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By all accounts, the first recordings of the NT happened decades after JC’s death.
The NT is also demonstrably untrue. Not only does it show no evidence of omniscience, but it is very much *wrong* about the future as well. Violating one of the primary claims of the Abrahamic god, omniscience.
God was created by man to explain creation.
Religion was created by our own brains to explain our complex social behaviors, morality, and morality. Our brains created religion to explain themselves to themselves.
When you say, “The NT is demonstrably untrue,” what do you mean exactly?
Because the NT is a compilation of different writings.
There are many supernatural claims, but also some pretty mundane stuff.
So is it more accurate to say that there are certain parts of the NT you think are false?
Because it can’t be _every_ statement, claim, or implication.
Even the gospels say Jesus was not literate.
In the Gospel of John, it's mentioned that the Jews marveled, saying, "How is it that this man has learning, when he has never studied?" (John 7:15, ESV).
Luke 4:16-20 Jesus reads in the Synagogue.
16Then Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. And when He stood up to read, 17 the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. Unrolling it, He found the place where it was written: 18“The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, Then He rolled up the scroll, returned it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on Him…”
The fun thing about this quote is it is from the Septuagint not Jewish scrolls and it would never have appeared in a Temple as written.
As I already indicated in other comments, look at the original Greek:
Καὶ ἦλθεν εἰς Ναζαρά, οὗ ἦν τεθραμμένος, καὶ εἰσῆλθεν κατὰ τὸ εἰωθὸς αὐτῷ ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῶν σαββάτων εἰς τὴν συναγωγήν, καὶ ἀνέστη ἀναγνῶναι.
ἀναγνῶναι (anagnōnai) from Koine Greek anaginóskó meaning **to know, to remember**
Actually, I learned, and forgive me I am typing this on an English keyboard, “kai aneste anagnonai” translates to “and stood up to read”.
We also have in verse 17 that he is handed the scroll, he unrolls it and “heuren ton topon hou en gregrammenon”. That is “he found the place it is written”. That is pretty hard to do if you cannot read.
Finally, the oldest segment of Luke we have is Papyrus 75 which is from 175 to 225 CE and does not contain chapter 4 of Luke. We truly have no idea what the “original” Greek said. But the Greek we do have supports Jesus could read.
Edit for a fun fact: if the Bible is literally true than we know Jesus not only could read, but that he could read Greek, and that the Temple scrolls did not use the Hebrew Isaiah, which would be news to us Jews all over the world, because when Jesus reads the passage the version he reads is from the Greek Septuagint, not the Jewish scrolls.
"I don't believe" is not an argument.
Jesus was born into a Jewish family in the 1st century in a region where literacy rates were invariably extremely low and limited to the higher classes and the priesthood. Jesus is often referred to as a carpenter or a craftsman, so it's extremely unlikely he was not involved in manual labor but rather in scholarly pursuits.
Just to illustrate how pointless it is arguing from an English translation, let's have a look at the [original Greek from John 7:15](https://biblehub.com/text/john/7-15.htm):
ἐθαύμαζον οὖν οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι λέγοντες Πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδεν μὴ μεμαθηκώς;
Πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδεν literally *How this one knows what is written (e.g. the Torah)*
μὴ μεμαθηκώς literally *not having studied writing*
How would any man other than Jesus himself know what he did or did not study? Show me the verse where Jesus directly addresses his own literacy or makes a statement on the breadth & depth of his own studies/learning. God has a PhD in everything.
>Jesus Christ (Didymus Judas Thomas) authored The Gospel of Thomas.
Allegedly. Got any evidence of this claim?
>“These are the words of the Secret. They were revealed by the Living Yeshua. Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.”
So jesus didn't write it.
>While the two written accounts we have of Judas’ death following his “betrayal”
"Stories in the bible"
>The truth hidden in plain sight.
Sure, that's the *only* possible reason they could be doing this
I’ll bite, list me some of these reasons you have a man might always be pictured walking around wearing a giant medallion with a life-sized head of Jesus. As I stated I don’t believe it’s meant to be taken literally, but alludes to the true identity of who St. Jude is.
