- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
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FWIW, the article is describing the standard “mythicist” position. A well-known argument that has been described many times before. There is nothing new being presented here, and all sources cited appear to be over a decade old. If you are familiar with this debate, you probably do not even need to read the article to know who the sources are. They are very familiar names to anyone that have read past articles on this subject.
I hate the whole debate anyway. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is a “real” Jesus because he wasn’t the product of a virgin birth, he didn’t perform miracles, he didn’t come back from the dead and he most certainly wasn’t the son of any god. He wasn’t even “king of the Jews” any more than a guy standing on the street corner claiming to be the president is one.
On top of that, since all of the Gospels were written, at earliest, decades later, anything he may have said or done, had he existed, could not possibly have been accurately transcribed or recorded in a time before cameras or audio recording.
So was there a real Jesus? It doesn’t matter because that isn’t the Jesus that Christians worship. The Jesus that Christians worship definitely did not exist.
Jesus likely existed. It’s easier to imagine the steps from an influential cleric to messiah-myth than an early church conspiracy to weave a savior whole cloth.
There is little evidence, but that’s exactly what you’d expect from a 2,000 year old narrative. What we know about emperors of the time is scant and largely mythical. If an accurate record of the life of an impoverished Rabbi from 1st Century were available, that’d be miraculous in itself.
Plus there is the textual argument that u/BrotherL0v3 makes.
I describe it like this… the earliest presumed mention of Jesus is in the work of Josephus around 93 AD.
Now, there is evidence that this mention is, itself, a 3rd century “insertion” by the Christian transcriber Eusebius, but aside from that, let’s take 93 AD as “gospel” ;)
So from the time of Jesus, to 93 AD, there is not one, single, contemporary reference. If you take the dating of his death sometime around 33 AD as accurate, that means, even following his death, nobody mentioned him for SIXTY YEARS.
If you are to believe that story, you have to believe nobody was talking about a guy who did miracles. Or leave that aside as a later invention, nobody was talking about The Sermon on the Mount, which was likely his biggest claim to fame in his lifetime.
The comparison I like to use is Elvis. We know Elvis existed because we have the photographs, recordings, contemporary evidence, and so on.
Now, imagine NONE of that exists. Not only that, Elvis died in 1977. We would be, right now, 13 years away from the first written record of Elvis. (1977 + 60 = 2037).
Unlikely doesn’t BEGIN to cover it.
More on how Josephus may have been “modified” around the 3rd century to meet Christian ideas:
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437
https://vridar.org/2015/01/16/fresh-evidence-the-jesus-passage-in-josephus-a-forgery/
This is an obvious example of the presentism fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysis)
Photographs and recordings did not exist in the 1st century. Not even the printing press. And most people were illiterate at the time. So it is far more likely that nothing would be written versus anything being written during that timeframe.
We have loads of written records of far less impressive things from the period, this argument holds no water.
We do not. Almost no written records from that time period has survived. Everything that we “know” comes from a copy of a copy, often made many centuries after the event.
There are also countless surviving frescoes, statues, carvings and monuments from the period that had every chance to record, you know, miracles.
Those are a handful of fragmentary texts. That actual proves my point.
You are conflating the biblical version of Jesus and the historical version of him. The mythicist position has always been that neither existed, but the historical view has always been that the latter (and only the latter) existed.
Just like how historical spider-man existed, but the comic version didn’t, right?
Don’t do religion, kids.
You’re just another brain dead mythicist. Might as well claim all historical figures are comic book characters.
I would disagree.
You would need positive evidence for your claim, saying the biblical Jesus doesn’t exist in neither important nor mundane records does not prove anything.
And claiming that because the miracles aren’t mentioned in any records is evidence of a historical Jesus is also false.
What is commonly meant by the claim that a historical Jesus could exist, is that it would be entirely banale for a mundane historical Jesus to exist. Meaning we can’t disprove him, and so current best practice to assume he did, just like all the other Jeushas, Marks, and Petruses we never hear about.
That is however not proof a historical Jesus did exist, it is just the working assumption when we can’t possibly tell.
And the post here puts doubt on that assumption, as there has been proof that stories where attributed to the Jesus character, and he might only be as real as Superman or Kilroy.
Those are generic Mythicist arguments. You lose credibility by even using such lazy and unoriginal ones. The fundamental problem is that it makes it impossible to demonstration that virtually anyone in history has ever existed because the burden of proof is set so high.
Okay look. I am an atheist, I think magical thinking in general and Christianity in particular are harmful and unnecessary.
BUT
I also enjoy learning about new testament history as a hobby. I’ve actually read the book How Jesus Became God that the article mentions, and they do a sneaky thing that annoys the shit out of me: they quote things being said by someone who disagrees with them that appear to completely demolish their own position, without quoting the explanation and nuance that inevitably follows. Ehrman obviously doesn’t see the quoted text as a problem for the idea of a historical Jesus, and usually explains as much after saying something like that.
I won’t nit-pick all the little over-simplifications, but I want to make an example out of one of them:
The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing “life of Jesus,” and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark and added their own corrections and new material. But they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree contradict the much later gospel of John, because they were written with different objectives for different audiences. The incompatible Easter stories offer one example of how much the stories disagree.
The incompatible Easter stories are actually something many secular scholars point to as evidence in favor of a historical Jesus.
I’ll go into more detail if anyone cares, but the broad strokes are this: the nativity narratives in both Matthew and Luke contradict not only each other but also known history and even basic plausibility. We’re pretty confident they were both made up.
So, why? Why would two different authors working from the same source material both tell weird lies about Jesus’ birth?
Well, the expectation of the Jewish public at the time was that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Mark doesn’t talk about Jesus’ birth, but it does say he was from Nazareth of Galilee. That presents a problem: how is this guy who people are calling Jesus of Nazareth also the messiah from Bethlehem?
That’s where we get Matthew and Luke trying to smooth things over: Matthew makes up a story about how Jesus was totally born in Bethlehem, trust me bro but Herod the Great tried to kill him so Joseph and Mary hid in Egypt until he died but then his son took over Judea so they moved to Nazareth. True story bro.
Then in Luke, the author says that Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, but Caesar ordered a census of the whole Roman empire where everyone had to return to their ancestral homeland because reasons. So they go to Bethlehem because David was Joseph’s… great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? Why they stopped at exactly twenty generations (and how the fuck Joseph would have known that before ancestry.com) is never specified.
Even if we grant miraculous intervention, these stories are both ridiculous on their face (at least, to a modern audience). If Jesus was fabricated whole cloth, why include these bullshit Easter narratives in the first place? Why not just say “He was born in Bethlehem” and be done with it? To my mind, these stories make the most sense as a post-hoc ass-covering to explain how the guy who was walking around calling himself “Jesus from Nazareth” was actually totally from Bethlehem the whole time.
how the guy who was walking around calling himself “Jesus from Nazareth” was actually totally from Bethlehem the whole time.
Iirc the gist of the issue why they wrote that was the same as the problem with Jesus being descendant of David through Joseph - he needed to fit into the messiah prophecy. And he couldn’t do that being a Galilean. Ancient Judeans were pretty chauvinistic overall in who is counted to even be a true Jew, remember the background of a tale of good Samaritan or how Herod was constantly bashed for being Edomite despite building spectacular center of worship.
