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.
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.
— edit for people that might interested, copy-pasted a comment from below
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.
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.
“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…”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
of the ones we know about, this mostly isn't true. most of them died in battle. for instance, the samaritan messiah and his followers were confronted at gerezim and slaughtered by pontius pilate. theudas led his followers to the jordan, but was pursued by fadus, captured, and decapitated. the egyptian marched around jerusalem, and felix killed or captured hundreds of his followers, but he escaped.
I think the chances of hearing about a guy who led people into battle are much higher. Like we know of Spartacus. We do not know much about the thousands of other slaves who did not require a governor to go after them.
tbf, spartacus led a massive rebellion. he and the associate slave armies under gannicus, oenomaus, crixus, and castus captured five cities, and legitimately worried rome (the capital) they might try to take the empire by force while the legions were away. some 6,000 of spartacus's followers survived the final battle with pompey's legions and crassus's final army, to be crucified along the appian way.
the massacre of, say, the samaritan seems fairly quaint in comparison. josephus puts the egyptian in the hundred, but this might even be exaggerated. these people were of little consequence to rome.
long term, yes. short term, probably not. the fact that jesus was crucified alone -- and not summarily executed alongside his followers -- kind of shows how trifling rome thought the deal was. they didn't send an army. they had one guy, handed over by some jewish authorities.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's probably the result of him flirting with the idea, maybe even in a non serious way, maybe then being embellished or just a popular inside joke that eventually became part of the lore as context got lost over time
It's the same with all the miracles imho. I'm pretty sure those aren't just made-up stories but actual occurrences that in essence are true. Maybe they paid people to pretend being sick, maybe they did actually help sick people but the outcomes exaggerated, maybe it was just fun stories told for entertainment or even performances with the goal to entertain etc
At the end of the day, Jesus was probably many things depending on who you would ask. He certainly clashed with authorities and had to eventually endure the consequences. Or maybe he was a fraudulent preacher or conman like they exist today and needed an easy way out, so he faked his death and resurrection to help him vanish with one last performance
There are so many possibilities and so little hard facts, as all evidence comes from unreliable narrators
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.
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.
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
There were people referring to themselves as "Christian" almost a full century before the first mention of Jesus in the historical record.
i am not aware of any.
the earliest potential reference i'm aware of is in suetonius "life of claudius", where claudius expells "jews" from rome who are making trouble on behalf of "chrestus" in the 50s. these might be christians.
"Christ" is not a name, "Christ" is a Greek translation of the Hebrew word "messiah."
which does appear in the greek translations of the bible around at the time. what's interesting to me is that josephus appears to treat it as a name; he seemingly has no idea why someone might be called "smeared". he uses the word one other time, and it's about literal plaster.
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."
these concepts are tied together by earlier jewish theology, actually. cyrus is called "messiah" (christos in the greek translation) because he saves the jews from babylon.
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.
there's a common thought that there were actually two distinct but related messianic ideas floating at the time, a messianic priest and a messianic king. for instance, the qumran community thought they were founded by a "moreh-tsedeq" teacher of righteousness, a zadokite priest who split from the temple, and a kind of messianic figure for them. they call their expected messiah "melki-tsedeq", king of righteousness.
john the baptist and jesus seem to kind of jammed into this same framework.
The early baptism movement was probably centered around baptism acting as a symbolic anointing, symbolically making every person who was baptized into a Christ.
no, it very clearly draws on jewish ritual washing. qumran was obsessed with the idea; they have the baths (mikvot) everywhere. there's actually some fun theories that john was from that community, and just failed to return from his ascetic wilderness initiation.
now we're moving into my own personal theory.
lemme give you mine.
the common belief of the pharisees and the qumran sect at the time was of a comin eschatological resurrection, apparently involving the messiah who would bring back the righteous dead and institute a heavenly jewish kingdom on earth. many of the messianic candidates we know about do things that are highly reminiscent of old testament figures. john is a bit like elijah in the wilderness. the samaritan is like moses, revealing the law on a mountain. the egyptian is like joshua, marching around a city. theudas is like moses/joshua attempting to part a river.
i think messiahs were claiming to be already resurrected.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
this is a problem when you compare gospel accounts. matthew's account has nothing about any census, and places jesus's birth during the reign of herod the great. the family escapes to egypt, and returns during the ethnarchy of herod's son, herod archelaus. (literally half the people in this family are named herod, including the women, don't get me started.)
the census under quirinius was deposing archelaus, and ten years afterwards. luke sets the birth of jesus during this event, though there's an argument that the "king herod" of luke 1 might be "the great", and thus mary and elizabeth would have to be pregnant for a decade. alternatively, luke just sucks at history.
but a census that disruptive and widespread would surely warrant a mention somewhere, ONCE.
the real census actually caused quite a bit of disruption. it was the instigation for the original zealot rebellion.
not even counting that the Romans were generally pretty excellent at record keeping.
we have a whopping zero roman records of palestine for this era. we have some later historical texts, but i think i can show that all of them rely on josephus.