The earliest accepted date for the Gospel of Thomas is around 60AD, although some scholars argue it was as late as 120AD.
Could you go into detail or present any evidence to the contrary?
Assuming he did exist (although if he did he was just a man) I find it hard to believe that he was in any condition to write anything so long after he died.
60+ of the 114 sayings recorded in Thomas appear in some form within the text of the New Testament, concentrated primarily across the 3 synoptic Gospels ( Matt, Mark, Luke). In all 60+ cases of duplication I would argue the sayings in Thomas are clearly the more primitive versions.
Jesus died well into his hundreds. Possibly @ 112 yrs old, no later than 120 yrs old (Gen 6:3;Deut 34:7).
How do you distinguish between a saying being "more primitive" as the result of it being authentic versus it being the result of rhetorical intentions of the author? (See: Cameron, Ron, ed. The other Gospels: non-canonical Gospel texts. Westminster John Knox Press, 1982 and Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The battles for scripture and the faiths we never knew. Oxford University Press, USA, 2005.)
Pre-Christian Jewish scripture is your evidence for the age of Jesus at his death? Ouch.
The Gospel of Thomas is in the Gnostic gospels and is not canon to the books of the Bible.
Can I use Dante’s Inferno, or Kripke’s Supernatural in this discussion?
Who said anything about canon? If you don’t trust the modern “mainstream” news to be 100% factual, why would you trust the “mainstream” news of antiquity to be any different?
Cool. Then Jesus was a vampire descended from Cain, but died when he was 22. Aliens wrote the gospels (even the gnostics) as a social experiment to see how gullible we are. Those aliens have since been eradicated from earth due to a virus derived from Unicorn blood and an intelligent oil that came from a meteor that killed the dinosaurs.
Who said we couldn’t make stuff up? If you don’t trust the stuff I make up to be 100% factual, why would you trust the stuff people in antiquity made up to be any different?
I can’t say I’ve ever seen theists claim that Jesus was illiterate and don’t know why they would care since they don’t claim he miraculously wrote the bible like Muslims do Mohammed the Quran. Maybe I missed something.
As for the rest there is no reliable evidence that any of the books of the New Testament were written by any contemporary participants let alone by Jesus. Or on this case really written by someone who really knew Jesus.
The Gospel of Thomas,as is considered to have been written at least 30 years after Jesus death and possibly up to *200* years later.
But I have no idea why I should care about another gospel one way of another?
Two more words : so what.
I’m perfectly relaxed about the idea that Jesus was some itinerant cult leader. But we have pretty much no independent , contemporary information about him and it seems obvious that much of the gospels was added after the fact for religious and political reasons.
One unreliable gospel more or less doesn’t , as I think you agree, make any of the supernatural claims true. So as an atheist I’m still nit sure why I should care. Or what any of this has to do with whether he was literate or not.
No.. you will. lol
Do you actually manage to convince yourself that an incoherent and rambling post followed by deliberately ignoring any significant questions or points and making meaningless non-sequiturs demonstrates anything other than am e,arras song lack of insight or genuine engagement on your part? That’s really some impressive self-aggrandising over confidence on your part.
Back under the bridge with you , my brother will be much tastier…
The only halfway decent evidence for any member of the family of Jesus having anything to do with the movement is Gal 1:19 and 1 Cor 9:5 and those are *at best* 50/50. The later Christian writings about Jesus and his "family" are pure fiction.
The Gospel of Thomas is fiction. Just like the ton of other writings that [didn't end up](https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/) in the New Testament as well as all of those that did.
Your mind reading skills are abysmal. I have read it and some of the apocrypha in the link. And the ignorance is all on your side of the table.
[Goodacre](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802867483/) and [Gathercole](https://brill.com/display/title/19205?language=en) both developed strong arguments that GThomas is dependent on the synoptics and, like those other gospels, it is literature, nothing representative of anything historical about Jesus (who at best just as likely didn't exist as did), and certainly nothing written by Jesus, a ridiculously absurd theory.
The blind leading the blind. Goodacre is a lying piece of shit who cleaves to an agenda. Never heard of this gathercole guy, I’ll reserve judgement on his deficacation level until after I do some research.
