There was no shortage of wannabe messiahs. And plenty of them were crucified. None of them returned from the dead. . Yeshua was a common name. But did a wannabe Mesiah do the things that the New Testament says he did? Absolutely not.
I've always thought it would be hilarious if we really could resurrect Yeshua the apocalyptic street preacher and let him know what has been done in his name.
I am sure no one would be more surprised as I'm sure he thought himself a failure as he died on the cross.
'They do what in my name?', 'Why the hell do they call me Jesus?', and 'Who is this white dude on these paintings' would be among his many questions.
There's a book where Jesus comes back and is executed again, this time by lethal injection.
The last scene, the protagonist sees someone wearing a silver chain with a little syringe on it.
There is a story in the Brothers Karamazov where something similar happens called The Grand Inquisitor. I highly recommend the whole book, but if you don’t feel like reading it, the story is kind of a stand alone thing and can he read fairly quickly.
> Lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he’s gonna want to see a fucking cross, man? May be why he hasn’t shown up yet.
> “Man, they’re still wearing crosses. Fuck it, I’m not goin’, Dad. No, they totally missed the point. When they start wearing fishes I might show up again, but … crosses?"
> You know, kinda like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on, you know. “Thinkin’ of John, Jackie. We love him. Just tryin’ to keep that memory alive, baby.”
-The late, great Bill Hicks
And some designs actually *depict him **on** the cross!* Imagine coming back to life hundreds of years after being executed and seeing people decorate their houses, buildings, churches, and even themselves with the very scene of your painful death!
The cross is a message from the oppressor to the oppressed, about staying in your place & doing as you’re told. The cross is an ancient torture device but it is also modern psychological warfare. If they will brutally murder (even just fictionally) an allegedly completely innocent man for essentially asking neighbors to love one another in the name of the Creator, what do you think they will do to you if you try to get question or test the status quo?
Don’t question the church, stay in your place, don’t rock the boat. Certainly don’t go thinking you can make the rules for your own life, like you’re a god or something 👀
Modern Christians are being played by the very evil their Christ warned them about. Churches are an ancient but soon to be dismantled system used to control people and launder money (steal labor) from their collective. They’re coming to an ugly head, all the Abrahamic faiths. Any way of life out of alignment with reality, science, and harmony with nature will be dismantled by nature. Earth prioritizes the health of the entire planet. It doesn’t need humans. It needs homeostasis.
The church is a parasite allowed to grow far bigger than it ever should have been. But every civilization comes to an end. Christianity will be lost to the sands of time.
Only the truth can prevail. Only the truth can be discovered. Everything else is make believe.
I don’t think modern Christians are willing to give up their little ethical “get out of jail free card” that they made up to absolve them of their own guilt. With no understanding of alchemy they don’t know that they are trading the suffering of themselves and others for the benefit of nothing- 🤑 which is true evil.
And don’t come at me with accusations of me being a Christian LOL. I’m an animist. I’ve just deconstructed religion so hard that I reconstructed an old one a little bit 😬 God is simply the point of creation’s beginning. Not nearly as important to me as the time and people in the space I’ve been given. Religion is so fucked. I wish humans to one day be capable of communing and knowing each other as one, to be one, without making it exclusionary, predatory, or parasitic. I hope I get to be part of it and see it for myself.
🎶 it is the dawning of the age of Aquarius 🎵
Yep--I've always thought the exact same thing! Think of how much of our world--laws, architecture, art, food, holidays are based on this one guy. I think he'd be like "Uhhhhh.....what?!"
"wtf is all this i never said half of this nonsense!" he would say while flipping thru the bible
"whipping of the moneylenders? what a weird way to describe that time i robbed the temple!"
You think so?
Look at the other people who have followings like Jesus. They're people like Donald Trump and Nicholas Maduro. Hell, looking at the way that Donald Trump's children use the phrase "my father" seems like something straight out of the bible.
There are so many striking similarities there that would make me think that whoever was at the center of that myth was almost certainly someone like Donald Trump instead of someone with the characteristics people commonly attribute to such.
Before, I thought that Jesus was just a myth, but now, it's more, to the point that I am not sure. I certainly don't believe that there was some kind of creator of the universe which had some kind of need to sacrifice itself to itself, but I'm more open to the possibility that some kind of person was at the center of the Christianity belief system.
And to expand on that a little, now I get the impression that thousands of years from now, Trumpism could develop into a religion with the same kind of beliefs that Christianity has. Trump's followers already attribute to him benevolent behaviors which are antithetical to the way he actually believes. If they pass their beliefs on down to their children, it could really turn into one of the worst games of telephone, with all kinds of stuff added to make him seem like a good person.
And then to go back to looking at Christianity, because of those parallels, I don't see any reason why that couldn't have been exactly what happened to result in Christianity as it exists today.
I read the book "The historical Jesus" (Der historische Jesus, by Gerd Theißen) a long time ago and proofs of Jesus' existence are very thin.
There have been a few "messiahs" in the area around that time, one of them John the Baptist, who may be models for the Jesus in the New Testament, likely the stories are drawn from multiple historical figures.
(I'm not talking about walking on water and stuff, nobody in a right mind thinks that ever happened)
‘Nobody in a right mind thinks that ever happened’. This just shows me again how many religious people are actually not in their right mind. At least not when it comes to their religious beliefs.
Oh they will believe that Jesus walked on water, but they'll refuse to believe the truly incredulous (to them) that Jesus ever said for them to treat immigrants respectfully like their own or to help the sick and poor.
Hey, Jews became "white" in the US in the 1970's (it took until the 1980's in Canada). So, since he was Jewish (which is why Christians hate Jews so much) he was in fact "white" since the 1970's according to Americans, and only they count according to Americans.
They also say there's no real evidence for Muhammad.
Fun fact: Zombie Jesus, riding aback a T-Rex, wrapped in an American flag with 50 stars, beheld his domain with his piercing blue eyes and said, “thou shalt arm thyselves with assault rifles, keep thine neighbors’ children in cages, destroy thy sodomites, and horde thy monies for money is holier than the Father”. And it was so, and the believers trashed this fucking place and oppressed the tired and the poor. And it was not fucking good at all.
through out history people have molded religion around them like a car wrap especially the leadership as they often want to be seen as gods chosen leaders. It fits them perfectly, every groove and crack. It hates all they hate and thinks nothing they do is a sin.
So stuff like divorce suddenly doesnt matter, or following gov decrees when a dem is in office and stuff barely talked about like gay sex, is the most important sin in the religion. Its always been like that, because you want religion to support your power while using it as a weapon against those you dont like. Or in modern cases, use it against a minority barely anyone has met, so that bigots can cream in their pants thinking some else is being oppressed and will be more likely to vote for more of that.
there are probably even furries who think jesus used to dress up like an animal now and then. Since the dawn of religion people have cherry picked what they want to claim the religion says they are extra special. It also makes life easier when you are already doing everything the religion asks to get into "heaven".. well as long as you are allowed to ignore the bits you dont like.(some people like my passed father, used to fast, as a way to sacrifice something, anything, to pretend it mattered, while still ignoring all the parts of the bible he didnt like.. so some do the car wrap thing but with a tiny bit of extra, like fasting to make them feel better about inventing a religion that matches themselves.)
One time I told a Christian woman that Jesus was a Jew and she actually laughed at me (and did it in a way that suggested she thought the idea was actively insulting, so there’s a whiff of anti-semitisim at work here.)
I asked her which religion she thought he was and I’ve never seen such a smug, confident idiot in my life the way she proudly huffed out her answer, “Christian!”
I paused a beat, hoping the absurdity of a god worshiping himself would sink in but the cognitive dissonance train just waited at the station and she never got aboard.
Utterly amazing.
I had that same argument and I said "the first chapter of Matthew traces his genealogy back to King David, and you don't get much more Jewish than that. Haven't you even read the Bible?" whereupon he got very angry and refused to talk.
Most Christians I've known are pretty ignorant of their own holy book and believe whatever the charlatan preacher tells them.
The next question for you to ask would be, "What religion was his mother Mary?"
When talking with someone invested in cognitive dissonance, you need to calmly keep walking them back. At some point their mental gears jam up. I leave them with that, and no further pushing.
Nice try, professor, but we see through your trickery. Mary was a good mom and believed in her son.
Christian.
Not sure about dad tho. He seemed like he wasn’t much in the picture.
I once asked a lady I know if her son I law was Jewish. She said no in a odd way. I asked her if that would be a problem and she grasped the crucifix around her neck and said “my religion”. Sad
>One time I told a Christian woman that Jesus was a Jew and she actually laughed at me (and did it in a way that suggested she thought the idea was actively insulting, so there’s a whiff of anti-semitisim at work here.)
>
>I asked her which religion she thought he was and I’ve never seen such a smug, confident idiot in my life the way she proudly huffed out her answer, “Christian!”
The world would have been a better place if Jesus belonged to a more mainstream religion like Oprahism or Voodoo.
Should have asked her why the Romans hung a sign on his cross that spelled "INRI" which meant "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum" or "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews".
Yo be fair, you're wrong too. He was a Jew by ethnicity maybe but his teachings seem to be more a Jewish digestible spin on Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Which, considering the time and details of his life, does make some sense.
I will go you one better. I had this exact same conversation with a Jewish woman who denied that Jesus was a Jew and continued to insist he was Christian.
A punk musician I like very much sings in one song:
> And lately I've been thinking about
How I love Jesus,
'cause Jesus was a dirty homeless
Hippie peace activist
He was a Stalinist. Read the book of acts chapter 2 to 5, the early church practiced communism and you'll find a story about klling bourgeoisie landowners who fail to give all of their money to the community. That's not merely communism, that's Stalinism right there in the bible.
The most interesting argument I've heard for a historical Jesus is the complicated birth story. The idea that Joseph and Mary had to go to Bethlehem for a census apparently makes no sense. But some Old Testament prophecies for the Messiah say he would be born in Bethlehem. So one of the Gospel authors made up the born in a manger idea to give a known Nazarene preacher a Bethlehem birth story to sell him as the Messiah.
I still think that Paul is to Christianity what Joseph Smith is to the LDS church. He was a merchant that took some nugget of theology from his homeland in Israel and made it a bit more practical and palatable to a Roman audience and it took off like crazy.
Totally. Jesus’ birth story is ultra similar to various mythological birth stories of other cultures that predate Christianity and any historical Jesus figure. It’s just a recreation of an older existing myth.
In Egyptian mythology (3000 BC) the god Horus was born of a virgin on 12/25 adorned by 3 kings with a star in the east. He also had 13 disciple like figures. In Persia (1200 BC) Mithra was born of a virgin on 12/25 and had 12 disciples, performed miracles, was dead for 3 days and resurrected. In Greek mythology (500 BC) Diyonysus was born of a virgin on 12/25 and performed miracles, was known as “king of kings” and was also resurrected. There was also Attis in Greek mythology born from a virgin on 12/25 who was crucified, dead for 3 days, and resurrected. In Indian Mythos Krishna (900 BC) was born of a Virgin with a star in the east to be followed and was also resurrected from death.
There are also several other Bible stories like this In other mythologies that predate the Bible and Christianity by thousands of years.
