Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practice:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
Edit: My suggestion to any who would like to see my opinion changed (see above quote) is to get on the Wikipedia and work towards changing the page. My upvote goes to Flying Squid for reminding us “does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship”
Edit 2: practicality changed to practice
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Whether or not the character in the Bible was based on a real person is irrelevant. He didn’t do any of the magic attributed to him, he didn’t come back from the dead, he didn’t ascend to heaven and, since the Bible was written decades after the events supposedly took place, we don’t even have a remotely accurate account of anything he said.
The Jesus of the Bible did not exist. Whether or not he was based on a real person does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship.
Kind of reminds me of Boidicca. Except we actually have evidence that Boidicca was based on a real person. Unlike Jesus.
But was her chariot real? That’s the real lynchpin when it comes to the legend of Boudicca
My personal take is that being agnostic as to the existence of Jesus is an intellectually supportable position.
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Any scholar who starts out by saying that maybe the stories of all the miracles aren’t all true, or anything along those lines, I automatically disqualify. I view it as if someone were to say “Maybe Odin didn’t actually kill all of the frost giants himself…” or something. I feel this falls outside the bounds of ad hominem, as the person is indicating a pre-existing disposition by acknowledging that there is even a remote possibility of a god-incarnate appearing on earth. This is not a scientific historian or anthropologist. This is a religious person seeking to fit facts to their beliefs.
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The majority of the rest of the serious scholars quote what I would call semi-contemporary sources (eg Josephus) as if they were documenting history. But Josephus also documented Moses as a historical fact, iirc, and contemporary evidence indicates without a shadow of a doubt that Moses never existed and the events in Exodus never occurred. Ancient historians were writing down what they were told. The scientific study of history and anthropology were not established at the time, and they were not looking for multiple sources and multiple lines of investigation.
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The OST reasonable argument I’ve read is that, if there were to have been an actual historical figure of Jesus, he led what was an unsuccessful attempt at reforming Judaism into a charismatic Jewish cult centered on emotions rather than the written law, which was running contrary to where the regional religion was heading at that time. He supported, or at least did not oppose, the Roman occupation (or at least that’s how it was recorded by the time it got through the pro-Roman editors), and he did not draw enough notice to be recorded by some of history’s most conscientious record keepers. What they do legitimately point out is that such a minor cult leader could not have been expected to be recorded in contemporary documents. I sympathize with that.
Therefore, my takeaway is literal agnosticism - I do not believe it is possible to positively confirm or deny a historical Jesus. Julius Caesar existed - I’m not denying that we can infer from history - but we have far more documentation informing us about Caesar than Jesus. I actively disbelieve in Moses, I actively believe in Caesar, and I am agnostic towards a historical Jesus in that I believe it is not possible to form a positive or negative belief based on available data.
I think that is very well-reasoned and makes a lot of sense, but I would still argue that it doesn’t matter because the Jesus who Christians worship never existed.
If Harry Potter was based on a real boy, that doesn’t mean he’s the same Harry Potter who went to Hogwarts.
I feel the same. I think that we go to less than defensible lengths to find the “historical Arthur” or the “historical Robin Hood” in a way that reveals more about our desire to be right despite mythologizing than it does about the actual dynamics of story development over time, and that it fails to take into account the lack of differentiation between fact and fable that we weren’t to see for millennia after these histories were created.
But Josephus also documented Moses as a historical fact, iirc, and contemporary evidence indicates without a shadow of a doubt that Moses never existed and the events in Exodus never occurred.
Eh, not quite.
The Exodus as described by the Bible did not occur.
What you don’t really see are scholars dealing with the Greek and Egyptian versions of the story. They pretty much exclusively engage with the Biblical account.
So for example, Josephus rehashes the Egyptian historian Manetho’s account of the Exodus events, where Moses comes back with foreign help to conquer Egypt.
An event that is recorded in Egyptian history by Ramses III who claimed at the end of the 19th dynasty (~1200 BCE) that Egypt was conquered by foreigners, who among other things “made the gods like men.”
At the end of the 19th dynasty, Egypt was conquered by an usurper Pharoh Amenmesse, who went by the name ‘Msy’ in Papyrus Salt 124. This was seven years after the single day battle between Merneptah and the sea peoples allied with Libya, where the sea peoples were recorded as having been without foreskins and at least one tribe was also one of the tribes captured in twelve groups by Ramses II after Kadesh (one group for each son with him).
