I find it very amusing that many of the same people who claim to be intelligent accept the Hebrew gods, YHWH, the Devil, Jesus, and good and bad angels as being factual historical characters instead of realising they are just as mythical as any Greek gods.
some very intelligent people have already tried to assert what you say though, and they have failed. There are some strange anomalies, Nazareth seems to have existed as a settlement everywhen
except the 1st Century AD, but nonetheless even though proof is scarce, some evidence of Jesus and particularly Paul are found in Roman writings, Herod, being a Tetrarch and then a king is somewhat easier to verify, i think even King David has been verified as having lived, which is why i asked you at what point do you stop believing that the characters in the NT were real? What do you know that PhDs in language who have verified the parts of Scripture that are historical v mythological or poetic do not?
Because i followed that discussion for years ok, and it is always fought to a draw, where you seem to have decided a winner.
Do you think the devil was also some real person who tempted the Jesus character?
How about we stick with Jesus here for the moment, and not cloud the issue.
But to answer your Q imo "the devil" is something you get with a forebrain, an inevitable consequence of getting Free Will, or of making gods, or however one might put it. But imo you are just obfuscating now, as no one believes "the devil" is a distinct fleshly person, even if most people anthropomorphize him.
Either the whole bible story is symbolic with symbolic characters or the whole story is historical with real historical characters and real talking animals.
so you say, but you do not know, and many disinterested 3rd parties have revealed the distinctions in the Book, some mythology, some poetry, some history, some prophecy. And no one has discredited the history part yet. Nor i guess the prophecy part. And a lot of smart people have tried. The donkey does not necessarily need to talk for Balaam to have been real.
It is far more sensible to see it as a symbolic collection of stories from beginning to end.
I am sure you are aware of the concept of "Chinese_whispers"
So I totally agree the bible should be read symbolically and not taken literally.
that's great but that does not mean that no Jesus physically existed, regardless of your current grasp of "scapegoat" and all. There is no point to mythologizing Jesus, at least that i can see, even if you grasp "scapegoat" and what that means.
Symbolically speaking, you are going to run in to trouble, because we are fallen, and a sacrifice was
required. And see, you are disputing this, but it is a necessary part of the symbology, as necessary as the flood that likely did not happen in the way we are told. It doesn't matter if it was
people that required it or not, see; No one, upon hearing "Who told you that you were naked?" would have smiled a smile of relief, and took off their fig leaf, because of what remained in their minds. Guilt or whatever.
If such things had literally happened, you would think there would be records of such mass murder and evidence of the opened graves and records of dead people returning to life outside of the bible stories.
Not necessarily, the slaughter of the innocents amounted to perhaps 20 infants--a morning's distraction for Herod, apparently--and the death of a firstborn son is a recurring theme in Scripture anyway, so i would say more importantly that insisting upon mythology here is the same error as insisting upon historicity imo, just the other direction.
It is ignoring the meaning of the symbolism to debate and argue over irrelevant factualism, however you like to cut it.
A man named Jesus might very well have existed and he might have been a philosopher and teacher but I am merely saying that the one portrayed in the bible cannot be real due to that character having supernatural powers which no real man has
so then why not accept that a stylized account of Jesus was created, and the supernatural powers likely are symbolic, even if they are real enough in a spiritual sense, too. Iow i might call something Great, Fabulous, Stupendous, and Other-Worldly, and the same thing to you might be like "meh," simply because you were already aware of it, speaking generally. Doesn't mean i was lying, or trying to deceive.
Therefore it is only logical to conclude
there you go, verifying my "logic and dialecticism vis a vis Scripture" theory again...
Mythology follows martrys and stories get embellished over time so what you end up with is not what you started with.
yes, i agree there, and i even understand why you might entertain that Jesus was a construct ok, but i would ask you to contemplate that you are essentially abandoning what matters to dispute what does not, with people who have just gone to the other extreme and are now in a Jesus Cult, perhaps.
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