| richardhutnik said: As a critique of the Christian religion, Zeitgeist has been found to be a lot of nonsense: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-02-25/ PERHAPS THE WORST ASPECT of “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” Part I of Peter Joseph’s Internet film, Zeitgeist, is that some of what it asserts is true. Unfortunately, this material is liberally — and sloppily — mixed with material that is only partially true and much that is plainly and simply bogus. Joseph’s main argument is that Jesus never existed and is in fact a mythical character based on earlier sun gods. He sees all the motifs and characters of the New Testament as coded astrological or solar references. The argument that Jesus was a mythical construct has been made before — for example by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in their 1999 book, The Jesus Mysteries, though Freke and Gandy made their argument with a far greater level of scholarship. In reducing Jesus to a sun god, Joseph ignores — as Freke and Gandy did before him — the powerful current of messianic apocalypticism prevalent in first century Judea. The fact that there were references back to earlier dying and rising gods in the Christ myth can lend an air of spurious scholarship to Zeitgeist, as long as one ignores the equally important messianic myth and the fact that there is a viable basis for an actual historical Jesus. Joseph totally ignores the messianic/apocalyptic aspects of the New Testament writings and erroneously asserts that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus. I will return to this issue later. For now, let us consider Joseph’s solar deity argument.
Now, if you have need for your disbelieve to have its own mythos to justify it, then it is fine to go with Zeitgeist. However, if you want to be factually accurate, you need to look elsewhere. A problem with material like Zeitgeist is that it attempts to paint a very large scale conspiracy that is vulnerable at every single point it makes a large-scale claim, of being false. |
"Joseph totally ignores the messianic/apocalyptic aspects of the New Testament writings and erroneously asserts that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus."
I assume this is the sentence I should be paying most attention to but I don't see anything in this that warrants the documentary false (I am having difficulty even understanding the paragraph fully) . How is the documentary proven wrong by avoiding the New Testament apocalyptic end of times (if anything many religions and cultures viewed or discussed a possible end of times/rebirth, I'm thinking Hinduism for one since they believe the world has been destroyed/reborn multiple times)?
Also, it was stated in the documentary that there were dozens of well known historians that lived in the area where Jesus would have roamed/lived. He states not one of these historians recorded anything dealing with Jesus. It wasn't until 100 A.D. or so later that Jesus was first brought up.
