Historical Jesus tangent

Are there any of those sources that can connect the people writing about JC with stories they heard of this particular man? It is not historical if they were writing about some dude who probably existed and were making shit up whole cloth.

I could write a story about a guy named jesus who was born from Maria and Jose down here in miami who worked in construction and there might actually be a guy fitting that description. even if I describe him getting arrested and helping out poor people it does not mean I am doing anything but writing fiction even though there is a pretty good chance there might be a dude very similar to that somewhere in this area now or in the past 100 years.

Did these storymakers even know there was a jesus around that time? Did they just make up a name? Did they hear a name and a story and just ran with their own version knowing people were speaking about this guy?

Calling it historical gives it academic value that is not established and therefor should not be done. We have a word for stories about people that may have existed and fictional events that happened to them. It is called a Parable, not a historical account.

There are the parables of the Buddha. They are not historical accounts of his life. They should not be deified, but they are. By the Buddha's own teachings they should not, but people have chosen to. There are sects of Buddhism that tell parables of jesus, but that does not make them historical records.

You are on words that have evidence and science backing them when there is none that can be established with the biblical accounts of the time.

I've listened to all of Bart Ehrman's Great Courses and have only become further convinced that if there was an actual Jesus, scholars have got a lot of it wrong.

Speaking of Bart Erhman, you'll note that he's more than happy to point out that there are no accounts written about Jesus during the time that he lived.

Ages ago, I read that historians have a formula dealing with how long it takes for something to get written down in a society where literacy is uncommon, and isn't directly connected to individuals who are members of the literate society. IIRC, it was well over 100 years. Meaning that if the earliest accounts of Jesus were written down in 100 CE (as they seem to have been), the actual events (whatever those were) would have had to have happened in 70 BCE or so. That throws out a whole bunch of things in the New Testament as relating to the time period.

Biblical scholarship, even that done by the best, can be questionable at times. For example, Erhman talks about how we know certain letters written by Paul are fake because they say things like, "You can tell that this was written by me because it's in my own hand." Erhman argues that the only reason you'd put that in is if you were trying to convince people that you were Paul when you were really somebody else. Logical, but when asked how we can be certain that Jesus was real, Erhman says that Paul talks about meeting Jesus' brother James, and asks why would Paul lie about such a thing. Well, Dr. Erhman, I can think of a couple of reasons why someone might do that.

And remember, it wasn't all that long ago, that biblical scholars thought that Moses was a real person, even if the events in Exodus were exaggerated. Now, of course, we know that absolutely none of it happened. If I were to try and suggest an actual person who might have been Jesus, and that we know a smidge about, it would be whoever founded the sect at Qumran.

Of course, there's a guy who's supposed to publish a book this year that he claims will prove that the New Testament was basically written by Pliny the Younger at the behest of the Roman government. I am dubious of this, but we'll see.

King Arthur just has to be real!
All those movies!
My childhood!
Eeehh, heh, hehhh!!!


That's what this shit sounds like to me.

Ignorant is bliss.

The earliest accounts (Corinthians) are estimated to be in the 50's. But applying that kind of formula (what is it based on?) stringently seems unwise.

I think the point on that issue is that Paul's admission that the meeting happened is reluctant and goes against his interests, the aim of that particular letter being to promote his version of Christianity as superior to James's and to highlight that he was not subservient to him.

Hey, man, you don't have to justify yourself to us.

My thoughts, based on what appears to be a reality where no God is present and what I know of human nature. After all, no place in the bible is told of that the writers didn't already have knowledge of, there is no particular insight into the world, and page 1 of Genesis where the creator tells of his creation is clearly factually wrong.

A guy named Jesus was probably real, and he was no doubt a significant philosopher, but most of the things told about him are lies. Virginal birth? Tacked on much later in time. If true it's much more likely Mary had an illicit affair and wanted to explain away her pregnancy. The resurrection? Judas had to point out Jesus to the Romans. He did - but chose someone else, probably a minor criminal, who they promptly crucified. The Jews didn't call for mercy for him because a lot of them were in on it. Jesus was walking around later and the Jews who weren't in on it went 'No shit, you are alive!' The reason we don't see much more of Jesus after a brief interlude isn't that he was called to heaven, but he got the hell out of dodge and went and lived the rest of his life in India.

Also it appeals to me that this makes Judas the good guy in the story, but he had to take the fall in order to keep his good buddy Jesus alive. He also took the silver because why the hell not? LOL.