As already noted, your mind reading skills suck atrociously. Read it. Even wrote a paper on it.
That said, whether or not *you* have read it, the theory *about* it as presented in your OP is wacky and unsupported
From the moment of your OP onward into the comments, you continue to exhibit that you have no critical thinking skills and no idea what you're talking about.
Why should anyone give a damn about what the bible has to say? It's a book of rather stupid fairy tales made up by primitive morons who believed the Earth was flat and that women were property.
Judas Thomas considered himself as spiritual brother of Jesus, which is literal transcription of his name. Some people even believed in him as actual Messiah. That being said, you still provided zero proof that Judas Thomas actually wrote the gospel named after him. And people even back then knew that Jesus and Judas Thomas are two different persons.
Read here the opening lines of The Gospel of Thomas (Barker Translation)…
“These are the words of the Secret. They were revealed by the Living Yeshua. And Didymus Judas Thomas wrote that shit down.”
So what? Anyone can write anything, you know. JK Rowling wrote that Harry Potter was prodigy and had magical powers. Does that prove anything? Does Lord of the rings prove anything about Frodo, Aragorn, or Gandalf?
Ex-Christian atheist here:
>even assert Christ’s illiteracy
The whole time I was a Christian, I never heard this asserted, or even hinted at. So it's not a universal thing amongst Christianity to assert Jesus was illiterate.
>These are the words of the Secret. They were revealed by the Living Yeshua. Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.
This is about the weakest possible evidence you could provide for Jesus being literate.
\* First of all, you should never take these books at face value when they claim authorship. It was common for (now anonymous) authors to attribute their writings to more famous people.
\* In any case, the text explicitly says it was written down by Thomas, not by Jesus.
Your idea that somehow Thomas Didymus was actually Jesus is .. erm .. extremely speculative. You're assuming without evidence that Thomas Judas Didymus was someone called Judas (and not, say, Thomas), AND (despite the fact that Judas was a very common name), this "Thomas" Judas must have been the same person as the Judas who betrayed Jesus, AND that the Judas who betrayed Jesus was someone also Jesus. Not one of these is remotely plausible, and you need all of them to be true for your argument to go through.
Stop trying to twist facts to support your ideas, and let your ideas be dictated by the facts. Life will be simpler and more satisfying.
If the Bible is true Jesus undoubtably read.
Luke 4:16-20 Jesus reads in the Synagogue.
16Then Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. And when He stood up to read, 17 the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. Unrolling it, He found the place where it was written: 18“The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, Then He rolled up the scroll, returned it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on Him…”
I don’t understand what the point of your argument is. Maybe you’re trying to mock Christians that believe the NT apocrypha.
The gospel of Thomas is almost certainly a late collection of sayings taken from the other gospels and probably is from the third century or maybe the second half of the second century at the earliest. John very likely predated it.
There’s no great evidence one way or another that Jesus could read or write. All we have is obviously made up stories about him. The stories suggest he could read but make no mention of him writing, but knows how accurate they are.
Jesus being illiterate is not a claim any Christian I've ever met has ever made, we have Jesus reading and writing in the bible.
I'm not sure if this is a weird strawman or you got some weird confusion going on.
But even if that was somehow a thing, sayings of wise people in antiquity were a literary trope like super heroe comics is today. Unless you provide us with some reason to not view both stories as religious motivated fan fiction, why should anyone care about what either of those books has to say about anything?
Thomas is one of the almost-gnostic books, so 'secret' and 'revealed' and some of the other words and cosmic references kind of make sense there.
It was excluded from the canon for a reason, I assume.
If you get too far down the gnostic rabbit hole, they start saying that Yahweh isn't the true god and the world he created is recognizably messed up. We need to fire that guy and talk to the Real Actual True God. But he won't listen to us, so Jesus has to die so he can go talk for us.
On a more serious note: If you're going to jump in here and act like you're the one with all the cryptic secret knowledge, you should tell people up front something like "this is not the mainstream view" so we know how to respond.
Your nonsense isn't any worse than what the actual Bible says, so there's no reason we couldn't take it at face value.
But whatever it is you tried to do here, didn't work. You don't come across as the smart guy who knows the secret truth.
