04-07-2009, 08:45 AM
The stuff about priests not marrying came from Paul, a former pharisee who converted after Jesus died, who claimed to have been personally appointed by him.
The vast majority of Christianity actually isn't really Christian, it's what I like to call Paulism. I am very suspicious that he might have actually been gay as well, and his self-loathing culminated into the re-injection of rules and regulations back into Christianity. From my understanding of Jesus, he was a "big picture" kind of person. He was more concerned with the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. Paul came in and made it about hard-and-fast rules again, obviously his Pharisee training asserting itself.
Anyway, I think that even though there is no objective evidence of Jesus actually existing, that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't. But, if he was an actual person, the miracles and other supernatural events were attributed to him later. The gospels weren't written until decades after his supposed death, so that leaves a lot of time for an oral tradition to mutate, especially among the superstitious societies of antiquity.
The vast majority of Christianity actually isn't really Christian, it's what I like to call Paulism. I am very suspicious that he might have actually been gay as well, and his self-loathing culminated into the re-injection of rules and regulations back into Christianity. From my understanding of Jesus, he was a "big picture" kind of person. He was more concerned with the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. Paul came in and made it about hard-and-fast rules again, obviously his Pharisee training asserting itself.
Anyway, I think that even though there is no objective evidence of Jesus actually existing, that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't. But, if he was an actual person, the miracles and other supernatural events were attributed to him later. The gospels weren't written until decades after his supposed death, so that leaves a lot of time for an oral tradition to mutate, especially among the superstitious societies of antiquity.