Jesus was a historical person. This doesn’t mean Christianity is correct, but there is sufficient historical evidence and most mainstream scholars of the era agree on this.
I think Lemmy has a problem with history in general, since most people on here have degrees/training in STEM. I see a lot of inaccurate “pop history” shared on here, and a lack of understanding of historiography/how historians analyze primary sources.
The rejection of Jesus’s historicity seems to be accepting C S Lewis’s argument - that if he existed, he was a “lunatic, liar, or lord,” instead of realizing that there was nothing unusual about a messianic Jewish troublemaker in Judea during the early Roman Empire.
But,
Exactly, and at that point, does it make sense to consider that person the same as the one from the new testament?
I think a big point of contention in the debate is that people say 'Jesus was(n't) real' without clarifying whether they mean the former or the latter bit of your comment. I have a hunch there'd be more agreement if everyone was more clear. Thanks for the helpful comment!
People should be mindful of the phrasing. The title of this post, for example, is misleading trying to make it seem more than there just being records of a person who had the name Jesus. Nobody would call me a historical figure in the future just because I existed.
I do not give a fuck about this evidence. I want evidence that this man is what Christianity is founded on. It doesn't need magic or anything, but more than just a fucking name having existed for me to even start thinking it's the same dude.
It’s the name with the explicit connection to James, a leader of the early church.
There’s a difference between the idea of a pseudo-fictional composite character, like King Arthur who was constructed centuries after his time, and a real historical guy who existed and had stories written about what he said.
Consider how much evidence we have for Pythagoras. Pythagoras was also a weird religious cult leader, but I’d expect most here would know him for the Pythagorean theorem. Which he didn’t come up with. Does that not make him enough of a “Pythagoras” for you?
You have to gauge your sense of skepticism. There’s a difference between “oh, Gilgamesh seems to be showing up in all of these King’s List documents that claim thousands of years of dynastic dominance which are 80% bullshit to oil up a kingship’s perceived position in the world.” and “oh, here’s a bunch of texts about an unusual rogue ‘rabbi’ that developed a following; there’s some probably exaggerated claims of healing, an oddly novel resurrection story that has more added to it as each Gospel is written.”
Read just the resurrection, Mark-> Matthew-> Luke->John to see how the more fanciful stuff develops. Heck - maybe even read the New Testament in chronological order - starting with the letters of Paul and see them as dealing with situations happening in real time. Treat it as a ‘found footage’/‘ambiguous narrator’ collection. A murder mystery.
There’s a difference between reading the Bible as a religious text, to either prove or disprove, and as a compilation of vastly different documents, by vastly different authors, writing across centuries.
For a modern example, think about John of God - one of the faith healing charlatans that Oprah promoted. Will people who live in the next few centuries automatically discount his existence because they find it occasionally next to a description of his supposed miracles, which accounts are perhaps more likely to survive than those of his sexual assault allegations? Will the things that he will have said to have said not be accurate, even if other information about him is not?
At the end of the day, there’s just as much evidence for the existence of several early historical figures that we don’t doubt the existence of. I think it’s reasonable to not privilege the text as anything other than a primary source document, and recognize that a lot of similar supernatural claims have been added to multiple real world figures in history.
I think the difference between doubting Pythagoras and doubting Jesus is that no one is claiming g Pythagoras existed to bolster their claims on holding a moral superiority. A lot of historical research (especially early on) into the history of Jesus is done by religious scholars who are explicitly seeking to back up things they already believe. I don't trust them. Most of the consensus is built upon this pre-conceived idea that he's real, and so the support is on shaky footing.
No one really cares if Pythagoras existed or not, so it's not worth considering. A lot of people hold a certain (potentially harmful, or at least ignorant of reality) view on the world because of a supposed figure named Jesus, and the fact there isn't much evidence he existed at all pretty heavily breaks the illusion we know he did miraculous stuff. If it's questionable that he even existed then it's certainly questionable that he did anything special.
The fact is, historical consensus is built on backing up a belief, in this case. Not on fact originally. It becomes incredibly hard and dangerous to your career to question the consensus without evidence —and you can't have evidence of non-existence. That means anytime anyone questions it people yell "most historians agree!" and no further questions are asked. I think it's much healthier to question it, regardless of what the consensus is. It wouldn't be the first time it's been wrong, and it can't hurt to be skeptical.
Pythagoras literally ran a mystery cult, and was associated for centuries with magical/divine powers after. Look at what probably happened to Hippasus.
Modern Bible scholars disconnect any ideas about moral superiority. The goal is to understand Jesus as a man, to the point where you can find polemics by modern Christian scholars about how godless the field is.
It’s good to question things, but there needs to be reasoning behind your question. There needs to be some sort of explanation of how a conspiracy developed to make a guy up who was crucified (Jewish conceptions of the Messiah at the time were more a kingly type ordained to overthrow the Roman yoke, and crucifixion is a pretty humiliating death…) Where is the motive, means and opportunity for a bunch of people to simultaneously decide this guy existed?
No one alive today cares. At the time, sure. No one is a part of his cult today, unlike Jesus's cult.
Like I said, it's based on knowledge from people who didn't. I feel like you're purposefully ignoring parts of what I said.