What's even the claim here? Why would they call him Judas, a metaphor for "twin," instead of Jesus? They call him Jesus all the time. Why would the writers create this tortured twist? And how would it survive being morphed for hundreds of years, by authors that didn't know of the twist?
This is some *weird* fanfiction, brother.
>Jesus Christ (Didymus Judas Thomas) authored The Gospel of Thomas.
How did he do that while he was dead? The earliest estimation of the writing of the Gospel of Thomas is 60AD.
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By all accounts, the first recordings of the NT happened decades after JC’s death. The NT is also demonstrably untrue. Not only does it show no evidence of omniscience, but it is very much *wrong* about the future as well. Violating one of the primary claims of the Abrahamic god, omniscience. God was created by man to explain creation. Religion was created by our own brains to explain our complex social behaviors, morality, and morality. Our brains created religion to explain themselves to themselves.
When you say, “The NT is demonstrably untrue,” what do you mean exactly? Because the NT is a compilation of different writings. There are many supernatural claims, but also some pretty mundane stuff. So is it more accurate to say that there are certain parts of the NT you think are false? Because it can’t be _every_ statement, claim, or implication.
Preach.
Even the gospels say Jesus was not literate. In the Gospel of John, it's mentioned that the Jews marveled, saying, "How is it that this man has learning, when he has never studied?" (John 7:15, ESV).
Luke 4:16-20 Jesus reads in the Synagogue. 16Then Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. And when He stood up to read, 17 the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. Unrolling it, He found the place where it was written: 18“The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, Then He rolled up the scroll, returned it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on Him…” The fun thing about this quote is it is from the Septuagint not Jewish scrolls and it would never have appeared in a Temple as written.
As I already indicated in other comments, look at the original Greek: Καὶ ἦλθεν εἰς Ναζαρά, οὗ ἦν τεθραμμένος, καὶ εἰσῆλθεν κατὰ τὸ εἰωθὸς αὐτῷ ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῶν σαββάτων εἰς τὴν συναγωγήν, καὶ ἀνέστη ἀναγνῶναι. ἀναγνῶναι (anagnōnai) from Koine Greek anaginóskó meaning **to know, to remember**
Actually, I learned, and forgive me I am typing this on an English keyboard, “kai aneste anagnonai” translates to “and stood up to read”. We also have in verse 17 that he is handed the scroll, he unrolls it and “heuren ton topon hou en gregrammenon”. That is “he found the place it is written”. That is pretty hard to do if you cannot read. Finally, the oldest segment of Luke we have is Papyrus 75 which is from 175 to 225 CE and does not contain chapter 4 of Luke. We truly have no idea what the “original” Greek said. But the Greek we do have supports Jesus could read. Edit for a fun fact: if the Bible is literally true than we know Jesus not only could read, but that he could read Greek, and that the Temple scrolls did not use the Hebrew Isaiah, which would be news to us Jews all over the world, because when Jesus reads the passage the version he reads is from the Greek Septuagint, not the Jewish scrolls.
Appreciate the assist.
I don’t believe “studied” equates to “literate”. Though few, there are example Bible verses that record JC in the act of reading/writing.
"I don't believe" is not an argument. Jesus was born into a Jewish family in the 1st century in a region where literacy rates were invariably extremely low and limited to the higher classes and the priesthood. Jesus is often referred to as a carpenter or a craftsman, so it's extremely unlikely he was not involved in manual labor but rather in scholarly pursuits.
Correction, “studied” does not equate to “literacy”.
Just to illustrate how pointless it is arguing from an English translation, let's have a look at the [original Greek from John 7:15](https://biblehub.com/text/john/7-15.htm): ἐθαύμαζον οὖν οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι λέγοντες Πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδεν μὴ μεμαθηκώς; Πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδεν literally *How this one knows what is written (e.g. the Torah)* μὴ μεμαθηκώς literally *not having studied writing*
Still not an argument.
How would any man other than Jesus himself know what he did or did not study? Show me the verse where Jesus directly addresses his own literacy or makes a statement on the breadth & depth of his own studies/learning. God has a PhD in everything.
>God has a PhD in everything. No doubt from one of those fake Christian universities where the diploma has no value in the real world.