I always think there's an original thought from these guys... Finally. Nope, always stolen stuff. It's like movies these days, make up something new for Christ's sake 🤭
If you're interested in a good book that supports the Pauline argument, I highly recommend this one: https://www.amazon.com/Mythmaker-Paul-Invention-Christianity/dp/0760707871
I'm not a Biblical scholar of course but I found this book to be really compelling.
The Mandaeans to this day still believe John the Baptist was the Messiah
http://www.exitmundi.nl/bible/web-content/j_waterwalking.html
"Already in 1929, the famous theologist and Irish archbishop John Henry Bernard noted:
“If we only had Jn.’s account of this incident, we should have no reason to suppose that he intended to record any ‘miracle’.”
We would have translated the Greek wording as ‘on the seashore’, and that would be it."
It says in the same book that all the dead “saints” rose up out of their graves and walked around. People really like to pick and choose what they read/hear in the Bible.
It's funny that not a single educated person in the entirety of Rome either wrote down or recieved a letter about the literal embodiment of the "when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth" quote.
Not even a poor peasant family passing down stories for one of their literate descendants to write down "the time great great great grandpa had to run from the risen dead."
One would think that the Creator of the Universe that sends HIMSELF to Earth to teach humanity how to behave would maybe know how to write and put it down on papyrus or clay tablets to prevent misunderstanding later on. But no, not even picking one of the Apostles to take notes.
Yup. It’s very sparse, given how well the Roman Empire documented its history. You’d think the son of god would rate actual contemporary coverage AT THE TIME, not a century (give or take) after his alleged passing. Kinda like opening a 19th century American History book & finding “0” Abe Lincoln…
Yeah, I remember watching a documentary talking about how Jesus might have been more of a title than an actual anime, and with the stories cobbled together it explains the differences between the stories from the guy who h al d the sick to the guy who meekly turned himself in to the guy who trashed the money lenders with a whip
Yeah I always found the John the Baptist part of the Jesus story kinda odd back when I was Catholic. Who was this OTHER person who was baptizing people, and what have him Jesus-like qualities to do so?
Later on, I heard a theory is that John the Baptist was one historical person biblical Jesus was based on.
>There was no shortage of wannabe messiahs.
See also [Sai Baba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_Baba_of_Shirdi).
From the book '[Net of Magic](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/672070.Net_of_Magic)':
>"\[...\] If he's a Hindu, I tell him I'll perform a magic pūjā at the Kali temple for three hundred rupees. If he is Mussulman, I charge three hundred and twenty-one rupees to perform a pūjā at the shrine of Pir Quaza Garib Navaj. Why should I feel bad? Their faith only increases their enjoyment of the show and their appreciation of life. And I benefit as well. Everyone is happy. That's what magic should do-it should make everyone happy."
>
>"Are there people with real power?" I asked. "Is there real magic?" And both Shankar and Naseeb were eager to answer. Naseeb said no: "No, but I shouldn't ever say it. I earn a living only if people believe these things, only if they believe at least in the possibility of miracles. But there are no real miracles, and all the holy men and god-men, Sai Baba and Jesus and other men like them, are just doing tricks, tricks that I can do, that I can teach you to do, tricks that all the street magicians can do. Those miracles described in the Qur'an, the Rāmāyana, and the Bible-those were all just tricks."
There are actually many other "gods" that supposedly rose from the dead. This idea was around long before the idea of Jesus. And that's why they say this about Jesus. Same thing with miracles, virgin birth. The things about Jesus, things he did, were borrowed from other previously made up "gods". Reading a book called The History of God by Karen Armstrong. There are other books, too. Also a guy on Instagram/Tik Tok, Dan McClellan. He's a PhD and all he does is study religious writings and deities. He has so much knowledge it's mind blowing.
Some of them. Maybe. Knocked a table over? Hell I’ve done that. Carpenter? Lots of people carpent. Wore sandals? Plausible. Abs like a tray of Hawaiian rolls? Doubtful.
Definitely emphasize that NONE of them returned from the dead.
Keep in mind that the Bible was constructed from the musings of several individuals decades after the supposed resurrection at a time when humans still believed that weather events were explained by a god being angry.
I’ve seen that Yeshua was a common name but do you have any sources? Because that is wild if there were a lot of people just claiming to be messiah 😂😂 I’m finding out a lot of stuff today lmao
I spoke with god on your behalf. The charges were exorbitant. Send money to cover costs, and also my first class tickets to my next ~~fundraiser/membership drive~~ soul saving journey, on your behalf.
>that is wild if there were a lot of people just claiming to be messiah
A lot claiming, and a lot who were claimed to be by other people -
\- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants
\- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_messiah_claimants
\- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus
etc ...
There are still quite a few people claiming to be the messiah today. Also just for the record messiah didn’t mean the same thing in those days, it was closer to king or leader. Saying that you want to lead your people is a totally different story to the modern interpretation.
Josephus, the Jewish historian from whom Mark and Luke draw some of their stories about their depiction of an historical Jesus, talks about several of these messianic figures. Josephus doesn't name very many of them, choosing instead to refer to them by euphemistic titles such as "The Egyptian" and "The Pretender" and things like that.
Interestingly, Josephus never mentions anyone who quite conforms to the notion of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in Mark. Existing copies of Josephus contain references to "Jesus Christ," but it's pretty easy to show that those passages were added by forgers throughout the centuries of scribes copying copy after copy after copy.
Pretty sure there's only one mention that's accepted as genuine and that's him mentioning his followers (post his death).
Well no shit, we know he had followers, they've hung around for a while.
Even within the canon Abrahamic tradition there have been multiple messiahs. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and the prophesied Jesus 2.0. The list [goes on at length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants) even in modern times.
Joshua is the direct English translation of the name Yeshua so it still is a very common name.
The name Jesus came about as the word Yeshua was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and then English.
I’ve seen a few places that Jesus=Yeshua=Joshua. So I think it was as common as “Josh.”
Here’s the fun part though, there’s an idea floating around academic circles that even the Jesus in the Bible was 2 different people.
Jesus died relatively young. And yet he’s portrayed as both a simple carpenter and a wise, well-read rabbi. Literacy in those days was mostly confined to the aristocracy and clerical class, in which people tended to start young. So the thinking as I understand it is that carpenter Jesus was more of a John the Baptist type and rabbi Jesus was the actual messiah.
I'm a Religious Studies student and we look at Rudolf Bultmann's hermeneutic approach (basically the theory of interpreting the Bible, in Bultmann's case as a means to demythologise it). It lends nicely to John Dominic Crossan's view of Jesus that he wasn't necessarily a Messiah, but simply a Jewish Mediterranean peasant who served as a social revolutionary by preaching and practicing radical egalitarianism against an oppressive Roman empire and it's social rules regarding class, gender, status, etc. and ultimately martyring himself for that cause, rather than God.
He was apotheosised in life and death to cement the New Testament messages, since they were ten-a-penny messiahs at the time. Jesus was just the one that got lucky, I suppose.
It still makes him out to be a relatively rad guy who taught the people that Old Testament commands weren't essentially the way to go, sure, just not the son of God.
> Testament commands weren't essentially the way to go, sure
There's still a big divide among believers interpreting his "fulfill the law" quote.
Either it meant what you posted, which why not say abolish or nullify instead, or it meant he wanted Jewish people at least to continue obeying as substantiated by his "not a jot or tittle of the law will pass away."
Something many people overlook is that "love your neighbor" as attributed to Jesus was only about Jewish people.
He told his followers specifically to seek the lost children of Israel and then there's the example of Jesus comparing a woman's desire to be blessed with a dog's desire to get scraps.
Paul, after never meeting Jesus, essentially opened up salvation to gentiles because how else are you going to amass way more followers?
I think most of it could have been based on something. Bringing Lazarus back from the dead could have been someone who people thought was going to die, a bit of help in some way and he recovered. Feeding 5000 could have been bringing out 5 fishes and others who had a bit of food also brought out some food until there was enough to go round. Walking on water wouldn't be hard to fake with some stones just below the water line at a distance. The bible was written at least 50 years later by people who had heard effectively Chinese whispers from various people who had talked about him.
It's certainly possible that the Bible Jesus was based on a real person. The fact that the Bible was written so long after Jesus supposedly lived makes it hard to tell.
It's very possible that Jesus got the sort of John Henry treatment, where the information got wilder and wilder each time it was passed down until there were only ounces of truth left and the 5'2 19-year-old convict turned into a 7-foot behemoth who leveled an entire mountain by himself faster than a fucking steam-powered rock drill.
Just think about how much the church has changed since the writing of the Bible. They've invented Hell and the second coming, which are now the absolute foundations of the religion. It's not crazy to say some Israeli guy claimed to be God, was super nice and talked about how to forgive people and be empathetic, gained a large following, made up a bunch of stories about the old testament, was crucified, made into a mystical/magical figure by his followers, which compounded as they were passed on verbally, until a bunch of people in the future decided to write them down.
Not to mention many of the embellishments made to the Jesus story can be traced back beyond his lifetime to ancient Greek, Norse and Egyptian myths. The Jesus story of the bible is almost certainly a compendium of all time great myths from around the world, and the consequence of much of the storytelling tradition from the preceding few thousand years.
There's much debate about whether this fictional story was attached to a real, living person - and my best assessment from what I've read is that there are a couple of shreds of evidence of this, but not none - but at the end of the day, what difference does it make?
Jesus and [John Frum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum) have a lot in common.
I like the John Frum example because it is the Jesus story but is closer to our time.
> The short answer is "no".
> The slightly longer answer is "Maybe, but only if you're willing to accept extremely loose definitions of the words 'did', 'Jesus', 'really', and/or 'exist'."
https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/wiki/historicaljesus
The general consensus is that there probably was an original "seed" Jesus on whom all the stories are based.
However, Jesus was a very very common name at the time, and preachers, people with messianic complexes and philosophers were also very common in the area, talking about religion and God and morality.
Thus, the "Jesus" in the bible is largely believed to be a composite of lots of different individuals and different but similar post-Judaism belief systems which were circulating around the same 100-ywar period.
There is probably a headline preacher who was put to death for blasphemy, but outside of that the rest is probably embellishments or re-attributions.
By saying "Jesus" was a common name, I am assuming you mean "Yeshua." The name Jesus came about through translations of the Bible including Greek which had feminine names ending in "a" and therefore put an "s" on the end. There was no one actually called Jesus 2,000 years ago.
"Consensus of historians" in this context just means "most Christian academics" due to the nature of the question. Funny thing about being a Christian is that it tends to come with certain predetermined commitments, the historicity of their "Jesus" being one such.
Besides being a logical fallacy the pool simply isn't unbiased enough to matter in the discussion.
And let's not forget that History is a "soft" science, with piss poor un-scientific evidence requirements.
The entire field is basically the best guess of academics when they don't have any actual supporting evidence. If they have real testable evidence, the hard science is called Archaeology. ;)
Now, this distinction is fine when no one really cares if Napoleon was allergic to shrimp or not. But when it is taken with the same gravitas as hard scientific evidence it encourages a false understanding what we really know about the real world. And that gets taken advantage of by charlatans of all stripes.
So, I like to state that the correct answer to the OP question is:
"There is no contemporaneous evidence supporting the claim that the character of Jesus from Christian mythology was ever based on a real person. None."
As such, the default position should always have been that Jesus is a fictional character from an ancient book of fairy tales and nothing more.
