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Jesus likely existed. It’s easier to imagine the steps from an influential cleric to messiah-myth than an early church conspiracy to weave a savior whole cloth.
There is little evidence, but that’s exactly what you’d expect from a 2,000 year old narrative. What we know about emperors of the time is scant and largely mythical. If an accurate record of the life of an impoverished Rabbi from 1st Century were available, that’d be miraculous in itself.
Plus there is the textual argument that u/BrotherL0v3 makes.
Jesus likely existed. It’s easier to imagine the steps from an influential cleric to messiah-myth than an early church conspiracy to weave a savior whole cloth.
Third option: no historical character but no conspiracy either. Just a bunch of folkloric stories evolving across few generations, before there was even a church to speak of.
They all start from a simple common ground, as simple as “what if the messiah already came?”. That idea spawns a bunch of stories, highly divergent from each other. The stories with no narrative appeal get forgotten; some survive, and people telling those stories add small details to them and “update” a few details. Eventually what used to be just “the messiah already came” becomes “the messiah already came, his name was Yehoshua ben Yoseph, he multiplied fish and bread, the Romans killed him, he said «LOL JK» in the third day. All accordingly to Yahweh’s plan”.
Eventually one of those stories catches the attention of a few Greek writers, and Christianity is born.
Some of those stories don’t make much sense to be developed that way. For example, the Gospels go to great lengths to attach Jesus to King David, and part of that is a conveluted census story to get him to be born in Bethlehem. If you want your Messiah to be from Bethlehem, then why not just make him be from Bethlehem?
Conversely, if he was a real person from the poduck village known as Nazareth, then it makes more sense. They still want to make the King David connection, so they invent this census story so he can be born in the “right” place.
Then there’s the problem that he died in a manner reserved for the dregs of society. What kind of god does that? This is a really big deal to people of the time. They care a lot about having a decent burial, and crucifixion victims are left to have their bodies picked at by carrion animals and then tossed into a mass pit grave. No one at the time would have come up with this fate for their revered figure.
So again, they’re dealing with a real person with widely known facts about his life, and it’s really inconvenient for spreading their message. So they cram this Nicodemus guy in the story as a rich benifactor. He has some political pull to take Jesus body down and put it in a brand new fancy tomb. He has little else to do in the story, and isn’t mentioned in Acts or by Paul or anywhere else. He only gets mentioned by John, which is the latest gospel.
So likely Nicodemus gets inserted in there to deal with the manner that Jesus died, but the story of his death wouldn’t have been a method they’d make up in the first place.
If you want your Messiah to be from Bethlehem, then why not just make him be from Bethlehem?
Narrative appeal. Compare the alternatives:
- Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
- Jesus’ family was from Bethlehem. However Joseph and Mary had to flee to Nazareth, as Herod ordered the massacre of children, thus Jesus was born in Nazareth.
The second one is simply more appealing. People like “meaty” stories, full of details and twists.
For comparison: #1 is like having Superman being simply an Earthling mutant, instead of as the prince of an alien planet. The former is boring, thus less likely to catch the attention of the people.
Then there’s the problem that he died in a manner reserved for the dregs of society. What kind of god does that?
Look at Greek tragedy.
Achilles dragging Hector’s body behind a chariot, something so dishonourable that the gods had to intervene - because a half-god was desecrating the corpse of a prince.
Or Heracles killing his own mortal half in a pyre to avoid the excruciating pain, while his immortal half ascends to godhood. It’s a half-god committing suicide, after being tricked by his own wife.
And yet neither Hector nor Heracles are historical.
Is Jesus being crucified so odd, in the light of those? It’s tragedy - it delivers emotional impact, and plays really well with the theme of the story: “He might be the son of a god, but he’s still treated as so disgusting that his corpse is not allowed to touch Mother Earth, to not dirty Her. That is not a problem - because the flesh is not the soul, his soul is divine. As him you should endure suffering of the flesh, as your own soul is also being prepared for The Kingdom of God.”