There does not need to be reasoning to not believe something. There needs to be reasoning to believe something. I don't believe Jesus existed in the same way I don't believe any other person who we don't know about existed. I just don't hold a belief. It doesn't matter to me, and I haven't seen enough evidence to actively hold a belief, and I don't care enough to try. It's not important to me.
I think even "vague Jesus human person existed" is maybe too much confidence with nothing to back it up. Don't even know if it was a singular dooms day death cult leader or an amalgamation.
Amalgamation doesn't work on such short timelines. We have evidence of christian missionaries less than 50 years after JCs death. It's not comparable to, say, Arthur, where the legends start 400 years after his supposed death.
I bet he was a member of the Judean People's Front.
Fuck off! He'd definitely have been a member of the Peoples front of Judea
Splitters
I think you're both wrong. I think he just always looked on the bright side of life.
I think Loretta would have a problem with that.
Because of the destruction of the Temple and the Judean rebellion there were probably a lot of messianic figures.
Jesus is just the one who achieved the necessary memetic virulence to be remembered.
Saul/Paul definitely helped this.
ETA: Also, stories attributed to Jesus may have happened to other messianic preachers.
See “the Egyptian” and Simon bar Kokhba..
It makes sense - I mean, Pompey literally went into the Holy of Holies and didn’t die. It must have felt as if there was something cosmically wrong.
The entire myth was also borrowed from Zoroastrianism, but let's just pretend that never happened I guess
Christianity is like English in that it will appropriate and assimilate words/ideas that help it survive
I mean, I guess... But they stole like, the entire fucking thing from an existing religion. Christianity would not exist without the parts they took from Zoroastrianism.
Didn't they rip off a lot of Hinduism too?
Uh… how?
The Zoroastrian “borrowing” is more along the lines of there’s a perfect good force versus a perfect evil force.
But I don’t know how there would be any Hinduism influence. There’s lot of Greek influence, but India was really far away.
All the similarities to Krishna.
The Zoroastrian influence is generally speculated to have occured to the Jews, hundreds of years before the advent of Christianity.
The Jews of Judea and Israel actually historically were conquered by the Babylonians, many of them were taken captive back to Babylonia, around 586 BCE.
Then around 539 BCE, Persia defeated Babylon, and Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Judea and Israel, as basically a new vassal kingdom, a significant improvent from being basically a slave caste in Babylon.
It is around this time period where the nature of Yahweh in texts begins to become much more monotheistic... prior to that, the proto-Judaism was actually pretty much the Canaanite polytheism.
Yahweh worship had been something of a splinter group / dedicated cult within Canaanism prior to the Babylonian scouring of Judea and Israel, but it seems that the survivors set free by the Persians had strong Zoroastrian influences on the later development of Yahweh into a monotheistic single God.
So... while there may have been Hindu influence on Zoroastrianism, there does not appear to be much direct Hindu influence on Judaism, as... you would expect maybe the concept of an avatar to show up at that point, not ~ 575 years later, roughly around 50 CE, with the advent of Christinanity, or you would expect maybe more polytheism, not less, maybe a very famous story or character archetype to get translated over into Canaanism/Proto-Judaism.
To the best of my knowledge, there is 0 evidence of interfaith influence between Hinduism and Christianity for say, the first centuries of the existence of Christianity.
All of the "Jesus' missing years are from when he went on a spritual/religious pilgrimage across Asia" type stories, those are all much, much more modern inventions, mostly made up within the last 200ish years, often by some kind of esoteric/syncretic occultist types in the mid to late 1800s.
Christians were basically a contentious, squabbling group of 'Gnostic' cults/sects for their own first roughly 150 to 200 years, in Judea, Greece, modern day Turkey, Egypt, eventually Rome...
And all these groups had widly, dramatically different interpretations of Jesus, Yahweh/God, and to what extent and how they tried to incorporate mainly the ideas of famous Greek philosophers into their new cults/religions... and they famously got into huge disagreements over this, over which texts were legit and not legit.
Some believed Jesus was basically an avatar of Yahweh.
Some believed he was fundamentally a human man, but maybe blessed or sort of adopted, favored and elevated by Yahweh.
Some believed he was an incarnation from an alternate realm of reality, meant to deliver to humans a way out of a fundamentally evil reality, which had created as basically a prison by a fundamentally evil version of Yahweh.
Some believed Jesus' true form was something like a 700 foot tall floating ghost giant.
I am not aware of any Christian arriving anywhere near, or having a discourse with India untill ... what, over a thousand years after its founding, after the advent of Islam?
You can stand here in 2025 and look backward, and project similarities you see onto different parts of the past, but this is the most egregious sin a historian can commit, to try to understand historical eras and places not from within them themselves, but from the standpoint of our modern cultural and material landscape.
If you have actual historical evidence that Hinduism did actually directly influence the development of Judaism or Christianity, I'd love to see it, but I don't think any of that actually exists.
What similarities to Krishna? Please give me some examples, and a plausible explanation of how those ideas would have crossed the continent?
This is far from the only thing. They also had the concept that everyone has free will to choose between good and evil. I believe they also had a concept of final judgement and heaven/hell (or an analogue).
Were those solely present in Zoroastrianism? From what I understand of Egyptian religion, there’s the whole Thoth “weighing your heart to see if it’s lighter than a feather” thing. I think free will has always been a “popular” idea, but even then, there are passages in the Bible that contradict free will - to the point that Calvinists much later discarded it.