But we don't have a copy that dates before 200 CE. By contrast, the Trojan War is thought to have occurred in the ~12 Century BCE, with the first accounts of it being written down (in the forms of The Illiad and The Odyssey) in the 8th Century BCE. If part of The Odyssey describes a total eclipse of the sun, then we pin the time period for the Trojan War down to around 1178 BCE. Bear in mind, of course, that the amount of archeological evidence we have for the Trojan Wars actually being a thing vastly outweighs the evidence for Jesus.

And? How is that different than god failing to aid his chosen people in defeating folks who had iron chariots?

Are you claiming that because there's a big lag between events and their recordings in terms of the Trojan War, that must also be the case for Jesus? That doesn't follow. For one thing, the latter existed in a vastly more literate society - a significant minority were able to read.

There are other obvious reasons for discounting the Iron Chariots bit. It's not obvious why Paul would have invented a meeting with a man whose message he was trying to distance himself from, less still invent that man full cloth and assign him a role as a brother of the figure he was claiming a unique relationship with. It more or less goes against his entire expressed theology.

The Trojan War is an interesting comparison. Although there is a city in the right place to be the historical Troy, there's no written proof of that. In fact, no archives have ever been found at "Troy." There have to have been some because there's no way such a wealthy city that made its money through taxation and trade could have been illiterate. The best guesses we have are that the city (cities actually) located at Hirsarlik is where Troy was located, that it was contested territory and that battles were fought there. The date of 1178 is interesting because that's right at the time modern scholarhip places the great Bronze Age Collapse. (See Cline's "1177"). Cline posits that the "Trojan War" was actually an accumulation of bits and pieces of historical events revolving around this critical piece of territory and the efforts between the Hittites and Mycenean Greeks to control it over a long period of time. Events were telescoped, conflated and in some cases IIRC invented out of whole cloth to spice up the story and create a coherent narrative. Something similar could certainly have happened with "Jesus".

I'm not sure what a Pharisee is in this context, but it sounds like he's reporting on a belief, not an event. Does nothing to disprove the assertion I made that there was more than one guy playing the part like the Brawny Paper Towel guys.
Pliney and Tacitus over a century later? Looks more like they were saying "Hey, these guys over here have a story about...". Might as well have been a 20 foot tall lumberjack with a blue ox...

Meanwhile, John fuckin' Calvin cast doubt on the physical "evidence" based on it's "abundance".

you sure you read it?

or maybe rather than snipe at each other's comprehension skills we could simply presume different takeaways from a relatively objective article?

No, I’m using it because it’s an unambiguous and familiar example of oral legends being written down at a later date that have some basis in reality. I was not attempting to suggest that the time frames are identical.

As there are with the Bible as a whole. That’s beside the point. It’s an easy example of where the Bible gives what can only be considered an unfavorable account of god’s abilities.

This is predicated upon the assumption that Paul actually wrote the text. And that we have the text in something resembling it’s original form. Dr. Robert M Price has argued that a number of books in the New Testament were written by people representing different factions in early Christianity and that some of the works shouldn’t be seen as trying to give an account of Christ or other prominent members of the early church, but as attacks against competing sects. I think he says that Simon Magus is actually a satire of Paul written by those who held opposing views on the religion. If it wasn’t Simon Magus, it was another figure from the NT being used to satirize Paul.

Finally, don’t forget that there were a number of different texts circulating about Jesus in 100 CE or so, and we only have copies of a few of them, with no real idea of how influential they might have been on society at the time.

Whatshisface who found Troy really fucked the site up. Archeology wasn’t much of a science then, but even by the low standards, he was horrible. Not only did he wantonly rip through the site, but he destroyed artifacts that he thought came from the wrong time period.

Interestingly, modern research in Greece has turned up significant evidence that supports Homer’s works. They’ve found a palace that matches up with Agamemnon’s, shows signs of a great feast from around the time the Greeks were thought to be plotting to invade Troy, and appears to have been destroyed some time after that.

Just the fact that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are so different would lead the unbiased reader to go "WTF?" when trying to reconcile them. Ironically there is some thought there was an original source for the Gospels called the "Q" source... The idea that there could be more than one "Jesus" could be comparable to the belief by some experts that there is more than one "Q" behind QAnon...

Schliemann truly was an archaelogical rapist. He's pretty much what you would get if Trump's hobby horse was archaeology. The man from whom he got his ideas about Troy's location was a shadowy American named Frank Calvert who urged him to dig shallow trenches, but pickaxes, steam shovels and dynamite was more to Schliemann's taste. The biggest problem is that the hill "Troy" is located on is a layer cake of 8 or 9 different settlements. It would be a nightmare for modern experts to sort out even using state of the art techniques and equipment such as geophysics. In fact, it was the use of geophysics that showed "Troy" was much more than the enclosure at the top of the hill, which was not nearly large enough to be a major city. It was, instead, a much larger settlement with a community surrounding the citadel (the "City of Fine Walls") at the top of the hill which so closely resembles Homer's Troy, that would have been quite an impressive city for the time. The hope among the archaeological community is that the kingdom's archives might be found in the lower city, while their greatest fear is that Schliemann destroyed them.

