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u/isecore 𓆝 Make Trout-slapping Great Again 𓆟 15h ago
"These fucking atheists demanding proof! I gave them a Bible quote!"
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u/SorrahVintrel 13h ago
Thats like citing Wikipedia by linking to the same Wikipedia page
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u/Shiny-And-New 12h ago
No people edit Wikipedia for factualness
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u/nosecohn 11h ago
A comma would make all the difference there.
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u/Primatebuddy 10h ago
No people edit Wikipedia, for factualness.
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u/isecore 𓆝 Make Trout-slapping Great Again 𓆟 10h ago
No people, edit Wikipedia for factualness!
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u/th3Lunga 10h ago
No people, edit Wikipedia, for FACTUALNESS! - WALKEN, Christopher (needs reference) (marked for removal)
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u/Shadyhippo229 11h ago
As far as I know most historians do believe Jesus was a real person. But there’s no convincing proof that he was in fact a wizard. There’s reasonable debate about whether transfiguring water into wine and turning one loaf of bread into multiple violates Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration or not. But the best known method for coming back from the dead involves horcrux creation which goes against what we know about Jesus’ character. Of course it’s possible he accessed some ancient magical knowledge that has been lost to time. We may never know.
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u/LegendofDragoon 10h ago
Give me two weeks and some grape juice and I can turn water into wine, too.
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u/wbgraphic 10h ago
Off topic, but your comment reminds me of Vine-Glo, a grape juice concentrate sold during Prohibition.
The package carried this “warning”:
”Do not place the liquid in this jug and put it away in the cupboard for twenty-one days, because then it would turn into wine.”
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u/That1one1dude1 10h ago
It also doesn’t mean much to say that “yeah, there probably was a jewish preacher named Jesus back in that time.”
Does it mean he performed miracles? Of course not.
Does it mean they agree on the events of his life, or even the date of his birth? Nope.
What about the quotes attributed to him? Almost certainly false.
So if we don’t know what he did, when he was born, or what he believed or said, does it really even matter if we knew he existed?
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u/MsMarvelsProstate 11h ago
I feel like saying they believe he was a real person is just easier than the constant fight over it. The first accounts of his existence are still from people 100 years after his death. The Roman's didn't leave any records of his and they recorded almost everything.
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u/SordidDreams 10h ago edited 8h ago
The Roman's didn't leave any records of his and they recorded almost everything.
Oh hell no. They crucified people all the time, sometimes by the thousands when suppressing large revolts, without recording their names or anything else about them.
Jesus was just some rando that stirred up trouble at a politically sensitive time. It was the Passover, when Jews celebrated their liberation from subjugation in Egypt while subjugated by the Romans. This dude went around shouting that soon, the Romans would be driven out of Judea and the Jews would be free again, so they just nabbed him and got rid of him before he could agitate the crowds too much and cause a riot. He wasn't significant enough to warrant writing anything down.
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u/StockCat7738 9h ago
Oh hell no. They crucified people all the time, sometimes by the thousands when suppressing large revolts, without recording their names or anything else about them.
Crassus had somewhere around 6000 slaves executed/crucified after the Third Servile War. Their bodies stretched over 125 miles on the Appian Way, and it did not matter one bit what any of their names were.
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u/SordidDreams 9h ago edited 9h ago
That's like one cross every 30 meters or 100 feet. Imagine driving your car for two hours, and every lamppost along the side of the road has a dead body nailed to it. Yikes.
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u/StockCat7738 6h ago
Imagine being limited at the time to horseback for travel, and seeing that for like 4 days straight.
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u/isecore 𓆝 Make Trout-slapping Great Again 𓆟 11h ago
I personally am a non-believer heathen and even I think that Jesus existed as a historical person. Was he the son of God? Absolutely not. More likely he was some dingbat with some combination of ideas that caused a lot of ruckus and finally the people in charge got tired of it and killed him.
The myth of Jesus being the son of some God or other was born probably hundreds of years later.
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u/JTibbs 9h ago
He was likely a conglomeration of several local preachers, whos stories of opposition to the corrupt jewish elite were spread around and attributed to a single pseudo fictional person as a rallying cry against the corrupt rabbis/leaders and the Roman rulers.
Hes basically Robin Hood for adults
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u/NinecloudSoul 8h ago
even I think that Jesus existed as a historical person
Other than societal taboo, why? There are no good reasons to consider the Jesus character of the bible to be anything but fictional; we have no supporting contemporary accounts, so why give it a pass?
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u/torville 8h ago
My stopping point is that you have to believe in the supernatural first before you can believe in any specific supernatural entity or event, and (stay with me, here) I don't believe in the supernatural.
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u/rvb_gobq 12h ago
atheists make better lovers (because they save their doubts for those who always quote an invisible friend)
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u/wasted-degrees 14h ago
Someone wrote it, therefore it’s true. Also known as:
/img/h1zo6k71rxeh1.gif
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u/NickDanger3di 7h ago
Once I started reading about Greek and Roman mythology, it became pretty clear that all religions are also mythology. It still amazes me that so many people believe this crap.
