Apollonius of Tyana

 A while back I was writing a blog post and could not remember his name.  Apparently my hard drive (my brain, that is) was temporaily locked up.  

He was born around 3 B. C. and seems to be the original that the Christians, Paul and Constantine used as their basis for the so called divine Jesus.  His name was Apollonius.  And we know for a fact that HE existed.  He was documented by various philosphers and writers of the ancient world.  

He traveled the ancient world, particularly that of Rome and Greece perfoming various healings, raising of the dead, and casting out unwanted spirited possessions.  He had a disciples, and even had a school.  He wrote books, and had books written about him, and though those works did not survive the Christians burning of books(some things never change, do they.  The Christians of the first through the third century A.D. were always burning libraries and destroying classical liteature and art.)But we know those works existed as the sophist Philostratus, mentioned them in his work Life of Apollonius.

Roman Emperor, Alexander Severus revered him.  Severus died in 235 A. D.  

So we have an earlier, historical, documented figure that did all the miracles that Paul and the later Christian founders attibuted to Jesus.  And unlike Jesus, let me again reiterate, is documented.

I know some of you are saying but Jesus is documented too.  And the answer is, no he is not.  Pointing to the Bible and claiming it documents Jesus is like using the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm to prove that Hansel and Gretel existed.  And it has been proven many times over that Roman historian who supposedly mentioned Jesus were later forgeries by scribes of the Catholic Church.  Josephus is a source used by the Christians to prove this.  But many, many modern scholars have pointed out the difference in the writing of this and believe that it was forged by Eusebius.  And they point to the passage written by Tacitus, "called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin", to claim Jesus existed.  Again, that only proves that there were folks calling themselves Christians, not proving there was a historical person named Jesus that was a savior and the son of God.  

So Paul who never knew or studied under Jesus and actually fought with the original disciples on Christianity, is the person who created Christianity for the Gentiles.  IF you read your bible, it is pointed out by Jesus himself that his brand of Christianity was for a sect for Jews ONLY.  So there were probably a lot of jewish street rabbi's named Jesus.  The evolution of the name goes like this: Yehoshua- Yeshua-(later became Joshua)-into the Greek Iesous which became the Latinized Jesus.  Now despite the Christians claims, we really have no authenic sources pointing to one particular individual as a historical Jesus.

Just like the early Christians appropriated the Torah and turned it into the Old Testament, they used the actions of Apollonius as a basis for their figure of Jesus.  And they appropriated the pagan religions for elements to add to their religion.

So there you go folks, Apollonious of Tyana, an actual historical figure who was used as the basis for Jesus.