If you are familiar with Homer, you may recall the Greek story about how immediately after Troy Odysseus went by ship down to Egypt where he fought in a single day battle and was captured, staying in Egypt for seven years until “a certain Phrygian” came to try to ransom him to Libya.
The Greek stories of the Exodus are that it involved many of the different pre-Greek ancestors, with the earliest (Hecataeus of Adbera) claiming the Jewish records of the event had recently been altered under the Persian and Macedonian conquests. And indeed, given the overlaps between Josiah’s alleged reforms with the Biblical Exodus narrative and the anachronistic character of Josiah’s reforms in light of the letters a century later between Jerusalem and Elephantine, there may be something to that.
This becomes much more interesting in light of archeology in just the past decade which has shown the “land of milk and honey” was importing bees from Anatolia, and that Tel Dan had Aegean style pottery made with local clay. See, back in the 50s an archeologist Yigael Yadin theorized that the lost tribe of Dan (said to have “stayed on their ships”) was actually the Denyen sea peoples up in Adana in Anatolia. They claimed their leaders belonged to a “House of Mopsus” - Mopsus was a figure said by the Greeks to have conquered Ashkelon (archeology supported as having been conquered by the sea peoples ~1190 BCE).
In fact, in the Argonautica there’s a prophet Mopsus who died in the desert as they were wandering back by foot from a conflict in North Africa. Shortly after this one of the local shepherds kills an elite pre-Greek warriors with the cast of a stone. Kind of weird that the Bible has their prophet Moses dying in the desert while wandering back from a conflict in North Africa and has a story about a shepherd killing an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone (thought by some scholars to be an earlier story reappropriated to David).
So while scholars have resolutely shown that the Israelites did not participate in an Exodus from Egypt and thus the Biblical version of that story did not occur as written, next to none have seriously looked into the extra-Biblical accounts, particularly in light of the recent archeological picture that’s emerging.
The idea of an Exodus from Egypt which did not include the Israelites but was later appropriated from the peoples forcibly relocated to the Southern Levant who cohabitated with the Israelites is quite interesting.
There’s a lot more to this, but to put it bluntly I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss all of Josephus’s comments on an Exodus because of modern scholarship. Modern scholarship is pretty much actively ignoring a lot of the things said about the Exodus in Josephus because they don’t match up with what’s in the Bible and papers for or against an Exodus almost exclusively concern themselves with the Biblical account. And even a cursory look into what Josephus and his peers were saying about the Exodus has a lot more things check out than you might think.
While I do not disagree with a single bit of what you said, it does sum up perfectly why I am comfortable with my position.
The dearth of conclusive records and the necessity of making what are in all honesty very strong inferences on the basis of slim and to be quite honest generously interpreted textual evidence and without archeological evidence that goes beyond what would be expected of normal commercial exchanges among roughly adjacent civilizations at the time amounts to what I’d tend to categorize as interesting but speculative.
To try to align that oth what Josephus documented as Antiquities of the Jews goes beyond what is considered a generous interpretation and closes in on what I was originally commenting on, which is the propensity of modern and motivated historians to start with the idea that a mythology has to have had some basis in fact, rather than being just the kinds of mythologies we find from around the world where peoples are trying to explain where they came from and where they should be going.
George Washington as he exists in American mythology is a creation of myth. He was a slaver and he was “He who Burns Villages” among the Seneca, and he proudly referred to himself as such. But there is no end to the evidence he existed - what we have is an iconification, not a fabrication.
In the case of Jesus, most people like to claim the former and deny the latter, but in the case of Moses (and Abraham, and many others), it’s like trying to track down the “real” Romulus and Remus. I just can’t see it as anything more than speculative.
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I mean, it’s really not hard to identify what Josephus is referring to in quoting Manetho:
then Rampsês, the elder of his [Sethos] sons, for 66 years. Thus, after admitting that so many years had elapsed since our forefathers left Egypt, Manetho now interpolates this intruding Amenôphis.
[…] he added a prediction that certain allies would join the polluted people and would take possession of Egypt for 13 years.
[…] First of all, he made it a law that they should neither worship the gods nor refrain from any of the animals prescribed as especially sacred in Egypt
Could this be in reference to Manetho, the successor of Ramses II, son of Seti I, who reigned for 66 years?
Might this be rehashing the details of the Papyrus Harris?
The land of Egypt was overthrown from without, and every man was ([thrown] out) of his right; they had no chief mouth for many years formerly until other times. The land of Egypt was in the hands of chiefs and of rulers of towns; one slew his neighbor, great and small. Other times having come after it, with empty years, Yarsu, a certain Syrian was with them as chief. He set the whole land tributary before him together; he united his companions and plundered their possessions. They made the gods like men, and no offerings were presented in the temples.
