You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
I like to picture my Jesus as a desert hippie that people liked and told tall tales of in order to give people living in that harsh environment some hope and meaning.
I like to think of Jesus with like giant eagles wings and singing lead vocals for lynyrd skynyrd with like an Angel Band, and I'm in the front row, and I'm hammered drunk.
IIRC, the religion didn't get anywhere is Palestine after Jesus supposedly died and it wasn't until decades later that it picked up in and around Greece thanks to Paul, but no one was around that saw any of the events attributed to Jesus - it was all heresay.
I mean the bible is how many pages and how much of it actually takes place during Jesus's life? And what is the timespan of the small part that does? Like a year? And the 4 gospels that talk about it are all rehashings of the same stories (more or less) and even contradict each other at times.
That's a story with a lot of gaps and plot holes to base a belief system around - and that doesn't even include all the baggage and hate that comes along with it.
People nowadays lose their mind and make death threats to the creators of stories that don't fix or create new plot holes in canon. And we're supposed to smile, nod, and happily accept one of the worst constructed stories ever just because some old white men that live the opposite way they tell us to live say so?
Skimmed through some of these, like this which isn't even a contradiction.
Even here you can see that it even shows a verse where Jesus drinks the vinegar in two gospels yet claim it's s contradiction because He didn't receive the wine.
Luke and Matthew were referring to acquiring or buying a staff, Mark was referring to simply going as you are. The emphasis was that Jesus didn't want them to excessively prepare for the journey, but simply go out with the sandals they were wearing and a walking stick they had on them.
how do you have sources for no? I mean I guess you can link to wikipedia and point out all the evidence is just some third party writings or such I guess.
The thing is that compared to other historical people we kid of have similar evidence. Like we have records of Socrates existing and we have records of some Joshua existing.
The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death, which is a extraordinary claim, we just say he was a very smart guy, we se very smart guys on a daily basis, nothing special with that so we can just believe it and even if we are wrong it has no real life implications.
For the Joshua guy, that's quite a different story. The claims about him are extraordinary and need extraordinary evidence. But we only have normal evidence. If the claims about him were true it would contradict almost everything we think we know about the universe, how it behaves, etc.
So again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death,
To use a more modern example, pretty much everyone agrees that Grigori Rasputin was a real person who played a crucial role in the court of the last Czar of Russia.
But there are some positively wild and unexplainable stories that have a decent amount of corroborating evidence that they happened. The story about him healing the prince via a phone call sounds like actual magic. However we all know magic isn't real, there is definitely some kind of logical explanation. But that explanation is lost to time.
So where do historians land on Rasputin? Well, there was definitely a guy called Rasputin. Some of the stories about him are true. Some are probably false or exaggerated. There isn't even a consensus on what colour the dude's eyes were. But that doesn't mean we dispute his existence.
nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death
Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn't have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.
Also, there definitely isn't any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.
We have a lot more contemporay primary sources for the existence of Socrates than we have of Jesus (of which the number of contemporary primary sources is 0).
The answers here are absolutely crazy. Go find some credible biblical scholars (ones whose jobs are not dependent on statements of faith) like Bart ehrman and read what they say. My understanding is that most scholars agree that Jesus existed, and even that he was crucified. Don't trust lemmy, don't even trust me, go find the experts, read what they say, and decide for yourself.
My opinion: It's a nice story. And with stories the most important thing is what it teaches us or makes us feel. Not that it's true. Maybe they took inspiration from several preaching hippies who lived back then and made one story out of that. Exaggerated everything and made stuff up. Probably all of it because the bible was't even written close to his supposed lifetime. It'd be like you now writing a story about a dude who died in 1870. Without any previous records to get information from. [Edit: The first things have probably been written down like 40-50 years after his death.]
And I mean if Jesus existed, he would certainly disapprove of what people do (and did) in his name.