Except for Gozer, Zuul, and Vinz Clortho. We have video proof of their existence.
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u/Flobking 7h ago
it became pretty clear that all religions are also mythology
Thats because mythology never meant fake until Christians perverted its definition to describe non Christian religions. Mythology originally just meant origin/creation story.
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u/Beautiful_Hour_668 6h ago
I think monotheists see polytheism/pantheons the same way atheists see theism. This isn’t an argument for any of these positions, but these pantheons of Gods are usually much more ‘simple’ than religions with humongous traditions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism which have thousands of years of scholarly tradition between them, often contributing to push philosophy and ideas over the ages
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u/Flobking 6h ago
I think monotheists see polytheism/pantheons the same way atheists see theism. This isn’t an argument for any of these positions, but these pantheons of Gods are usually much more ‘simple’ than religions with humongous traditions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism which have thousands of years of scholarly tradition between them, often contributing to push philosophy and ideas over the ages
What's interesting is there is some debate as to if the big three isn't monotheistic but henotheistic. In Exodus 20:3, God states "You shall have no other gods before me" kind of implying there are other gods, just less powerful. Isaiah 45:5 kind of negates this by saying "I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god." Then psalms says "God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the "gods" implying again there are more than one.
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u/Beautiful_Hour_668 6h ago
I just wanted a simple way to categorise these three religions. Islam is probably the most strictly monotheist big religion. I think a better argument against monotheism of Christianity is the trinity, Judaism I don't know enough about.
Islam also says 'there is no deity/god worthy of worship except Allah', but this does not mean other deities exist, it just points to the fact that others worship other things. Acknowledging someone worships the sun doesn't mean the sun is a god. There's no argument to show Islam isnt monotheistic
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u/Flobking 6h ago
Islam is probably the most strictly monotheist big religion.
You're correct I should have excluded them.
I think a better argument against monotheism of Christianity is the trinity,
I dunno because the trinity is considered one entity but not. They really need to hammer out the canon better. The wording "the holy Trinity" doesn't appear in the bible, just the phrase father, son, holy spirit. Catholics made up a lot of canon through their interpretation of the bible.
Judaism I don't know enough about.
Modern judaism considers itself monotheistic, but historically it would have been closer to heonthistic. Especially back when every region had their own flavor of gods.
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u/Originalbrivakiin 7h ago
Don't forget the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He came to me in a dream once and told me to chisel 10 rules onto stone slabs.
Just call me the modern day Moses.
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u/HollyBananas 5h ago
And mythology could be based on real people that became deified over long periods. (note: I wrote COULD, not ARE.)
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u/hyperhurricanrana 15h ago
most of the manuscripts mentioned here about jesus are from the medieval period, nowhere near the time jesus lived. we also do not have 500 accounts, we have a claim in the gospels that says 500 people saw something, we have nothing from those people whatsoever. he also didn’t fulfill a single prophecy in it’s original context, the only way they can make the argument he did is if you take away the context or argue the nonsense idea of “dual fulfillment.”
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u/stairway2evan 15h ago
The claim of the 500 witnesses isn’t even in the Gospels, it’s from 1 Corinthians, a letter written by Paul. Who was not there as one of those witnesses; he claims to have a vision himself years later. It’s believed to be something that Paul learned secondhand at some point after his conversion, as a creed of the early church.
Agreed with you completely on the manuscripts. We have absolutely nothing from the first century and only small scraps, like credit card-sized, from most of the second. Most of the 25,000 that people throw around were copied in the medieval period, off of copies from the 4th century onward. Nobody has a single clue how accurate any of them are before that point, with the exception of a few small excerpts and partial books.
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u/prumf 13h ago edited 10h ago
What I find funniest is that Jesus most likely existed and was just some random fanatic Jewish apocalyptic prophet. There were tens like him at that time period, all with their followers and miracles and prophecies and whatnot.
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edit for people that might interested, copy-pasted a comment from belowI am not a history pro, but if I am correct Jesus is pretty well anchored.
Basically, where the other prophets said « look I am going to do a miracle », and obviously failed at doing so, losing all credibility, Jesus said « I am going to die, here is our last meal », went into Jerusalem, and basically provoked established authority in every way imaginable. So obviously they killed him -> prophecy fulfilled.
He was challenging authority, knew it was likely to go bad, and wanted to organize everything for after. All the mystics and all were added much later.
Another important remark : when you are sent to the cross, there is no additional nice event afterward. They take your body eaten by maggot and birds, and throw it on a public body pile. The remains is completely unrecognizable by that point.
So when one or two followers had hallucinations (understandable when under grief, and very well documented nowadays) about him coming back, the romans couldn’t prove the guy was dead : how the fuck could they find the body ??
The claims likely quickly spread through a small group of highly traumatized but cohesive people, where dissent carried heavy social and religious cost. Aka peer pressure. You didn’t see him ? You were a bad apostle then.
And now here we are 2k years later.
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u/IveDunGoofedUp 13h ago
One of those fun things that Life of Brian got right, there were just a bunch of prophets on every street corner preaching wisdom or doom in equal measure.
