Will the real Jesus please stand up?

The real Jesus has moved on... into the new age. He is living too and evolving. Time to grow up kids.

Earlier I quoted a web author named Jeffery Jay Lowder from a website called infidels.org. Okay, as silly as this sounds, I need some instruction on how to post links. I can't do it on my tablet, and I can only assume that I can on this laptop.

Anyway, getting back to Lowder...He quotes in the same article I referenced earlier a so called pagan author named Pliny the Younger. Lowder concludes that Pliny did not offer independent evidence of the historicity of Jesus. In other words, Pliny was not an eye witness to Jesus, nor did he refer to any non-Christian writing in his own writing. There was no reference to Pliny's writings being suspect in any way.

I am going to quote part of Pliny's narrative which would have been written in 111 or 112 AD (according to Lowder):

The early parts of the passage are about his inexperience in punishing Christians and his musings about how to appropriately to punish them (including death). Eventually he says:

"They affirmed, however, the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternative voices a hym to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery..."

In the last part of the above paragraph Pliny says, "but I could discover nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition." This sort of comment would be expected from a nonbeliever.

BUT... What does Pliny's observation of these early Christians suggest that they believed about Jesus? I submit that when Pliny said they were singing as "to a god" that he was witnessing Christian belief in the deity of Jesus. Not being a monotheist himself, Pliny would never have said the people sang to Jesus as God. His best description of deity worship (according to his world view) would necessarily refer to Jesus as a god.

I discuss this here because I have had it up to my eyeballs with people saying that some church or council decided that Jesus is God, and that these are the main reasons people today believe that Jesus is God. Most people who have said this are not completely aware of what was going on in Nicea in 325 AD. I'll get this in while since I can be overly academic, and there may be other things people want to discuss.

In the meantime, does anybody out there really think anyone on this forum would believe something because of a council vote? We are all smarter than that.....

Let us know if you want to discuss this further. Some posters leave one comment and never return, so if you have something to add we'll be here.

Hi Jen,

It looks like your thread is really moving.

Jesus was fully God, and fully man, when He walked this earth.

Shalom!

It's what I know to be true. I communicate with angels, which I have mentioned on here many times. And the time is definately now, as in we are in the end times, heading into the new age. It's going to be more wonderful then anyone could even imagine.

It's what I know to be true. I communicate with angels, which I have mentioned on here many times. And the time is definately now, as in we are in the end times, heading into the new age. It's going to be more wonderful then anyone could even imagine.

Hi TW,

I am so glad you are here. There is simply too much to cover for one OP. And I'm having a little battle with this laptop. I thought for once it would ne nice to be able to post a link, but I still haven't figured out how to do it. And, I tried to use the underline function, but I can't get it to work. Before this evening is over I might have to trim my nails...lol! Typing on the virtual keyboard that is on my tablet is a heck of a lot easier than this.

I will look forward to your comments!

Hi Aunty,

You and anyone else can call me Jen. When you say new age are you only referring to the time period after the time of the end, or does it include a particular belief system too? I would also be curious to know what you mean when you state that Jesus has evolved.

It's very hard to apply logic and reason to something that is paranormal. And I believe that is the way it is intended.

What I mean is that it is there is a great deal of faith that is required.

Sure, Daniel, I will continue. Two authors' opionions on the existence of Jesus is enough for now.

I left off with the receipt of my very first Bible. My family continued to have no church, so most of what I was learning about God came from reading the Bible. We only had to take one "religion" class during my time at the Catholic high school. Its focus was history and not personal faith. It was actually pretty interesting.

So I continued my own little life with God through reading my Bible and praying. Then we moved back to Ohio to a smaller town than before. A couple new friends invited me to their church.

The first church I visited was pretty weird, and I did not go back. Only when the DaVinci Code book came out did I realize that what my high school friend called a church was really a Masonic temple. Then the fact that the children's area in the "church" was full of comic books about the Druids made sense.