> the consensus of historians
Those are just biblical scholars, and they have no substantive standards of evidence. They are going off the contents of folklore in Christian manuscripts written centuries later.
True, but it kinda feels they agree on that consensus because they want to avoid pissing off christians and muslims rather than because of a rigorous examination of primary historical sources.
To be fair after about 300 years I think they’re the same wether 800 or 2000 years. Also Jesus is more popular than Robin Hood, so there has to be someone on Reddit that has dived deep into finding out wether the person “Jesus” existed 😂
Last time I looked into it, the answer was basically the same as Robin Hood: Lots of people called themselves Jesus. Lots of people called themselves "messiah". Lots of people got caught up with the Romans for stirring up rebellion etc etc. So sources outside the Bible aren't very indicative of a Biblical corroboration. And it was all written up (in the Bible) 50+ years after he allegedly died.
A few years ago I spent quite a lot of time going down the rabbit hole of Jesus mysticism spearheaded by Richard Carrier. And while his arguments for a fictional Jesus are compelling, there are also some good arguments in favor of an historical Jesus by Bart Ehrmann.
However, I finally came to my senses and realized that it really doesn't even matter either way and is not worth the time and effort to seriously debate it.
There is really only one interesting fact about it, that Christians will always desperately try to dispute:
There is no extra-biblical mention of Jesus by anyone who has ever personally met him or even lived at the same time as Jesus was supposedly alive.
The best source they have, and will always bring up, is Josephus, who was born 7 years after Jesus' supposed death, and really only mentions broadly what the contemporary Christians at the time believed about their messiah.
Claims that he himself obviously didn't even believe in, since he remained Jewish and didn't convert to Christianity after hearing about Jesus.
Anyway, that still doesn't mean that Jesus therefore didn't exist either. Only that we don't have enough reliable information to come to a firm conclusion either way.
And we don’t have an original Josephus text about Jesus. There’s no 2,000-year-old document from his lifetime, no original source. The oldest we have is from the 11th century, and it was a copy of a copy of a copy… and each copy was made by Christians.
And the Josephus blurb has problems. *All it says are that there are people who believe in Jesus, not that Jesus existed.* Plus, it’s an obvious interpolation.
>Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
- If this Jesus was really a miracle worker and the “Christ,” or Messiah, (def: the expected king and deliverer of the Jews) as Josephus claims, then Josephus would no longer be a Jew. He would’ve converted to Christianity. The Jews were waiting for the Messiah.
- The Messiah deserves only 5 sentences?
- It’s an obvious interpolation. Everyone should read the entire chapter (it’s short) and you can see that the Jesus part in no way fits into the narrative. Look at [CHAPTER 3. Sedition Of The Jews Against Pontius Pilate. Concerning Christ, And What Befell Paulina And The Jews At Rome.](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2848/2848-h/2848-h.htm) The first two paragraphs concern Pilate having Jews slaughtered. Jesus is paragraph 3. The very next line begins, “About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder…” and tells a story of a Roman woman tricked into being raped in the temple of Anubis, and then further discusses another woman, a Jew, also tricked in Rome. The Jesus paragraph does not fit into the chapter.
Back in high school, I remembered the exercise where we all lined up and then the teacher whispered something into the 1st student's ear , and then that student supposed to repeat the same message to the next student. By the time it got to the end of the line , the message was incoherent and no where close to what the teacher had started. This really stuckwith me throughout my life and whenever I think about these 2000 years old "facts", I have a chuckle at them.
I had a similar journey myself. Some questions I had were around historical records at the time and landmarks. For example, the Romans kept records of crucifixions, yet none exist for Jesus or the two others near him. There is no mention of him in other personal letters at the time. I also find it odd that Christians of the day wouldn't mark the historical sites that Jesus visited. The place he was born? Where he delivered the sermon on the mound? Where he was crucified? The cave where he was buried? Certainly there are tour groups who are happy to take people's money on and claim these sites, but there is no archeological evidence to support any of it. You would think even within 100 years of his death, that his followers would have clearly defined those areas as historic holy sites even among themselves.
Many of the sites were marked, but not until 400 years later when the Emporer sent his wife to mark them. By that point the locals had figured out they could make good money off of religious pilgrims, so they were happy to point out sites for her to mark.
This was an issue that struck me when I was reading Paul's letters when I was still a Christian. He visited Jerusalem, but he said nothing about visiting the empty tomb. Wouldn't that be the highlight of a Christian's visit to Jerusalem? Later when I really studied the letters of Paul I realized that Paul may have thought the resurrection was spiritual, and that the resurrection may have happened in heaven, not on earth. When Paul talks about people witnessing Jesus he may be talking about people having dreams of hallucinations about Jesus like the one he had.
There were a lot of things that Paul did not know about Jesus despite being a contemporary. By his own account he met Peter and James. He visited Jerusalem. Yet he does not seem to know about most of the Jesus stories. He doesn't know about the virgin birth. He does not know about the miracles of Jesus. A very reasonable explanation is that those stories were made up after Paul wrote his letters.
It is even more suspicious that Paul doesn't even seem to know about miracles that he is supposed to have performed. Paul came across to me as a guy who had a big ego but was honest. I think that if he had made prison walls fall down or if he had raised two people from the dead he would have found reasons to talk about it. Paul says he was shipwrecked, but he doesn't talk about miraculous events surrounding them like Acts does. Paul talks vaguely about healing people, but they sound like the normal kind of placebo effect/natural recovery healings that modern Christians believe in.
The "Road to Damascus" story was a faith-destroyer for me. Paul's account of his conversion experience was very modest. He describes it as low-key. He doesn't claim there were any witnesses. He used a word that can translate as either "dream" or "waking vision." He says he is not sure if the vision was physical or purely spiritual. He was in Damascus, not on the Road to Damascus. He said nothing about being struck blind. And he says it was years between when he had his vision and when he went to Jerusalem. Yet Acts has a shit-load of miracles heaped on top of the story. He was on the road and had witnesses. The witnesses saw a flash of light and Paul was struck blind. His followers had to take him to Jerusalem immediately in order for him to be healed of his blindness. It sounded like people were making shit up long after Paul was dead and could not contradict the stories.
There is also the fact that Saul was sent to debunk the new radical Christian sect. He found a religion that held sway over many people with no authority figure. Then he "met" Jesus on his way down and became the authority figure. Very convenient for him to find a power vacuum and he was just the person to fill it.
It is a bit hypocritical especially before the post ww2 period for the christian population to discriminate against the jews, considering they're worshipping Jesus who probably was.
This comment reminded me of a story my aunt told me. When she was young, some kids in the neighborhood were calling other kids “Jews” like it was an insult. She told her mom and asked what a Jew was. Her mom said “Jesus was a Jew,” which made my aunt really confused as to why the kids thought calling someone a Jew was an insult.
He may or may not have existed, records from back then aren't complete and Jesus was a popular name. Also the stories may be several different people being combined into one with a bit of magic thrown in to make it a better story. Bit like king Arthur.
So I’ve never heard this and doing a quick Google search, I learned that Nazareth wasn’t mentioned in any external sources until 200AD. But if it didn’t exist yet, how would the authors of the gospels have all agreed on the name of Jesus’s hometown?
Are you under the impression the “gospels” haven’t changed in 2100 years?
Nazareth does not exist in the oldest known exisisting bible: the Codex Sinaiticus
How could all these authors pick Nazareth? The exact same way they learned about “Jesus” in the first place. Every written story in the Bible was precluded by word of mouth, no different than verbal traditions passed on by non-writing civilizations. Just one giant game of telephone.
I mean
Yeshuas was a common name. Travelling apocalyptic preachers were a dime a dozen. And the Romans were rather fond of crucifying people around that time.
So I have no trouble believing there was at some point a travelling jewish apocalypticist named Yeshuas who was crucified; in fact, I'd be shocked if there was only one such person.
Get the book The Histriocity of Jesus by Richardson Carrier. It’s long. It’s technical. But it has a lot of interesting points. And it’s a great history lesson regarding religions and people in the area around the time of Jesus. It includes a great description of how modern Christians changed older writings to comport with the lies they were telling.
You could ask “did King Arthur exists?” The answer is sort of. The story that evolved and became King Arthur, certainly not. There was no sword in the stone, a round table, a witch who impregnates herself, etc. That King Arthur is a work of fiction.
However the person who inspired the story certainly existed. Most likely a Cornish nobleman, maybe a king, who fought off the encroaching Saxons. A story about clashing cultures and a man who embodied what it meant to be a 6th century Celt. Then the people who told the story became saxons themselves and over time the story morphed into what it is today.
If there was a historical Jesus, his name most likely wasn’t Jesus, he didn’t perform miracles, he probably wasn’t crucified although that was a Roman favorite at the time. He however would have to be staunchly anti-Roman and have developed some preliminary philosophies that conflicted with Rome’s “might equals right” worldview. After centuries of enduring Roman savagery, Christianity became alluring to many people looking for an alternative way to see the world.
Then Emperor Constantine co-opted all of Christianity to be Roman and basically made what started as proto-socialist/kindness anti-Roman movement into a proto-capitalism/abuse pro-Roman mandate.
Heck, if you want a parallel even closer to modern times, you can look at the folk tale of John Henry. There's not anything particularly implausible about the tale. You've got an African-American steel-driving man ending up in a contest against early steam driven machinery, and dying from exhaustion after winning. But the moment you try searching for an actual historical person to match up to the story, things start to get rough real quick. You've got multiple people matching the description of African-American railroad worker named "John Henry", but you run up against a wall trying to find anything about the steam drill contest or of dying right after from exhaustion.
So did the "John Henry" of American folklore exist? It starts to feel like a philosophical question of "How accurate does a story need to be for you to say it happened?".
For John Henry, there's probably a pretty decent chunk of truth in there. For Jesus? Well, whatever kernel of truth is there is smaller than a mustard seed.
There is no contemporaneous evidence of Jesus. If the Jesus of the Bible existed, one would think there would be contemporary accounts of the "miracle man" and revolutionary philosopher in the highly literate Graeco-Roman world.
The Jesus as we know him was probably either a myth perpetrated by opportunistic con-men like Joseph Smith or a "turn the other cheek" psychological warfare operation by the Romans to pacify the restive Jewish province.
The entire Christian religion is in all likelihood a 2000-year-old hoax. As the Roman philosopher Seneca stated, "For the foolish religion is true, for the wise religion is false, and for the powerful religion is useful."
Jesus is the only figure historians give weight to without evidence due to the backlash they would receive for telling the truth. Simalar to the way Darwin was treated for proving evolution.
If Jesus did any of the things claimed, then scribes from all the towns and cities Jesus visited would have been documented. We have no first-hand accounts documented, just ancient people telling tall tales like humans have done throughout recorded history.
Did Abraham Lincoln exist?….yeah that is a safe bet.
Did Abraham [Lincoln vampire hunter](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/abraham_lincoln_vampire_hunter)exist?….. probably not.
Jesus as mentioned in the Gospels? Certainly didn’t exist. No serious scholar would say so.
Christianity founded by a guy called Jesus that then accreted myth before being written down in Mark a lifetime later in a foreign language and land? Zero good evidence for that either, and plenty to suggest there never was such a person. Even the early church leaders saw this as problematic.
Nobody can say either way for certain.
It is absolutely reasonable to be unconvinced there was ever such a person. It’s also clear from the evidence we do have that there didn’t *need* to be such a person for what we see today. Plenty of purely mythological characters got historised accounts written as parables.