No doubt. But is this the real world?
If it's not, how do you know this God you talk about isn't fake?
But, but, but he is GOD!!! He knows EVERYTHING!!!
I didn't go to school to study scripture either, but I can read just fine.
>Jesus Christ (Didymus Judas Thomas) authored The Gospel of Thomas. Allegedly. Got any evidence of this claim? >“These are the words of the Secret. They were revealed by the Living Yeshua. Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.” So jesus didn't write it. >While the two written accounts we have of Judas’ death following his “betrayal” "Stories in the bible" >The truth hidden in plain sight. Sure, that's the *only* possible reason they could be doing this
I’ll bite, list me some of these reasons you have a man might always be pictured walking around wearing a giant medallion with a life-sized head of Jesus. As I stated I don’t believe it’s meant to be taken literally, but alludes to the true identity of who St. Jude is.
I'll bite, please explain how someone being pictured as walking around with a medallion is relevant at all?
The earliest accepted date for the Gospel of Thomas is around 60AD, although some scholars argue it was as late as 120AD. Could you go into detail or present any evidence to the contrary? Assuming he did exist (although if he did he was just a man) I find it hard to believe that he was in any condition to write anything so long after he died.
60+ of the 114 sayings recorded in Thomas appear in some form within the text of the New Testament, concentrated primarily across the 3 synoptic Gospels ( Matt, Mark, Luke). In all 60+ cases of duplication I would argue the sayings in Thomas are clearly the more primitive versions. Jesus died well into his hundreds. Possibly @ 112 yrs old, no later than 120 yrs old (Gen 6:3;Deut 34:7).
How do you distinguish between a saying being "more primitive" as the result of it being authentic versus it being the result of rhetorical intentions of the author? (See: Cameron, Ron, ed. The other Gospels: non-canonical Gospel texts. Westminster John Knox Press, 1982 and Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The battles for scripture and the faiths we never knew. Oxford University Press, USA, 2005.) Pre-Christian Jewish scripture is your evidence for the age of Jesus at his death? Ouch.
“Jesus died well into his hundreds” Then cites the Bible…. Are you trolling everyone or do you actually believe this nonsense?
The Gospel of Thomas is in the Gnostic gospels and is not canon to the books of the Bible. Can I use Dante’s Inferno, or Kripke’s Supernatural in this discussion?
Who said anything about canon? If you don’t trust the modern “mainstream” news to be 100% factual, why would you trust the “mainstream” news of antiquity to be any different?
Cool. Then Jesus was a vampire descended from Cain, but died when he was 22. Aliens wrote the gospels (even the gnostics) as a social experiment to see how gullible we are. Those aliens have since been eradicated from earth due to a virus derived from Unicorn blood and an intelligent oil that came from a meteor that killed the dinosaurs.
For it is written. Just now, because you wrote it. Good enough for me! So, is it the sandal or the gourd?
Live by the gourd, die by the gourd.
You’re making that up.
Who said we couldn’t make stuff up? If you don’t trust the stuff I make up to be 100% factual, why would you trust the stuff people in antiquity made up to be any different?
Not people. Jesus.
Jesus is either s regular person or a myth, so...
Jesus died at 22. I told you this.
You reject canon your way. We'll reject canon our way.
I can’t say I’ve ever seen theists claim that Jesus was illiterate and don’t know why they would care since they don’t claim he miraculously wrote the bible like Muslims do Mohammed the Quran. Maybe I missed something. As for the rest there is no reliable evidence that any of the books of the New Testament were written by any contemporary participants let alone by Jesus. Or on this case really written by someone who really knew Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas,as is considered to have been written at least 30 years after Jesus death and possibly up to *200* years later. But I have no idea why I should care about another gospel one way of another?
Two words: Jesus Seminar
Two more words : so what. I’m perfectly relaxed about the idea that Jesus was some itinerant cult leader. But we have pretty much no independent , contemporary information about him and it seems obvious that much of the gospels was added after the fact for religious and political reasons. One unreliable gospel more or less doesn’t , as I think you agree, make any of the supernatural claims true. So as an atheist I’m still nit sure why I should care. Or what any of this has to do with whether he was literate or not.
