I’m pretty sure without the fossilised bones we would think dinosaurs weren’t a thing
Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed?
frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
No. But physical proof is not the standard we use for determining someone’s historical existence.
BlowMe@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Eczpurt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Its easy to put bones together and say that it existed but there’s no way to guarantee “these are certified bones of Jim the stegosaurus, religious figure”
BlowMe@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Are you doubting about our Lord Jim the stegosaurus?
fah_Q@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Hail Jim Tri dinos in one.
Tramort@programming.dev 1 week ago
Bones prove you existed.
But the absence of bones does not mean that you didn’t.
SonicDeathTaco@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
That’s because there weren’t multiple people around to write down what they saw. You’re confusing paleontology and history. They have very different standards for proof.
There are tons of historical figures for whom we have no physical evidence. But we have tons of written evidence from people who all experienced those people.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
History is known by:
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Archæological evidence
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Texts
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Archæogenetics
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Historical linguistics
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Myth (euhemerism)
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Maybe some others I’m forgetting
Dino-history isn’t comparable to tthe literate Roman period.
BlowMe@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yet we have dozens of proof about empires and people BEFORE Jesus. Like the Egyptians
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
The tone of this comment males it suddenly seem like you’re not asking a question but trying tp prove a point.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
The Egyptians also mummified their dead, preserving the corpses into the modern era. “Older” ≠ “more evidence”
We have loads more records from the Romans than from the Norse for example, even though the Norse came later, because the Norse didn’t keep as many records as the Romans.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Which Egyptians are you referring to? We have lots of archæological proof of the Judaeans.
JimSamtanko@lemm.ee 1 week ago
People. Not person. There is HUGE difference.
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gedaliyah@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s prehistory. Everything we know about history comes from written accounts. Historians study written documents and argue whether or not the available evidence makes it more likely that something (or someone) was real or fiction. Most historians agree that
nooneescapesthelaw@mander.xyz 1 week ago
We don’t have the bones of gengis khan either
frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
Dinosaurs aren’t people.
bastion@feddit.nl 1 week ago
They are, in accordance with the teachings of Jim the Stegosaurus.
Rekorse@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
The point is that you are asking the wrong question sort of. If we only accepted physical remnants of someone or their life to prove they exist, Jesus wouldn’t be the only one we would have to throw out.
Not to say I know how to prove stuff historically, it does sort of seem like magic sometimes. If we found out today that carbon dating was off by a magnitude I would not be shocked, so that’s all the faith I have in it due to my bad understanding of it.
kokesh@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You won’t find fossilized Jesus, he apparently got resurrected and became wine & cookies, so some people started eating him on Sundays. And he doesn’t want us to say fuck, or shit, or do it in the butt. But that’s not really related to the question.
olafurp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Archaeology in good at giving us clues about the living thing. References to people existing is almost purely based on text people wrote. The proof would be someone writing down “Chrestos, popular among the poor was crucified for his crimes for spreading heresy” as a contemporary. But since the earliest reference we have is a century after his death it’s not necessarily accurate or true.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Literary proof is, but also doesn’t exist for Jesus Christ.
There’s a few mentions of just a “Jesus” but its not like no one else was named Jesus, and those don’t really make any mention of him being remarkable in any way.
There’s just no evidence
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 week ago
AFAIK most historians/scholars agree that Jesus was a real person (even if a lot of the Bible’s claims about what he did is not true). What are you basing your opinion on?
nyctre@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Exactly this. The person did exist. There’s proof of that. It wasn’t the son of god and didn’t perform miracles, but he was real nonetheless.
Tryptaminev@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Important notion that Jesus never claimed to be the son of god and that entire line of thinking was established some four hundred years after.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
So we have to differentiate between what is the actual Gospel and life of Jesus and what the more creative parts of the churches invented on top of it over time.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
There exists documented proof in many bits of literature from around 200 BCE to around 100 CE of numerous different figures in what is called ‘Jewish Apocalypticism’, ie Jews in and around what was for most of that time the Roman province of Palestine, preaching that the end would come, that God or a Messiah would return or arise and basically liberate the region and install a Godly Kingdom, usually after or as part of other fantastical events.
Jesus was one of many of these Jewish Apocalypticists. Much like the rest of the movement’s key figures, they were wrong, and their lives were greatly exaggerated in either their writings or writings about them or inspired by them.
This seems to be the (extremely condensed) opinion of most Biblical Scholars.
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 1 week ago
m.youtube.com/watch?v=z8j3HvmgpYc
Satans Guide to the Bible for more apocalyptic felt Jesus.
Liz@midwest.social 1 week ago
I’ve heard theories that key people probably had hallucinations of Jesus a few days after he was killed, which was the big thing that helped launch him from yet-another-apocalyptic-preacher to (eventually) God himself. I don’t know how well these are accepted, though.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
This stems from the fact that, so far, the earliest written fragments we have from what is now the New Testament are some of the writings of Paul.