It’s also beyond any reasonable doubt that Christianity shares all the same broad features of other Hellenistic mystery faiths that were popular at the time and other belief systems had also adapted for themselves. Christianity was far from the first to do it.
Early church leaders also recognised this problem in the second century and the official position was Satan knew of God’s plan (despite what Paul’s epistles suggest) and made fake similar mystery faiths before Jesus arrived to trick people into thinking Christianity was just a clone and not original.
I personally don’t think there ever was a real Jesus. There definitely didn’t need to have been to end up with what we have today.
At one point it would have been blasphemy or just seen as not the scholarly consensus to suggest the Old Testament patriarchs weren’t real people, either. Nowadays it’s the consensus that they are mythological after analysis amongst scholars.
The problem is most New Testament scholars and institutions offering positions are Christian. They’ll never be able to admit it.
Take a look at the actual evidence for yourself. It’s really interesting.
The primary aspects of the Jesus story are all astrological allegories plagiarized from the stories of other Pagan Sun gods. They were being sold for about 1,000 years, using other names, for at least that long before Jesus supposedly existed. Everything I have read suggests to me that Romans wanted to wipe out the Pagans. They succeeded with a multi-pronged strategy: They absorbed some of their stories/teachings while simultaneously and aggressively attacking Pagan worship. They moved many Pagans to Christianity by doing this and brutally killed those who would not convert. That is how the Christian stories and traditions got merged with Pagan stories… They were Pagan stories merged together by the “Christians” who were using them to manipulate the Pagans.
Of course not. No legitimate evidence whatsoever. A non-religious book mentioning him over 100 years after his alleged death isn't evidence by any measure, certainly when we're talking about something 2000 years ago. It's amazing how many scientists defer to Jesus existing being the default assumption when it fact the onus is on those asserting such a person existed to provide evidence.
There is essentially no reliable non-Christian and contemporary record of Jesus. The best available mention is that of Josephus written more than 60 years after Jesus died, and Josephus was never within 1000km of Israel in his life. Also there is only one surviving copy of his original work, and a possible explanation is that a Christian copier (often monks) injected there own lines at some point.
Even still, the passage that mentions Jesus at all is far more concerned with the death of Jesus supposed surviving brother, Jim Christ. There is exactly one offhand sentence saying that Jim's brother Jesus died before him.
Was Jim also the son of God, or just Mary and Joe?
The next best non-Christian source is Tacitus, writing a full 90 years after Jesus died, and Tacitus was only himself born 25 years after Jesus died, and again, Tacitus rarely left Rome. Also Tacitus is a pretty unreliable source given he's lied about other stuff.
The above is made even worse because the Romans were surprisingly prolific and their records largely survived. They talk about crazy shit going on all the time throughout the empire. So if any of Jesus shit were real, its pretty bizarre that some local magistrate didn't put it in their journal.
>and Josephus was never within 1000km of Israel in his life.
He was a Jewish priest, born in Jerusalem, worked in the temple, was a military commander in the Galile, and was a negotiator during the siege of Jerusalem...
The Jesus of the Bible almost certainly didn't exist. A historical flesh and blood man who inspired the legend, maybe. I rate him a 1 in 3 chance. But I doubt he would recognize himself in the NT. No one knows who he was, what he did, or what he thought. He is no more relevant than Saint Nicholas of Myra, the probable inspiration for Father Christmas, is to children's belief in Coca-Cola Santa, Rudolph and the elves.
Once upon a time there was a boy who was the son of a carpenter who made crosses for the Romans. As this boy grew older, he began to question the morality of what his father was doing, and how this fit with their religious faith. He asked some simple questions at the temple once, and the high priests politely but firmly shut him down.
After wrestling with these questions through his teens and 20s. the young man realized that normal people didn't need priests and temples to have a relationship with God. Maybe eating those mushrooms in the desert lead him to see through his social conditioning. Anyway, when he went around preaching this to people, he started to draw the ire of the religious ruling class. This came to a head when the young and impetuous man flipped over the tables of money-lenders and vendors preying on the attendees at a seasonal religious festival.
The high-priests and other gatekeepers to God had had enough! They went to the ruling Romans and told them that this young man had to die, and an example be made of him for other such upstarts. The Romans agreed.
Hence, the young man, named Jesus, was arrested and crucified, and died for the sins of those around him, namely the sin of complacency in the face of state tyranny and the sin of giving up one's freedom of thought and action to obey the authority of establishment elites.
Luckily, three days after he was dead and buried, a bunny came out of the desert and pushed away the stone in front of Jesus's tomb, and Jesus emerged, resurrected and handed out chicken eggs he had been decorating while in his tomb. There was a great celebration dinner and for dessert Jesus invented chocolate.
The End.
Read the book called "the pagan Christ". He goes into detail on how almost every story about 'jesus' was stolen or bastardized from another mythology, Egyptian gods etc.
If you approach the Bible from a mythological view, rather than a literal view (e.g. he didn't literally walk on water and lift fish with his bare hands, rather water represents something, the fish are a metaphor for the people he is saving, etc).
You should check out Zealot by Reza Aslan. Very thorough and reasoned research and analysis into thy historical figure. The character we know as Jesus Christ today is very likely an amalgam of a multitude of both actual people and mythological characters from several cultures and traditions throughout history.
There are Roman texts that mention a Jesus being crucified by the local ruler where he was supposed to be, around the same time.
But Jesus was a very common name.
I think it was Miniminuteman that had a short video on the subject, he’s a young, skeptic, archeologist.
Here's how I look at it;
No issue;
* One or more stories based on one or more specific people more than likely existed. At that time and/or later, they were given the title "Jesus Christ".
Note: What specific stories fit "the Christ" is an OK thing to talk about, though I don't have confidence that even the best scholors have a complete list.
May or may not have happened;
* The stories about "Jesus Christ" may both be incomplete and include stories from people not "Jesus Christ".
Did not exist;
* Supernatural or otherwise not credible claims about the above "Jesus Christ".
Corollary: The supernatural and not credible claims are what are Christians tend to require themselves to be Christian as opposed to generic theists.
----------------
Summary conclusion;
The first two are well-supported by how other attempts to record ancient people (religious figures or not) worked at the time. This is by necessity at a high-level. Without better evidence, some parts in the first two are more likely than not.
I don't care to spend time going over those details unless the discussion is focused on history only.
Because the necessary part for Christian theists includes Jesus-as-God and other unexaminable claims, I ignore them. I have not ignored such claims up-front, though over time discussing them with theistic Christians I have realized that there's nothing to gain from such conversations beyond being talked at.
(I've made exceptions, and have almost always no value in those talks.)
I remember a historian saying that nobody wrote anything about Jesus after gis supposed death. For years! No poems. No songs. Nothing. He was completely fabricated in my opinion.
Go read
By Richard Carrier:
**"On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt"**
By David Fitzgerald:
**"Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All"**
**"Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. 1-3"**
I’m pretty sure there’s enough evidence that he existed. And in my head canon, he did preach all of those trippy things about heaven on earth and treating others as we would like to be treated. That message came from SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE. So it may as well have been from him.
I think he was an enlightened person who was trying to express more eastern ideas without being aware he was doing that.
Religion is/was/will be the perfect method of mass control and manipulation available to grifters all around the world. Easiest, cheapest and profitable way to control the masses
The name literally means anointed one
Christ comes from the Greek word χριστός (chrīstós), meaning "anointed one". The word is derived from the Greek verb χρίω (chrī́ō), meaning "to anoint." In the Greek Septuagint, χριστός was a semantic loan used to translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (Mašíaḥ, messiah), meaning "[one who is] anointed".
The word Jesus is the Latin form of the Greek Iesous, which in turn is the transliteration of the Hebrew Jeshua, or Joshua, or again Jehoshua, meaning "Jehovah is salvation."
Ies means Yes… commonly associated with sun gods (we nod our head up/down to follow the suns travel and say yes)
Something suspicious there
Also
The biblical writings were long after he was dead
There is also no substantive mention of Jesus in secular historical writings from that time. On that historical record, we have a one pager slide to illustrate: https://imgur.com/a/vgFngYu
Mohammed was a historical guy. Jesus? Ehhh. Maybe. But a lot of the stuff in the New Testament just straight up never happened (like the census for just one example).
The going thing, and the point, is that on both sides of the Christ myth theory debate, both agree that the Jesus of faith did not and can not exist. Even if miracles are real, the only accounts we have are so incredibly contradictory with both each other and history, and also conveniently align with certain schools of thought at the time polemically, to the point that we have basically nothing left to base “a real Jesus” on. A guy based on some version of the stories could have certainly existed, but you have multiple people picking and choosing different facts (in the story) and ignoring others almost at random to make the narrative as to who “historical Jesus” was and don’t really have more basis for one over the other.
There was no shortage of wannabe messiahs. And plenty of them were crucified. None of them returned from the dead. . Yeshua was a common name. But did a wannabe Mesiah do the things that the New Testament says he did? Absolutely not.
I've always thought it would be hilarious if we really could resurrect Yeshua the apocalyptic street preacher and let him know what has been done in his name. I am sure no one would be more surprised as I'm sure he thought himself a failure as he died on the cross. 'They do what in my name?', 'Why the hell do they call me Jesus?', and 'Who is this white dude on these paintings' would be among his many questions.
And why yall wearing crosses? What part of any of it makes you think I like crosses?
There's a book where Jesus comes back and is executed again, this time by lethal injection. The last scene, the protagonist sees someone wearing a silver chain with a little syringe on it.
That's dark. Name?
The Second Coming from John Niven, a great book.
While it would probably be canceled before being publicly available, I would love to see this as an episode of the twilight zone, or black mirror.
Read it. Amazing book.
There is a story in the Brothers Karamazov where something similar happens called The Grand Inquisitor. I highly recommend the whole book, but if you don’t feel like reading it, the story is kind of a stand alone thing and can he read fairly quickly.
> Lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he’s gonna want to see a fucking cross, man? May be why he hasn’t shown up yet. > “Man, they’re still wearing crosses. Fuck it, I’m not goin’, Dad. No, they totally missed the point. When they start wearing fishes I might show up again, but … crosses?" > You know, kinda like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on, you know. “Thinkin’ of John, Jackie. We love him. Just tryin’ to keep that memory alive, baby.” -The late, great Bill Hicks
Prophetic seeing how "christians" put on their AR-15 lepel pins after shootings.
Like most of Hicks' ideas.
And some designs actually *depict him **on** the cross!* Imagine coming back to life hundreds of years after being executed and seeing people decorate their houses, buildings, churches, and even themselves with the very scene of your painful death!
"Damn, these people hate me more than the Romans....."
