Getting Started
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Hellenism Syncretic Judaism Jesus legend Jesus Scholarship
Apostolic Legend Apostolic Scholarship Over Paganism Over other Christianities
The facts about what we think we know about Jesus

 

One itsy bitsy problem with the claim Christianity borrowed from Paganism is the New Testament. The histories of Jesus' life written by people who knew Him don't mention Him lifting salvation from Osiris, so why should we?

POCM > Triumph reviews the facts, not about Jesus, but about what we think we know about Jesus.The history we believe: where does that history come from, and how did it get to us?

Why do we care about all this? Because if the New Testament stories are not historical, POCM's version of Christian origins looks a lot more reasonable, that's why.
What you'll discover at POCM > Triumph is that there are two versions of the history of what we know. The Sunday School version and the Fact Based version.
 

The Sunday School version —the "orthodox legend" —is the version you maybe know. The gospels are the histories recorded by people who knew Jesus (or at least, knew people who knew Jesus). We can trace the gospels right back to the people who wrote them.

The Sunday School version gets its facts from, well, from the Sunday School version. The Sunday School version is an ancient legend passed down from the early church fathers, for eighteen hundred years, through generations of believers.
 

The Fact Based version comes to us from a couple hundred years of scholarly research, by believers and non-believers, into the actual facts behind the Sunday School version.

Fact-based research has proven a couple things.

First, that the gospel miracles cannot be based on naive ancient understanding of natural phenomena. A close look at the details of how that could have happened turns up too many wild improbabilities. Therefore, the gospels must be myths. [David Strauss wrote about this in 1835. We'll review his analysis.]

Second, the gospels could not have been written by the guys, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with their names on the covers. There are several reasons for this:
the earliest gospel manuscripts don't have names on the covers; the evidence is, the names were added later.
Matthew and Luke clearly copy from Mark. Not just ideas and paraphrases, but idiosyncratic word for word phrasing that no two, or three, people could have come up with each on their own. These facts force even the most arch conservative believing scholars to admit this "literary dependence." And literary dependence shoots the hell out of the theory that the gospels are first hand histories.

It was early Christian custom to write books like the ones in our New Testament, and after the book was finished, to go back and put some famous apostles name on the cover. Early Christianity had lots of Gospels, lots of epistles, lots of acts. Ours fit perfectly with that tradition.

Now, we don't believe the Gospel of Thomas—in which Jesus brings salvation not by dying on the cross, but by teaching secret wisdom—was actually written by the apostle Thomas. So according to what evidence and what reasons can we believe our gospels were written by our apostles?

It turns out, there are no non-circular criteria you can apply to both our gospels and their gospels and come up with the answer our gospels as unique and true, and the other early Christian gospels as phony.

The point of POCM > Triumph is simply to give you the facts about all this. The history we believe: where does that history come from, and how did it get to us?

When you do look at the history of our history, it turns out the Sunday School version, the "orthodox legend, or, as scholars call it, the "myth of apostolic succession", is not history at all. It is legend. Legend and myth.
  		 

The Scholarship Split
I'm jumping ahead here, but under the next big tab, POCM > Scholarship, we'll see that the results of scholarly research are so strong that believers have been unable to disprove them. So believing scholarship has simply abandoned the reasoned discussion and gone off on it's own, to start its own subculture of scholars who start their research with the idea the gospels are basically true. They are scholars not of whether the gospels are true, but of how they are true.

  

The other thing you'll discover at POCM > Triumph is that how our version of Christianity won out over all the other versions of Christianity, and how it got passed down to us, may be a bit different from what you thought.

Here's a map showing Christian theologies developed in the three centuries after Jesus—before the Roman government got involved in church doctrine. Like other ancient religions, early Christianity invented new theologies as it spread to new cities. Modern Christianity still calls each of these Christianities a heresy. There are heresies all over the map—except in Rome. That's because after the emperor Constantine converted in AD 312, Roman Christianity defined orthodoxy. You converted to Roman orthodoxy or Roman soldiers exterminated you. With swords. Or they tied you up and burned you.

Sixteen hundred years ago, Roman guys with swords decided what will go in in your church this Sunday. Wow!
 

 

The final thing you'll learn at POCM > Triumph is that Paganism did not wither and disappear because of Christian moral superiority. Paganism ended when it was brutally and savagely suppressed.

  		 
Reasons

Does this mean that I, Greg, know how Christianity began, Who Jesus was, which gospels are closest to Him, and which of His sayings in the NT are truly His? Nope. It doesn't. I don't know these things. And I don't think there is any way to know them. Too much information has been lost.

All I know is, the myth of apostolic succession (as scholars call it) is a phony.
  