They did not steal anything. It's such a weird take to be out here applying 20th century notions of Intellectual Property to mythology from 2000 years ago. If you approach old world cultures and memetic ecology with reddit catchphrases, you're just gonna rot your brain. Not worth it.
I read this as "Sean Paul" and now my mind won't stop with "so me go so"
Yup
As you indicated, this isn't an unpopular opinion in the wider world. There are records outside of Christian scripture that mention Jesus. No legitimate historians doubt that he existed.
Yeah - it is an unpopular opinion on Lemmy though. I’ve been accused of being Christian for making this argument, as if accepting the historicity of the figure inherently means accepting the claim that he was a divine being.
I think you’re looking for the word “history”
edit: sorry.. I try not to be that guy, but I couldn’t help myself
I was not.
Historicity: the quality of being a real and important part of history and not a myth or legend (= ancient story)
I stand corrected, TIL!
Adults are discussing history. Whatever they did to you in Sunday school class is not relevant here.
Is Bart Ehrman a “religious scholar”?
Modern biblical scholarship starts with a prima facie assumption that miracles and god are not real. It’s a very rich field, with many people with a variety of religious beliefs and non beliefs.
Your ignorance and rejection of an entire academic field is no different from a creationist rejecting the academic consensus of biologists.
Please give me an example of “legitimate historian.” Do you read much academic history? Do you have a degree or any formal training in history on which to make the claim that you can distinguish “legitimate” historians from illegitimate ones?
Things we don't understand happen. When we like the happening, it's a "miracle," when we don't, a "catastrophe."
I'm so puzzled by this insistence that all who analyze religious history must be religious nutcases. Even if you write off all the scholars who are religious, religion still exists as a concept in the world, and in the same way you don't have to be a virus to study virology, you don't have to be religious to study religion. There are plenty of atheists who are deeply interested in religion, if for no other reason than the massive impact it has on all our lives.
Who ? When ? What part of their argument makes them more credible than other historians ?
It's quite possible, but the waters are muddied since every legendary facet was treated as fact, so the historical record is relatively less reliable given how much of it was manipulated in the name of faith.
Celsus, a second century author and critic of Christianity, did not make the claim that Jesus did not exist. Early Roman and Jewish critics of Christianity did not make the claim that Jesus did not exist. Instead, their claims were that he was the son of a Roman soldier (no virgin birth) and that his miracles were attributable to the same common magic that everyone believed in at that time.
If I were writing in 170 CE, and wanted to prove that Christianity was false because Jesus was made up, then I would probably say that.
Historians are aware of the fact that texts can be altered or manipulated or untrue. That’s part of the process of reading a primary source - thinking critically about what your source is saying, what biases they might have, and yes, if there were alterations or manipulations. There is ample study and linguistic analysis to determine those kinds of changes.
I mean... maybe. He was writing about events 150 years ago in another country. He may not have had direct knowledge of them. Think about how contentious history can be today with the benefit of modern documentary evidence, professional historians, etc. and think about how uncertain things under such distance would be back then.
You can't just assume something is true because historians didn't say it wasn't. That's not how it works.
People not claiming he wasn't real is not evidence that he was real. Presumably they were making statements acceptable for their period in time in their location. Was it acceptable for them to proposition that he may not have existed? Is that even useful?
If the goal is to convince people to not follow that religion, and they currently do, they're much more likely listen if you agree they have a basis in reality but are slightly incorrect. It's part of the reason Christianity has been so successful —it meets people where they are and adapts to their beliefs.
If you want to convince people that they're wrong, you don't say that. You say "you're right about this, but this part is wrong." If you say their entire belief system is built on lies then they double down. It's been shown time and time again with doomsday cults. The more they're proven wrong the more strongly the followers believe in it.
Yes! The pagan Romans were still in power. An easy way for them to win points would have been to point out the guy never existed. Why would Tacitus describe the crucifixion if it didn’t happen?
You have communities of people claiming that this guy was real and being obnoxious to Roman authorities. The Romans eventually went full ham on Judea - burning down the second Temple. It would be really really unusual if the guy didn’t exist and they didn’t say so.
Were this any other historical figure it would be enough to say we have sufficient evidence for existence. You’re letting your bias against the followers of this figure color what evidence you’ll accept for their existence.
Are we all going to turn into Muhammad mythicists next?
I don't think most serious scholars would swear that a Jesus existed at that time and place, but would say that it is much more likely than not based on the confirming evidence from outside of the Christian faith. At some point you need to decide how much evidence is enough for any ancient topic. There's no particular reason that I've found credible enough to convince me that there WASN'T a historical figure there, even though I absolutely refuse to accept any magic or miracles.
That's the thing though —you shouldn't need convincing that he wasn't real. You should need convincing the he was real. I don't have any particular reason to doubt he existed, but equally I don't have a good reason to believe it either, so I just don't. That's the default position.
I don't need to doubt he existed to also not hold a belief that he did.
I've always understood historical Jesus as a concession, and not a reflection of confirmed existence.
What Jesus are they talking about? That needs to be defined first. Not the one depicted in the bible that’s for sure.