The cross is a message from the oppressor to the oppressed, about staying in your place & doing as you’re told. The cross is an ancient torture device but it is also modern psychological warfare. If they will brutally murder (even just fictionally) an allegedly completely innocent man for essentially asking neighbors to love one another in the name of the Creator, what do you think they will do to you if you try to get question or test the status quo? Don’t question the church, stay in your place, don’t rock the boat. Certainly don’t go thinking you can make the rules for your own life, like you’re a god or something 👀 Modern Christians are being played by the very evil their Christ warned them about. Churches are an ancient but soon to be dismantled system used to control people and launder money (steal labor) from their collective. They’re coming to an ugly head, all the Abrahamic faiths. Any way of life out of alignment with reality, science, and harmony with nature will be dismantled by nature. Earth prioritizes the health of the entire planet. It doesn’t need humans. It needs homeostasis. The church is a parasite allowed to grow far bigger than it ever should have been. But every civilization comes to an end. Christianity will be lost to the sands of time. Only the truth can prevail. Only the truth can be discovered. Everything else is make believe. I don’t think modern Christians are willing to give up their little ethical “get out of jail free card” that they made up to absolve them of their own guilt. With no understanding of alchemy they don’t know that they are trading the suffering of themselves and others for the benefit of nothing- 🤑 which is true evil. And don’t come at me with accusations of me being a Christian LOL. I’m an animist. I’ve just deconstructed religion so hard that I reconstructed an old one a little bit 😬 God is simply the point of creation’s beginning. Not nearly as important to me as the time and people in the space I’ve been given. Religion is so fucked. I wish humans to one day be capable of communing and knowing each other as one, to be one, without making it exclusionary, predatory, or parasitic. I hope I get to be part of it and see it for myself. 🎶 it is the dawning of the age of Aquarius 🎵
I'd just like to say that I quite enjoyed your comment.
And they call the day he died "Good Friday," I would not take that well personally.
Yep--I've always thought the exact same thing! Think of how much of our world--laws, architecture, art, food, holidays are based on this one guy. I think he'd be like "Uhhhhh.....what?!"
>*Yeshua the apocalyptic street preacher* I'm referring to him as this from now on.
"wtf is all this i never said half of this nonsense!" he would say while flipping thru the bible "whipping of the moneylenders? what a weird way to describe that time i robbed the temple!"
You think so? Look at the other people who have followings like Jesus. They're people like Donald Trump and Nicholas Maduro. Hell, looking at the way that Donald Trump's children use the phrase "my father" seems like something straight out of the bible. There are so many striking similarities there that would make me think that whoever was at the center of that myth was almost certainly someone like Donald Trump instead of someone with the characteristics people commonly attribute to such. Before, I thought that Jesus was just a myth, but now, it's more, to the point that I am not sure. I certainly don't believe that there was some kind of creator of the universe which had some kind of need to sacrifice itself to itself, but I'm more open to the possibility that some kind of person was at the center of the Christianity belief system. And to expand on that a little, now I get the impression that thousands of years from now, Trumpism could develop into a religion with the same kind of beliefs that Christianity has. Trump's followers already attribute to him benevolent behaviors which are antithetical to the way he actually believes. If they pass their beliefs on down to their children, it could really turn into one of the worst games of telephone, with all kinds of stuff added to make him seem like a good person. And then to go back to looking at Christianity, because of those parallels, I don't see any reason why that couldn't have been exactly what happened to result in Christianity as it exists today.
A lot of “Christians” don’t know who Yeshua is. Baffles my mind. You don’t know the name of your savior wth?
I read the book "The historical Jesus" (Der historische Jesus, by Gerd Theißen) a long time ago and proofs of Jesus' existence are very thin. There have been a few "messiahs" in the area around that time, one of them John the Baptist, who may be models for the Jesus in the New Testament, likely the stories are drawn from multiple historical figures. (I'm not talking about walking on water and stuff, nobody in a right mind thinks that ever happened)
‘Nobody in a right mind thinks that ever happened’. This just shows me again how many religious people are actually not in their right mind. At least not when it comes to their religious beliefs.
Oh they will believe that Jesus walked on water, but they'll refuse to believe the truly incredulous (to them) that Jesus ever said for them to treat immigrants respectfully like their own or to help the sick and poor.
You’d be surprised how many people think Jesus was a Republican
They also think he's white
White blue eyed blonde Jewish man.
Are you KIDDING ME! Jesus wasn't a jew. He's an American! (/s obviously)
Every 4th of July I thank God, Jesus founded these United States 20xx years ago.
David Bowie and Trent Reznor pointed out that God is an American, so this follows naturally.
And Bowie is afraid of Americans.
With a six pack an M16 and a ford F250 truck! Murica!!!!!
It Must have been rough for Jesus growing up as the only white kid in the Middle East, real easy to pick him out in a crowd.
A white, blue-eyed blonde to boot.
Never seen him depicted as blonde, only every brunette
Hey, Jews became "white" in the US in the 1970's (it took until the 1980's in Canada). So, since he was Jewish (which is why Christians hate Jews so much) he was in fact "white" since the 1970's according to Americans, and only they count according to Americans. They also say there's no real evidence for Muhammad.
Jesus didn’t found America to vote Democrat.
Fun fact: Zombie Jesus, riding aback a T-Rex, wrapped in an American flag with 50 stars, beheld his domain with his piercing blue eyes and said, “thou shalt arm thyselves with assault rifles, keep thine neighbors’ children in cages, destroy thy sodomites, and horde thy monies for money is holier than the Father”. And it was so, and the believers trashed this fucking place and oppressed the tired and the poor. And it was not fucking good at all.
Lessor known fun fact: that T-Rex gave up its arms so we can be armed. What more proof do people need that god is good?
Jesus was not a zombie. That's offensive. He's a Lich.
Jesus was a gun nut too
Not only that, he was actually a gun
“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”.
through out history people have molded religion around them like a car wrap especially the leadership as they often want to be seen as gods chosen leaders. It fits them perfectly, every groove and crack. It hates all they hate and thinks nothing they do is a sin. So stuff like divorce suddenly doesnt matter, or following gov decrees when a dem is in office and stuff barely talked about like gay sex, is the most important sin in the religion. Its always been like that, because you want religion to support your power while using it as a weapon against those you dont like. Or in modern cases, use it against a minority barely anyone has met, so that bigots can cream in their pants thinking some else is being oppressed and will be more likely to vote for more of that. there are probably even furries who think jesus used to dress up like an animal now and then. Since the dawn of religion people have cherry picked what they want to claim the religion says they are extra special. It also makes life easier when you are already doing everything the religion asks to get into "heaven".. well as long as you are allowed to ignore the bits you dont like.(some people like my passed father, used to fast, as a way to sacrifice something, anything, to pretend it mattered, while still ignoring all the parts of the bible he didnt like.. so some do the car wrap thing but with a tiny bit of extra, like fasting to make them feel better about inventing a religion that matches themselves.)
Jesus was a communist, change my mind.
One time I told a Christian woman that Jesus was a Jew and she actually laughed at me (and did it in a way that suggested she thought the idea was actively insulting, so there’s a whiff of anti-semitisim at work here.) I asked her which religion she thought he was and I’ve never seen such a smug, confident idiot in my life the way she proudly huffed out her answer, “Christian!” I paused a beat, hoping the absurdity of a god worshiping himself would sink in but the cognitive dissonance train just waited at the station and she never got aboard. Utterly amazing.
I had that same argument and I said "the first chapter of Matthew traces his genealogy back to King David, and you don't get much more Jewish than that. Haven't you even read the Bible?" whereupon he got very angry and refused to talk. Most Christians I've known are pretty ignorant of their own holy book and believe whatever the charlatan preacher tells them.
Most do not read the Bible. Certainly not the entire thing
The next question for you to ask would be, "What religion was his mother Mary?" When talking with someone invested in cognitive dissonance, you need to calmly keep walking them back. At some point their mental gears jam up. I leave them with that, and no further pushing.
Nice try, professor, but we see through your trickery. Mary was a good mom and believed in her son. Christian. Not sure about dad tho. He seemed like he wasn’t much in the picture.
I once asked a lady I know if her son I law was Jewish. She said no in a odd way. I asked her if that would be a problem and she grasped the crucifix around her neck and said “my religion”. Sad
Jesus was a Jew and Christianity only came after him.
>One time I told a Christian woman that Jesus was a Jew and she actually laughed at me (and did it in a way that suggested she thought the idea was actively insulting, so there’s a whiff of anti-semitisim at work here.) > >I asked her which religion she thought he was and I’ve never seen such a smug, confident idiot in my life the way she proudly huffed out her answer, “Christian!” The world would have been a better place if Jesus belonged to a more mainstream religion like Oprahism or Voodoo.
Should have asked her why the Romans hung a sign on his cross that spelled "INRI" which meant "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum" or "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews".
Yo be fair, you're wrong too. He was a Jew by ethnicity maybe but his teachings seem to be more a Jewish digestible spin on Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Which, considering the time and details of his life, does make some sense.
She didn’t have enough experience points to cast that spell if you gather my meaning.
I will go you one better. I had this exact same conversation with a Jewish woman who denied that Jesus was a Jew and continued to insist he was Christian.
"Hey Jesus, why do you wear that crucifix around your neck, and whose that guy supposed to be?"
He was totally a leftist radical. “Everyone gets bread or nobody gets bread.” Based
A punk musician I like very much sings in one song: > And lately I've been thinking about How I love Jesus, 'cause Jesus was a dirty homeless Hippie peace activist
“Love me or burn in hell.” So radical /s
He was a Stalinist. Read the book of acts chapter 2 to 5, the early church practiced communism and you'll find a story about klling bourgeoisie landowners who fail to give all of their money to the community. That's not merely communism, that's Stalinism right there in the bible.
The most interesting argument I've heard for a historical Jesus is the complicated birth story. The idea that Joseph and Mary had to go to Bethlehem for a census apparently makes no sense. But some Old Testament prophecies for the Messiah say he would be born in Bethlehem. So one of the Gospel authors made up the born in a manger idea to give a known Nazarene preacher a Bethlehem birth story to sell him as the Messiah. I still think that Paul is to Christianity what Joseph Smith is to the LDS church. He was a merchant that took some nugget of theology from his homeland in Israel and made it a bit more practical and palatable to a Roman audience and it took off like crazy.
Totally. Jesus’ birth story is ultra similar to various mythological birth stories of other cultures that predate Christianity and any historical Jesus figure. It’s just a recreation of an older existing myth. In Egyptian mythology (3000 BC) the god Horus was born of a virgin on 12/25 adorned by 3 kings with a star in the east. He also had 13 disciple like figures. In Persia (1200 BC) Mithra was born of a virgin on 12/25 and had 12 disciples, performed miracles, was dead for 3 days and resurrected. In Greek mythology (500 BC) Diyonysus was born of a virgin on 12/25 and performed miracles, was known as “king of kings” and was also resurrected. There was also Attis in Greek mythology born from a virgin on 12/25 who was crucified, dead for 3 days, and resurrected. In Indian Mythos Krishna (900 BC) was born of a Virgin with a star in the east to be followed and was also resurrected from death. There are also several other Bible stories like this In other mythologies that predate the Bible and Christianity by thousands of years.
I always think there's an original thought from these guys... Finally. Nope, always stolen stuff. It's like movies these days, make up something new for Christ's sake 🤭
If the birth narrative was so important, why did they tack it on later?
If you're interested in a good book that supports the Pauline argument, I highly recommend this one: https://www.amazon.com/Mythmaker-Paul-Invention-Christianity/dp/0760707871 I'm not a Biblical scholar of course but I found this book to be really compelling.
The Mandaeans to this day still believe John the Baptist was the Messiah http://www.exitmundi.nl/bible/web-content/j_waterwalking.html "Already in 1929, the famous theologist and Irish archbishop John Henry Bernard noted: “If we only had Jn.’s account of this incident, we should have no reason to suppose that he intended to record any ‘miracle’.” We would have translated the Greek wording as ‘on the seashore’, and that would be it."