This was describing the end of the 19th dynasty before Setnakhte came to power in 1189 BCE, exactly 13 years after Amenmesse (going by the nickname ‘Mose’ in at least one document) overthrew the grandson of a Ramses who reigned 66 years and forced him to flee Egypt - just like how the Egyptian historian Josepus is quoting talked about how Moses conquering Egypt caused the grandson of a Ramses ruling 66 years to flee Egypt.
You have it backwards.
Myth doesn’t dictate history, but history does very frequently inform and dictate myth, particularly myth that is presented as having been historical.
There really was a Mose who conquered Egypt in a situation that bears striking resemblance to the story of Moses conquering Egypt in Josephus. That’s a historical fact. As is his alleged doing so with help from without, and the subsequent eradication of Egyptian religious customs in primary sources at the time. Other details in the Manetho account are likely mythical or mistakes, but the core of it seems at least inspired by recorded history.
The much more interesting question is why the Biblical version of Moses doesn’t conquer Egypt, or doesn’t become the leader of another different foreign nation (another feature to the story found in Josephus and shared by Greek parallels). You’d think those would be things a tradition owing itself to the figure should want to claim or even embellish, not suppress.
Let me try explaining where I’m coming from using a different approach, because I feel like we’re focusing on different parts of the discussion and may be sometimes speaking past each other.
Let’s define a function, C(s1, s2) that takes as arguments a single possibly matching statement about two figures, historical or literary or both, and returns their correlation. There would be three classes of dimensions, let’s say. Historical (that is, the identity function in the historical record, in which the exactness and detail of the two records would describe a distance function in some metric space). Semantic - again a metric function that looks at conceptual overlaps in the idea-space concepts that capture the textual information surrounding the two statements. Semiotic - the cultural symbology surrounding the two statements. This function is a bit more complex because when some semiotic element is all but omnipresent (eg flood myths around societies that lived in flood plains) it’s actually evidence that the myths probably evolved independently and do not descend from a common ancestor, as it were.
So we could in theory take factual knowledge of Caesar and Augustus, compiled across a wealth of contemporary literature and exhaustive historical research, and compare them with the Caesar_2 and Augustus_2, which is how we will designate the characters in the Shakespearean play. We would expect C to return a value close but not equal to 1.
What is important is that any levels of indirection or redirection increase the metric space between the two variables in any of the dimensions, making identity less likely. That’s where you start to fall into the realm of historical coincidence and a generous interpretation to reach what might have been a predetermined conclusion.
We’d want to make a more complex function where we can weight with confidence factors and so on, but that’s the general idea as specifically as I can lay it out. Because I’ve left it largely descriptive and non-mathematical I’m concerned that there might still be a lot of opinion that you think can be factored in. I’m actually talking about realizing these concepts in a metric space and deriving a real distance function.
Does that help?
Two issues with your paradigm.
(1) What you are plugging into the function really changes the results. Are you plugging in the entire mythos, or only parts?
For example, in your Ceaser and Augustus examples you are selectively choosing a ‘factual’ picture of them, presumably leaving out stories like a baby Augustus climbing a tower when no one was looking to be found at its top staring at the sky.
If we pick and choose, something like Josephus’s story looks very close to an identity function to the events at the end of the 19th dynasty with some extremely specific details. We just need to ignore things like the claim of getting the Hyskos in Jerusalem to attack Egypt, as that detail is almost certainly false.
Presumably given the way you are discussing it, you see it necessary to evaluate the stories as a whole, which I do not (and despite that not being the convention you chose when it is convenient to what you are trying to prove vs disprove).
(2) This then feeds into the second issue, which is your sense that a greater distance between overall stories means we can’t trust sub-detail matches to be anything more than historical coincidence.
These texts are very heavily edited along the lines of “history is written by the victors.” But details that are left can be highly specific in matching against details elsewhere and help reveal what’s really going on under the layers of BS.
As a modern example, we can look at 9/11 conspiracy theories. Even though a bunch of crazy BS has been added to the history, while it in aggregate dilutes the identity between overall sets of claims and history, the part of the claims of “the two tallest towers in the US fell on Sept 11th” is very much grounded in truth and not coincidence.
There’s added benefit in taking a partial look as well, as it’s one of the only ways you can end up with testable predictions in this field.
