freeinfidel

I’ve been busy with the day job lately, hence the lack of posts, but I just had to share this post over at Pharyngula. Check it out - and see if you can come up with an appropriate caption (I imagine there will be quite a few takes on ’second coming’ and ’suffer the children’). This has to be about the most inappropriate representation of Jesus I’ve ever seen - and presumably it was designed to sell to the faithful. Ah well, plenty of people get excited about Jesus, it’s nice to see him getting excited too.

The resurrected controversy about the alleged Lost Tomb of Jesus raises an interesting paradox: are Christians better served by a mythological Jesus? Might discoveries about the real existence of Jesus undermine their faith?

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In first-century Judea, apocalyptic prophets with serious messiah complexes were thick on the ground. When Saul/Paul set about creating a church, did he pick the wrong one?

After the death of the Jewish despot Herod (several years before the alleged birth of Jesus, by the way), the Jewish world was in a chaotic state. Herod, in spite of his savagery, was still something of a Hellenised Jew. By and large, however, the Jewish civil war - or Maccabean revolt, if you will - that had occurred decades before had sent Judaism lurching back into a more fundamentalist form. This savage period, dishonestly sanitised and decorated with the fabricated miracle of the eight-day oil lamp, is now celebrated as Hannukah. In first-century Judea, however, the result of this reversion to a more totalitarian church was not light but darkness - a deep brooding and foreboding.

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