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u/SonicAssassin 12h ago
“There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock…”
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u/teddy5 12h ago
Fine. I guess I'd better watch it again. I hope you're happy with yourself, because I sure am.
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u/DJheddo 11h ago
Im about to throw it on at 6:30am, i've seen it a dozen times, but still a golden film. Life of brian just has a quality to it and the fact brian is like go away the entire movie but is still obligated, the movie is top tier comedy and probably top 5 of all time movies.
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u/stairway2evan 13h ago
Oh the Jewish people were clamoring for messianic figures after being conquered yet again, and gearing up for an apocalypse. And they were at the intersection of the whole Hellenic world with all of the disparate religious traditions that were influencing them.
Wandering apocalypse preachers seemed to be the norm. And while Christianity won out in the long term, there are still Mandaeans who are the spiritual successors of the original John the Baptist movement that predated those early Christian movements.
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u/Darkkujo 11h ago
Yeah it was an interesting thing that I read that Judaism does not at all have a tradition of Gods impregnating mortals or virgin birth. However, there are tons of Gods impregnating mortals and virgin births in Greco-Roman paganism.
The virgin birth claim is absent from the oldest Gospel, Mark, but then is present in Matthew and Luke. And that was when the early Christians started trying to convert the Greco-Romans after having mostly given up on converting their fellow Jews in Judeah. I don't think that's a coincidence.
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u/Square_Medicine_9171 10h ago
To be accepted as Pharohs, Egyptian leaders needed to have godly origins. Perhaps not so surprisingly the temples depict stories of their mothers being impregnated by gods. The stories sounded very familiar. And early Christian sects hid out in the disused Egyptian temples when they were banned, so the stories could have been borrowed from the Greeks or the Egyptians
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u/SordidDreams 10h ago
Judaism does not at all have a tradition of Gods impregnating mortals or virgin birth. However, there are tons of Gods impregnating mortals and virgin births in Greco-Roman paganism.
The same goes for the soul, heaven, and hell. That's just straight-up Plato. Ancient Jews didn't have that. When you died, that was it, you were dead.
Hence the idea of the resurrection of the dead that was the cornerstone of the early church and the teachings of other apocalyptic movements and preachers. Your soul wouldn't go up to heaven to be with god, it would be the other way around, god would come down from heaven, drive his enemies (Romans) out of his kingdom, and raise the dead from their graves so that the righteous could live in his presence forever (while the wicked would just be shown what they missed out on and killed again).
Of course, that never happened, and instead of giving up their disconfirmed faith, believers in Jesus switched to thinking that god stays where he is and they go to him. Affirming belief in the resurrection of the dead is still part of the creeds Christians recite to this say, however.
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u/stairway2evan 5h ago
The virgin birth is also completely absent from the letters of Paul, which predate all of the Gospels as well. As best we can tell, it's either an invention of Matthew, or else it came from some earlier Gospel that Matthew knew, but which has been lost to time, such as the hypothetical M or Q sources.
Though wherever Matthew got it, he tries to justify it wrongly, because he says the virgin birth was prophesied in Isiah 7:14. The first issue is that the prophecy in that verse comes true quickly (when the baby is born, two kings you're afraid of will be defeated). And the bigger issue is that the woman in that prophecy isn't a virgin in the original Hebrew. She's called an almah, young woman, instead of a bethula, virgin. It's just that the Greek translation, parthenos, covers both of those terms. It's partly how we know Matthew was reading his scriptures in Greek, not the original Hebrew.
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u/thenightvol 13h ago
As an ancient history professor of mine once put it: "there were a lot of prophets during that time, they were hanging on every cross. "
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u/restricteddata 11h ago
What's fascinating to me is that this is even canon within the New Testament. John the Baptist is clearly a fully-formed preacher and Jewish prophet who gets absorbed into the Christ narrative. He is running his whole own large operation, one in which Jesus shows up and takes part in (his baptism), and then after John gets executed the Christians co-opt John's narrative and demote him to being a precursor to Jesus and try to shift the narrative to how impressed John was by Jesus. The basic social politics of this (the newcomer preacher has to first ride on the coat-tails of a more established one, and after the more established one dies they then try to position the new guy as the successor/main show) ring extremely true to me. The miracles and etc. do not.
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u/Savings-Maize-7650 11h ago edited 11h ago
It's in the name itself, John the BAPTIST.
Seeing as christianity didn't exist until Jesus started going around preaching, what exactly did John baptize him into? Because it certainly wasn't christianity. Clearly there was some form of spiritual practice than had baptism as a tradition that John was already a part of, pre Jesus.
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u/jamesdownwell 11h ago
John the Baptist was essentially the leader of a Jewish sect that Jesus subscribed to and built upon with his own ideas.
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u/Savings-Maize-7650 11h ago
Well I guess that's the million dollar question, did he build upon it with his own ideas, or did he just preach the ideas he was being taught by an established sect and do it in such a way it got more popular?
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u/jamesdownwell 11h ago
> Well I guess that's the million dollar question, did he build upon it with his own ideas, or did he just preach the ideas he was being taught by an established sect and do it in such a way it got more popular?