I mean, I wouldn’t expect consistency here. In fact, a lot of the argument in favor of a historical Jesus is that the story doesn’t make much sense unless they were trying to work around inconvenient facts about an actual person. Kinda like how L Ron Hubbard has a story about how he saved a young woman from a satanic cult (in actuality, he stole Jack Parsons’ girlfriend and life savings).
If you want an apologist answer, then it’s that both Mary and Joseph were descended from David. Several generations removed, mind you. They weren’t closely related as far as we know.
Matthew and Luke both give alternate genealogies, and apologists say that one is for Mary and the other for Joseph. Which one is which isn’t clear. These are usually the same people saying that you can’t read between the lines of the Bible; you must take the words as they are. And yet, you can’t reconcile those two genealogies without somehow assuming something that isn’t in the text.
@frezik
The bible itself is the best evidence against the truth of the bible & the existence of God. 🤔
Okay look. I am an atheist, I think magical thinking in general and Christianity in particular are harmful and unnecessary.
BUT
I also enjoy learning about new testament history as a hobby. I’ve actually read the book How Jesus Became God that the article mentions, and they do a sneaky thing that annoys the shit out of me: they quote things being said by someone who disagrees with them that appear to completely demolish their own position, without quoting the explanation and nuance that inevitably follows. Ehrman obviously doesn’t see the quoted text as a problem for the idea of a historical Jesus, and usually explains as much after saying something like that.
I won’t nit-pick all the little over-simplifications, but I want to make an example out of one of them:
The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing “life of Jesus,” and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark and added their own corrections and new material. But they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree contradict the much later gospel of John, because they were written with different objectives for different audiences. The incompatible Easter stories offer one example of how much the stories disagree.
The incompatible Easter stories are actually something many secular scholars point to as evidence in favor of a historical Jesus.
I’ll go into more detail if anyone cares, but the broad strokes are this: the nativity narratives in both Matthew and Luke contradict not only each other but also known history and even basic plausibility. We’re pretty confident they were both made up.
So, why? Why would two different authors working from the same source material both tell weird lies about Jesus’ birth?
Well, the expectation of the Jewish public at the time was that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Mark doesn’t talk about Jesus’ birth, but it does say he was from Nazareth of Galilee. That presents a problem: how is this guy who people are calling Jesus of Nazareth also the messiah from Bethlehem?
That’s where we get Matthew and Luke trying to smooth things over: Matthew makes up a story about how Jesus was totally born in Bethlehem, trust me bro but Herod the Great tried to kill him so Joseph and Mary hid in Egypt until he died but then his son took over Judea so they moved to Nazareth. True story bro.
Then in Luke, the author says that Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, but Caesar ordered a census of the whole Roman empire where everyone had to return to their ancestral homeland because reasons. So they go to Bethlehem because David was Joseph’s… great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? Why they stopped at exactly twenty generations (and how the fuck Joseph would have known that before ancestry.com) is never specified.
Even if we grant miraculous intervention, these stories are both ridiculous on their face (at least, to a modern audience). If Jesus was fabricated whole cloth, why include these bullshit Easter narratives in the first place? Why not just say “He was born in Bethlehem” and be done with it? To my mind, these stories make the most sense as a post-hoc ass-covering to explain how the guy who was walking around calling himself “Jesus from Nazareth” was actually totally from Bethlehem the whole time.
I don’t know that Mark having errors based on Old Testament prophecy necessarily means that the corrections in later gospels were fictionalizing a real event. That is one possibility. Another possibility is that the author of Mark wasn’t as well versed in Old Testament prophecy as the authors of later Gospels, who worked to correct this.
Yours is not a terrible hypothesis by any means, but I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as you think it is.
I mostly only read English so, wouldn’t any version I read have been translated twice?
It would have been translated once, directly from the Gnostic gospels that were found. But I’m not sure why that matters since they would be scholarly translations because they were found in the mid-20th century and the important thing is discovering what the Gnostics believed, meaning an accurate translation would be necessary.
