One Theory I like is that the Jesus we know is an amalgamation of multiple Messiah figures that were walking around around that time, one of them was the basis for the religion and then other stories about those other Messiahs were folded in over the years
I like this reasoning a lot, however:
#2. In terms of there being a real-life Y’shua, AFAIK it’s hard to know if such a person ever really existed in the first place, or if they were in fact more of an amalgamated ‘King Arthur’ / ‘Robin Hood’ type, very much inspired by earlier legends & mythology, and greatly elaborated upon in later years, via oral traditions, before finally being documented hither & tither by various writers scattered around the region.
AFAIK there is no archeological evidence whatsoever for that exact person’s existence, and no contemporaneous writing from the time, describing his life.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 14 hours ago
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Almost like every lauded, ‘perfect’ figure across history?
In fact, “The Messiah” is a concept that certainly goes back long before some dude allegedly named “Y’shua” was branded that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah
Now, modern humans being ~300Kyrs old, I would guess that it’s not just an ancient fixation, but even endemic to our very species… our very way of hoping and wanting and longing for a return to ‘the good times,’ directly embodied in a mythological figure.
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 1 day ago
bufalo1973@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Maybe he existed… but only as a common human and all the supernatural things were added later.
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Oooohhhh
I mean, yes, obviously. It all of a sudden makes the other commenter’s steadfast insistence against me make sense, if they thought that I meant this person actually existed who could do real life magic tricks and came back from the dead and he still watches to see if you’re masturbating.
Yes, I was talking about the historical figure, not the superhero. I thought that went without saying but maybe not.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Dude, I did nothing of the kind.
Wow, it’s almost like you managed to copy-paste the known fact that the body of Christian scholars agrees that someone existed, later known as “Jesus,” and then seemingly couldn’t deal with a rebuttal upon your notion of ‘that clearing up everything.’
So now you’re getting weird about the fact that I had to re-do my comment, simply because I responded to the wrong commenter at the time? So, did not see my rebuttal at all? Did you not see my attempt to explain that?
Go ahead, tho– consider this your opportunity to fairly reply to what I said above. Sound good?
KneeTitts@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Lets consider that jesus did exist and did someone have a cure for leprosy. Why didn’t he give that cure to everyone??? We still have leprosy today, kinda proves he didnt have the cure. But again lets say he did and he only gave it to a couple people, not a very godly thing to do, to withhold that cure from the entirety of humanity.
bufalo1973@piefed.social 5 hours ago
Maybe he cured a strong headache (maybe some herbal remedy) but they grew the anecdote and he ended up “curing leprosy”.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 9 hours ago
As I see it, there’s pretty much a landslide of evidence, from almost every studied angle, that points to what you just postulated.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 day ago
Which is fine as far as it goes, yet does very little if anything to address the body of the above concerns.
While “Jesus” likely had something with an actual person who once lived, nailing down the details of his life and history seems highly problematic from a scholarly & historical POV, and as for embellishment, amalgamation and distortion… all such things are highly possible, and even highly likely, AFAIK.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 16 hours ago
But then you’re making up new standards of evidence for historical characters, and only applying them to Jesus.
All evidence points to a jew who, under roman occupation, organized a political and religious movement around his person with a message so powerful that it immediately started replicating. Otherwise, how can we explain the sudden outflow of missionaries from Galilee ? Whose message were they spreading, which travelled as far as Asia and Ethiopia with relative unity and consistence ? What reason do we have to doubt that a revolutionary mystical prophet such as Jesus existed (they were legion at the time in that region), and why should we subscribe to some more exotic, laborious explaination ?
The question is not whether Jesus’ story was embellished and distorted, because it was, with 100% certainty. But then that’s true of everything we know from that time period. We have 0 archeological evidence of most historical characters existence, only hearsay and unreliable testimony. But we don’t doubt their existence because the alternative would have to be far fetched and contrived to fit the evidence.
bitcrafter@programming.dev 6 hours ago
I think that it is worth noting that the person who did most of the successful evangelizing in the beginning that led to the explosion of the movement was actually Paul, who had his own message that wasn’t quite the same as Jesus’s apostles–in fact, he started spreading the message without talking to them first because he figured that he already knew everything that he needed to know, which led to conflict that required Acts to work really hard to make it seem like they were all on the same side all along.
But regardless, it is peculiar that people seem to think that starting a widely successful cult is a particularly hard thing to do if the founder has enough charisma (and luck), given that all you have to do is look around at the numerous modern examples. For example, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966 by a guy banging drums in New York, and has since grown into a huge movement with hundreds of dedicated temples. So it is far more plausible that this is what happened in the case of Christianity than that some other more complicated process synthesizing the existence of a fake founder.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Absolutely false, right from the get-go, “Bob.”
The whole point of what I said above is to understand things from an historians and archeologists’ POV. You know– the ones who generally try their best to strictly adhere to known facts & reality?
Such criteria is commonly applied to virtually EVERY significant figure in history, Bob. Are you actually (haha) asking for a special exception for someone possibly known as Y’shua ben Josef during his lifetime, who later got turned in to an almost impossibly, legendary figure by political, financial and religious institutions…?
I sure hope not, anyway, because that would not be the “Bob” we all know and love.
bitcrafter@programming.dev 22 hours ago
You are thinking about this the wrong way. From the scraps of information that we do have, which includes volumes of work by Jesus’s followers, there are two extremes one could take: we know absolutely nothing about Jesus or whether he even existed, or we know absolutely everything about Jesus. I agree that the later extreme is wrongheaded, but surely treating it as a binary choice so that the only other possibility is that we can say nothing at all about Jesus is also wrongheaded.
You might argue reasonably, of course, that his followers cannot be trusted, so we can learn nothing from their writings. This is not true, however, because if nothing else we can learn from the editorial choices that they made; for example, when a Gospel goes out of is way to explain a detail that would have been embarrassing to contemporaries, this actually provides potential evidence that this detail was true and widely known at the time so that it needed to be explained, because otherwise it would just have been left out.
At the end of the day, scholarship is essentially about weighing probabilities rather than certainties, and good scholars do not pretend otherwise.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 9 hours ago
I consider that a terrible way of framing things, and then to make matters worse, you propose only a binary set of conclusions.
Please do better then that if you want to debate fairly.
Thank you.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 day ago
Whoops; apologies.
I borked up my last reply-comment, and so deleted that, and re-created from scratch.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 day ago
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 1 day ago
What? Of course it does. A near-unanimous consensus by experts in the field is worth more than whatever you are bringing up in your Lemmy comment.
I mean, it would be possible to lay out logic so compelling that even if experts in the field felt one particular way about it you could make a case otherwise, but weird strawmen like wanting archaeological evidence of Jesus’s specific skeleton or something is not that.