The second church I went to was a mainline protestant church that you would all recognize. My friend was heavily involved, and I went often enough to propose that my parents check it out. I did not officially join since I was going off to college (I graduated a year early).

At the time, I did not know that were means of fellowship apart from one of the denominations. Recall that my parents gave me no insight on this sort of thing. I was basically clueless. I am not saying that denominations are bad, by the way. I think a person has to pick and choose carefully when becoming involved in a local body of Christ.

There was definitely something missing, and now I know it has to do with intimate involvement with the body of Christ. There were probably smaller groups for fellowship that I was not aware of. My parents go to that church to this day.

So I went off to college, but I never got involved with a group during that time. I was aware of a couple of groups I did not want to be involved in, and beyond that nobody every invited me to their group, and I did not actively seek one out. My private worship and study continued.

After college I heard the call of God pretty clearly regarding his desire for me to be involved with other believers. That is when I started church shopping. After some serious searching I was pretty frustrated that I had found the place that God was calling me to. Then one day after my vacation, I came home to listen to an unlikely answering machine message.

I had met this guy at a party eleven months prior to this message. We had exchanged phone numbers, and I didn't hear from him within a reasonable amount of time, so I thought that was it for him.

So his message indicated that he wanted to invite me to go water skiing with him and his friends. My first thought was "after eleven months...you have got to be kidding me!" There were two factors that led to my returning the phone call. One was curiosity and the other was that I remembered there was something different about him that had to do with God.

The water skiing opportunity had passed, so he picked me up at work for lunch, and then subsequently we began to spend more and more time together. He told me about his fellowship and we discovered that we believed the same things about God and Jesus. I did not tell him I was looking for a group. My promise to myself was that I was not going to get involved in a group because of a man, and that it was going to be because of God and God alone.

I decided to check out his fellowship behind his back. I dragged a friend with me to the address that was in the phone book. Our plan was to go in the evening since he attended in the morning. We arrived on time, and nobody was there.

I called the fellowship the next day and told the person who answered the phone that I tried to attend but that no one was there. It turned out that their offices are at a separate location from their meeting place. My friend and I had gone to the wrong place. I got the correct address for the meeting place and suggested they amend their phone book entry. Apparently, this had not come up before since just about everybody who attends does so at the invitation of a friend.

Finally the next week my friend and I returned,this time to the correct location, and I knew within ten or fifteen minutes that I was "home." My friend was in agreement that this was a fellowship that preached the true gospel as it is written in the Bible. The particular friend that came with me already had a believing church that I was not interested in (she prefers a more traditional church).

I started attending regularly on my own and found that the group had started as a small Bible study near the campus of the university I attended. It had grown to the point that they rented an old warehouse for their large meetings. I discovered early on that this was just one aspect of the group. The life of the fellowship was in the home churches, something I had never heard of before. They are more or less based on the house church movement of the early church as discussed in the Bible.

After a couple of months I called the office and said I wanted a home group but that I did not want to go to my guy friend's group since I was checking things out behind his back. They gave me a meeting time and address. Boy were the people in that group surprised! It was unheard of for someone to just show up like I did without knowing someone in the group. They were very warm and inviting, and I attended for about a month before I finally confessed to my guy friend who said I was always welcome to check out his home church. I did and I stayed in his group since it was a better fit for me (we did not end up together). The overall fellowship got bigger and bigger until land was purchased and a good sized campus was constructed.

I wish I could adequately describe the sweetness of Christian fellowship in the context of a group that is small enough where you consider every member to be a close friend. We all still attend the large meeting, but after the teaching is over, we hang out in our small group and potluck. Our study of the Bible continues to be one of my favorite aspects of my life. I don't think I could find a better place to learn and share. And of course, my one on one time with God has only gotten better. The word is an amazing representation of love. Each sentence is woven into a huge tapestry of God's revelation of himself. It is so intricate that there is not a person who has ever existed that could have made it up.

Jesus didn't exist. He is a solar myth along with about 29 other man deities based on the "sun" and born of a virgin on Dec 25th when the "sun" is born again on the cross of the zodiac.


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