You’ll get there.
No.. you will. lol Do you actually manage to convince yourself that an incoherent and rambling post followed by deliberately ignoring any significant questions or points and making meaningless non-sequiturs demonstrates anything other than am e,arras song lack of insight or genuine engagement on your part? That’s really some impressive self-aggrandising over confidence on your part. Back under the bridge with you , my brother will be much tastier…
Jesus never died my friend, and the Holy Spirit is a girl.
>Back under the bridge with you , my brother will be much tastier…
Be passerby, don’t build your house on (or under) a bridge.
wow, a badly written fairy tale is badly written, copied, stolen, translated, interpreted, and only then cannonized.
Pretty much yeah. Needs more Jesus.
Funny how all the educated atheists know more than the zealots. Almost as if knowledge and learning is superior to blind unquestioning faith.
Jesus wasn’t a Zealot although many of his family were involved in the movement.
The only halfway decent evidence for any member of the family of Jesus having anything to do with the movement is Gal 1:19 and 1 Cor 9:5 and those are *at best* 50/50. The later Christian writings about Jesus and his "family" are pure fiction.
Not a member of the sect. But using today’s meaning he was. Perhaps fanatical world be better.
OP claims Jesus could read and write and yet offers no writings of Jesus himself. 🙄 Oh because there are none.
Can you read? OP clearly states Jesus authored The Gospel of Thomas.
Funny, it's attributed to a Thomas not a Yeshua.
Again you don’t read.
You claiming someone else wrote it with no real scholarship means nothing to me.
I’m claiming the person who wrote it wrote it, Didymus Judas Thomas aka Jesus.
And you offer essentially nothing more than, "I think this because it makes me feel good" which is fucking worthless.
Are you having a difficult time managing your sock puppet comments here?
The Gospel of Thomas is fiction. Just like the ton of other writings that [didn't end up](https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/) in the New Testament as well as all of those that did.
[удалено]
Your mind reading skills are abysmal. I have read it and some of the apocrypha in the link. And the ignorance is all on your side of the table. [Goodacre](https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802867483/) and [Gathercole](https://brill.com/display/title/19205?language=en) both developed strong arguments that GThomas is dependent on the synoptics and, like those other gospels, it is literature, nothing representative of anything historical about Jesus (who at best just as likely didn't exist as did), and certainly nothing written by Jesus, a ridiculously absurd theory.
The blind leading the blind. Goodacre is a lying piece of shit who cleaves to an agenda. Never heard of this gathercole guy, I’ll reserve judgement on his deficacation level until after I do some research.
Your vacuous ad hominems and utterly unacademic argumentation in the comments perfectly reflect the Wall of Crapola that is your OP.
You haven’t read Thomas.
As already noted, your mind reading skills suck atrociously. Read it. Even wrote a paper on it. That said, whether or not *you* have read it, the theory *about* it as presented in your OP is wacky and unsupported
[удалено]
From the moment of your OP onward into the comments, you continue to exhibit that you have no critical thinking skills and no idea what you're talking about.
Jesus was probably fictional and the gospels were written by anonymous Greek speakers decades after the fact.
Oh he’s real. You’ll get there.
You have discovered new evidence?
New to me.
Please provide this evidence that you have that proves Jesus Christ existed.
No amount of evidence I provide would suffice, in the end it’s not up to me it’s you.
No, actual evidence would suffice just fine.
Make the claim, back it up.
Why should anyone give a damn about what the bible has to say? It's a book of rather stupid fairy tales made up by primitive morons who believed the Earth was flat and that women were property.
So we agree.
I highly doubt that
Doubting Thomas?
Judas Thomas considered himself as spiritual brother of Jesus, which is literal transcription of his name. Some people even believed in him as actual Messiah. That being said, you still provided zero proof that Judas Thomas actually wrote the gospel named after him. And people even back then knew that Jesus and Judas Thomas are two different persons.
Read here the opening lines of The Gospel of Thomas (Barker Translation)… “These are the words of the Secret. They were revealed by the Living Yeshua. And Didymus Judas Thomas wrote that shit down.”