So as an example, in the above comment regarding the Denyen being the tribe of Dan, we had two ‘coincidences’ - Dan are referred to as staying on their ships in Judges 5 and there’s Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Iron Age Tel Dan. These might be happenstance coincidences, but if we consider the bubble of these details, we can hypothesize that if there’s something more to this identification, we might expect to find additional details in line with such an identification outside that bubble.
And indeed, in Ezekiel 27:19, the only other place the same form of Dan is used outside Judges 5, it’s in reference to Dan and the Greeks together trading with Tyre. Which fits pretty well with identifying Dan as the Denyen in Adana given the Denyen were right next to the Ahhiyawa (pre-Greeks) and the mentioned trade goods are in line with what would have been coming from that area of Anatolia.
But there’s a ton of historical inaccuracies surrounding these sections, so if we collect the Bible together in aggregate it’s not going to match pretty much anything as a historical “identity function”.
So there’s value in looking at the overlaps between multiple sources piecemeal, as if things are only random coincidence there shouldn’t be a collection of similar piecemeal details across multiple sources including emerging archeological details.
In the other direction too. If you look at the Noah story in the Bible in its entirety you might conclude that it’s a flood myth like other flood myths, much like in your comment. And yet if you look at the piecemeal details, instead it looks like a famine mythos that was reworked into a flood myth due to Babylonian influence.
So it’s more productive to look at details over the overall stories.
Make sense?
At the end of the 19th dynasty, Egypt was conquered by an usurper Pharoh Amenmesse, who went by the name ‘Msy’ in Papyrus Salt 124. This was seven years after the single day battle between Merneptah and the sea peoples allied with Libya, where the sea peoples were recorded as having been without foreskins and at least one tribe was also one of the tribes captured in twelve groups by Ramses II after Kadesh (one group for each son with him).
just for the record, Herodotus records Egyptians, Colchians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians and Syrians as all practicing circumcision; and the inscription from Merneptah, it states that the the ones who were circumcised; they took their hands while the ones that weren’t, they took their foreskins (or full penis?)
It’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that the presence of circumcised men in that implies the Sea Peoples equate to jews.
You misunderstand. I’m not saying the sea peoples were Jews. I’m saying that after Ramses III forcibly resettled the sea peoples into the Southern Levant and were cohabitating with the Israelites that aspects of their history ended up syncretized into the Isrealites’ traditions and beliefs.
And technically at the time the type of circumcision practiced in Egypt was a partial circumcision, like the dorsal slit. The passage about the sea peoples is unique in all Egyptian records, literally translated as “without horns” and interpreted by scholars as without foreskins given the context about the hands.
The partial circumcision in Egypt wouldn’t have resulted in being without a foreskin at all.
And as you can see in Joshua 5:2 after leaving Egypt there’s an instruction to circumcise a second time. This is explained in 5:4 onwards, but that pattern of a thing being said and then an secondary explanation after is often a later interpolation to try to explain something that existed earlier on.
Given the practice in Egypt was partial circumcision and the sea peoples were fully circumcised, had any of them been the captives taken after Kadesh (such as the Lukka appearing in both instances), going from a partial circumcision in Egypt to a full circumcision would have meant having a second circumcision after leaving Egypt.
And there’s a ton more information than just that bit.
If you are interested, there’s a thread that starts here where I mention a lot of it, and a different angle I’d discussed in a post here.
You misunderstand. I’m not saying the sea peoples were Jews. I’m saying that after Ramses III forcibly resettled the sea peoples into the Southern Levant and were cohabitating with the Israelites that aspects of their history ended up syncretized into the Isrealites’ traditions and beliefs.
Gotcha, guess I jumped that a bit. I’m going to blame my eyes going crossed from reading too many “that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying ‘can’t prove it’ back-and-forths.”
P.S. Speaking of Herodotus, he also said the Thesomophoria, a multi-day women only ritual celebrated all around the Mediterranean, had originated with the daughters of Danaus fleeing Egypt.
You might notice that in Judges 11 there’s a multi-day women’s only ritual (this is its only real mention in Judaism, it seems to have disappeared from the historical record and was no longer practiced among the Israelites later on). You might also notice that the explanation given for why it was taking place is remarkably similar to the story of Idomenus’s return home to Crete where he sacrificed his own child as the first thing he saw upon his return.
So, was listening to this pod cast, random recommended thing. The overall podcast was about climate change. In any case they were looking at the end of the Bronze Age and the podcast host was interviewing an archeologist that wrote about it (and the sea people’s,) he posited that they might have just been climate refugees- people moving around for work or whatever to find a better life.
