Chris,

Well, sadly, a lot of stories have enough currency that folks are
willing to die for them. There are folks who will blow themselves and
others up today because they think God will bless them for it.

Well, I don't know if there are that many people willing to toss away
everything on the basis of an impressive story. There are really very
few people who are that nutty.

As for the early Church, it certainly wasn't "Christian" as we know
the word today.

Depends on what you call the early church. We don't know what the very
earliest practitioners, Jesus' assumed disciples, were doing, aside from
the evidence of Paul and his associate Luke. As you say, he had his own
ideas. But the only evidence that I can think of about what they were
doing comes from Acts, and that's not exactly unbiased. That being said,
the earliest evidence describes the idea of a communal meal with
overtones of cannibalism. That sounds awfully like modern Christianity,
at least as practiced by Anglicans, Lutherans and Catholics.

What's come down to us as Christianity is really

Paul's interpretation of Jesus, which the Jews of his day rejected and
still reject today and for the same reason. Paul claimed that Jesus'
death did away with the Law, which the Jews believe God them as the
means of reconcilliation with him forever and can never be abrogated.
Even Jesus himself said this.

Assuming that he actually said it, of course. But by the same token, he
was oddly eccumenical in his treatment of Samaritans and others. And he
did make some odd comments about the nature of the law and how it could
be practiced. Hell of a message, considering the context.

The first "Christians" were headed by

James, the brother of Jesus, along with Peter in Jerusalem. They were
Jews through and through and did not believe that Jesus was in any way
divine or that his death was any sort of substitutionary atonement for
sin.

You do not know this.

They worshipped in the temple as Jews and kept all the festivals

and holidays including the Day of Atonement. They thought he was the
Messiah, but that's a Jewish concept and merely means the man chosen
by God to bring about the conclusion of Judaism, i.e., The End of
Days. This was "the Kingdom of God" that Jesus often talked about,
NOT the bloodbath depicted in Revelation.

Again, this is your interpretation, based on your notions of how people
ought to act in a situation that you are envisioning. It is a pretty
picture, but massively conjectural. And your interpretation of what a
Messiah ought to do according the the Hebrew tradition differs markedly
from the views of the Zealots and Maccabees.

The Jewish concept of a

time of world peace as the end of days rather than a time where the
majority of world's population will be slaughtered by God seems a
little more God-like! (Though I don't believe in any God concept, as
an aside).

To you, obviously, and maybe to me, too. But I don't know if the
population of Roman Palestine, which was forced to suffer daily contact
with an occupying force that refused to keep the law, and were therefore
physically unclean, would necessarily agree with such a warm, fuzzy
conclusion.

Paul's ideas very, very closely mirror theological

tenets taken from other savior, god-man cults that pre-date
Christianity and that were popular at the time. For instance,
Mithras was called The Light of the World, had 12 disciples, was born
on Dec. 25th, was nailed to a tree and resurrected three days later
for the sins of the world and his death and resurrection was
celebrated by his followers in a ritual of wine and bread.

Just to pick a nit, these were not Paul's ideas - they were part of the
gospels.

Otherwise, your comments about Mithras are remarkably confident,
considering that its practitioners wrote almost nothing down. It was a
secret religion. Not writing about it was part of the deal. Also, the
sources that we have on Mithras generally derive from the Christian
world. It is difficult therefore to determine which religion influenced
which. However, it is clear that Christianity echoed a number of mystery
cults in the Mediterranean basin and near east.

This quote

is attributed to Mithras: "He who will not eat of my body and drink
of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the
same shall not know salvation." Jesus was a Jew and had a religion,
Judaism. He lived and died trying to make people become better Jews
as he understood it, not trying to make them Christians. It would
take Paul for that and Jesus would truly be appalled at the claims
made for him that he would have never made himself.

If it's not putting too fine a point upon it, how the hell do you know
what would have appalled Jesus? You are a product of your world, not
his, and your world (especially its ideas about right and wrong) have
been massively influenced by the very religion you choose to disdain.

Cheers,
Chris

Clyde,

I'm sorry but you are not a real christian and certainly not Catholic
at all.
And because of that you have no idea what you are talking about
period.
If you did, you would know about the miracle of the Eucarist, where
wine became human blood and the host...a circular wafer of
bread..became human flesh..heart muscle in fact.

Do some research.

Clyde,

I'm sorry but you are not a real christian and certainly not Catholic
at all.
And because of that you have no idea what you are talking about
period.
If you did, you would know about the miracle of the Eucarist, where
wine became human blood and the host...a circular wafer of
bread..became human flesh..heart muscle in fact.

Do some research.

Clyde,

I'm sorry but you are not a real christian and certainly not Catholic
at all.
And because of that you have no idea what you are talking about
period.
If you did, you would know about the miracle of the Eucarist, where
wine became human blood and the host...a circular wafer of
bread..became human flesh..heart muscle in fact.

Do some research.

Clyde,

I'm sorry but you are not a real christian and certainly not Catholic
at all.
And because of that you have no idea what you are talking about
period.
If you did, you would know about the miracle of the Eucarist, where
wine became human blood and the host...a circular wafer of
bread..became human flesh..heart muscle in fact.

On 24 Jul, 13:03,