The historical Jesus Christ was a doomsday cult leader

IntroductionMy fellow participant has forfeited Round 2, but it is just as well, since I could use the opportunity to more fully address the points that he brought up in Round 1. He will have the last word in this last round, and I thank him for the experience.Explanatory powerBoth sing_along and I have used a set of Bible passages to reinforce our respective models of the historical Jesus. Any imagined theory of the historical Jesus can be evidenced using Bible passages, but some theories are more probable than others, so we need a methodology to decide which theory has the upper hand. The methodology of debate that I support is "Argument to the Best Explanation" (ABE) by C. Behan McCullagh, summarized on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org...). It is a methodology most appropriate for settling fundamental disagreements on any given empirical topic. I don't demand that sing_along use the same methodology, but a methodology of some sort is important to make his case, and I will use ABE for my own case.There are five key criteria of ABE--greater explanatory scope, greater explanatory power, more plausible, less ad hoc, and disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs. The criterion most relevant in this debate, in my opinion, concerns "greater explanatory power." The criterion states, "The hypothesis must be of greater explanatory power than any other incompatible hypothesis about the same subject; that is, it must make the observation statements it implies more probable than any other."In other words, the evidence should narrowly expect (or predict) the theory.I claim that my theory has far more explanatory power than sing_along's theory. Most of the passages that I listed in Round 2 are very strongly expected of the theory of Jesus as a doomsday cult leader--the doomsday prophecies, the seeming imminent deadline, the seeming encouragement of hatred and separation from one's family, and the command of complete devotion to his own self. Conversely, such passages are very unexpected of either a "commendable moral teacher" or a "Marxist." Magnifying the problem, we should very much expect the opposite.Jesus and MarxismTo build his model of the historical Jesus, sing_along made references to passages in the Bible that are not directly relevant to the historical Jesus--the Old Testament and 2nd-century Christian writings. However, he did effectively quote the gospel of Luke and the Pauline epistle to Philemon. The theme of those two passages is to be content with one's own given share of wealth. A connection is drawn to a saying of Karl Marx:"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."However, there is a strong misalignment between the sociological reality of early Christianity and this Marxist imperative. For Jesus or the early Christians to be both Marxist and content with their share would be unexpected for a society that was, by all scholarly accounts, very sharply divided between the rich and the poor, with the rich being the oppressive ruling class. Writes Bart Ehrman in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, p. 19, "In the early Christian world, there was no such thing as a middle class as we know it... In that world, only a few persons belonged to the upper class; nearly everyone else was in the lower. Few people had any hope for social mobility, slaves made up perhaps a third of the total population in major urban areas, and many of the poor were worse off than enslaved."In such a world, contentment with one's own share is NOT the expected Marxist response, by any stretch of the imagination. The entire thrust of the Communist Manifesto was the overthrow of an oppressive and unjust social system (the capitalist society of the late 19th century western world was only a fraction as offensive). If Jesus encouraged contentment, then he was not a Marxist. Aligning with Marx's own negative opinions of the Christian religion, Jesus would have been more of a tool of the bourgeoisie.Conversely, Jesus's encouragement to be content with one's own share of wealth is compatible with the theory that Jesus led a cult. In a travelling oratorical cult, the wealth must be divided according to the leader, and it is in the leader's interest to discourage complaints about an unfair share.Love bombingEffectively quoting from Galatians, sing_along makes another valuable point that Jesus, according to the earliest Christian testimony, strongly encouraged acts of love, generosity and compassion, and I accept this. Such behavior is incompatible with a stereotypical cult, but it is not at all incompatible with true cult behavior as known in the behavioral sciences. One of the well-known methods of cult recruitment is, in fact, "love bombing." According to the study, "Group processes in cult affiliation and recruitment," by David A. Halperin, 1982, "This use of unqualified and total approval of the prospective cult member by the cult recruiter has been dubbed 'love bombing.'" See also the Wikipedia article titled, "Love bombing" (http://en.wikipedia.org...). When I said that I intended the term, "doomsday cult," to be descriptive and not pejorative, it was intended to help us get a more accurate perspective of Jesus as a cult leader, unclouded by our negative judgments of cults.Peace and harmonyA third valuable point by sing_along is that "But above all, the message that Jesus preached was to teach mankind to live in peace and harmony." There is at least some gospel evidence that Jesus may have believed this. Matthew 10:34 says, "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." Luke 12:51 says, "Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division." Though, on the face, this evidence may seem to contradict the claim that Jesus preached peace, it speaks to the existence of an early opposing school of thought known and opposed to the community of the gospel of Q that supported "peace on Earth," and this perhaps may have been the thinking of the historical Jesus.On the other hand, it remains unclear whether this line of thinking came from inside the Christian community or from the outside, and, regardless of that, it remains unclear whether such a doctrine is original to Jesus. Unfortunately, without knowing, the prima facie evidence shows that the earliest Christians primarily believed that Jesus not only failed to uphold "peace on earth" but he explicitly opposed it in favor of division and "a sword."Though violence is very seldom in the interest of cult leaders, a mentality of "spiritual warfare" with the larger community is typical. One of the characteristics of a cult is "a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society" (http://www.csj.org...).ConclusionThe New Testament historian Albert Schweitzer pointed out that fellow liberal Christian scholars in his own time (1910) merely remade Jesus in their own images, following the pattern of every other ideological thinker. Jesus, however, was fully an ancient character of his own time, not in any way concerned with the prejudices of the modern age. If somehow Jesus wasn't a doomsday cult leader, then all of his Christian successors most certainly were doomsday cult leaders, as their own writings appear on the face, and all of them made the most convincing efforts to make Jesus appear likewise. However, we merely apply the criterion of less ad hoc (or Occam's razor) to conclude that this same behavior is found in Jesus himself.This is my last entry in the debate. I know that I brought up new arguments despite what sing_along requested, but I had only two opportunities total to make arguments (my fault, admittedly). sing_along may use his last entry as he sees fit. Again, I think him for this.