fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5680 ]

[ SECRET POST #5680 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5680 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You can only trust written records where the primary written material pre-dates the Constantinian era, or which was written in non Christian countries. A lot of the historical records that fell into the hands of the Catholic Church were heavily edited in their translations and updatings to bolster the idea that Jesus, y'know, even existed at all; for which there is little actual evidence. Best guess is that, as we know Judea at the time was a hotbed of wannabe Messiahs, they just picked bits and pieces from all of them and attributed them to Jesus. This isn't even a conspiracy theory, pretty much every historian admits it.

For the record, I meant contemporary stuff written on the topic, not ancient sources. That said I do agree that the ancient sources can be problematic, although maybe not to the same extent that you do.

Best guess is that, as we know Judea at the time was a hotbed of wannabe Messiahs, they just picked bits and pieces from all of them and attributed them to Jesus. This isn't even a conspiracy theory, pretty much every historian admits it.

As far as I understand, the mainstream historical view is that Jesus very definitely existed and that the very basic skeleton of the gospel narrative is probably at least somewhat reliable. I tend to agree that there are some good grounds for skepticism about the details of that narrative, but, the mainstream academic view is generally not super opposed to the idea of the gospel narratives. And even as someone on the more skeptical side it seems very hard to argue that there was no historical Jesus whatsoever and that he's a pure invention.

There were plenty of wandering preachers and Messiahs, and Jesus wouldn't have been that uncommon a name, so someone who was a wandering preacher called Jesus probably existed. Then everything the early church liked got stuck on the character, and everything they didn't like got quietly ignored. Jesus as we know him is what movie and tv adapters would call a composite character.

So Monty Python was right?

yup

Monty Python was absolutely right and it's mind-boggling that the historical record aligns with it.

This.

There were a lot of savior god/goddess cults around at the time, with dying and resurrected deities, as well as many teachers, rabbis, miracle workers, and people whose followers thought they were the Messiah.

The big thing is that the only definite Jesus we know existed was one who got crucified, simply because that was not a common execution method. You had to get into some SUPER deep shit to get that particular sentence. And thus, it's the only reliable documentation about the Historical Jesus. (As opposed to the Biblical Jesus, which is a whole other thing.)

I mean, if you're gonna make an amalgamation of figures, you're probably gonna choose the one whose death was the most metal as the definitive character.

Uh, crucifixion was super common. The Romans crucified tens of thousands of Jews during the wars.

Not at that exact time (CE 6), according to my professor in Early Christian History, which I took at a world-famous and highly respected university last semester. According to him (a foremost scholar on the Historical Jesus), the only evidence of Jesus Christ even existing is Roman records of the rare crucifixion dating from that time.

On another note, can we not all agree that the man's name was Joshua, not Jesus?

Different localised spellings of the same name... his name very likely was Yeshua if you really want to be pedantic.

The problem with most foremost Christian scholars is that they tend to be Christian first, scholars second, and are working off frameworks built by those religious academics back in the Victorian age and prior. We need to dismantle that old edifice where biblical acceptance was just a fact of life, before we can treat the bible like any other folklore and pseudo-history and then restart from there. There was a time when even serious Egyptologists took Exodus as fact, and now we know that slaves didn't build the pyramid, there was no mass captivity of Israelites, and nobody engaged in a mass migration of Egypt, much less burning bushes and seas parting. Jesus needs to be treated with the same modern rigueur, and we're just not there yet.

That's the problem with almost all religious scholars, especially those of dogmatic religions.

I think what you say is true but there are people who are not believing Christians in the field and they're not Christ Myth people generally. Bart Ehrman is probably the most notable one, I think.

AFAIK the only reasonably reliable non-Christian reference to historical Jesus is the passage in Josephus which talks about Jesus being called Christ and being the brother of James, and nothing else - not anything about him being crucified.

There's also the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus, which does talk about Jesus being crucified but which is generally regarded as a later Christian interpolation, I believe.

Here's a reference full of crucifixion, including the Josephus passage about Jesus:

https://pages.charlotte.edu/james-tabor/archaeology-and-the-dead-sea-scrolls/josephus-references-to-crucifixion/

AYRT

So I think at minimum we can say that there was some historical figure called Jesus Christ; that most likely he was crucified; and that a corpus of stories about his life and teachings came into existence sometime over the course of the years from ~40 AD to ~70 AD, with Paul writing a bunch about his teachings from ~50 AD on and oral traditions coming up with a bunch of stuff over the same period.