A Jesus who had an apocalyptic ministry, some amount of followers, was executed by the Roman state and said at least some of the things recounted in the Gospels. Matthew and Luke are clearly pulling from some sort of earlier source, which likely had at least some accurate accounts of his teaching.
Could also be teachings of some of the other messianic cults just misattributed to Jesus, but either way he was clearly the only one that managed to maintain relevance much past their death.
TLDR: "The one in my head, that I cherry picked from a contradictory fictional source"
Have you ever read a document from before 1400? Just curious, because you seem to be under the illusion that reading primary sources means that you either take everything they say literally, or dismiss them as entirely made up. This is exactly what I mentioned with regard to ignorance of historiography and method earlier.
Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes all say contradictory things about Socrates. Will you argue that Socrates was fictional?
Plato (indirectly via fabricated self insert character) describes Atlantis as a story he read from his great great uncle Solon, who himself apparently heard about the story from 'Egyptians'...
... therefore, Atlantis is 100% confirmed real, lol.
The letter J wasn't even invented until the year 1524, so formally speaking, Jesus, Jews, Judges, January, June, July, and every other word including the letter J did not exist in the 1400s or before.
Therefore, Jesus never existed.
Lower case letters are medieval too, so only IESUS existed. Case closed.
That's just orthography; the letters and words didn't exist, which is unrelated to whether the things they represent did. There was in fact a judge, a January, and a Julius Caesar in Rome.
The joke ->
💨
-> you
His name in Aramaic, which was what he almost certainly would have actually spoken, was almost certainly Yehoshuah, which was a common name at the time.
It was often shortened to Yeshua, sometimes to Yeshu.
(This is still a common surname in Hebrew to this day.)
When translated into Greek, this became IESUS.
This is because Greek doesn't really have a representation of Y as consonant, and because Greek also doesn't really do the 'sh' sound, that got changed to just an 's'.
The earliest Gospels that we have are largely (entirely?) written in Greek, because:
Most people of the time were illiterate or functionally illiterate, and most people who learned how to write, well they were taught Greek, because it was the most common shared language of business and governance in the eastern Mediterranean.
There was very obviously a push to proselytize to Greek speakers, the Gentiles, to grow the movement outside of Judea, by many early Christians.
Anyway, yeah, you are correct that the harder J consonant did not develop until much, much later, in Europe.
So... if you were to do a more modern, direct translation of Yehoshuah, to a modern name in modern English, it would roughly be Joshua / Josh, not Jesus.
You realize that books like the First Epistle to the Corinthians were actual letters written and sent to those churches? That's one example, but there is plenty of history to be pulled from the Bible. Shitloads of New Testament books are Apostles sending Jesus' words to various churches and governments. Look up "epistle".
Look at the Old Testament for more history. Books like Leviticus, where we can pick out loads of weird proscriptions, were the records of law as the Tribe of Levi saw it.
A scholar can spend a lifetime unpacking the Bible without believing in ghosts, holy or otherwise. You're doing the "I'm too smart for this bullshit!" thing. Stop. You're having the opposite effect.
Also the fact that modern scholars recognize that not all of the Epistles were even written by Paul! You’d think if all of these Bible scholars were fervent Christians hellbent on ignoring historical evidence, they wouldn’t be arguing that Paul didn’t write Ephesians or Colossians, or that the Pentateuch was probably a compilation from four different authors!
I never knew they had all been ascribed to Paul, always thought there was various authors.
Ephesians and Colossians explicitly claim to have been written by Paul.
I find it funny that you end up with a or multiple pseudo-Pauls, when... Paul is already not his original name, lol.
Hmm... let me get this straight.
Your unpopular opinion™ is that someone named Jesus may have existed around the same time that all the stories about Jesus Christ of Nazareth were written?
and that “most mainstream scholars of the era” agree with OP
Have you heard about this dude named Brian?
I'm Brian, and my wife is too!
Joseph Smith was real too. Why should anyone care
Well, the followers of Joseph Smith spent a great deal of money back in the early ‘oughts against gay marriage. Perhaps looking into things like the Book of Abraham (a “translated” copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which wasn’t able translated until after the Rosetta Stone, and clearly does not say what Smith said it did), genetic testing of Native American tribes showing no Middle East inheritance, the various anachronisms (iirc, pre Columbian horses?) and the precedence of “KJV’ism’s” in the text might be important. We can debunk a lot of what Smith said, which might have significance for a religion that has a stranglehold over the politics of Utah.
Religious cults don't care about reality.
You might not care about any particular religion, but there is a pretty good chance that any particular religion cares about you, and wants to enforce its ideas on yourself, and the world.
Religion drives wars, it drives politics, it drives culture, it is a fundental component of human existence.
Just because its own mythology or doctrines may be whatever level of contradictory or false... does not mean these things do not affect you, and the rest of the world.
That has nothing to do with what I said. You're not convincing people to leave their cults by arguing historical minutia with them.
Sometimes people aren't always trying to convince people to leave cults, and are instead just trying to describe and discuss aspects of reality, like religions.
People should care about reality, reality involves religious people driving how that reality progresses.
If you disagree with that, you don't actually care about truth, you are an anti-intellectual.
Ideas must be considered, explored, examanined, discussed, in order to determine their truth or falsity.