You are free to copy and paste any words you find at POCM, as long as
1 You don't charge anyone for the stuff you borrow
2

Every time you borrow, you tell folks it came from POCM and
link back to the page you got it from, or just to:  www.pocm.info
3 You really really promise to live with goodness and goodwill in your heart.
What other people think about POCM
The truth is that the plan of salvation was shown to Adam in what is called the Mazzaroth (Hebrew Zodiac) before any books were written.  The Mazzaroth was later perverted by satan into occultic astrology. In the book of Genesis we see evidence that Levitical rules were in place when Cain and Abel brought there sacrifices before God. What I am saying is the religion that Jesus taught was the same as that God commanded in the Torah (old testament). The pagan religions that you repeatedly refer to are a corruption of what God told His people 6,000 years ago.  God creates, satan counterfeits and deceives.  Paganism started at the tower of Babel when satan influenced nimrod and he rebelled against God.  All the nations had known the truth about Messiah but it was perverted with sun worship orchestrated by satan.  You refer to "ancients" that overnight developed civilization, mathematics, etc.; not so, they were influenced by fallen angels (read Genesis 6 and  the book of Enoch) and that is were "myths" about giants and titans come from. One of his greatest weapons is appealing to the arrogance of man.  He has people believe they are so sophisticated, that it is silly to believe he exists.  The problem with Christianity is that it  lost its Hebraic roots soon after the resurrection due to persecution, that is why Jesus warned us about false doctrine. Rev 2:9 "I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan." You have been duped by a master deceiver, he has been active for thousands of years, he plants seeds of doubt in minds, his hatred for you is without limit, he will laugh at you throughout eternity.
     
 
A scholarly and handsome reader Kicks POCM's Ass

My name is Tim King timnterra - at- hotmail -dot- com .

I would like to inform Greg of his mistake regarding the New Testament.

to which Greg says

Tim doesn't even try to answer POCM's challenge to explain the ancient-religions-were-similar evidence with an analysis that is comprehensive and consistent.

Tim's analysis is simply The Bible is True, in support of which, he offer's one of the apologists' regulation reasons: Jesus is Historical.
I will now make a claim and if you wish to discredit it you must provide proof not your opinion. The method of postulating what we want has many advantages. They are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Bertram Russell
The New Testament documents are the most widely criticized, objected to, slandered, and defamed writings of history. Yet they remain above reproach and are defended by any true scholar of literature as accurate history.

Tim has been told, and he accepts, not only that the NT is history, but that every true scholar agrees it is history. Tim believes the world's most widely criticized books are universally recognized as accurate.

Tim is a very nice man who has spent a long time among believers whose start-with-the-answer scholarship tends more to boosterism than to meddling with facts.

We disagree. We can still be friends.

Allow me to explain the difference between facts of history and myths of history. A fact is placed in a actual time and space where as a myth is "long ago in a land far away" or a non factual space and time.

 

 

 

 

 

Tim's analysis is much repeated: Jesus is Historical, and therefore Real and True. Christianity did not borrow Pagan ideas because Real magic godmen don't copy nothin'.

I like Tim's version. He gives the argument more explicitly that most: His set up is:
 S1 Facts (he means true events) happen in historical time.
S2 Myths happen in mythical time.
Where he came up with these untrue claims, Tim doesn't say. The answer, of course, is he came up with them by reasoning backward from the conclusion he is determined, by God, to reach.

If you feel I'm stretching, notice Tim doesn't believe his own reasoning. He has no doubt the magical talking animals and other fantastic stories in Genesis are "facts", even though they happened "long ago in a land far away."

When someone gives you a "reason" that only works in the one place it has to work for their theory to be true, and that in other situations gives a completely different answer, you should not believe their analysis.

This is important because the myths you speak of are based in a fictional realm where the New Testament Writings are placed in a concrete factual space and time.

Step 2 is to prove the pagan myths are myths --- because—turning set up S2 around—they are set in mythical time.

That the Pagan myths are myths, I have no doubt. But not because, like so much of the Bible, they are set in mythical time. Many aren't.

Tim's believers' analysis is immune to facts. He's been to POCM, he's written a long essay refuting POCM, but he hasn't actually read POCM. He doesn't know the most basic facts about ancient Pagan religion, or the most basic facts about POCM's theory.

Let me give you an example from the book of Luke. This is how the book starts: "... In The time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah..."

This may appear to be a bland statement, but it is quite potent because it places the events of the life of Jesus in factual space and time. This is not a just story made up from jumbled bits of pagan myths it is History as defined by verifiable testimony.

I ask you to research Herod king of Judea see the time in which he lived and read the events of his life. I assure he was a real man who really lived and ruled Judea at this crucial time in history.

Step 3 is to prove Jesus is real, by turning setup S1 around. Jesus' stories are set in historical time, therefore they are "fact".

Tim, and the many big name believing scholars who repeat this argument, are confused. The setup is A implies B. But the available fact is not A, it is B. And it is simply not true that A implies B means B implies A.

If it did, we might conclude: The Queen farts. Jimmy Swaggart farts. Therefore Jimmy Swaggart is the Queen.
I hope this argument has produced in you a seed of faith that might blossom into a new meaningful life for you.