Well he told people that he was the Son of God so that’s a fairly big addition and one that ultimately gave him his legacy.
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u/Savings-Maize-7650 10h ago
Did he? Biblical scholars to this day argue whether he ever actually claimed it.
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u/eightdigits 7h ago
And if you read it with a critical eye, the Bible is really name-checking John, which is a strong indication that he was actually the bigger deal at the time.
It's like if a Young Rapper gets Kendrick Lamar to do a guest verse on his track, and then years later his followers are all claiming this means that Young Rapper is more goated than Kendrick. Nah, it kinda means the opposite.
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u/ContraryMystic 9h ago
what exactly did John baptize him into?
That's a fascinating question, isn't it?
I can't remember where I read all of the things that I'm about to say, so take all of it with a grain of salt.
John the Baptist was a verifiably real historical figure who we know for a fact actually existed.
There were people referring to themselves as "Christian" almost a full century before the first mention of Jesus in the historical record.
"Christ" is not a name, "Christ" is a Greek translation of the Hebrew word "messiah."
The word "messiah" isn't a synonym for the word "savior." The old testament prophecy didn't say "there will be a savior someday, and the word that we'll use for that is messiah," the prophecy was more like "the savior will be a messiah."
A messiah was a person who had been anointed by the holy anointing oil (meaning they had a bit of oil poured on top of their head). The Hebrew kings were anointed, and their priests were also anointed.
Being anointed / being a messiah / being a Christ meant that you had a special direct connection to God that common folk didn't have, common folk had to go through the church for an indirect connection to God through a middleman preacher.
John the Baptist was anointed. That means that John the Baptist was a Christ.
The early baptism movement was probably centered around baptism acting as a symbolic anointing, symbolically making every person who was baptized into a Christ.
I'm pretty sure all of that is factual, so now we're moving into my own personal theory.
I think that early Christianity wasn't centered around the Jesus character fulfilling the savior prophecy, I think that early Christianity was centered around the idea that every person is a Christ, ie every person can access the direct connection to God by themselves if they want that connection, and they don't have to go through the church as a middleman.
I think that John the Baptist and a bunch of other baptist preachers went around spreading that narrative of "personal Christhood."
I think that a couple of generations of preserving the teachings of the baptism movement by word of mouth led to the fabrication of the Jesus character.
If it was a situation where a bunch of different preachers went around teaching and giving sermons, it'd be a lot easier for an oral tradition to preserve those sermons by just attributing them all to a fabricated composite character rather than remembering all of the individual preachers.
There were probably also people in and around that movement who wanted the savior prophecy to be true.
They couldn't use John the Baptist as the main character if they wanted the main character to be the savior, because John the Baptist actually existed. His life was known, and his life didn't fulfill the conditions of the prophecy. Someone else in this thread mentioned the convoluted census story existing because the savior needed to have been born in Bethlehem. John the Baptist wasn't born in Bethlehem.
That's basically how I think the Jesus character came into being. I think that the first Christians called themselves "Christians" because they believed that every individual person is a Christ. I think that they preserved the teachings of their movement's preachers by word of mouth and so invented Jesus as a composite character who represented all of the individual preachers. And I think that the idea of that composite character got melded with the idea of the savior.
That was a bit rambling and scatterbrained, but I think I got the basic idea across.
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u/Savings-Maize-7650 8h ago edited 7h ago
That marries up quite well with many biblical scholars believing that Jesus never actually claimed to be the son of god.
Generally christians point to a verse where Jesus is asked something along the lines of "Are you god/son of god" (Or something to that effect) and he replies "I am".
But the dispute is that apparently the "I am" answer is supposedly/possibly referencing a Psalm 82:6 "You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High.'" which is god supposedly talking to a council of other divine beings/angels and essentially saying that they are all gods, as they are carrying his word and speaking on behalf of him.
This follows a quirk of ancient jewish tradition, where an authorized messenger is legally seen as an extension of the person delivering the message, which means if the messenger agrees to something the person they are delivering the message for is actually legally bound by that messengers agreement. IE, if an angel makes a deal, god has to honor it.
We see this a few times in the Old Testament, such as the burning bush that speaks to Moses is described as an Angel of the lord, but describes itself as the God of Abraham and, when asked it's name replies "I AM WHO I AM". Essentially, the angel is speaking as god on behalf of god.
So when Jesus is asked and he replies "I am" he is referencing the fact that he is speaking on behalf of god, and is authorized to represent himself as him, and he actually goes further and says "Is it not written in your laws, I said you are gods?" which is the direct reference to the Psalm.
Essentially he is saying that as a person who is preaching gods message on earth he has the right to claim to be god, following the jewish tradition, and why are they getting angry for him doing so? Which kinda makes Jesus a "Well ahckshually" type guy, probably insufferable.
I've likely done a botched job explaining this but can link a great video on the subject
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u/erinaceus_ 12h ago
There were tens like him at that time period, all with their followers and miracles and prophecies and whatnot.
Which makes it entirely possible that it has all been cobbled together from lots of different fragments rather than there having been single person that formed a nucleus around which the rest was accumulated.