And they're free to do that, but it doesn't have anything to do with with improving conditions for anyone or deprogramming cultists, so to assert that everyone should spend their time on it is ridiculous, as it amounts to a hobby.
People have a limited amount of time in their lives to spend. Learning about a religion, or how it ties into real history, should be done as a hobby by those interested or when it is pragmatic to do so. Arguing with zealots about how their cult ties into history is a pointless endeavor that is really playing their game, and therefore not pragmatic.
Now you're just being unserious.
Not all ideas are equal. If someone says we should genocide an ethnic group, the correct response is to recoil in horror and condemn the idea. When someone makes supernatural claims from their religious cult, the correct response is to make arguments that have at least some chance for a spark of deconversion - not to engage them in a rousing conversation about minutia that will NEVER have any positive impact.
Saying Jesus existed but biblical events didn’t happen is meaningless. And since we know the bible is full of crap, it doesn’t really matter if a Jesus existed or not. That specific fairy tale Jesus is made up. Maybe it is a dramatization of real events, maybe it is a mix of stories and legends about several different people, maybe it was fabricated, it doesn’t really matter. Saying “Jesus existed” is just feeding the apologists, and there are so many Christian historians than I cannot take claims like that seriously.
Who fucking cares?
Why do we care about history in general?
It provides us with some patterns in human behavior, things that cannot really be studied in a lab. You could approach early Christianity as a way to better understand mass movements, or the different coping strategies of an oppressed/conquered people. You could read the text of the New Testament and ask yourself why these ideas were appealing and what that might say about human nature.
As part of the study of ideas, Christianity is a really interesting expression of how Hellenistic thought mixed with Judaism. There’s a reason a lot of Neoplatonists were Christian.
The early conflicts with Judaism as Christianity developed its own identity have pretty far reaching impacts, with the death of Jesus being placed on all Jews and being used to justify atrocities to this current day.
Or, as a guy that thinks about the Roman Empire at least a couple times a day, it’s a great window into the experience of a backwater Roman province that eventually revolted and was absolutely crushed.
Jesus is not history in general, and I still don’t fucking care.
Because people made religion out of it? A religion from a Canaanitic people, who never set food in the desert they claim to have walked in for 40 years, but hey, we can't all worship the same Canaanitic Storm God Elohim, amirite?
Yeah, cults are gonna cult. People made religion out of spaghetti and comets. I still don’t care if Jesus ever existed.
I don’t necessarily care if Buddha or Carl Sagan existed, but I like the philosophy that is attached to them.
People think that if it's not recorded, it didn't happen. That line of thinking ignores that entropy of historical documents. Records are lost in fires, floods, looting, improper care, and more. There is also the issue of conflicting information from different sources. Is the document written by Ancient Person A about Ancient Event correct or is it Ancient Person B's version correct.
STEM people are trained with principles that are consider absolute until a paradigm shift happens.
It's why historians have the 5 C's: context, change over time, causality, complexity, and contingency.
The profession what would under historical evidence and historical thinking would be lawyers. Lawyers get cases all the time were you don't have direct evidence. For example, it's a murder case. There is no murder weapon and no eye witness. The victim was found with multiple stab wounds. There's a suspect in custody.
How do lawyers prove the suspect did the murder? Lawyers bring in collaborative evidence, such as: the suspect was seen with the victim before the murder, the suspect was seen in the area after the estimated time of death, the suspect had blood on their shirt, the suspect had a motive, etc.
To circle back to Jesus. There is no fundamental law of physics nor experiment to prove Jesus. Historians have to apply the five C's to prove the existence of Jesus. Collaborating documents, events, archeological evidence, carbon dating of physical evidence, etc.
Of course as soon as religion is mentioned, people's biases go into overdrive.
That's inaccurate at the very least for scientists. Scientists are trained to test and retest everything. We tend to give them names like "positive controls" when we run experiments on things we're pretty sure are going to work, but we still test them.
There is a lot of historical evidence that a lot of historical figures claiming to be the second coming of the messiah existed at the time. Jesus was just the most popular one. He’s the crème de la crème of messianic figures of the time. That’s all.
I remember stumbling into a book of all of said messianic figures, left out in the library.
In particular, I remember his name. Yeshua ben Yosef (sp? It's been 20years). I thought it funny that with a name like that and a Muslim ban in place (at the time) he would have never been allowed past customs.
Okay, now do Atlantis.
The “evidence” for Atlantis is Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, which is pretty clear in context to be a myth Plato is using to make a philosophical point. He’s not claiming it is historical, and it connects to Plato’s ideal of a “Noble Lie.”
UsefulCharts just released a youtube video on the topic. The argument is basically "the earliest documents referencing Jesus aren't explicit that he was real but on the other hand it wasn't long before he was treated as real". Basically there wasn't a lot of time for myth to be reinterpreted as history.
Personally I'm ambivalent, Sherlock Holmes wasn't real but he may have had a real effect on criminology. People may confuse his historicity. Compared to Houdini.
This passage in Josephus’s Antiquities would be the best evidence outside of the New Testament texts. Josephus refers to “Jesus, who was called Christ”’s brother James being executed, likely due to his role in leading an early group of Christians.
You can also read Bart Ehrman for some analysis and arguments from a professional historian.