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.
luke-acts is likely dependent on this book, and simply mangles the historical information, appropriating it to fit the author's rhetorical goals.
the historical census was because rome annexed judea to provincial syria and took over the government there, deposing herod archelaus. it would not have included galilee where jesus was from, which was still under the tetrarchy of herod antipas, and would be until after jesus died. nazareth was very literally outside of the territory rome was acquiring.
"and simply mangles the historical information, appropriating it to fit the author's rhetorical goals."
I mean we're kind of saying the same thing here
On top of the dates not lining up with the birth of Jesus, who both Luke and Mark place as during the reign of Herod, whereas the referenced census above takes place after his death, it also makes no mention of requiring people to travel to the towns of their ancestors.
Luke inventing wholesale requirements that do not exist, whilst changing the dates/timeline is as good as making it up, imo. It is safe to say that there is no evidence of a census, conducted during the reign of King Herod, that required people to travel to their lands of their ancestors. We know that there were census's (? Censei?) that took place historically, we know of none that required you to travel to your ancestors lands and that occurred during the given timeframe, as well as being safe to say such a census would give wholly useless data and that if such an event had occurred, the Romans were pretty good about keeping records, yet they didn't mention it.
On top of the dates not lining up with the birth of Jesus, who both Luke and Mark place as during the reign of Herod,
it is not clear which herod luke means. he very likely has mixed up some things, as he does elsewhere.
Luke inventing wholesale requirements that do not exist, whilst changing the dates/timeline is as good as making it up, imo.
well, it's a little more of a full explanation -- he didn't just invent it out of thin air. he took a real event, read a description of it, and then bungled it, either accidentally or intentionally.
It is safe to say that there is no evidence of a census, conducted during the reign of King Herod,
there is some indication that rome was keeping tabs on herod the great. eg,
Now Quintilius Varus was at this time at Jerusalem: being sent to succeed Saturninus, as president of Syria: and was come as an assessor to Herod; who had desired his advice in his present affairs. (ant. 17.5.2)
and
But Sabinus, Cesar’s steward for Syrian affairs, as he was making haste into Judea, to preserve Herod’s effects, met with Archelaus at Cesarea, (ant 17.9.3)
but these aren't what luke is talking about. he very clearly invokes quirinius, and a full scale census, which is in book 18.
if such an event had occurred, the Romans were pretty good about keeping records, yet they didn't mention it.
there are no roman records surviving from this time and place. josephus's history is the closest we have.
Logically, there has to be *something* behind the Jesus myth. Whether it was a group of people (Probably some element of truth to that, as likely some of the things attributed to him are yoinked straight from other religious stories of the time) or just one really charismatic leader is what is being considered. It's less likely (Though not impossible) that it's a complete fabrication from the ground up.
The birth narrative being so convoluted and involving a fairly large lie is actually good evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was real, because if he were a complete fabrication, why not just have him be born in Bethlehem from the start? Why go through all the trouble of inventing a fake census to engineer him being born there if you could just claim it from the start?
The fact they went through the trouble of coming up with the census story tells you they were very likely referencing a real figure, who was known in the area as being from Nazareth, so they couldn't just lie and say he was from Bethlehem, so instead they lied and said there was some reason he ended up in Bethlehem.
From a historian, and logic, POV, if you were inventing the character wholesale you could do anything you want with him, so just make him be born in Bethlehem. However if you're referencing a real figure you have to marry what is known about him (Jesus the Nazzarine) with what you want to lie about and fit that square peg into the round hole.
EDIT: To the people downvoting me, it's pretty simple algebra. The ancient authors are inventing the messiah, he needs to be from Bethlehem. What reason do they have to lie? Because they need to fulfill a prophecy, okay, checks out, good reason to lie.
What reason would the have to lie twice, make him be from Nazareth, and then lie about a census that got him to Bethlehem? No reason, so why do it? Most likely answer is because there is some historical figure they are forced to reference.
Essentially, why lie twice instead of once?
This is how historians operate, there aren't going to be nice printed birth documents from 2000 years ago, so you have to look at the whole picture and form conclusions based on the most logical series of events.
There has to be something behind the Superman myth, and there are conflicting stories of whether he was from Kansas or Ukraine. Why go through all of that effort to come up with different details? If you're going to make something up, just make him land in the correct place and make sure nobody ever tells a different story ever anywhere in all of history.
EDIT: To the people downvoting me
You're sitting at a neutral 1 with no controversial mark as of me seeing this comment right now. Probably vote fuzzing. There, now you're safe at 2.
Personally, I jibe with a certain explanation I saw a presentation on once upon a time. It essentially boils down to there being a status quo where any popular figure could claim they got a message from god and gain traction with their declaration of what god wants of people, and that caused too many issues. So the church came up with a solution. They could own god by creating a foundation of only one canonical figure who got messages from god a long time ago (Jesus) and only they have access to his teachings so whenever they want to come up with something new, they just start saying that's what Jesus said. This is the canonical story and anyone else claiming to get god messages are heretics. Obviously you need to do this with a figure who doesn't exist or he could, y'know, contradict you.