If we assume that was true; it would make sense that these refugees spread their culture to the new places.
It would explain a lot of the parallels.
Edit: the guest was Eric Klein and it was a [throughline](https://The Aftermath of Collapse: Bronze Age Edition (2021)) episode.
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Whether or not he was based on a real person does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship.
The problem with this thinking is it cedes the historical figure to the crazies following the BS version of events drafted to undermine that original figure.
For example, have you ever wondered why the public saying of the sower parable, about how seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn’t multiply and only the seeds which reproduce multiply, is the only parable in Mark and Luke given a secret explanation in private?
Why was a saying about seeds so dangerous it needed to be explained concretely?
You probably don’t know that the only other explanation for this parable before the middle ages was the one recorded among the Naassenes, who thought it was about seeds scattered at the dawn of the cosmos through which the universe was completed. This same group was saying the mustard seed parable about the smallest seed was in reference to an indivisible point as if from nothing.
If you aren’t familiar with Leucretius, you might miss that what’s being discussed here is Epicurean atomism as he rendered it in his epic poem in Latin 50 years before Jesus was born. Not having the Greek word atomos (‘indivisible’) to rely on, he instead called the same concept in De Rerum Natura ‘seeds.’
Given that book is the only extant work from antiquity to describe survival of the fittest, this means he was writing about how these indivisible seeds randomly scattered at the beginning of the cosmos interacted to gradually develop the Earth and then plants and animals, and how only the things which survived to reproduce continued on. In fact, in book 4 he explicitly refers to failed biological reproduction as “seed that falls by the wayside of the path.”
So here’s Jesus 80 years after this is written, in a conservative religious theocracy, talking publicly about how randomly thrown seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn’t reproduce and the seed which does survive to reproduce multiples like crazy. He ends up allegedly the enemy number one of that religious theocracy who eventually have him killed, his followers are persecuted by Jerusalem, and his movement ends up co-opted outside Jerusalem’s influence by the guy persecuting them. And that co-opted version of the story offers up a secret explanation for the above parable, as well as secret claims of having been the Jewish messiah, and later on he’s said to have been claiming to not have been changing one word of the Jewish law.
And the version of his sayings that doesn’t say anything about being a messiah, ridiculed following religious law, and includes things like “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels” ends up declared heresy and buried in a jar for millennia because even owning it becomes punishable by death.
But 99.9% of the population doesn’t know any of the above because a third believes in the BS version with the secret explanations and the other two thirds are so tired of having that BS version shoved down their throats they assume there’s nothing worthwhile in looking into the historical figure which caused the BS version to exist in the first place.
What makes you think any version of the events isn’t bullshit? Even if he existed? The gospels were written decades after he supposedly died. They weren’t written by historians and they didn’t have primary sources to work from.
The fact is that Christians worship a fictional being that may or may not have been based on a real person. I don’t see why it matters if there was a real person because we know essentially nothing about him with any certainty and he wasn’t the guy with magic powers who came back from the dead. That is the guy who Christians worship, not some historical figure.
The canonical version of Jesus is pretty much a dime a dozen in many large ways. There were numerous people in Judea at the time coming forward claiming to fulfill messianic prophecy.
What was not a dime a dozen were people in Judea taking Epicurean naturalism as a foundation and then layering Plato’s demiurge and eikon concepts on top to argue against Epicurean surety of final death.
That’s a remarkably unique philosophical perspective in the Mediterranean, its existence means someone needs to have come up with it, and given elements of it even predate Paul’s letters and are baked into the two sayings regarded by scholars as most likely tracing back to a historical Jesus, a guy who was killed by the state in a state that would have looked very unfavourably on that philosophy, the attribution that makes the most sense is to the figure it’s literally being attributed to.
We can’t know the full details given the evidence for it only still survives in the opposition to it within canonical sources, but there’s enough there to figure out the general picture.
So while I think pretty much anyone in Judea could have been coming up with “he was secretly the fulfillment of the Messiah prophecies and was exclusively extending Judaism” as dozens of others were recorded making the same claims, I just don’t see it as probable that a historical Jesus’s most likely authentic parables are directly paraphrasing Leucretius by accident and that later traditions continuing the interpretation of his sayings in the context of Leucretius do so by happenstance when Leucretius and Epicureanism in general goes from being mentioned in the Talmud as “why do you study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean” in the 1st century to having fallen from popularity in the 2nd century as Platonism gradually revives into Neoplatonism by the 3rd century.