Context: Josephus was born 4 years after Jesus' supposed death, and he wrote his Antiquities some 60 years after that...
I don't know if that's trustworthy in archaeology / history, but that doesn't feel very trustworthy to me.
I dunno, Rebecca Skloot was born 21 years after Henrietta Lacks died, but The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is still widely hailed as one of the best and most accurate biographies ever written. Jonathan Eig was born 4 years before MLK died, but his biography of the man from a couple years ago (55 years after King's death) isn't spurned. Heck, Ron Chernow missed Alexander Hamilton by a century and a half but it was so faithful that even the rap opera based on it was hailed for its accuracy.
Doesn't seem to me that such a range is necessarily disqualifying of the account.
Those seem like poor examples, contemporary authors have access to vastly more resources.
Maybe. Vastly more disinformation to identify, too, though.
The passage refers to the killing of James, which would have happened sometime in the 60s CE, only about three decades before the writing of the Antiquities and during a time when Josephus was alive.
I was under the impression that historians more didn't have any evidence to discount the existence of the guy than so much as distinct records of him, so because of Christianity it's generally accepted a guy existed. But it's been a while since I looked into it and my memory is kinda shit, I'm getting old.
Just want to add a couple of things
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There were no extra-Biblical references to Pontius Pilate until 1961. Now imagine how much documentation must have surrounded the Roman prefect of Judea. All of it gone, except for a bit of limestone.
Also an argument (I think I heard it from Hitchens, but not sure): We know that the Nativity story is bogus because the Census that was supposed to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem is anachronistic. And we know that it's important that Jesus be from Bethlehem (City of David) because the Messiah was prophesized to be from there.
So the question is: if were making up Jesus from whole cloth, why not just make him Jesus of Bethlehem? Why go to the trouble unless Jesus of Nazareth was something people were already familiar with?
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your 1961 statement, but from Wiki on Pontius Pilate:
The Pilate Stone is where his 1961 date comes from. The Josephus bit that mentions Pilate is the “Testimonium Flavianum” which is the reference to Jesus in Josephus that was likely edited by a later source. It does look like the numismatic evidence (coins) are ridiculously common though.
Often, coins are the only evidence of historical figures. Lots of petty kings that never have anything written about them, but do have coins.
Downvote for stating "facts" without sources.
Chiming in here with no degrees or STEM training to say that I exist, but it's unlikely there will be any record of me in a couple thousand years. Though I haven't given the whole water to wine thing a go so don't count me out just yet.
Jesus doesn't have to be a single historical person.
Never knew Jesus is plural from Jesu
ITT: "Hitler existed"
Oh so you're a Nazi and believe Raiders of the Lost Ark was a documentary?! Go to hell! (Which doesn't exist and I know that because I'm smart.)
Anyway, my understanding was that the existence of a single man, Yeshua the Nazarene, was still a bit controversial. Don't some scholars suspect the Biblical Jesus was an amalgamation of a number of itinerant preachers? Or does much of the historical evidence lie in the fact that the Gospels seem to be talking about the same person? Which I think is your take?
What's your background on this particular post? LOL, not looking for a resume, just broad strokes.
Also, why is he referred to as being from Nazareth when the Bible clearly states he was born in Bethlehem? Was Nazareth a state in which lay Bethlehem? I thought Judea was the state.
I haven’t seen this idea seriously suggested. Perhaps some of the ideas are an amalgamation - I suspect Paul had to do with a lot of softening of anti-Roman rhetoric. But the mainstream consensus suggests an individual.
What seems to be likely is that he was from Nazareth (tiny, backwater town), but prophecy would suggest he needed to be from Bethlehem, which explains the ridiculous “go to your homeland for the census” thing. (This also is sorta evidence for the historicity of the individual - what we might call a “criterion of embarrassment” - if they were just going to make the guy up on the spot they’d have had him just born in Bethlehem.)
My background is that I have a BA in history, and have done a little graduate level study of religion and historiography. I’m not a professional academic but I’m enough of an armchair enthusiast to have studied a little Koine.
Doesn't the Bible say exactly that?
So his parents were from Nazareth and the census was a literary device to get Jesus' birth to line up with prophecy? I'm still a bit confused.
Yes. Jesus was referred to often as a “of Nazareth.” If he had actually born in Bethlehem, then he probably would have been referred to as “of Bethlehem.” Notice how Mark, the gospel that was probably written first, does not have any form of birth story. Luke and Matthew have two contradictory accounts, which invoke a contrivance to get Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. Mark just says that he came out of Nazareth.
It’s easy to see the authors of Luke and Matthew adding the nativity stories in to make a prophetic argument.
I think the closest thing to a “historical” Jesus in the Gospels is probably found in the original Mark. The ending of Mark describing Jesus’s appearances after the resurrection is a later addition and was not present in the original texts.
Going from memory here, I heard it years back. Robert M. Price's podcast The Bible Geek covered the argument against a historical Jesus in an episode, noting that a major pillar in the argument is an obituary written by Josephus. Wikipedia has a page on Josephus's account.
Price's argument, such that I remember, has to do with the fact that Josephus' account outright calls Jesus the Messiah, despite supposedly being written in the first century CE when this would have been a niche argument, suggesting that this account was not actually written when it purports to be. But I haven't listened to Bible Geek in a long time, all of this could be a misrepresentation.