I think you’re confusing the Gnostic gospels with something like the King James Bible. It’s totally different. We only knew what the Gnostics believed from secondary sources until the Gnostic gospels were discovered.
Well, the expectation of the Jewish public at the time was that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem.
Can you explain more about this? Why would they expect him to be from Bethlehem?
Obscure Old Testament prophecy that the author of Mark could very well not have known about-
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Micah 5%3A2&version=NIV
I wouldn’t exactly call the Book of Micah a well-known part of the OT and I doubt it was back then either.
how the guy who was walking around calling himself “Jesus from Nazareth” was actually totally from Bethlehem the whole time.
Iirc the gist of the issue why they wrote that was the same as the problem with Jesus being descendant of David through Joseph - he needed to fit into the messiah prophecy. And he couldn’t do that being a Galilean. Ancient Judeans were pretty chauvinistic overall in who is counted to even be a true Jew, remember the background of a tale of good Samaritan or how Herod was constantly bashed for being Edomite despite building spectacular center of worship.
I describe it like this… the earliest presumed mention of Jesus is in the work of Josephus around 93 AD.
Now, there is evidence that this mention is, itself, a 3rd century “insertion” by the Christian transcriber Eusebius, but aside from that, let’s take 93 AD as “gospel” ;)
So from the time of Jesus, to 93 AD, there is not one, single, contemporary reference. If you take the dating of his death sometime around 33 AD as accurate, that means, even following his death, nobody mentioned him for SIXTY YEARS.
If you are to believe that story, you have to believe nobody was talking about a guy who did miracles. Or leave that aside as a later invention, nobody was talking about The Sermon on the Mount, which was likely his biggest claim to fame in his lifetime.
The comparison I like to use is Elvis. We know Elvis existed because we have the photographs, recordings, contemporary evidence, and so on.
Now, imagine NONE of that exists. Not only that, Elvis died in 1977. We would be, right now, 13 years away from the first written record of Elvis. (1977 + 60 = 2037).
Unlikely doesn’t BEGIN to cover it.
More on how Josephus may have been “modified” around the 3rd century to meet Christian ideas:
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437
https://vridar.org/2015/01/16/fresh-evidence-the-jesus-passage-in-josephus-a-forgery/
Yeah, why aren’t there any photographs of Jesus, checkmate religtards
You kid, but for the first several hundred years the concept of the bearded Jesus didn’t exist either.
This is an obvious example of the presentism fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysis)
Photographs and recordings did not exist in the 1st century. Not even the printing press. And most people were illiterate at the time. So it is far more likely that nothing would be written versus anything being written during that timeframe.
We have loads of written records of far less impressive things from the period, this argument holds no water.
We do not. Almost no written records from that time period has survived. Everything that we “know” comes from a copy of a copy, often made many centuries after the event.
There are also countless surviving frescoes, statues, carvings and monuments from the period that had every chance to record, you know, miracles.
Those are a handful of fragmentary texts. That actual proves my point.
You are conflating the biblical version of Jesus and the historical version of him. The mythicist position has always been that neither existed, but the historical view has always been that the latter (and only the latter) existed.
I would disagree.
You would need positive evidence for your claim, saying the biblical Jesus doesn’t exist in neither important nor mundane records does not prove anything.
And claiming that because the miracles aren’t mentioned in any records is evidence of a historical Jesus is also false.
What is commonly meant by the claim that a historical Jesus could exist, is that it would be entirely banale for a mundane historical Jesus to exist. Meaning we can’t disprove him, and so current best practice to assume he did, just like all the other Jeushas, Marks, and Petruses we never hear about.
That is however not proof a historical Jesus did exist, it is just the working assumption when we can’t possibly tell.
And the post here puts doubt on that assumption, as there has been proof that stories where attributed to the Jesus character, and he might only be as real as Superman or Kilroy.
Those are generic Mythicist arguments. You lose credibility by even using such lazy and unoriginal ones. The fundamental problem is that it makes it impossible to demonstration that virtually anyone in history has ever existed because the burden of proof is set so high.