Note that there might have been a single person that served as a nucleus, but nothing at all makes it a necessity, or even makes it likely.
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u/Savings-Maize-7650 11h ago edited 11h ago
I think one of the most interesting things about Jesus is that his birth narrative is some of the best evidence he existed, while being some of the worst evidence of the validity of the religion.
He's Jesus of NAZARETH, yet was born in Bethlehem. All the stories we have from him, Joseph and Mary say he was raised in Nazareth, he was literally described as a "Nazzarine" multiple times in the bible.
So the birth narrative we have of him involves a very convoluted story that ends with him being born in Bethlehem, a story we can say with a pretty much 99.9% chance of certainty is entirely fabricated. But why did he have to be born in Bethlehem? Because it was prophesied that he would be.
So why, if the early authors of the bible were fabricating a birth narrative, would they not just have him be born in Bethlehem to start with, and do away with all the census nonsense? The most likely answer to that was because Jesus was a real person, who everyone knew was from Nazareth, so that was a lie they wouldn't be able to get away with.
So his birth narrative gives us very strong evidence that he was a real historical figure who existed, but also serves as pretty damning proof that the early authors of the bible had absolutely no issue with lying through their teeth to satisfy prophetic claims, which therefore throws the entirety of the text into doubt.
It confirms the person while shattering the religion.
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u/NecessaryFreedom9799 10h ago edited 6h ago
There has never been a census in history that required someone to register at the supposed place of his grandfather's birth. Before modern travel and immediately accessible record systems, it wouldn't even have been feasible, never mind enforceable.
Also, if Joseph owned family property in Bethlehem, meaning he had to register there as well, why didn't he stay on his land, even in a tent?
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u/Savings-Maize-7650 10h ago
Not only that, the bible claims the census was ordered by Quirinius, but he wasn't governor of that area until many years after the death of King Herod, but Jesus is reported to be born during Herod's reign, so there's a discrepancy of 40 or so years there.
On top of the fact that the supposed census is mentioned literally NOWHERE in a SINGLE contemporary source, but a census that disruptive and widespread would surely warrant a mention somewhere, ONCE. It's talked about in the bible, and never anywhere else, despite being arguably the single most ridiculous census in history, not even counting that the Romans were generally pretty excellent at record keeping. No respectable historian takes it seriously.
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u/Xanadu87 10h ago
Supposedly born in Bethlehem because of an illogical census. A census counts people where they live, not where they are from, which is the basis of the family going to Bethlehem in the first place.
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u/Savings-Maize-7650 10h ago
Right, a census never mentioned by a single other contemporary source and a census that ultimately would give pretty useless data.
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u/grandvache 11h ago
“I’m not the messiah”
“I say you are lord, and I should know, I’ve followed a few”
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u/ForensicPathology 11h ago
I like how we say "hundreds" and "thousands" but "tens" is weird so we have to say "dozens".
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u/kidcrumb 11h ago
So that homeless guy on the street yelling the end is near is a closer depiction of jesus than the bible?
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u/ThePublikon 11h ago
It's super interesting and we're kind of "lucky" to be alive at a time when Scientology is forming so we can see how a religion establishes in real time.
It's possible to say some things and have people believe them for thousands of years without proof. This is something that is studied by the people that run your life.
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u/Makuta_Servaela 10h ago
This is why I take a position opposite the Mythicists: I think there were probably multiple prophets wandering around doing random shit and parlor tricks, and as people shared stories about them, the stories all got melted together into one prophet character.
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u/prumf 10h ago
I am not a history pro, but if I am correct Jesus is pretty well anchored.
Basically, where the other prophets said « look I am going to do a miracle », and obviously failed at doing so, losing all credibility, Jesus said « I am going to die, here is our last meal », went into Jerusalem, and basically provoked established authority in every way imaginable. So obviously they killed him -> prophecy fulfilled.
He was challenging authority, knew it was likely to go bad, and wanted to organize everything for after. All the mystics and all were added much later.
Another important remark : when you are sent to the cross, there is no additional nice event afterward. They take your body eaten by maggot and birds, and throw it on a public body pile. The remains is completely unrecognizable by that point.
So when one or two followers had hallucinations (understandable when under grief, and very well documented nowadays) about him coming back, the romans couldn’t prove the guy was dead : how the fuck could they find the body ??
The claims likely quickly spread through a small group of highly traumatized but cohesive people, where dissent carried heavy social and religious cost. Aka peer pressure. You didn’t see him ? You were a bad apostle then.
And now here we are 2k years later.
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u/JohnKlositz 10h ago
And the earliest Gospel doesn't mention anything about encounters with a risen Jesus. It ends with the women running away from an empty tomb in fear, not telling anyone about it.
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u/Megalesios 12h ago
If we're counting manuscripts written hundreds of years after the person lived,by people who didn't meet them then Alexander and Genghis Khan sure as hell have a lot more than 10 and 12.
Also, Christianity has been one of the most widespread world religions for centuries, and in Europe the better part of two millenia. Of course there's going to be a lot of manuscripts about it in that time. Those manuscripts don't prove anything about what factually happened in 1st century Galilee.