As to the stuff that was in the oral traditions and teachings that got incorporated into the Gospels and the Epistles, we obviously can't say for sure where that stuff came from, and I definitely *don't* think it's reliable in every detail. The oral tradition may have invented stuff, it may have composited stuff from multiple figures into a single character, and it may have accurately recorded stuff - it may have done all 3 at the same time.

However, I don't see why the idea of a composite character is more plausible than a singular character. It doesn't seem like there's any direct evidence to support the idea of a composite character, and it doesn't seem like the idea of a composite character doing the things ascribed to Jesus is fundamentally more plausible than a single character doing them. So it seems like, while a composite character is a possibility, there's no particular reason to think it's the most likely possibility. The reality is that the details just aren't reliable enough one way or the other to say.

no, no that's not the minimum we can say. we can say there was a cult-leader who might have been executed via crucifixion and a following that decided to write down some stories about him 70+ years after the execution (date completely ambiguous since we have no records of this execution from a culture that kept meticulous records). literally eveything else is specious, which is why the almalgamation theory is more likely than not.

someone's fan club went nuts. we don't even know that this person was named Jeshua bin Josef, or that he was from Nazareth vis-a-vis Galilea, or if a guy by that name did anything notable enough to have garnered enough of a following that the fan club would have gone through the effort to pretend his tomb was empty, that he did a bunch of weird and inconsistent miracles. until the historial record can nail down a dude by that name who was verified to have been among the messianic figures of the time period, I'm not going to say that anything is taken as given.

Especially as Joshua and Joseph were both names of high significance to the Jews, so natural choices to tie a Messiah figure in to the existing scriptures, and apocalyptic resurrection cults were very popular at the time (and would have gotten a particular boost after the destruction of Jerusalem, which happened before the Gospels were written).

Paul was writing before the destruction of Jerusalem, though.

He was also writing after the Roman conquest of Judea, and conquered peoples tend to grasp around for saviors.

Re: da

(Anonymous) - 2022-07-26 16:33 (UTC) - Expand

we can say there was a cult-leader who might have been executed via crucifixion and a following that decided to write down some stories about him 70+ years after the execution

I think this is mostly the same thing I said.

I think calling the cult-leader-figure "Jesus Christ" is pretty reasonable, given that Paul does so and Paul is writing very early. And I don't know where you got the 70+ years figure -- are you saying that Jesus' death was several decades earlier than traditionally ascribed, or are you saying that the Gospel of Mark was several decades later than academics place it? Or some combination of both? But other than that, yes, I agree that this is close to the limit of what we can say for sure.

literally eveything else is specious, which is why the almalgamation theory is more likely than not.

This I don't really get. There are many possible explanations for how the Gospel narrative came into existence - maybe it was an amalgamation of stories about multiple figures, maybe it was stories about one specific figure, maybe it was invented for cult religious reasons, maybe it's some combination. I don't see why the amalgamation theory is more fundamentally plausible than other possible theories.

What does amalgamation explain better that other theories? It doesn't explain the supernatural parts of the Gospel narrative. And most of the non-supernatural parts of the Gospel narrative are not really super implausible or unlikely on the face of it. Again, the amalgamation theory is definitely *plausible*, I just don't think it's more likely than other theories. Ultimately, like you say, all of this is pretty specious and up in the air - and that's also an argument against being able to say that Jesus was definitely a composite character - we just don't know enough to say that for sure, or even to say it's more likely.

You know what does explain the supernatural parts of the narrative? The oppression of a conquered people, and that they were living before television came along to break the boredom. Half invented, half made up.

There is the same amount of evidence for Jesus as there is for King Arthur or Robin Hood.

That's definitely not true about King Arthur. We have very definite and concrete Christian accounts of Jesus from within the first 25-50 years of his death, and we have a non-Christian source who is generally accepted as a reliable contemporary historian of the period attesting to his existence.

There's nothing even remotely close to that for Arthur - our earliest records for Arthur are 9th and 10th century, when a historical Arthur would have lived in the 5th or 6th century.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #5680 ]

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Crucifixion was pretty common

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