Ben Goren wrote:

You do realize that millions upon millions of devout Christians
would say you're fucking nuts for claiming that Jesus never
went to Hell, right?

I mean, does [the Apostles' Creed] sound even remotely
familiar?

Do many Christians believe that this happened? Yes. Is that
belief Biblically based? Not really. Do the verses that permit
Biblical support of the belief have anything to do with Jesus
engaging in a fight in the underworld to save men's souls?
Emphatically no.

Not at all. In fact, everybody whom I've ever discussed the
myth of Orpheus with--and, it should be noted, I belong to a
music fraternity in which said myth plays a central role--has
been struck by the similarities.

Well, everyone I know thinks your argument is all wet. See why
arguing from popularity doesn't hold up?

Here's a repeat of the challenge. Can you name one aspect of
Jesus that's unique to him and has no counterpart amongst the
other various pagan gods?

There is a fair bit of apologetics literature addressing the
issue of the pagan copying thesis. I'd be happy to provide some
links if you're really looking to understand the Christian view
on the subject.

Well, for starters, I'd expect everybody in the entire
Mediterranean to have written something about it by the year
50.

That strikes me as an unreasonable demand.

I'd certainly expect Philo to /not/ have gone on that final
ambassadorial trip of his to Rome, because he would have been
too busy in Jerusalem writing the first Gospel, the one
everybody considered to be definitive--and that's assuming that
he didn't become one of the Disciples, himself.

Why would Philo's ostenisble gospel be "definitive", rather than
that written by witnesses of the events, or their colleagues?

I'd also expect the stories to be self-consistent. I mean, come
on! Jesus's birth is the most famous in history...and then he's
completely forgotten until he's a young man? He gets most
publicly and emphatically executed by The Powers That Be...and
then a few days later, he's back doing--very publicly--exactly
that which got him offed in the first place, for an entire
month and a half, without even a hint of a peep from said
Powers?

I think "very publically" is an exaggeration.

And it seems reasonable to me that if someone executed by the
Romans came back to life again, it's not exactly something
they'd be happy about or likely to want to record.

At any rate, there is a record of an inscription of an Imperial
edict that threatens punishment by death to anyone who disturbs
a grave. That seems like a pretty harsh penalty, but could make
sense if it was motivated by the "trouble" caused by the
accounts of the empty tomb.

And that's ignoring all the incessant contradictions in the
Gospels themselves--really, trying to ``reconstruct'' what
``actually'' happened is perfectly futile, because no two
Gospels can agree on /anything./

That may be a reasonable reason for saying the Gospels aren't
divinely inspired, but not for saying that the underlying events
that they record didn't happen. If the Gospels agreed perfectly
on every particular, you'd just complain that they show obvious
collusion between the authors.

Oh, and I'd expect Josephus to devote at least an entire
chapter to the excruciating details of how the Sanhedrin
disgraced themselves, and I'd expect Pliny to tell about the
hordes of zombies running around downtown Jerusalem, and I'd
expect the Chinese to record the impossible eclipse at the time
of the full moon, and on and on and on....

There are references made in some early Christian writers to the
work of a 1st century historian named Phlegon, who wrote of a
solar eclipse during the full moon, during the reign of Tiberius
Caeser. But unfortunately, Phlegon's work has not survived to
this day. That's why I think you have to be careful in how much
you lean on this argument. We only have a small fraction of
what was written during the 1st century, so it's hard to say
what may have been lost; and that only speaks of what was
written down in the first place.

Perhaps most importantly, I'd expect Paul to have actually
known some details about what went down, and I'd expect him to
/not/ have described a pagan mystery cult with a purely
spiritual salvation god at its heard (which is exactly what he
did).

No, Paul believed in a flesh-and-blood Jesus. From Paul's
epistles, you could learn that Jesus was

a biological descendant of David (Rom 1:3),

lived a sinless life (Rom 5:18), was killed by the Jews (1 Thess
2:15), died and was raised from the dead (Rom 6:4, 10:9, 14:9, 1
Cor 15:12, 1 Thess 1:10) after 3 days (1 Cor 15:4),

was seen after His death by Peter, by the disciples, by 500 men,
most of whom were alive in Paul's day, and by James (1 Cor
15:5-7),

was a Jew (Rom 9:5),

was a descendant of Abraham (Gal 3:16),

was a man (Phil 2:8),

was born of a woman (Gal 4:4),

was a minister (Rom 15:8),

is coming back (1 Cor 1:7, Col 3:4, 2 Thess 2:1-3),

was God in human form (Col 2:9),

was crucified (1 Cor 1:18, 2:2, 2 Cor 13:4, Gal 2:20, 3:13, Phil
2:8),

was betrayed (1 Cor 11:22), participated in a dinner in which he
gave bread and wine and referred to them as His body and blood
(1 Cor 11:24),

and that Peter, John, and James were important figures in the
Christian movement (Gal 1:18-19, 2:3)