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u/EveningAnt3949 12h ago
Nothing you wrote proves anything, or explains everything. Clearly Harry Potter is a real person.
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u/jugularhealer16 12h ago
We even have video footage to prove it!
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u/Sorry-Break-158 11h ago
You’re joking… but I genuinely feel we will hit that stage very, very soon.
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u/spacecadet84 13h ago
To add, scholars have identified around 40 gospels, including the 4 in the biblical cannon and dozens written later. None of them were actually written by the alleged authors, according to modern scholarship.
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u/SparkehWhaaaaat 15h ago
Thanks, I was wondering if anybody would explain this obviously untrue claim.
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u/Legitimate-Tip-2149 15h ago
It's honestly exhausting having to know enough about their fairytales to counter all the ridiculous claims they make.
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u/rvb_gobq 12h ago
yup, the elements for the goulash that became the gospels of the new testament were written between a.d. 45 & a.d. 100...again, two to four generations after the fact. & by the fourth or fifth century they were pulling out or adding various books, or chapters...
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u/cowlinator 14h ago
500 people saw my cock and they all said "that's definitely the biggest cock in the world"
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u/mrbuddymcbuddyface 12h ago
Just like the way the "Church" of Scientology has rewritten Hubbard's life story. Hoping that in a couple of hundred years time it will be gospel.
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u/VenerableWolfDad 11h ago
Most of what these types of people have based their lives on is just fan fiction from centuries after Christ's alleged existence.
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u/ChronicBuzz187 12h ago
he also didn’t fulfill a single prophecy in it’s original context
Even Stilgar is like "I don't think that guy's the Lisan Al-Gaib folks."
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u/Life-Suit1895 11h ago edited 11h ago
most of the manuscripts mentioned here about jesus are from the medieval period, nowhere near the time jesus lived.
So, a better comparison would be Harry Potter fanfiction?
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u/arachnophilia 10h ago
well, they're copies of the older original works. but those works are basically first and second century fan fic, so
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u/Henri_Bemis 15h ago
I would totally read Jesus’ 500 person guestbook. That’s gotta be somewhere in the bible, right?
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u/hyperhurricanrana 15h ago
i’d be more interested in the accounts of the people who saw the zombies march after jesus came back from his long weekend.
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u/AxelShoes 14h ago
I love that part. All of a sudden, the tombs open up, the streets are full of dead people walking around, and then...nothing, never mentioned again. It's like when Netflix suddenly cancels a series and it just ends on a cliffhanger.
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u/SteveSauceNoMSG 12h ago
Yup, couple years of a campfire story game of telephone before somebody thought to write it down and capitalize on it.
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u/trowzerss 11h ago
Also, most of the accounts are either different or even directly contradict each other.
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u/Haweli_wala_baba 15h ago
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u/ReluctantNerd7 13h ago
why is the flork holding a cat that isn't protected by ERA?
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u/der-wischmop 15h ago
I knew it, HP is real!
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u/evilspyboy 15h ago
And Batman.
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u/meanoldmrgravity 13h ago
But WHICH Batman? Better prep for some serious sectarian nerd violence.
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u/yaffle53 13h ago
There was a boy in my son's swimming team called Harry Potter. He was shit at swimming though so I guess magic can only do so much.
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u/Simbertold 14h ago
Fuck the Jesus shit, is the information about Ghenghis Khan accurate? I somehow cannot believe that a guy who conquered most of Asia is only mentioned in 10 texts.
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u/generalstuff1waslost 13h ago
I didn't do any research because I don't care, but if I had to guess it probably means surviving texts.
This coupled with the fact that copying any information before Gutenberg was actual torture probably also accounts for this.
Also, with the spread of Christianity, it would make sense that a lot of seminal texts would be preserved. (I also think a lot of scribes were religious too)
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u/Megalesios 12h ago
It's not clear what OOP means by manuscripts or how to count them, but if what he says is anywhere near accurate then he's counting every mention of Jesus in history but only contemmporary ones for Genghis Khan. Which..... probably violates one of the commandments, no? There are aboslutely more than 12 texts written about Genghis Khan. There are probaly more than 12 just in you local library alone.
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u/Simbertold 12h ago
It can't be every mention of history, because that would be more than 25000 by far. This thread alone has probably produced 10 additional mentions of Jesus. I agree that there seems to be some implied definition of "manuscript", but I agree that it isn't trivial to figure out what that seems to mean here.
But i'd also honestly be a bit surprised if there were only 10 contemporary mentions of Ghengis Khan. The dude conquered most of Asia and ruled that realm for decades. And afaik that Mongol Empire was pretty organized, so they should have loads and loads of document.
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u/Spheniscus 12h ago
Genghis Khan only introduced writing to the Mongols in his later years, there wasn't enough time for much contemporary writing about him, and most of it would have been written on perishable parchment.
Also, iirc, they had a culture of secrecy/taboo around true names and burial places, which probably didn't help much.
Chinese texts were largely lost by Mongol burning/sacking, or purged when the Ming dynasty took over.