Just like how historical spider-man existed, but the comic version didn’t, right?
Don’t do religion, kids.
You’re just another brain dead mythicist. Might as well claim all historical figures are comic book characters.
For a person of prominence speaking to hundreds of people? When we do have other similar first hand examples?
FWIW, the article is describing the standard “mythicist” position. A well-known argument that has been described many times before. There is nothing new being presented here, and all sources cited appear to be over a decade old. If you are familiar with this debate, you probably do not even need to read the article to know who the sources are. They are very familiar names to anyone that have read past articles on this subject.
I hate the whole debate anyway. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is a “real” Jesus because he wasn’t the product of a virgin birth, he didn’t perform miracles, he didn’t come back from the dead and he most certainly wasn’t the son of any god. He wasn’t even “king of the Jews” any more than a guy standing on the street corner claiming to be the president is one.
On top of that, since all of the Gospels were written, at earliest, decades later, anything he may have said or done, had he existed, could not possibly have been accurately transcribed or recorded in a time before cameras or audio recording.
So was there a real Jesus? It doesn’t matter because that isn’t the Jesus that Christians worship. The Jesus that Christians worship definitely did not exist.
The only difference between a religion and a cult is time.
If someone comes up with a fanciful story right now about a savior or prophet that said a bunch of stuff 60 years ago and a group of people started following it as a teaching … we’d call them a cult.
If the cult lasts for generations or hundreds of years we eventually start referring to it all as a religion.
The only difference between a religion and a cult is time.
I wish people would stop saying this. Research into the BITE Model and High Control Organizations have given specific criteria to the sorts of groups people would call “cults”. Some of the more fanatical sections of the Catholic Church qualify just as much as a multi level marketing scheme that started 5 years ago.
Agreed. But I would also say that the person 60 years ago is not the same as the person they worship. It may be based on them, but it isn’t them,
The example I always use is the villain Bloefeld in the James Bond novels and films. Ian Fleming based him on the father of his school friend, who had the same name. I don’t think anyone would claim that the “real” Bloefeld is the one from the novels and films.
That’s my problem with this debate. As I said, it doesn’t matter whether or not there was a real person the character of Jesus in the Bible was based upon because the character of Jesus in the Bible is the one that Christians worship and he definitely did not exist.
Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. We’re talking about faith, which is basically a socially acceptable mental illness that can bypass logic and facts entirely regardless of subject matter. We’ve seen true believers ignore video evidence of cops commiting murder, flat earthers determine that somehow their own evidence that proves the earth to be round must be wrong, conservatives believing that somehow Trump cares about them, UFO weirdos believing they’ve been abducted, cryptid hunters failing to understand that they’re quarry had vanished in the age of ubiquitous high-def cell phone cameras, and climate deniers haven’t accepted proof yet. Hell we’re talking about the same idiots that think Jesus loves guns. Or the ones that got COVID and swore on their subsequent deathbeds that the vaccine was somehow worse.
They sure as hell aren’t gonna believe that there’s no proof that Jesus didn’t exist.
Until somebody finally finds a way to cure blind faith, we’re gonna just be saddled with a huge permanent population of delusional idiots.
And they don’t give a rat’s ass about the message of the Gospels, they focus on the exact wrong opposite things, the fetishes and imagery cooked up by the church along the way.
They are simpletons, still in the goddamned Middle Ages, easily manipulated by other greedy pigs who also drank the kool-aid in childhood, all performing the mental gymnastics that they are “doing God’s work” against overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I think the historical signifigance of jesus lends more credibility to his existence, its just his supernatural abilities that are not credible theories
Arthur Pendragon has a lot of historical significance as well.
Next on the news: centaurs have no historical basis.
man I love stuff like this, nothing upsets them more than just pointing out how unlikely even the non-miraculous shit would be, all piled into one person’s lifetime. and the lack of contemporaneous evidence, and the fact that most of the jesus brand is adopted from other origin stories wholecloth… they get cranked though lol, it’s hilarious
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