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.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 21 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 12 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.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 11 hours ago
Yeah i don’t understand what’s so controversial here. This time and place was home to a million apocalyptic militant movements, and Jesus’s just was the most successful of his generation.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 15 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.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 11 hours ago
That is simply not true. There’s a lot of historical figures from Antiquity for whom we have zero archeological evidence, it’s kind of the norm in fact. Literary evidence is fine if it can be corroborated from multiple independent sources. If we go by your standards then Socrates and Pythagoras are not historical figures, neither is Tacitus, or Hannibal, or most people who were not kings and did not have steles or coin to their name.
A couple centuries before his embellishment by the roman state, the so-called Jesus movement was flourishing and started to expand in pretty much every direction. The existence of this movement is abundantly attested in independent sources from very distant places.
Are you saying this movement did not exist and the sources that attest to it are not reliable ? Are you saying there was a movement but it wasn’t founded by a guy named Y’shua ben Josef from Galilee ? Why would that be ? Do you think they lied, or forgot the name and origin of their founder ? I understand the idea but what would be the point, and how would those various sub-groups, some of which were very distant geographically, have coordinated their lie so perfectly ?
At one point Okham’s razor says the most probable thing is that a guy named Y’shua from Galilee did indeed start a religious movement. It’s happened before, it’s happened again, why would this specific occurrence need an esoteric explanation ?
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Haha, and later on, some group of assholes tried to make hay with the original guy… to the extent that whatever he might have actually said (remember the Gnostics?) to the message of bullshit “Christianity?”
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Wow, it is as if you need something to be true, in the deepest sense, in order to validate your life?
Dude– and THAT’S the part I always try to confirm. Live your life!
Enjoy our silly, mutual existence, if you can!
WE ARE HERE F0R A LITTLE WHILE, and also we like our animal friends et al.
The ride will be over soon, my friend. So let’s enjoy…
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 11 hours ago
Looks like you tried to reply to my actual response, and then sort of went all Gonzo-weird ness for motivational purposes?
Well, HELLO THERE, fellow freakazoid!
(I mean, that’s what the point is here, right..?)