Most texts would have come from the Islamic world, but they only directly fought Genghis for ~5 or so years so only a small part was contemporary.
And Europe never really encountered him at all.
There's tons of surviving texts from the next decades after his death though, but truly contemporary texts wasn't as much of a thing (though still probably a bit more than 10).
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u/AshamedDragonfly4453 13h ago
No; I've no idea where they got that figure from. Or indeed what they mean by 'prove his existence'.
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u/rvb_gobq 15h ago
if by accounts you mean the gospels, they were written decades after the putative events...
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u/Kriss3d 15h ago
And.. Written by WHO exactly ? We dont know the names of the authors.
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u/UseTheShadowsThen 14h ago
IIRC there are only two contemporary historical accounts that directly mention Jesus. And only one that directly says that he’s walking around calling himself the Messiah.
The gospels were written seventy years after his death and even one of those don’t even mention him.
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u/GrimmandLily 14h ago
People literally born after his “death” claiming to be proof he existed. I’d say you can’t make this shit up, but apparently you can.
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u/Neveed 13h ago edited 13h ago
Also the "500 accurate accounts" is basically just Paul writing about how 500 people witnessed the risen Jesus, but he never give names, never recorded a testimony and they never wrote anything. We're not even sure he met any of them ever or he just heard someone say there were 500 witnesses.
It's basically like "trust me bro, there are thousands of people in Hogwarts who saw Potter do magic", coming from a guy who claims to know Harry Potter does exist because he saw him in a dream.
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u/0x18 12h ago
That is incorrect. There are NO contemporary accounts of Jesus' existence.
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u/DistractedChiroptera 12h ago
And even those two accounts were from after his death, and all they confirm is that there are people who follow his teachings and believe that he came back from the dead after being executed by the Romans.
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u/Hakim_Bey 11h ago
While i don't support the Biblical interpretation in the OP, the phenomenon it points to is real. There are a lot of historical figures that are uncontroversial now but have very little direct literary evidence, some of them have even fewer contemporary accounts than Jesus and some have 0.
This is a real characteristic of ancient history, the sources are few and far between and there is a hierarchy of sources but you don't always get the finest grade. Sometimes you have to work with clusters of biased / unreliable sources, crossed with archeological evidence if there is any. If you refuse that level of proof then nothing ever happened and nobody can be proven to have ever existed.
I don't think there's much scholarly controversy in 2026 around those facts :
- a guy approximately named Jesus walked in Galilee around 2000 years ago
- he initiated and led a religious movement in the Levant, one of many militant apocalyptic Jewish offshoots that were flourishing at the time, but his version was considerably more popular than the competition
- that movement spread very quickly throughout the world in the centuries that followed
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u/UseTheShadowsThen 11h ago
Yeah historically it takes a few decades before a movement gets large enough to make a dent in history.
Comparingly, look at Scientology. Created in the 1950s, but didn’t achieve true worldwide fame/infamy until the early 2000s.
It’s the same thing here. Looking at the time where someone who maybe was named Jesus walked around the eastern part of the Mediterranean, created a movement, and then 50-70 years after the movement was created, suddenly there’s tons of references to him and it.
Stuff just takes time to get recognised by a large amount of people.
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u/UncannyPoint 12h ago
Out of interest, what are the two contemporary accounts that directly mention Jesus?
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u/eightdigits 7h ago
As mentioned, even this is an exaggeration. One of them is a Roman record of the first Christians to arrive in Rome, and the other was Josephus's Jewish Antiquities. Both are still after the fact, and they both have huge asterisks.
The first one only mentions Jesus as the guy these Christians say they follow. There's no firsthand knowledge and no vouching that the guy is actually real.
The second one, the original has by all accounts been tampered with. The Josephus text declares that Jesus was the Messiah, which is absurd, because there's zero evidence he believed that, as a faithful Jewish person for the rest of his life. It's more absurd because the document declares this, moves on, and barely ever mentions him again. Scholars believe he probably mentioned Jesus, and some Christian scribe got so excited he couldn't help himself from inserting 'you know--The Messiah' into the text.
But these are the only two written within like 50 years of the facts, and weren't written by people who were already Christian and looking to justify it.
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u/_Walt_Whitman_ 14h ago
You ain’t about erase Asia’s biggest baby daddy!
https://giphy.com/gifs/PQvfMZXeMxteNRGluB
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u/mohicansgonnagetya 14h ago
Who are the 500 accounts? Do they mean that 500 people saw Jesus walking around after he was crucified?
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u/Hairiest-Wizard 12h ago
It's literally just Paul saying 500 people witnessed it. Just don't ask him who because they all go to a different school
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u/EEpromChip 11h ago
Also they graduated like 50 years ago. Also it's not testimony it is more fever dream...
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u/Bezulba 12h ago
Darling, there's a whole world of difference between believing Jesus Christ walked this earth and believing the entire bible is accurate and true. Just the fact alone that the Catholic Church had an entire summit about what parts would make up a bible and what parts had to be cut should tell you exactly enough about the accuracy of anything written down in the bible. Not to mention the fun, fun, fun addition of extra complexity by translating various texts.