Yeah afaik the earliest record of the gospels and Jesus date to 90AD, which is of course beyond the memory of a single generation. Either the stories were passed down orally that long (telephone game), or the whole thing was really invented around that time, since there are multiple written records suddenly appearing in the early 2nd century.
The creation of Christianity around 90-120AD makes more sense than anything to me, given the geopolitics of the time.
A stroll through any necropolis back then would reveal many tombs marked Yeshua and Miryam and Yosef. Just common names. If someone were to invent myths around that time, they might just pick names like that, especially given the hebrew meaning of Yeshua (salvation through god).
I not a biblical scholar so grains of salt.
The earliest Gospel, Mark, was written about 70 CE. (There’s also evidence that a “Q source” and a “sayings source” were floating around earlier - the commonalities in Luke and Matthew) Paul’s epistles are even earlier; Galatians was written somewhere 40-60 CE. Paul’s epistles are written to communities of Christians, meaning that that Christianity has already spread by then.
It's not quite certain that Jesus and Paul actually met in person. So all his writing might be apocryphal. His word might have become christian canon, but he is not really a source one can trust.
While Jesus and Paul likely never met in person, the point is that Paul is writing to established Christian communities within a few decades of Jesus’s death. There are already churches with established leadership and community structures.
Interesting, thank you for the missing detail there. I didn't realize Paul's writings were that early, but, he would have been 65-70 at least by then? I suppose that's possible.
What I remember from Bible Geek (and/or Human Bible, another podcast he did) was that the earliest of the gospels actually dates to the 4th century CE, and that three of them are likely derivative works from an earlier book, lost to us, that scholars call "Q." I think it was John that was the only gospel thought not to originate from it.
Addition: looking it up, here's Q source on Wikipedia. It states that Matthew and Luke are thought to originate from Q, but not Mark or John.
Price is specifically referring to the “Testimonium Flavianum“ there, which most scholars agree was altered. The part of The Antiquities that refers to “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James” most scholars think is original, and I don’t know if Price has made an argument about that quote.
Price is probably the only person with enough background to be a mythicist, but his arguments still just don’t seem to match how people act. “Oh, the Egyptians have Osiris, let’s make up our own god who gets resurrected!”
The evidence just seems more likely to show that the man existed, and had more elaborate details added to his biography as time went on. You can see a much higher “Christology” as you read each Gospel in the order they were written (details in the resurrection story, how many angels were at the tomb) until you get to John which makes Jesus the logos itself. The story needs to start with some sort of nucleus, something real, that has things added to it step by step.
Isn't that pretty much the whole origin of the roman pantheon? They heard about the cool greek gods and made their own copies.
That’s a common misunderstanding/simplification. It’s more “wow, these gods are kinda similar to ours, so they must be the same.” Portable Orange on YT has a good and well sourced video, and I think reading Dr. Devereaux’s blog posts is a good way to understand some ideas about ancient polytheism. Neither of these are published journal articles or books, but they both thoroughly cite their sources.
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vxOBbYSzk
Esoterica - Who was the historical Jesus?
Jesus-ish existed? Just a thought. A little of this a little if that. Some of these & those. Perhaps a few of the other things and ta da. An individuals legacy can change with every generation. The fish gets bigger every time my Dad recounts the tale of the monster Largemouth Bass he caught.
There's a conspiracy theory that Jesus is a composite character plagiarised from half a dozen or more pre-Christian faiths, and in particular the key points of his life are actually personified versions of the Winter solstice and the movement of the sun and the stars (including the Zodiac in some versions of the theory).
It's widely believed amongst atheists, but it's simply not true on any level. He was a real dude and was really crucified, and the supposed earlier versions of Christ-like characteristics are either extremely tenuous coincidences or simply outright lies (with some honest mistranslations/misinterpretations). Bart Ehrman, an atheist himself but a world-renowned scholar on the history of Christianity, has several books which deal with this question to varying degrees, the main one being "Did Jesus Exist?". It's worth reading (or listening to) if you're curious about it. He addresses the specific claims of proponents of the conspiracy theory directly, like those of Richard Carrier.
I'm atheist, but I respect history and historical scholarship. It's one of the handful of disciplines that humanity can't really afford to overlook or devalue in 2025 if we want to survive into the next millennia. Agreeing on reality is one of the hardest things to do in the current climate. Overeager atheism that plays fast and loose with historical fact is not helping us secularise the world. It's making us seem like we're debunkable, because in this specific case, we are. It's like in a video game when you get to a boss fight and see that the boss has a glowing section on its body that you're supposed to shoot. Pretending Jesus wasn't a real person is like us placing a giant glowing chest plate on our efforts and watching helplessly as Christians fire directly at it. There's no need for it.
Maybe nothing unusual about his existence, since it is historically proven anyway. But what about the stories of healing and even resurrecting? Would you also think that these were not unusual?
“Miracle workers” were not that uncommon during the era - see Apollonius of Tyana who lived around roughly the same time.
I think OP was asking if the particular miracles ascribed to Jesus were common.
For resurrection from the dead, Empedocles was said to have thrown himself into volcano to ascend to Godhood. He would have existed about four centuries before Jesus, but this story would have probably been popular at the time of Jesus.
Elijah raises a boy from the dead in the Hebrew Bible.
