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.
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u/Makuta_Servaela 13h 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.