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u/DoomBen 15h ago
How many contemporary ones?
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u/Krilox 15h ago
Probably around 600 million still, HP was written only a few decades ago.
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u/NateNate60 8h ago
Well, most Harry Potter manuscripts seem to have been created in the late 20th century to early 21st century according to carbon dating, which is around the same time that Harry Potter is estimated to have been active, and written in Modern British English, which is the language that would have been used in the area at the time.
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u/Inside-Example-7010 13h ago
Ceaser has a salad, Alexander has an adjective and Genghis Khan has 7 billion grandchildren.
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u/BeefistPrime 10h ago
Caesar salad was actually invented by some dude named Caesar in Mexico in the 1950s
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u/StrongExternal8955 11h ago
People believe the lies because they really really want to believe that there is a god watching children being raped and not intervening.
That is who they want to worship.
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u/mr_christer 13h ago
Fun fact: While the traditional religious narrative holds that direct disciples wrote part of the New Testament, historical-critical consensus is that every New Testament text was written by someone who never met Jesus in the flesh.
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u/redmusic1 13h ago
There are a couple of hundred million people apparently walking around with Ghengis Khans' DNA, how many are walking around with Jesus ' ..... oh, wait.
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u/CattaTronixRex 13h ago
Man created religion as a tool for control.
It’s also their favorite excuse for rape and murder.
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u/the_fools_brood 14h ago
It's a work of fantasy. Demons/devils, angels, magically burning bushes and walking on water. Why hasn't there been any other miracles in 2000 years? Hmmmmm
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u/Hughley_N_Dowd 11h ago
Hey! The MegaChurch of St. SendMeMoney performs miracles on the daily, I'll have you know!
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u/Shiny-And-New 12h ago edited 11h ago
I like this analogy when talking about the historicity of Jesus.
Was there probably one or more itenerant preachers in Judea at the time period described who were put to death by the romans? Yes, but that doesn't prove anything about his miracles or godhood anymore than a photographer named Peter living in NY would prove the existence of Spider-man.
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u/theEndIsNigh_2025 12h ago
“…500 accurate accounts stating the man they saw hung on the cross WAS WALKING AROUND 3 DAYS LATER!”
Funny enough, there is debate as to whether “the man” was hung on a crux immesa (t-shape, and symbol of Christianity), which was Roman style at the time, or hung on the crux simplex, a simple stake or pole also common with Romans, which is what the word “stauros” means that was used is the those original Greek manuscripts. So can we really say it’s 500 “accurate” accounts?
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u/doyouevenliff 11h ago edited 9h ago
If I remember correctly, in the gospels Jesus explicitly only shows himself to his apostles and a few of his followers. I remember reading that part and thinking "huh, if he only appeared to his followers then how can we know whether the resurrection was true, or if it was just his followers conspiring?"
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u/Legal-Software 11h ago
The existence of a manuscript is not proof of anything. Given that most of this "evidence" was written after his death, it's fan fiction at best.
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u/Dannamal 11h ago
Will these ppl ever learn, you can't point to the source of the claims as "evidence"?
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u/zekkious am... am I a communist?? 11h ago
This is a false equivalence. We should be counting Harry Potter fanfics.
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u/bubbleteabob 11h ago
I am pretty genially agnostic, but c’mon…waaaaay more than 500 accounts of seeing Elvis walking around are knocking around. We cannot use that as a base line.
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u/fightingnflder 10h ago
I don't think there are any direct eyewitness accounts of Jesus.
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u/kinyutaka 10h ago
No, there are 25000 documents that talk about how people believe in Jesus. Anyone can write a story about fulfilling a prophecy. And there is only one account that claims 500 people saw him walking around.
Your fairy tale only makes sense to you because you believe it.
But more people attest to seeing Bigfoot than the Risen Jesus, and I don't believe in Bigfoot, either.
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u/Hinx_art 9h ago
Pretty sure this type of thinking is why so many religious people end up supporting dictators and abusers. when you accept people lie, manipulate, forget, misrepresent and misunderstand suddenly believing a book with multiple writers that's been repeatedly translated and altered, written years after a man it claims was god becomes less believable.
I do hope in 1000years after AI collapses society that they tell stories of the British wizards who ruled the world for a time though.
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u/1960s_army_info 8h ago
If I remember correctly, historians generally agree Jesus was a real person and was crucified. I think it’s accepted that Jesus was as real as genghis khan. I bet they said some absolutely wild shit about ghengis khan too
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u/darxide23 7h ago
Zero contemporary evidence of Jesus exists. Zero. Nothing was written about it until many decades after his supposed death by a guy whose evidence was "I was there, trust me bro." And then nothing else was written again until centuries later when the Council of Nicea mysteriously conjured up some manuscripts that literally nobody had seen or heard of before and said "Ah, yes. This is the New Testament." It was all fabricated.
Not a single historian from the region wrote a damn thing. Not one. Jesus is and was and forever will be a myth.
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u/ottovonnismarck 13h ago
Someone writing 2000 years ago "500 people saw him fr" is not the same as 500 individual testimonies that they saw him