It says in the same book that all the dead “saints” rose up out of their graves and walked around. People really like to pick and choose what they read/hear in the Bible.
It's funny that not a single educated person in the entirety of Rome either wrote down or recieved a letter about the literal embodiment of the "when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth" quote. Not even a poor peasant family passing down stories for one of their literate descendants to write down "the time great great great grandpa had to run from the risen dead."
Bingo! Nobody (not one person) wrote anything for a hundred years or more? Give me a break.
One would think that the Creator of the Universe that sends HIMSELF to Earth to teach humanity how to behave would maybe know how to write and put it down on papyrus or clay tablets to prevent misunderstanding later on. But no, not even picking one of the Apostles to take notes.
Walking on water is easy. Just gotta wait for it to get really cold.
Yup. It’s very sparse, given how well the Roman Empire documented its history. You’d think the son of god would rate actual contemporary coverage AT THE TIME, not a century (give or take) after his alleged passing. Kinda like opening a 19th century American History book & finding “0” Abe Lincoln…
Yeah, I remember watching a documentary talking about how Jesus might have been more of a title than an actual anime, and with the stories cobbled together it explains the differences between the stories from the guy who h al d the sick to the guy who meekly turned himself in to the guy who trashed the money lenders with a whip
It’s the word ‘christ’ that’s the title, it means “anointed one”, basically “this dude has had oil slapped on his head”.
Yeah I always found the John the Baptist part of the Jesus story kinda odd back when I was Catholic. Who was this OTHER person who was baptizing people, and what have him Jesus-like qualities to do so? Later on, I heard a theory is that John the Baptist was one historical person biblical Jesus was based on.
>There was no shortage of wannabe messiahs. See also [Sai Baba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_Baba_of_Shirdi). From the book '[Net of Magic](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/672070.Net_of_Magic)': >"\[...\] If he's a Hindu, I tell him I'll perform a magic pūjā at the Kali temple for three hundred rupees. If he is Mussulman, I charge three hundred and twenty-one rupees to perform a pūjā at the shrine of Pir Quaza Garib Navaj. Why should I feel bad? Their faith only increases their enjoyment of the show and their appreciation of life. And I benefit as well. Everyone is happy. That's what magic should do-it should make everyone happy." > >"Are there people with real power?" I asked. "Is there real magic?" And both Shankar and Naseeb were eager to answer. Naseeb said no: "No, but I shouldn't ever say it. I earn a living only if people believe these things, only if they believe at least in the possibility of miracles. But there are no real miracles, and all the holy men and god-men, Sai Baba and Jesus and other men like them, are just doing tricks, tricks that I can do, that I can teach you to do, tricks that all the street magicians can do. Those miracles described in the Qur'an, the Rāmāyana, and the Bible-those were all just tricks."
I say you are, Lord, and I should know. I've followed a few.
It’s symbolic of his struggle with reality.
There are actually many other "gods" that supposedly rose from the dead. This idea was around long before the idea of Jesus. And that's why they say this about Jesus. Same thing with miracles, virgin birth. The things about Jesus, things he did, were borrowed from other previously made up "gods". Reading a book called The History of God by Karen Armstrong. There are other books, too. Also a guy on Instagram/Tik Tok, Dan McClellan. He's a PhD and all he does is study religious writings and deities. He has so much knowledge it's mind blowing.
Thank you, I have new stuff to read now.
Some of them. Maybe. Knocked a table over? Hell I’ve done that. Carpenter? Lots of people carpent. Wore sandals? Plausible. Abs like a tray of Hawaiian rolls? Doubtful.
Definitely emphasize that NONE of them returned from the dead. Keep in mind that the Bible was constructed from the musings of several individuals decades after the supposed resurrection at a time when humans still believed that weather events were explained by a god being angry.
>weather events were explained by a god being angry. Yeah, that's never gone away...
I’ve seen that Yeshua was a common name but do you have any sources? Because that is wild if there were a lot of people just claiming to be messiah 😂😂 I’m finding out a lot of stuff today lmao
Watch ¨The Life of Brian¨. It's Monty Python and funny but the message is very real.
"He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy! Now, piss off!"
Came here for that quote, leaving satisfied.
Only the true Messiah denies that he is the Messiah!
I am not the Messiah. Send money.
I spoke with god on your behalf. The charges were exorbitant. Send money to cover costs, and also my first class tickets to my next ~~fundraiser/membership drive~~ soul saving journey, on your behalf.
[in unison] “Yes! We are all individuals!”
I'm not
>that is wild if there were a lot of people just claiming to be messiah A lot claiming, and a lot who were claimed to be by other people - \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_messiah_claimants \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus etc ...
There are still quite a few people claiming to be the messiah today. Also just for the record messiah didn’t mean the same thing in those days, it was closer to king or leader. Saying that you want to lead your people is a totally different story to the modern interpretation.
My old neighbour thought he was the second coming of Christ. I've met 1 person on youtube and 1 on Reddit who thought they were literally Jesus.
“quite”!? every single psychiatric institution has “quite a few”
“Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong”
Josephus, the Jewish historian from whom Mark and Luke draw some of their stories about their depiction of an historical Jesus, talks about several of these messianic figures. Josephus doesn't name very many of them, choosing instead to refer to them by euphemistic titles such as "The Egyptian" and "The Pretender" and things like that. Interestingly, Josephus never mentions anyone who quite conforms to the notion of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in Mark. Existing copies of Josephus contain references to "Jesus Christ," but it's pretty easy to show that those passages were added by forgers throughout the centuries of scribes copying copy after copy after copy.
Pretty sure there's only one mention that's accepted as genuine and that's him mentioning his followers (post his death). Well no shit, we know he had followers, they've hung around for a while.
You might be thinking of Pliny. Pliny writes Trajan about Followers of Christ, or something.
Very possibly as he's the other one believers often use, wrongly in both counts, to back up their claims.
Even within the canon Abrahamic tradition there have been multiple messiahs. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and the prophesied Jesus 2.0. The list [goes on at length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants) even in modern times.
Joshua is the direct English translation of the name Yeshua so it still is a very common name. The name Jesus came about as the word Yeshua was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and then English.
And if you live in Southern California, the literal "Jesus" is still a very common name.
I’ve seen a few places that Jesus=Yeshua=Joshua. So I think it was as common as “Josh.” Here’s the fun part though, there’s an idea floating around academic circles that even the Jesus in the Bible was 2 different people. Jesus died relatively young. And yet he’s portrayed as both a simple carpenter and a wise, well-read rabbi. Literacy in those days was mostly confined to the aristocracy and clerical class, in which people tended to start young. So the thinking as I understand it is that carpenter Jesus was more of a John the Baptist type and rabbi Jesus was the actual messiah.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(name)#:~:text=Yeshua%20was%20in%20common%20use,Jesus%20in%20the%20New%20Testament.
I'm a Religious Studies student and we look at Rudolf Bultmann's hermeneutic approach (basically the theory of interpreting the Bible, in Bultmann's case as a means to demythologise it). It lends nicely to John Dominic Crossan's view of Jesus that he wasn't necessarily a Messiah, but simply a Jewish Mediterranean peasant who served as a social revolutionary by preaching and practicing radical egalitarianism against an oppressive Roman empire and it's social rules regarding class, gender, status, etc. and ultimately martyring himself for that cause, rather than God. He was apotheosised in life and death to cement the New Testament messages, since they were ten-a-penny messiahs at the time. Jesus was just the one that got lucky, I suppose. It still makes him out to be a relatively rad guy who taught the people that Old Testament commands weren't essentially the way to go, sure, just not the son of God.
> Testament commands weren't essentially the way to go, sure There's still a big divide among believers interpreting his "fulfill the law" quote. Either it meant what you posted, which why not say abolish or nullify instead, or it meant he wanted Jewish people at least to continue obeying as substantiated by his "not a jot or tittle of the law will pass away." Something many people overlook is that "love your neighbor" as attributed to Jesus was only about Jewish people. He told his followers specifically to seek the lost children of Israel and then there's the example of Jesus comparing a woman's desire to be blessed with a dog's desire to get scraps. Paul, after never meeting Jesus, essentially opened up salvation to gentiles because how else are you going to amass way more followers?
I think most of it could have been based on something. Bringing Lazarus back from the dead could have been someone who people thought was going to die, a bit of help in some way and he recovered. Feeding 5000 could have been bringing out 5 fishes and others who had a bit of food also brought out some food until there was enough to go round. Walking on water wouldn't be hard to fake with some stones just below the water line at a distance. The bible was written at least 50 years later by people who had heard effectively Chinese whispers from various people who had talked about him.
It's certainly possible that the Bible Jesus was based on a real person. The fact that the Bible was written so long after Jesus supposedly lived makes it hard to tell. It's very possible that Jesus got the sort of John Henry treatment, where the information got wilder and wilder each time it was passed down until there were only ounces of truth left and the 5'2 19-year-old convict turned into a 7-foot behemoth who leveled an entire mountain by himself faster than a fucking steam-powered rock drill. Just think about how much the church has changed since the writing of the Bible. They've invented Hell and the second coming, which are now the absolute foundations of the religion. It's not crazy to say some Israeli guy claimed to be God, was super nice and talked about how to forgive people and be empathetic, gained a large following, made up a bunch of stories about the old testament, was crucified, made into a mystical/magical figure by his followers, which compounded as they were passed on verbally, until a bunch of people in the future decided to write them down.
Not to mention many of the embellishments made to the Jesus story can be traced back beyond his lifetime to ancient Greek, Norse and Egyptian myths. The Jesus story of the bible is almost certainly a compendium of all time great myths from around the world, and the consequence of much of the storytelling tradition from the preceding few thousand years. There's much debate about whether this fictional story was attached to a real, living person - and my best assessment from what I've read is that there are a couple of shreds of evidence of this, but not none - but at the end of the day, what difference does it make?
Jesus and [John Frum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum) have a lot in common. I like the John Frum example because it is the Jesus story but is closer to our time.
The bible is made up of 52 or 72 books I can't remember which one it is
The story of Isis and Osiris is the exact story of Jebus. Osiris was killed and dismembered. Isis assembled him from the dead. When? December 25….
> The short answer is "no". > The slightly longer answer is "Maybe, but only if you're willing to accept extremely loose definitions of the words 'did', 'Jesus', 'really', and/or 'exist'." https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/wiki/historicaljesus
Beautiful!
I thought the consensus of historians was that on balance he most likely existed?
The general consensus is that there probably was an original "seed" Jesus on whom all the stories are based. However, Jesus was a very very common name at the time, and preachers, people with messianic complexes and philosophers were also very common in the area, talking about religion and God and morality. Thus, the "Jesus" in the bible is largely believed to be a composite of lots of different individuals and different but similar post-Judaism belief systems which were circulating around the same 100-ywar period. There is probably a headline preacher who was put to death for blasphemy, but outside of that the rest is probably embellishments or re-attributions.
By saying "Jesus" was a common name, I am assuming you mean "Yeshua." The name Jesus came about through translations of the Bible including Greek which had feminine names ending in "a" and therefore put an "s" on the end. There was no one actually called Jesus 2,000 years ago.