My summary is oversimplified. I still think it's the correct answer to OP's question: is there physical evidence. Because there isn't anything physical. But there are written records from a bit later, suggesting that somebody with that name must have existed. Glad someone else thinks I picked the correct article. Seems it's not that easy to find good information. The English speaking internet is filled with low quality efforts to portray the facts in a way they'd like to have them.
I have a few good books though. Back when I was young (and became an atheist,) I used to read a lot about philosophy, the political message of the New Testament. And what life was like in that time.
Agree. But that specific article seems pretty alright. Also talks about the relics and history records for example by Tacitus.
There also is a Wikipedia article which I think is not written that well. And a lot of education material by churches or religious organizations which I did not cite for obvious reasons.
There also is a Wikipedia article which I think is not written that well. And a lot of education material by churches or religious organizations which I did not cite for obvious reasons.
That's because Christian apologists constantly brigade those articles.
The only physical proof you can have of a person that lived before photography is a body. So no, Jesus did not have a publically marked grave and we do not have his bones.
That being said, there is a difference between proving something historically and proving it in the court of law. Historical evidence points to Jesus having been a person that lived around that time.
Chances are he was more like a cult leader it wasn’t until a decade or two after his death that things really got into full swing, so chances are the actual Jesus would be quite surprised by everything “he” did.
But there were a lot of Jewish mystics cropping up at the time so it’s not impossible or even implausible for some one vaguely matching the description to have existed.
Good thing back in the day there were probably very few cult leaders....
Does anyone wonder about how the story of Jesus being plagiarized from the Egyptian myth of Horus affects the narrative about the Jesus that supposedly lived and died a century earlier? You know the one that happened to have incredibly important political value for the established leaders of the time?
Exactly. An example from outside the Bible might be Achilles. There was probably a great warrior with that name in the Mycenaean Greek world. Later storytellers probably just added more to make it sound better or the material was from other warriors who were like Achilles.
Some of Jesus' teachings definitely come from the milieu of the Roman era in Judea and Palestina.
Personally my favorite head canon is that Jesus was, or his parents were, Egyptian born Jews or Coptic converts to Judaism. It's a reverse Obamas birth certificate. There is so much time spent establishing the lineage and explaining the flight to Egypt.
You realize that a significant portion of the bible is the collected letters and works that were at the time (that it was assembled) considered credible, right?
There’s a period of around 80 years that’s pretty hard to account for, but unlike the four gospels where there’s little corroborating evidence that tracks back into that 80 year period, the epistolary works are pretty likely to be authentic. They also reference a bunch of other letters that didn’t survive, something that tends to make them more likely authentic than not. And they involve people who were eyewitnesses of a man named Jesus (or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer) and his younger (step) brothers.
The rest of the statements about him were solidified by 80 years or so after his death, but all the accounts don’t quite line up — which is actually a good argument for them being based on actual events.
So while there may be plenty of room for debate as to how much of the biblical teachings actually originated with a man named Jesus, his actual existence seems more evident than, say, Shakespeare.
The mental gymnastics is palpable. That things don’t line up is evidence they’re true? And because people believed it at the time it must be credible? Did a guy really live in the belly of a whale for three days simply because some simpletons believed it?
That’s how epistemological analysis works… if the general structure is the same but everyone pulls different meaning out of an event, something probably happened. If everything lines up exactly, someone probably faked the letters. If there’s totally conflicting stories, the record has been tampered with too much to say anything. If there’s no record, there’s nothing to say one way or another.
Of course not because it's a load of hogwash. Go play telephone with a class of 6th graders for 5 minutes and then tell me these stories are accurate. Also the events in most of them are clearly impossible situations.
Assembled a thousand years after the fact by a group with a vested interest in solidifying the narrative to fit their own.
Hell, the Tanakh didn't really get put together until well after Christianity appeared and it was a reaction to Christians appropriating Jewish literary culture to establish their own.
It'd be similar to people a thousand years from believing that Christian Gray is literally descended from Edward and Bella.