Is it possible that the paraphrasing was coincidental and that this gets wrapped up in a unique philosophical outlook by the end of the first century by someone other than Jesus but then solely attributed to him even though he wasn’t even a particularly popular figure at the time? I guess? But I certainly wouldn’t put money on it against the alternative.
The general ‘undeniables’ are that a man named Jesus existed, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified. It’s presumably safe to say that he was preaching something that was upsetting to the local Jewish and/or Roman authorities, given his crucifixion. While we’ll obviously never know precisely what he was saying, it is important to remember that the New Testament is a collection of independent documents, and so you can extract some common themes from them. He was clearly a reformer of some kind, something of a hippy, and appears to have emphasized some level of personal humility and charity. It should also be kept in mind that this era was a time of massive religious turmoil in the region, and Jesus was far from being the only radical reformer going around and preaching. He just happened to become very popular after dying.
While he obviously wasn’t a magician and didn’t come back from the dead, I do think there are certainly some themes in his message that are positive, and it’s not a coincidence that you see them echoed in other independent religious traditions. Of course, most Christians don’t live up to those values to any meaningful degree at all, but that’s another matter.
There’s two things:
- A real person named Yeshua, that we know almost nothing about
- A mythical character named Jesus, who may be loosely based on Yeshua
When the question “Did Jesus exist?” is asked, the subtext usually conflates the two, with the answer about there being a real Yeshua being used as proof that the mythical character Jesus was or was not real. But they’re different.
Abraham Lincoln existed. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter didn’t.
You take that back about ALVH
For real the documentary about him was well done
Note that it says “scholars”, not “scientists”. Most of those scholars will be theologians, which will hardly argue against the basis for their own livelihood. The fact is that there’s no definitive evidence about the guy so this is all conjecture.
Why would a scientist have any reason to have a professional opinion on that matter? What scientific method could be applied to this question? How could it be tested? How could you ever scientifically confirm if some random dude existed 100+ generations ago?
The reason it says scholars is because it is people who read, cross reference and analyze historical texts and eye witness accounts to make inferences and draw conclusions about events of the past. They are historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and yes, theologians. Being a theologian is not the same as being a religious apologist or even religious at all. Many Christian theology experts are not Christian themselves. Many are atheists, Jews, Muslims, etc. It just means that their body of work and focus is on studying theology as a subject. Being an atheist doesn’t mean you need to reject the opinions of theologians or, indeed, religious people, on matters of history. It’s a bad position to reject anyone’s opinion out of hand based on their title or personal beliefs or culture. That goes for everyone.
Some actual contemporary records would go a long way.
Well of course that would go a long way as positive proof. But a person being in some sort of contemporary records at that time, and such a record surviving to this day, is not incredibly likely or common. A lack of such a record is not, in itself, a major indicator that someone didn’t exist. A lack of evidence is not evidence against.
I’m not saying the dude didn’t exist, I’m just saying there’s no contemporary evidence for his existence.
The point of the post was people saying that he didn’t exist. Not saying you said it.
Is easier to reject all aspects of the Bible as fairy tale than to accept that some parts are based in reality. It’s like reading historical fiction or films that are “based on a true story” but took a lot of dramatic liberties, and then reject all elements as false. If I write a fan fiction about Sherlock Holmes investigating the Zodiac Killer, the fact that the events are fabricated and the character of Sherlock Holmes is fictional doesn’t mean that the Zodiac Killer didn’t exist.
There could very well have been a person, Yeshua of Nazareth, who was a mystic and traveled with disciples and was ultimately crucified as a blasphemer. That is not at all a far fetched set of facts for the timeframe. Nor is the fact that over decades of oral retelling, his story became embellished, tweaked for interest, and ultimately mythologized. Certainly, some events, details and “miracles” were fabricated. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a dude about whom these exaggerated stories were told. Of course it’s possible that there was never such a man at all. That seems less likely to me, but it could be. But to claim knowledge that that’s the case would be asinine.
I have no problem with the notion that the book has some historical accuracy and some embellishment (and some outright fabrication).
What I have a problem with is people insisting that everything in the book is real and they’ll kill you for sorting yourself into the wrong Hogwarts house.
Since they can’t play nice with their fan-fiction, I’d prefer to shut the whole site down.
(sorry devolved into too many metaphors there)
Yes, but that’s not the same as claiming knowledge of the non-existence of a person from 2000 years ago, or rejecting the premise that some real person could have been the basis for the surreal stories about them. By all means criticize the believers, reject the merit of the book, and hold the question of the reality of a human Jesus as irrelevant or pointless. Just don’t put forth a gnostic claim of his non-existence when you cannot know that for a fact.