Anyone here know Latin?

The translation on Wikipedia of Tacitus' description reads to me like Tacitus describing something he believed to be true, not just "hey, here's what those crazy Christians say":

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.​

The translators were Christian, so presumably could have had a motive to translate Tacitus' words in that particular way, but I'm not seeing any serious claims that the passage was mistranslated.

anyone familiar with the modern GOP wouldn't be guessing

Some folks claim it’s a forgery, it seems. https://ehrmanblog.org/fuller-reply-to-richard-carrier/

Given that Tacitus was born in 54 CE, he wasn’t exactly writing about current events.

I don't see how it is relevant if the timeframe doesn't have some bearing on the case we're discussing.

So what are the reasons for supposing that Paul (or whoever wrote Corinthians) would lie about meeting the brother of Jesus?

It's very clear that at least some of the NT books are pseudepigraphical as you suggest - Price's claim is that basically all of them are. I don't think that stands up when there are several with a consistent language, theology (distinct and very obviously earlier than that in other texts) and a plausible historical setting.
But Price's stuff is interesting - debate is healthy when so much is uncertain. His ideas about Simon Magus fall into this bracket and it's plausible that Simon represents negative traditions about Paul giving money to the Jerusalem church that originated in an opposing faction of the early Christian movement. Since Luke-Acts appears to be a carefully balanced political document, aimed at reconciling the Petrine and Pauline branches, in that he's worked into being a distinct character.
He also appears in apocryphal works - but all of these (and Acts) are much later than Corinthians.

Yeah, some of the non-biblical references to Jesus are disputed. And I don't dispute the lack of physical evidence. I just find it entirely in line with what would expect concerning an illiterate itinerate cult leader who was unsuccessful in obtaining much of a following until after his death. None of this changes your mischaracterisation of the state of academia on this question. I mean, taking a different view is fine - but the fact is that those considered experts in the field overwhelmingly don't share it.

Mods, perhaps split the theological stuff off to its own thread? This now has very little to do with Republican bigotry.

1000 years from now...





Seriously... "Rainbow Dash crucified" gets a million and a half results... at least a few folks are going to claim to have seen it happen

Well, I'm sorry, but I haven't had a day off in almost two months, and, if I'm lucky, it'll probably be another two months before I have a day off. In reality, odds are that I won't have a day off until some time in late November at the earliest. So, forgive me if I'd rather use an example off the top of my head than go plumbing the depths of esoterica on the web to find one with a potentially closer time frame.

What are the reasons for supposing that Paul would admit about having a negative meeting with James? It adds "realism." If Paul's argument is that only he is teaching the true word of Jesus and that others have been deceived, what better proof of this than him having a disagreement with James? If the devil can blind the brother of Christ to the truth, then he can blind anyone, so you'd better be fucking careful.

Consistent language, theology, and a plausible historical setting only mean that it's likely those texts had the same author. One who was unlikely to have been Paul. Paul was a tent maker, and, at best, probably only semi-literate, if at all. Being generous, you could say that Paul dictated the works to someone who transcribed them. None of that is evidence that the events described in the works are remotely true, or that the person who authored the works was an eyewitness or authority on them. Superman first appeared in the comics 84 years ago. During that time period, there have been subtle reworkings of his origin story and his abilities. Broadly speaking, however, they've remained consistent: Superman is an orphan from a dead planet who was raised in Kansas and developed his super abilities because of the influence of our sun on him. Things like Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex fill the same role as the apocryphal writings about Jesus (especially when he was a kid, prone to murder). None of that really means any of it is true.

Additionally, social change, especially in a backwater Roman province, was pretty glacial. Odds are, the life of a peasant in such a place didn't change significantly for hundreds of years. Contrast that to the 21st Century, where youngsters now often have no idea what "burning a CD" means. So, pretty easy for someone writing in 200 CE, for example, to get things mostly right about life in 100 CE, or even earlier.

Price is a real interesting cat, and a good example of how someone can grasp some important truths, but still be trapped by their own delusions (as he accuses folks like Bart Erhman of doing when it comes to the historicity of Jesus). Price was a fundamentalist preacher, who got a number of advanced degrees from respectable institutions and later realized that religion was bullshit. However, he did not shed many of his other beliefs that are commonly intertwined with fundamentalism. Dude was pretty bugfuck crazy for Trump. I'd trust him to have a good position when it came to matters theological, and that's about it.

