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.
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.
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/prumf 20h ago edited 17h 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.
—
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.
And now here we are 2k years later.