Honestly, for me it comes down to “who cares if he existed?”
In 1000 years, if people only ever tell stories about me that are largely (or entirely) made up, who cares if I actually existed?
I hope they do make up stories about me.
I’m boring. myths would be more entertaining.
As I said, that’s fine. I also agree that the existence or non-existence of a human that is the basis for the Jesus figure is irrelevant. What’s a problem is when people claim knowledge that they don’t have. It’s perfectly acceptable to not hold a belief without asserting to know that the belief is untrue. I can not believe that Jesus was a real person without asserting that he wasn’t.
Here is my biggest issue with this question. Given the popularity of Christianity, Jesus is accepted by default. Mythicism, the idea that Jesus didn’t exist as a historical figure, is regarded as a claim needing proof.
This is 180 degrees backwards. Jesus not existing should operate as the null hypothesis until his historicity is proven. Seemingly every discussion, even the quotes in OP’s article, discuss historicity as the null hypothesis and require mythicism to proof the non existence.
Jesus not existing should operate as the null hypothesis until his historicity is proven
This standard of proof invalidates a massive chunk of historical figures that are commonly accepted as having existed.
I mean, how do you know that Alexander the Great existed? We don’t have his body. All the major sources about him wrote long after he died. The only evidence we have of Socrates existing comes from his students; how do you know Plato and Xenophon didn’t make him up? Sure, Julius Caesar wrote some books, but maybe they were later forgeries, since it’s not like we have parchment that he wrote on.
It is not a reasonable null hypothesis to state that all sources describing a historical figure were lying, misled, or delusional. That is a positive claim that should not be accepted without evidence.
This standard of proof invalidates a massive chunk of historical figures that are commonly accepted as having existed.
And? It does not affect my life in the least if Alexander the Great didn’t exist.
The only evidence we have of Socrates existing comes from his students; how do you know Plato and Xenophon didn’t make him up?
I don’t, but I also don’t care. If there is wisdom in the words that are attributed to Socrates, what else matters? The existence of Socrates is meaningless. The Socratic method is great for instruction, and it remains such irrespective of who developed it.
It is not a reasonable null hypothesis to state that all sources describing a historical figure were lying, misled, or delusional. That is a positive claim that should not be accepted without evidence.
And no one is saying that, I’m afraid you don’t understand and the null hypothesis. I am not making a positive claim that these figures are in fact fictitious. But someone is claiming they did exist, and they bear the burden of proof.
I think it’s ridiculous to claim that an actual standard of evidence is too high of a bar. If you cannot reasonably demonstrate that a person existed, then why would you believe it? It’s certainly shouldn’t be accepted as truth, perhaps conjecture or hypothesis at best.
“Jesus” was an extremely popular name at that time.
Prophets were a dime a dozen.
There were likely multiple “prophets” named “Jesus”…
It in no way validates that the “Jesus” from the Bible was anything other than fiction.
OP you might want to read this section of that Wikipedia page:
Sources for the historicity of Jesus
It’s an unconvincing self-referential mess that pays constant deference to the very sources under question (the gospels).
Wikipedia is rarely a good source of information for things that can’t be evidentially verified. The best we can say is “we don’t know” and ignore the biases of religious scholars.
There could have been a guy named Willy Wonka but that doesn’t make that book’s story real either.
Conversely the name could be gotten entirely wrong like in the case of Boidicca. Boidicca being just a nickname given by the Romans and we don’t know the British woman’s real name
It’s frustrating. I actually took an interest in New Testament history, in part because the question "What actually happened to make all these people believe such wacky stuff? " is one I find interesting. And as far as I can tell, there are really only two big critical scholars that are mythicists: Robert Price and Richard Carrier. Neither one really gives a convincing argument for a completely fictional Jesus IMO, and IIRC Carrier really hasn’t published much at all. But if your only exposure to critical Bible scholarship is r/atheism, you’d think the mythicist position is the unquestioned consensus because they get posted and reposted there constantly.
Atheism should be a conclusion we arrive at as a consequence of proper skepticism. But for a lot of reddit, it feels like it’s just a contrarian position people take where they just believe the opposite of whatever religious people think.
I don’t know nearly enough to judge whether carrier is rigorous or reliable, but having read a couple of his books, it made enough sense for me to basically dismiss the question of whether or not anything about Jesus was based on a real guy. I’ve not seen proof that he was, though I recognize that given the languages and historical contexts involved, the field isn’t one that lends itself to armchair speculation.