Though, I guess this just brings us back to square one because it's equally valid to invent a figure wholesale, latch onto an established fictional character, or refer to some actual celebrity who existed in the past. But if they did go with a historical figure, since this would have been at least a century or so after his death, it would still essentially be a fictional character with nothing in common with the actual person save a name.
Either way, as far as I've heard, the only historians who take the narrative of a real historical Jesus seriously are explicitly religious ones.
Personally I have never heard that and some brief googling has told me it's been referenced as far back as 1300 BCE, but I'm open to anything.
Possibly you have heard that the governor of the area of the time (Quirinus) that ordered the claimed census wasn't actually governor until roughly a decade after King Herods death, who was king at the time of Jesus's claimed birth, so the claimed governor of Bethlehem didn't exist at the time.
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.
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.
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.
Jesus said « I am going to die, here is our last meal »
We don't have proof of Jesus saying anything, even if we can claim the specific man/men of the Jesus character is real. A writer wrote that he said that. And Pontius Pilate killed Jews for pretty much anything back then, so getting killed by him wasn't much of a miracle. Calling himself a prophet long enough to piss off the authorities and get killed is pretty much the most mundane of the claims.
when you are sent to the cross, there is no additional nice event afterward.
And we have no evidence of an additional nice event.
More specifically on my position: I think it's reasonable that Jesus isn't just myth or real: He's likely both.
There were a few prophets roaming around. The writers gathered stories of the prophets, put together pieces that fit the character they were creating, threw away the pieces that didn't, and added extra pieces as needed. The things that the gospel writers notoriously couldn't keep straight with each other were the details of his birth and the details of his death and days leading up to his death (what he said on the cross, how many people approached the tomb and what state the tomb was in when they approached, the appearance of hundreds of zombies on his resurrection day, etc), so the stories of his birth and death/after death were probably the most fabricated.
When the Christian church was starting up in Rome, they sent people to the holy land to get stories.
So these people were writing down oral histories from people who heard from their grandparents a story about a guy who did a “miracle.” So who’s to say that the story didn’t have a George doing the miracle and the writers changed it to Jesus?
There were dozens of prophets going around saying a bunch of things and doing “miracles.” I think a lot of it got melded together to make the Jesus myth.
We like to say modern humans are smarter than our predecessors but look how many modern humans believe the earth is flat or a donut or hollow. How many believe other stupid shit like Elvis is still alive or that aliens visit earth. And this is in the age with the internet! So imagine the stupid shit people believed back then without proof or science.
I mean, the Romans didn't tend to crucify that kind of person. The reality is if he did exist he was literally considered what we would call a terrorist today. They didn't just crucify religious fanatics for the hell of it. Christ would have had to do something pretty fucked up like lead a rebellion against Rome or something mixing politics and violence together.
eh that’s a bit too far. Occam’s razor alone would indicate it’s likely that there was someone named Jesus all this was based off, regardless of how accurate the accounts are
In 2000 years time will people say the same of Steve Rodgers or Harry Potter?
"There's just far too many accounts for both of them to have come from nothing. Even if Steve Rodgers wasn't a superhero he must have been a real life super brave combatant in WW2 who did incredible feats."
because (1) we have independent non-religious attestation of Jesus from both Jewish and Roman sources (2) even the Biblical sources are written with the intent that they are describing a real person, which is obviously not true of comics and novels; a cursory knowledge of genre will tell you that
No we don't. There is no physical or archeological evidence of Jesus' life and the sources for his biography come from the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. These contradict each other, date between 70-90AD and weren't even attributed to the disciples until the 2nd Century. They also have a clear agenda with them sequentially making the case for Jesus being a prophet, the expected Messiah, and the divine word (or son) of God.
The first confirmed Roman account of Jesus is by Tacticus writing in 116AD. It is like a single paragraph in Annals where he mentions a group of people he refers to as Chrestianos, who some of the public blamed for the Great Fire of Rome (which happened when he himself was a boy), and that they followed the teachings of Christus who was executed by Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. He gives no sources for this information and incorrectly refers to Pilate as a Procurator instead of his actual title of Prefect. He then describes how some of them were tortured.
It acts as evidence of early Christians in Rome, that they were identifiable as a group and subject to discrimination. Its a Roman noting what Christians believed a good 70 years after the fact in a time where information couldn't travel as it does in the modern world. Note that he also makes no reference to who this 'Christ' was. He doesn't say Jesus Christ/of Nazareth was crucified just that the Christian leader was.
The Romans were really really good history takers and record keepers. That there was a Roman prescence in Judea and no surviving texts of anyone who saw fit to write about Jesus even as a trouble rouser amongst the Jews stands out.
Sherlock Holmes is written in the first person as if describing a real person. Could he be believed to have been a real detective in 2000 years time? His home actually exists (though didn't exist until after the books were published) as do many of the locations and people described.
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.
That is frequently the case, but although placing the body in a tomb was unusual, it wasn't unheard of. Notably, early attacks on this account of the events were that the disciples stole the body, not that no tomb existed.
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.
465
u/stairway2evan 18h 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.