Yes.

3 pages of this?
Jesus Christ!

But unlike Jesus, this is real.

This is the thing for me. There are no primary sources supporting the notion of a historical Jesus. The Gospels were written by people who never could have met Jesus, roughly 30-80 years after Jesus died. And even so, I wouldn't rely on Christianity's core religious text as historically accurate, especially when they are inconsistent and written well after the life of Jesus. It's disingenuous to say there was a historical Jesus, but the events of the New Testament are probably fictional, since the assumption that Jesus was real comes primarily from the New Testament. We cannot use historical methods and standards of evidence to examine works of fiction.

Even with the historians Josephus and Tacitus, there is a lack of primary source material. Both were born after Jesus's purported death, and their brief references to Jesus in their works came 60-80 years after his purported death. That's a whole two or three generations removed from the timeframe from when Jesus was allegedly alive, and they seem to rely on Christian sources.

How did it take two or three generations for anything in the historical record to appear about Jesus? How did the people who actually knew him not write a single thing about him down, or save any artifacts relating to Jesus?

So I think stating there is consensus that Jesus was real is disingenuous when that consensus comes primarily from centuries and centuries of Christian scholars relying on the core religious texts of Christianity as "historical sources." Jesus's historicity was repeated so frequently throughout the centuries that it became an assumed truth, and not based on actual independent historical evidence.

All of this in contrast to another religious figure/prophet who we know existed: Joseph Smith. His religious writings and any divine attributions are obviously bullshit, but there is no denying that the man existed. There is ample independent historical evidence that Smith existed (including his own writings). We don't have any of that for Jesus (despite Jesus being literate, at least according to the Gospels). We have documented historical evidence of other historical figures centuries before and after Jesus's timeframe, but none for Jesus.

All that being said, I don't think we can definitively say that Jesus never existed (proving a negative and all of that). Personally, I am not convinced there was a real Jesus based on the lack of primary sources, artifacts, and other independent historical accounts contemporaneous with Jesus's purported lifetime. But can I say for certain he never existed? No.

But I'm sure Wordforge will get to the bottom of this.

Don't forget Mohammed. It is interesting that while Mohammed the Prophet did exist, Jesus, who's historicity is shaky at best, is also a great figure in Islam.

And Moses.
Holy shit, Moses.
The Koran flashes back to Moses more than the Waynes are killed in Batman.

To expand upon what @Fisherman's Worf so adeptly put, we have to look at the references of historical information put forth in fictional work with the motivation of the people making it and society. Christianity is so huge, and religious stories are so fabricated for the purpose of power and money that we cannot look at anything they say without recognizing the extreme likelihood they were lies meant to deceive people during a time when deception often became the establishment of fact. In other word's the liars of faith often manufactured evidence to make their story true because there was a weakness in evidence.

Just look at a modern day religion that uses the same weaknesses to establish a "magical" prophet. We can look at Scientology to see the motivations and practices con men used in the past to convince followers to follow them. LRH specifically studied science, psychology, cults, and faith to manufacture his religion. Why do people assume that 2000 years ago everyone in the sphere of religion was good and noble? Religion has always been a con.

From my own experience it is actually difficult to stop being treated like a prophet when you start helping people spiritually. I do not speak spiritually anymore because good people were tossing money at me and begging for my help. I was just a kid talking about what ifs and ideas and people on the internet wanted so desperately to find some meaning they wanted to pay me money. People immediately stepped in and conned the fuck out of these people. I was in a fringe group from the furries and I know of hundreds of thousands of dollars that were conned from a few people.

This is in modern times, and not way back when common people did not have books written about the history of religious and spiritual cons.

We know the christian church sought and obtained a stranglehold on knowledge and made huge successful efforts to destroy science and evidence against their lies. The world's knowledge was set back by the christian church in the dark ages. The preservation of knowledge was by people against the destruction of the church. Some people try to lie and say the church preserved and promoted knowledge, but that lie fails to recognize the force most likely to destroy science and knowledge was the church itself.

It is intellectually dishonest to claim the stories of fiction that promoted the lies of the christian faith were historically accurate in any way when they were trying to create a fictional history. It is the same thing as trusting the confederate states to be honest about the history of slavery in the present day. The only thing you can get is what the lies were, and not what history actually was.

The actual difference that is important between Harry Potter and the bible is that JK Rowling was not trying to create an alternate account of a false history and the Bible/Torah/Koran are.