Something I can say is that most of the scholars are religious, and most of the ones who aren’t still were raised religious. It’s obvious that there are a lot of preconceptions being thrown around, and a lot of overtly religious people muddying the waters.
There’s not many scholars because mythicism is nuts.
Literally the earliest primary documents we have are a set of letters by someone known to be persecuting followers of Jesus (in areas he had authority) writing to areas he doesn’t have authority to persecute in, claiming he’s joined the cause, telling them to ignore other versions of Jesus or other gospels, and acknowledging his peers are claiming he and his followers are doing evil in the name of good.
You just don’t see that within decades of a mythical invention of a religion. Those other versions of the tradition have clear and concise beliefs reflected in Paul’s opposition to them which line up with popular apocryphal texts likely dated to the first century.
This sort of split is seen over and over with cults built up around a real person within years of them ending up imprisoned or dead.
What’s typically seen with mythical figures instead is syncretism where the legends combine and grow. It’s not “no, Dionysus didn’t conquer India, he was instead kidnapped by pirates in the Mediterranean” but “oh, he conquered India too? Did you know he was kidnapped by pirates?”
This only happens for Jesus much later on. The early days are characterized by infighting and schisms. It’s nearly what all the letters and nuances of the gospels are about. “Oh, he said this parable in public - but then in private he told us it was really about X.” “There was a race between that unnamed disciple and Peter and though the unnamed guy got there first, he waited and it was Peter who went inside the tomb first.” “That Thomas guy was doubting he physically resurrected but then changed his mind.” “They wanted to claim the seat at his right hand in heaven, but he said the last would be first and it was reserved for someone who was slave to all (like Paul, the last apostle who said in his letters he made himself a slave to all).” “Hey Corinth, why did you depose Rome’s appointed elders? Also, isn’t it awesome when young people defer to the old and women keep silent?”
Additionally, the mythicists are so dogmatically committed to their views that it interferes with their scholarship. So as an example Carrier thinks the mentions of cosmic generative seed in Gnosticism relates to a “cosmic sperm bank” rather than recognizing it as the influence of Leucretius’s “seeds of things” from De Rerum Natura where 50 years before Jesus is born he happened to describe survival of the fittest and naturalist origins of life as randomly scattered seeds which develop into the life we see by way of what survived to reproduce, even describing failed biological reproduction as “seed falling by the wayside of a path.”
Which is a much more interesting angle for a guy who goes on to have a canonical “secret explanation” for a public saying about how only the randomly scattered seeds which survive to reproduce multiply and the seed that falls by the wayside of a path does not. A parable located in apocrypha right after a saying about how no matter if lion ate man or man ate lion man would be the inevitable result and how the human being was like a large fish selected from many small fish. That apocrypha elsewhere seems to refer to Leucretius’s ideas and even explicitly calls the idea that spirit arose from flesh the greater wonder compared to the idea flesh arose from spirit.
But no, instead he could only see a cosmic sperm bank because the idea canonical Christianity was a conservative retcon of a very different early set of ideas would have meant it likely there was an original historical figure with those transgressive ideas that needed to be reworked with things like secret explanations in private for public sayings.
David Fitzgerald is another mythicist who has published a few books on the subject.
Personally, I think there was indeed a Jesus that the Bible character was loosely based on.
It seems more likely that a bunch of religious myths accumulated around a real rabbi than that they all got made up whole cloth.
The “brother of James” comment from Josephus seems to be real and not added on by pious frauds later. However, as others have pointed out, the name was common back then, as was James. As such, it is definitely plausible that this was another semi-famous Jesus.
I hear he existed and his real name was Bryan.
What have the bloody Romans ever done for us?!
The proof of it is in the holy gourd.
Yes but, consider the lily
There are literally no authentic contemporary accounts of the miracles performed by whoever “Jesus” was supposed to be.
Someone would have wrote about that shit at the time & not waited for ~80 years.
There are plenty of historians that think Mythicism should be taken seriously.
Yes, there probably are real people on which the story is based. No, the stories involving to him are not actually true. c.f.: King Arthur
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE.
Jesus’s name was not actually Jesus; it was probably closer to Yeshua. “Jesus” comes to us via transliteration from Aramaic to Greek to Latin.
I am definite that folks with the name yeshua existed around that time. Many jesus’s nowadays to. That im certain. biblical jesus. not so much.
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