not what anyone is actually using in any field where it is...

There’s a book that allegedly uses a theorem from probability to prove that the probability of the existence of Jesus can’t be more than 1/3.

All sources were written for propaganda purposes.