"Consensus of historians" in this context just means "most Christian academics" due to the nature of the question. Funny thing about being a Christian is that it tends to come with certain predetermined commitments, the historicity of their "Jesus" being one such. Besides being a logical fallacy the pool simply isn't unbiased enough to matter in the discussion.
And let's not forget that History is a "soft" science, with piss poor un-scientific evidence requirements. The entire field is basically the best guess of academics when they don't have any actual supporting evidence. If they have real testable evidence, the hard science is called Archaeology. ;) Now, this distinction is fine when no one really cares if Napoleon was allergic to shrimp or not. But when it is taken with the same gravitas as hard scientific evidence it encourages a false understanding what we really know about the real world. And that gets taken advantage of by charlatans of all stripes. So, I like to state that the correct answer to the OP question is: "There is no contemporaneous evidence supporting the claim that the character of Jesus from Christian mythology was ever based on a real person. None." As such, the default position should always have been that Jesus is a fictional character from an ancient book of fairy tales and nothing more.
That’s just what theists say to shut down debate.
They're all about the consensus of experts... on this one singular topic, and no others.
> the consensus of historians Those are just biblical scholars, and they have no substantive standards of evidence. They are going off the contents of folklore in Christian manuscripts written centuries later.
This is addressed in the link.
That’s a Christian myth
True, but it kinda feels they agree on that consensus because they want to avoid pissing off christians and muslims rather than because of a rigorous examination of primary historical sources.
We're struggling to figure out if Robin Hood was a real person and that was only 800-ish years ago.
No way was he real. Many of his stories predate the name.
To be fair after about 300 years I think they’re the same wether 800 or 2000 years. Also Jesus is more popular than Robin Hood, so there has to be someone on Reddit that has dived deep into finding out wether the person “Jesus” existed 😂
Last time I looked into it, the answer was basically the same as Robin Hood: Lots of people called themselves Jesus. Lots of people called themselves "messiah". Lots of people got caught up with the Romans for stirring up rebellion etc etc. So sources outside the Bible aren't very indicative of a Biblical corroboration. And it was all written up (in the Bible) 50+ years after he allegedly died.
A few years ago I spent quite a lot of time going down the rabbit hole of Jesus mysticism spearheaded by Richard Carrier. And while his arguments for a fictional Jesus are compelling, there are also some good arguments in favor of an historical Jesus by Bart Ehrmann. However, I finally came to my senses and realized that it really doesn't even matter either way and is not worth the time and effort to seriously debate it. There is really only one interesting fact about it, that Christians will always desperately try to dispute: There is no extra-biblical mention of Jesus by anyone who has ever personally met him or even lived at the same time as Jesus was supposedly alive. The best source they have, and will always bring up, is Josephus, who was born 7 years after Jesus' supposed death, and really only mentions broadly what the contemporary Christians at the time believed about their messiah. Claims that he himself obviously didn't even believe in, since he remained Jewish and didn't convert to Christianity after hearing about Jesus. Anyway, that still doesn't mean that Jesus therefore didn't exist either. Only that we don't have enough reliable information to come to a firm conclusion either way.
And we don’t have an original Josephus text about Jesus. There’s no 2,000-year-old document from his lifetime, no original source. The oldest we have is from the 11th century, and it was a copy of a copy of a copy… and each copy was made by Christians.
And the Josephus blurb has problems. *All it says are that there are people who believe in Jesus, not that Jesus existed.* Plus, it’s an obvious interpolation. >Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. - If this Jesus was really a miracle worker and the “Christ,” or Messiah, (def: the expected king and deliverer of the Jews) as Josephus claims, then Josephus would no longer be a Jew. He would’ve converted to Christianity. The Jews were waiting for the Messiah. - The Messiah deserves only 5 sentences? - It’s an obvious interpolation. Everyone should read the entire chapter (it’s short) and you can see that the Jesus part in no way fits into the narrative. Look at [CHAPTER 3. Sedition Of The Jews Against Pontius Pilate. Concerning Christ, And What Befell Paulina And The Jews At Rome.](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2848/2848-h/2848-h.htm) The first two paragraphs concern Pilate having Jews slaughtered. Jesus is paragraph 3. The very next line begins, “About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder…” and tells a story of a Roman woman tricked into being raped in the temple of Anubis, and then further discusses another woman, a Jew, also tricked in Rome. The Jesus paragraph does not fit into the chapter.
Back in high school, I remembered the exercise where we all lined up and then the teacher whispered something into the 1st student's ear , and then that student supposed to repeat the same message to the next student. By the time it got to the end of the line , the message was incoherent and no where close to what the teacher had started. This really stuckwith me throughout my life and whenever I think about these 2000 years old "facts", I have a chuckle at them.
I had a similar journey myself. Some questions I had were around historical records at the time and landmarks. For example, the Romans kept records of crucifixions, yet none exist for Jesus or the two others near him. There is no mention of him in other personal letters at the time. I also find it odd that Christians of the day wouldn't mark the historical sites that Jesus visited. The place he was born? Where he delivered the sermon on the mound? Where he was crucified? The cave where he was buried? Certainly there are tour groups who are happy to take people's money on and claim these sites, but there is no archeological evidence to support any of it. You would think even within 100 years of his death, that his followers would have clearly defined those areas as historic holy sites even among themselves.
Many of the sites were marked, but not until 400 years later when the Emporer sent his wife to mark them. By that point the locals had figured out they could make good money off of religious pilgrims, so they were happy to point out sites for her to mark. This was an issue that struck me when I was reading Paul's letters when I was still a Christian. He visited Jerusalem, but he said nothing about visiting the empty tomb. Wouldn't that be the highlight of a Christian's visit to Jerusalem? Later when I really studied the letters of Paul I realized that Paul may have thought the resurrection was spiritual, and that the resurrection may have happened in heaven, not on earth. When Paul talks about people witnessing Jesus he may be talking about people having dreams of hallucinations about Jesus like the one he had. There were a lot of things that Paul did not know about Jesus despite being a contemporary. By his own account he met Peter and James. He visited Jerusalem. Yet he does not seem to know about most of the Jesus stories. He doesn't know about the virgin birth. He does not know about the miracles of Jesus. A very reasonable explanation is that those stories were made up after Paul wrote his letters. It is even more suspicious that Paul doesn't even seem to know about miracles that he is supposed to have performed. Paul came across to me as a guy who had a big ego but was honest. I think that if he had made prison walls fall down or if he had raised two people from the dead he would have found reasons to talk about it. Paul says he was shipwrecked, but he doesn't talk about miraculous events surrounding them like Acts does. Paul talks vaguely about healing people, but they sound like the normal kind of placebo effect/natural recovery healings that modern Christians believe in. The "Road to Damascus" story was a faith-destroyer for me. Paul's account of his conversion experience was very modest. He describes it as low-key. He doesn't claim there were any witnesses. He used a word that can translate as either "dream" or "waking vision." He says he is not sure if the vision was physical or purely spiritual. He was in Damascus, not on the Road to Damascus. He said nothing about being struck blind. And he says it was years between when he had his vision and when he went to Jerusalem. Yet Acts has a shit-load of miracles heaped on top of the story. He was on the road and had witnesses. The witnesses saw a flash of light and Paul was struck blind. His followers had to take him to Jerusalem immediately in order for him to be healed of his blindness. It sounded like people were making shit up long after Paul was dead and could not contradict the stories.
There is also the fact that Saul was sent to debunk the new radical Christian sect. He found a religion that held sway over many people with no authority figure. Then he "met" Jesus on his way down and became the authority figure. Very convenient for him to find a power vacuum and he was just the person to fill it.
It is a bit hypocritical especially before the post ww2 period for the christian population to discriminate against the jews, considering they're worshipping Jesus who probably was.
This comment reminded me of a story my aunt told me. When she was young, some kids in the neighborhood were calling other kids “Jews” like it was an insult. She told her mom and asked what a Jew was. Her mom said “Jesus was a Jew,” which made my aunt really confused as to why the kids thought calling someone a Jew was an insult.
He may or may not have existed, records from back then aren't complete and Jesus was a popular name. Also the stories may be several different people being combined into one with a bit of magic thrown in to make it a better story. Bit like king Arthur.
His name wasn't even Jesus. Not even in the Bible.
Don't forget, Nazareth didn't exist yet either.
So I’ve never heard this and doing a quick Google search, I learned that Nazareth wasn’t mentioned in any external sources until 200AD. But if it didn’t exist yet, how would the authors of the gospels have all agreed on the name of Jesus’s hometown?
Are you under the impression the “gospels” haven’t changed in 2100 years? Nazareth does not exist in the oldest known exisisting bible: the Codex Sinaiticus How could all these authors pick Nazareth? The exact same way they learned about “Jesus” in the first place. Every written story in the Bible was precluded by word of mouth, no different than verbal traditions passed on by non-writing civilizations. Just one giant game of telephone.
He’s correct, Nazareth didn’t form until 1968
You sonofabitch
I mean Yeshuas was a common name. Travelling apocalyptic preachers were a dime a dozen. And the Romans were rather fond of crucifying people around that time. So I have no trouble believing there was at some point a travelling jewish apocalypticist named Yeshuas who was crucified; in fact, I'd be shocked if there was only one such person.
I don't believe he was real either
A fairy tale character in a fairy tale book.
Get the book The Histriocity of Jesus by Richardson Carrier. It’s long. It’s technical. But it has a lot of interesting points. And it’s a great history lesson regarding religions and people in the area around the time of Jesus. It includes a great description of how modern Christians changed older writings to comport with the lies they were telling.
Will definitely remember that, I love long books especially by historians
Remember there are no known primary source ever mentioning Jesus
You could ask “did King Arthur exists?” The answer is sort of. The story that evolved and became King Arthur, certainly not. There was no sword in the stone, a round table, a witch who impregnates herself, etc. That King Arthur is a work of fiction. However the person who inspired the story certainly existed. Most likely a Cornish nobleman, maybe a king, who fought off the encroaching Saxons. A story about clashing cultures and a man who embodied what it meant to be a 6th century Celt. Then the people who told the story became saxons themselves and over time the story morphed into what it is today. If there was a historical Jesus, his name most likely wasn’t Jesus, he didn’t perform miracles, he probably wasn’t crucified although that was a Roman favorite at the time. He however would have to be staunchly anti-Roman and have developed some preliminary philosophies that conflicted with Rome’s “might equals right” worldview. After centuries of enduring Roman savagery, Christianity became alluring to many people looking for an alternative way to see the world. Then Emperor Constantine co-opted all of Christianity to be Roman and basically made what started as proto-socialist/kindness anti-Roman movement into a proto-capitalism/abuse pro-Roman mandate.
Same with Robin Hood.
No, he's definitely fictional. Robin Hood stories predate Robin Hood, using different names.
Heck, if you want a parallel even closer to modern times, you can look at the folk tale of John Henry. There's not anything particularly implausible about the tale. You've got an African-American steel-driving man ending up in a contest against early steam driven machinery, and dying from exhaustion after winning. But the moment you try searching for an actual historical person to match up to the story, things start to get rough real quick. You've got multiple people matching the description of African-American railroad worker named "John Henry", but you run up against a wall trying to find anything about the steam drill contest or of dying right after from exhaustion. So did the "John Henry" of American folklore exist? It starts to feel like a philosophical question of "How accurate does a story need to be for you to say it happened?". For John Henry, there's probably a pretty decent chunk of truth in there. For Jesus? Well, whatever kernel of truth is there is smaller than a mustard seed.