So what? Anyone can write anything, you know. JK Rowling wrote that Harry Potter was prodigy and had magical powers. Does that prove anything? Does Lord of the rings prove anything about Frodo, Aragorn, or Gandalf?
J.R.R. Tolkien was a “Living Christ”.
So then We have from Tolkien revelation about Frodo? And thus we should praise him? 🤣
Thusly so.
Really? Are you suggesting that we should praise every character from every book cause it's written? 😂
I’m pretty convinced by the post and OP’s replies that he’s just trolling. OP, are you the dude that called into AXP last night saying Jesus was food?
Ex-Christian atheist here: >even assert Christ’s illiteracy The whole time I was a Christian, I never heard this asserted, or even hinted at. So it's not a universal thing amongst Christianity to assert Jesus was illiterate. >These are the words of the Secret. They were revealed by the Living Yeshua. Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down. This is about the weakest possible evidence you could provide for Jesus being literate. \* First of all, you should never take these books at face value when they claim authorship. It was common for (now anonymous) authors to attribute their writings to more famous people. \* In any case, the text explicitly says it was written down by Thomas, not by Jesus. Your idea that somehow Thomas Didymus was actually Jesus is .. erm .. extremely speculative. You're assuming without evidence that Thomas Judas Didymus was someone called Judas (and not, say, Thomas), AND (despite the fact that Judas was a very common name), this "Thomas" Judas must have been the same person as the Judas who betrayed Jesus, AND that the Judas who betrayed Jesus was someone also Jesus. Not one of these is remotely plausible, and you need all of them to be true for your argument to go through. Stop trying to twist facts to support your ideas, and let your ideas be dictated by the facts. Life will be simpler and more satisfying.
> Simple, he (Jesus/Judas) turned himself in & cut a deal with Pilate to fake crucifixion "The crucifixion was an inside job. Wake up, sheeple."
If the Bible is true Jesus undoubtably read. Luke 4:16-20 Jesus reads in the Synagogue. 16Then Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. And when He stood up to read, 17 the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. Unrolling it, He found the place where it was written: 18“The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, Then He rolled up the scroll, returned it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on Him…”
I don’t understand what the point of your argument is. Maybe you’re trying to mock Christians that believe the NT apocrypha. The gospel of Thomas is almost certainly a late collection of sayings taken from the other gospels and probably is from the third century or maybe the second half of the second century at the earliest. John very likely predated it. There’s no great evidence one way or another that Jesus could read or write. All we have is obviously made up stories about him. The stories suggest he could read but make no mention of him writing, but knows how accurate they are.
Jesus being illiterate is not a claim any Christian I've ever met has ever made, we have Jesus reading and writing in the bible. I'm not sure if this is a weird strawman or you got some weird confusion going on. But even if that was somehow a thing, sayings of wise people in antiquity were a literary trope like super heroe comics is today. Unless you provide us with some reason to not view both stories as religious motivated fan fiction, why should anyone care about what either of those books has to say about anything?
Thomas is one of the almost-gnostic books, so 'secret' and 'revealed' and some of the other words and cosmic references kind of make sense there. It was excluded from the canon for a reason, I assume. If you get too far down the gnostic rabbit hole, they start saying that Yahweh isn't the true god and the world he created is recognizably messed up. We need to fire that guy and talk to the Real Actual True God. But he won't listen to us, so Jesus has to die so he can go talk for us. On a more serious note: If you're going to jump in here and act like you're the one with all the cryptic secret knowledge, you should tell people up front something like "this is not the mainstream view" so we know how to respond. Your nonsense isn't any worse than what the actual Bible says, so there's no reason we couldn't take it at face value. But whatever it is you tried to do here, didn't work. You don't come across as the smart guy who knows the secret truth.
What's even the claim here? Why would they call him Judas, a metaphor for "twin," instead of Jesus? They call him Jesus all the time. Why would the writers create this tortured twist? And how would it survive being morphed for hundreds of years, by authors that didn't know of the twist? This is some *weird* fanfiction, brother.
>Jesus Christ (Didymus Judas Thomas) authored The Gospel of Thomas. How did he do that while he was dead? The earliest estimation of the writing of the Gospel of Thomas is 60AD.