In a pre-modern medicine world, how do you actually tell if someone is dead or not? How do you explain things like a remission from cancer? Even in the modern world, at faith healing ceremonies people will walk out of their wheelchairs or claim to be healed of a variety of ailments. It’s not impossible to imagine scenarios where someone appeared to be dead but was not, or had some chronic condition that they appeared to temporarily recover from.
Excellent reply! Had not thought on much of that, especially the last phrase. Seen that IRL when dad was dying of lung cancer, many have told tales of sudden lucidity at death, all that.
By the stink.
When people stop being at war with themselves, various degrees of physical and mental healing happen.
Sure, a man like Jesus was inevitably real. He just didn't have powers, due to powers being impossible.
Jesus was in no way a historical figure.
Secular sources for his existence aren't exactly abundant, but they're fairly convincing. Certainly there are historical figures from that long ago with less evidence for their existence
Very convincing argument./s
Can you provide evidence of a 1st century conspiracy to make such a figure up? What was the purpose of that conspiracy?
The onus is not on them to find you anything. The onus is on you to prove that he's real.
Uhhh… no. Let’s use Occam’s razor here.
We have evidence of a group of followers of Jesus within a few decades of his death. Paul’s letters are probably the earliest written examples, written in the 60’s, where he is writing to groups of early Christians. We have independent confirmation in Josephus of “Jesus, who was called Christ” as well as the existence of John the Baptist.
The idea that a group of people in the mid first century all decided to collectively make up a guy who had supposedly died less than a few decades ago would require some kind of weird conspiracy. Lacking evidence of that conspiracy (or even evidence of a similar conspiracy?) the more reasonable explanation is that the guy existed. It’s not an extraordinary claim. We have about as much evidence for Socrates, who doesn’t automatically generate this kind of response.
The claim that the guy doesn’t exist has a lot more evidence than the claim that the guy does. The null hypothesis is that he existed, because it is the simplest way to explain the evidence we have, and doesn’t require a conspiracy that stretches over several communities and cities in the 1st century Roman Empire.
Again, the methodology of history is not the same as STEM. I want you to consider what you think the standard of evidence for providing someone exists is, and whether a personal dislike of the guy’s followers is coloring your interpretation of historical evidence.
I need you to stop patronizing people. I am well aware of how history works. People in STEM are capable of understanding other things. Wild, I know.
Historians do not agree on this, no matter how much you pretend that it's a fact.
Who? Give me some historians that disagree. The free one I’ll give you is Robert Price, who will even admit that the mainstream historical consensus disagrees with him.
Yeah, people in STEM are capable of understanding other things, just like people in the humanities are capable of understanding other things. But if one’s background is in Asian history, and they start to claim that the mainstream academic consensus on general relativity is wrong, they’re going to need to provide some serious justification.
Have you read a text from before 1400?
You can't make that shit up lmao
Can you show some evidence he existed? We'll wait
Can you show some evidence that Socrates existed? We’ll wait
I never understood the problem with Jesus existing. Like, duh, you think the Roman Empire, the America of the time, the Big Satan, would just be randomly coerced into changing their state religion by, well, nothing? A group of loud folks that followed the (new and radical at their time, btw) teachings of... no one? Even without much historical knowledge, Jesus existing seems like the most reasonable conclusion, lol.
I think those who had bad experiences with religion often go all out... but just because some religious ideologies might be internally inconsistent or just because your parents forced you to go to church instead of letting you play Pokémon Emerald and you resent them for it does not mean that nothing behind Judeo-Christianity happened. 🤷
Just because Jesus could have existed, doesn't necessarily mean that he did
Except a guy called (roughly translated and modernized) Jesus did exist and was associated with messianic cults and seems to have been crucified. Which wasn't particularly uncommon, either the name, the messianic cults, or the crucifixions. Basically there's no reason not to accept a guy that seems to be who Christianity is based on actually existed and probably said and did some of the (non miraculous, obviously) things that were written about him.
But then what prompted an apocalyptic political and religious movement to spring forth from the Levant at the time, with missionaries going round the world to share the message of one Yeshu from Galilee ?
I mean sure maybe it was a conspiracy and they lied about their founder but what's the point of that ? Occam's Razor tells you that most of the time when a group of people start repeating the exact same message claiming it comes from person X, then person X existed.
What's baffling to me is that theories where Jesus doesn't exist are generally more convoluted and less explicative. What's the point ?
I mean, he did leave a big mark in the world but yeah, sure, although we're about two millennia late for visual confirmation, lol.
Yeah, so did Zeus
I think you misunderstand this post: Jesus is a dude who lived. Just a dude. No one is making any more claims.
And that's not an agreed upon fact among historians.
Again, the existence of a historical Jesus does not mean miracles or resurrection or God. This is childish, reactive anti-theism.
https://www.bartehrman.com/josephus/
Josephus was born shortly after a historical Jesus would have died. His mentions of Jesus in his writings was from more than sixty years later when christians were an active and growing cult in the region where he lived. I agree that Jesus was likely a historical person but Josephus is only a point of evidence for it. It's the easiest known mention of Jesus and not too much after he would have lived but Josephus's writings are far from proof of a historical Jesus.
Take this childish shit back to reddit. Adults are speaking.