Paul was not one of the Apostles, and it seems possible that, after persecuting earlier, existing Christians, he could have basically had a stress induced psychotic break and hallucinated the vision of Jesus that he had, then converted.
Thing is though, Christians would have to … you know exist and already be a real thing first, for that to make sense.
It does explain why Paul does not mention some very key elements of the narrative of the Gospels: He just had not actually read about or heard of those parts yet.
This creates some theological problems down the line, and some of those problems were ‘remedied’ by what a good deal of scholars and historians believe to be forgeries… chapters of the Bible that modern Christians attribute to Paul, but do not seem to actually have been written by Paul.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I have a pet peeve about this phrase. A) yes there is. B) that’s not the standard, e.g. it would be incorrect to say there’s no evidence aliens abduct and probe people: there are eyewitness accounts
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t believe that, and since it’s impossible to show evidence something doesn’t exist, the people claiming evidence Jesus existed is gonna have to do some linking…
You mean evidence?
Evidence isn’t the standard for things existing?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Hard evidence has never been the standard for proof that a historical figure existed. Corroborating records are. It’s great if you can find some hard evidence, but if that was the standard then most people in history wouldn’t have any historical proof of their existence. And even when there is a corpse, we still rely on burial records to be certain that the corpse is who we think it is.
Like a third of the bible as well as several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua (which we now translate as Jesus) who traveled around Palestine preaching and was crucified in around 33AD. There are plenty of historical figures who we mostly agree existed despite having approximately the same amount of proof as for Jesus.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 week ago
Quality of the evidence matters. I’m personally not a historical expert on the topic and in such situations, I’m inclined to believe whatever the people who are experts say - and as far as I gather, most experts are in the “Jesus was a real historical person”-camp.
frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Of course not. There are millions of examples of false claims for which there is more than zero evidence. e.g. I can claim I know which stocks will rise tomorrow, and point to various data of times I’ve been right. You can’t correctly say “There is zero evidence Frightful Hobgoblin is prescient about stock movements”.
There often exists evidence of two mutually incompatible propositions. This is basics.
If you want to research the historicity of Jesus it’s easily done. If you want to argue on the internet… you know what they say about that.
frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
I agree with you that Jesus wasn’t God, who doesn’t exist, and that there were no miracles, which are impossible. However, this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no evidence for the existence of Jesus, the Jewish apocalyptic preacher.
The earliest documents about Jesus, such as the Pauline Epistles, were written by people who knew people who knew him. In a mostly illiterate society 2,000 years ago, this is about as good as evidence gets. It’s also the exact same kind of evidence as a journalist or researcher writing an account based on interviews with people. This was how, e.g, Herodotus wrote his histories. When Herodotus says ‘A guy rode a dolphin once’ we dismiss that. But we don’t say ‘The people in the Histories didn’t exist’. We do much the same with Jesus and the miracles.
If the Apostles had wanted, for some reason, to invent a guy, that would have been risky. Other people would have just said, ‘That guy didn’t exist’. If they had anyway decided to invent a guy, they’d have invented someone who actually fulfilled the Jewish propehcies of the Messiah, instead of inventing Jesus, who obviously didn’t. This suggests they didn’t invent him, which strengthens the plausibility of the evidence we do have.
A third way of looking at this is to ask if there are any comparable figures, religious founders from the historic era, who we now think were wholly made up in the way you’re suggesting. But there aren’t. The Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Zoroaster - they all certainly existed. Indeed, I can’t think of any figures form the time period who were actually imaginary.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Personally, I think it’s most likely that he’s composed of many people. It’s a bunch of stories which all got attributed as one person, which isn’t uncommon. Personally, though I’m far from an expert, I think there wasn’t a singular Jesus figure who actually existed, but rather a story of a figure named Jesus that rose from stories about other events.
Like you said, it’s almost certain that something was happening around that time. In fact, there are many more Messiahs who were mostly forgotten. I just think it’s most likely that people told stories and those stories all merged together into another larger story, which then became the story of Jesus.
frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
It’s certainly possible that sayings of other people were later attributed to him, but to really make this case you’d need to have quotations that were attributed to multiple sources, including him, if you see what I mean. Absent that, it could be true, but there’s no particular reason to believe it.
There are enough specific biographical details about Jesus of Nazareth to make it likely that there’s a specific, real central figure. For example, the fact that he was from Nazareth was a problem for his early followers (it didn’t match the Messianic prophecies), which is why they invented the odd story of the census, so that they could claim he’d been born in Bethlehem. That seems unlikely to have happened if there hadn’t been a real, central historical figure.
Also, none of the early non-Christian sources claim he wasn’t real, which they surely would have done if there was any doubt on the matter.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 week ago
… The four Gospels?
uienia@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Written up to a couuple of centuries after his supposed existence.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 week ago
The Gospel of John, the latest Gospel, was written between 90-100AD
robocall@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 week ago
They are still comprehensive documents about Jesus written in His lifetime