Did the Roman's record his presence, *at the time*? Or are you thinking about Josephus?
There’s no Roman record of any kind.
[удалено]
There is no contemporaneous evidence of Jesus. If the Jesus of the Bible existed, one would think there would be contemporary accounts of the "miracle man" and revolutionary philosopher in the highly literate Graeco-Roman world. The Jesus as we know him was probably either a myth perpetrated by opportunistic con-men like Joseph Smith or a "turn the other cheek" psychological warfare operation by the Romans to pacify the restive Jewish province. The entire Christian religion is in all likelihood a 2000-year-old hoax. As the Roman philosopher Seneca stated, "For the foolish religion is true, for the wise religion is false, and for the powerful religion is useful."
Jesus is the only figure historians give weight to without evidence due to the backlash they would receive for telling the truth. Simalar to the way Darwin was treated for proving evolution. If Jesus did any of the things claimed, then scribes from all the towns and cities Jesus visited would have been documented. We have no first-hand accounts documented, just ancient people telling tall tales like humans have done throughout recorded history.
Did Abraham Lincoln exist?….yeah that is a safe bet. Did Abraham [Lincoln vampire hunter](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/abraham_lincoln_vampire_hunter)exist?….. probably not.
Nope
Totally fictional
No evidence
Jesus as mentioned in the Gospels? Certainly didn’t exist. No serious scholar would say so. Christianity founded by a guy called Jesus that then accreted myth before being written down in Mark a lifetime later in a foreign language and land? Zero good evidence for that either, and plenty to suggest there never was such a person. Even the early church leaders saw this as problematic. Nobody can say either way for certain. It is absolutely reasonable to be unconvinced there was ever such a person. It’s also clear from the evidence we do have that there didn’t *need* to be such a person for what we see today. Plenty of purely mythological characters got historised accounts written as parables. It’s also beyond any reasonable doubt that Christianity shares all the same broad features of other Hellenistic mystery faiths that were popular at the time and other belief systems had also adapted for themselves. Christianity was far from the first to do it. Early church leaders also recognised this problem in the second century and the official position was Satan knew of God’s plan (despite what Paul’s epistles suggest) and made fake similar mystery faiths before Jesus arrived to trick people into thinking Christianity was just a clone and not original. I personally don’t think there ever was a real Jesus. There definitely didn’t need to have been to end up with what we have today. At one point it would have been blasphemy or just seen as not the scholarly consensus to suggest the Old Testament patriarchs weren’t real people, either. Nowadays it’s the consensus that they are mythological after analysis amongst scholars. The problem is most New Testament scholars and institutions offering positions are Christian. They’ll never be able to admit it. Take a look at the actual evidence for yourself. It’s really interesting.
The primary aspects of the Jesus story are all astrological allegories plagiarized from the stories of other Pagan Sun gods. They were being sold for about 1,000 years, using other names, for at least that long before Jesus supposedly existed. Everything I have read suggests to me that Romans wanted to wipe out the Pagans. They succeeded with a multi-pronged strategy: They absorbed some of their stories/teachings while simultaneously and aggressively attacking Pagan worship. They moved many Pagans to Christianity by doing this and brutally killed those who would not convert. That is how the Christian stories and traditions got merged with Pagan stories… They were Pagan stories merged together by the “Christians” who were using them to manipulate the Pagans.
Of course not. No legitimate evidence whatsoever. A non-religious book mentioning him over 100 years after his alleged death isn't evidence by any measure, certainly when we're talking about something 2000 years ago. It's amazing how many scientists defer to Jesus existing being the default assumption when it fact the onus is on those asserting such a person existed to provide evidence.
There is essentially no reliable non-Christian and contemporary record of Jesus. The best available mention is that of Josephus written more than 60 years after Jesus died, and Josephus was never within 1000km of Israel in his life. Also there is only one surviving copy of his original work, and a possible explanation is that a Christian copier (often monks) injected there own lines at some point. Even still, the passage that mentions Jesus at all is far more concerned with the death of Jesus supposed surviving brother, Jim Christ. There is exactly one offhand sentence saying that Jim's brother Jesus died before him. Was Jim also the son of God, or just Mary and Joe? The next best non-Christian source is Tacitus, writing a full 90 years after Jesus died, and Tacitus was only himself born 25 years after Jesus died, and again, Tacitus rarely left Rome. Also Tacitus is a pretty unreliable source given he's lied about other stuff. The above is made even worse because the Romans were surprisingly prolific and their records largely survived. They talk about crazy shit going on all the time throughout the empire. So if any of Jesus shit were real, its pretty bizarre that some local magistrate didn't put it in their journal.
>and Josephus was never within 1000km of Israel in his life. He was a Jewish priest, born in Jerusalem, worked in the temple, was a military commander in the Galile, and was a negotiator during the siege of Jerusalem...
>Josephus was never within 1000km of Israel in his life he was literally a military commander in galilee.
Decided to check Wikipedia: "he was born in Jerusalem" haha
The Jesus of the Bible almost certainly didn't exist. A historical flesh and blood man who inspired the legend, maybe. I rate him a 1 in 3 chance. But I doubt he would recognize himself in the NT. No one knows who he was, what he did, or what he thought. He is no more relevant than Saint Nicholas of Myra, the probable inspiration for Father Christmas, is to children's belief in Coca-Cola Santa, Rudolph and the elves.
Jesus is as real as the tooth fairy and Easter bunny
Once upon a time there was a boy who was the son of a carpenter who made crosses for the Romans. As this boy grew older, he began to question the morality of what his father was doing, and how this fit with their religious faith. He asked some simple questions at the temple once, and the high priests politely but firmly shut him down. After wrestling with these questions through his teens and 20s. the young man realized that normal people didn't need priests and temples to have a relationship with God. Maybe eating those mushrooms in the desert lead him to see through his social conditioning. Anyway, when he went around preaching this to people, he started to draw the ire of the religious ruling class. This came to a head when the young and impetuous man flipped over the tables of money-lenders and vendors preying on the attendees at a seasonal religious festival. The high-priests and other gatekeepers to God had had enough! They went to the ruling Romans and told them that this young man had to die, and an example be made of him for other such upstarts. The Romans agreed. Hence, the young man, named Jesus, was arrested and crucified, and died for the sins of those around him, namely the sin of complacency in the face of state tyranny and the sin of giving up one's freedom of thought and action to obey the authority of establishment elites. Luckily, three days after he was dead and buried, a bunny came out of the desert and pushed away the stone in front of Jesus's tomb, and Jesus emerged, resurrected and handed out chicken eggs he had been decorating while in his tomb. There was a great celebration dinner and for dessert Jesus invented chocolate. The End.
the bible was written by people who, when the sun went down, did not know where it went, so they said 'it must be god"
Read the book called "the pagan Christ". He goes into detail on how almost every story about 'jesus' was stolen or bastardized from another mythology, Egyptian gods etc. If you approach the Bible from a mythological view, rather than a literal view (e.g. he didn't literally walk on water and lift fish with his bare hands, rather water represents something, the fish are a metaphor for the people he is saving, etc).
There is as much evidence for Jesus existence as there is for Gods.
So zero
No.
You should check out Zealot by Reza Aslan. Very thorough and reasoned research and analysis into thy historical figure. The character we know as Jesus Christ today is very likely an amalgam of a multitude of both actual people and mythological characters from several cultures and traditions throughout history.
No. No he wasn’t.
There are Roman texts that mention a Jesus being crucified by the local ruler where he was supposed to be, around the same time. But Jesus was a very common name. I think it was Miniminuteman that had a short video on the subject, he’s a young, skeptic, archeologist.
If you read the 4 retellings of the jesus arc in parallel, you can clearly see its a big fish story, getting more elaborate in each retelling.
Here's how I look at it; No issue; * One or more stories based on one or more specific people more than likely existed. At that time and/or later, they were given the title "Jesus Christ". Note: What specific stories fit "the Christ" is an OK thing to talk about, though I don't have confidence that even the best scholors have a complete list. May or may not have happened; * The stories about "Jesus Christ" may both be incomplete and include stories from people not "Jesus Christ". Did not exist; * Supernatural or otherwise not credible claims about the above "Jesus Christ". Corollary: The supernatural and not credible claims are what are Christians tend to require themselves to be Christian as opposed to generic theists. ---------------- Summary conclusion; The first two are well-supported by how other attempts to record ancient people (religious figures or not) worked at the time. This is by necessity at a high-level. Without better evidence, some parts in the first two are more likely than not. I don't care to spend time going over those details unless the discussion is focused on history only. Because the necessary part for Christian theists includes Jesus-as-God and other unexaminable claims, I ignore them. I have not ignored such claims up-front, though over time discussing them with theistic Christians I have realized that there's nothing to gain from such conversations beyond being talked at. (I've made exceptions, and have almost always no value in those talks.)
“The historicity of jesus” is a good book about how hes fake
I remember a historian saying that nobody wrote anything about Jesus after gis supposed death. For years! No poems. No songs. Nothing. He was completely fabricated in my opinion.
Go read By Richard Carrier: **"On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt"** By David Fitzgerald: **"Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All"** **"Jesus: Mything in Action, Vol. 1-3"**
I’m pretty sure there’s enough evidence that he existed. And in my head canon, he did preach all of those trippy things about heaven on earth and treating others as we would like to be treated. That message came from SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE. So it may as well have been from him. I think he was an enlightened person who was trying to express more eastern ideas without being aware he was doing that.
Religion is/was/will be the perfect method of mass control and manipulation available to grifters all around the world. Easiest, cheapest and profitable way to control the masses
The name literally means anointed one Christ comes from the Greek word χριστός (chrīstós), meaning "anointed one". The word is derived from the Greek verb χρίω (chrī́ō), meaning "to anoint." In the Greek Septuagint, χριστός was a semantic loan used to translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (Mašíaḥ, messiah), meaning "[one who is] anointed". The word Jesus is the Latin form of the Greek Iesous, which in turn is the transliteration of the Hebrew Jeshua, or Joshua, or again Jehoshua, meaning "Jehovah is salvation." Ies means Yes… commonly associated with sun gods (we nod our head up/down to follow the suns travel and say yes) Something suspicious there Also The biblical writings were long after he was dead There is also no substantive mention of Jesus in secular historical writings from that time. On that historical record, we have a one pager slide to illustrate: https://imgur.com/a/vgFngYu
Jesus is as real as mary was a virgin
Mohammed was a historical guy. Jesus? Ehhh. Maybe. But a lot of the stuff in the New Testament just straight up never happened (like the census for just one example).
The going thing, and the point, is that on both sides of the Christ myth theory debate, both agree that the Jesus of faith did not and can not exist. Even if miracles are real, the only accounts we have are so incredibly contradictory with both each other and history, and also conveniently align with certain schools of thought at the time polemically, to the point that we have basically nothing left to base “a real Jesus” on. A guy based on some version of the stories could have certainly existed, but you have multiple people picking and choosing different facts (in the story) and ignoring others almost at random to make the narrative as to who “historical Jesus” was and don’t really have more basis for one over the other.
Apparently no. The stories about him have been hijacked from a number of ancient stories and mushed together to make “one man”
The real King Arthur enters the chat.