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From Reddit
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Whether or not the character in the Bible was based on a real person is irrelevant. He didn't do any of the magic attributed to him, he didn't come back from the dead, he didn't ascend to heaven and, since the Bible was written decades after the events supposedly took place, we don't even have a remotely accurate account of anything he said.
The Jesus of the Bible did not exist. Whether or not he was based on a real person does not matter at all because that's not who Christians worship.
Kind of reminds me of Boidicca. Except we actually have evidence that Boidicca was based on a real person. Unlike Jesus.
But was her chariot real? That's the real lynchpin when it comes to the legend of Boudicca
My personal take is that being agnostic as to the existence of Jesus is an intellectually supportable position.
Any scholar who starts out by saying that maybe the stories of all the miracles aren’t all true, or anything along those lines, I automatically disqualify. I view it as if someone were to say “Maybe Odin didn’t actually kill all of the frost giants himself…” or something. I feel this falls outside the bounds of ad hominem, as the person is indicating a pre-existing disposition by acknowledging that there is even a remote possibility of a god-incarnate appearing on earth. This is not a scientific historian or anthropologist. This is a religious person seeking to fit facts to their beliefs.
The majority of the rest of the serious scholars quote what I would call semi-contemporary sources (eg Josephus) as if they were documenting history. But Josephus also documented Moses as a historical fact, iirc, and contemporary evidence indicates without a shadow of a doubt that Moses never existed and the events in Exodus never occurred. Ancient historians were writing down what they were told. The scientific study of history and anthropology were not established at the time, and they were not looking for multiple sources and multiple lines of investigation.
The OST reasonable argument I’ve read is that, if there were to have been an actual historical figure of Jesus, he led what was an unsuccessful attempt at reforming Judaism into a charismatic Jewish cult centered on emotions rather than the written law, which was running contrary to where the regional religion was heading at that time. He supported, or at least did not oppose, the Roman occupation (or at least that’s how it was recorded by the time it got through the pro-Roman editors), and he did not draw enough notice to be recorded by some of history’s most conscientious record keepers. What they do legitimately point out is that such a minor cult leader could not have been expected to be recorded in contemporary documents. I sympathize with that.
Therefore, my takeaway is literal agnosticism - I do not believe it is possible to positively confirm or deny a historical Jesus. Julius Caesar existed - I’m not denying that we can infer from history - but we have far more documentation informing us about Caesar than Jesus. I actively disbelieve in Moses, I actively believe in Caesar, and I am agnostic towards a historical Jesus in that I believe it is not possible to form a positive or negative belief based on available data.
I think that is very well-reasoned and makes a lot of sense, but I would still argue that it doesn't matter because the Jesus who Christians worship never existed.
If Harry Potter was based on a real boy, that doesn't mean he's the same Harry Potter who went to Hogwarts.
I feel the same. I think that we go to less than defensible lengths to find the “historical Arthur” or the “historical Robin Hood” in a way that reveals more about our desire to be right despite mythologizing than it does about the actual dynamics of story development over time, and that it fails to take into account the lack of differentiation between fact and fable that we weren’t to see for millennia after these histories were created.
Eh, not quite.
The Exodus as described by the Bible did not occur.
What you don't really see are scholars dealing with the Greek and Egyptian versions of the story. They pretty much exclusively engage with the Biblical account.
So for example, Josephus rehashes the Egyptian historian Manetho's account of the Exodus events, where Moses comes back with foreign help to conquer Egypt.
An event that is recorded in Egyptian history by Ramses III who claimed at the end of the 19th dynasty (~1200 BCE) that Egypt was conquered by foreigners, who among other things "made the gods like men."
At the end of the 19th dynasty, Egypt was conquered by an usurper Pharoh Amenmesse, who went by the name 'Msy' in Papyrus Salt 124. This was seven years after the single day battle between Merneptah and the sea peoples allied with Libya, where the sea peoples were recorded as having been without foreskins and at least one tribe was also one of the tribes captured in twelve groups by Ramses II after Kadesh (one group for each son with him).
If you are familiar with Homer, you may recall the Greek story about how immediately after Troy Odysseus went by ship down to Egypt where he fought in a single day battle and was captured, staying in Egypt for seven years until "a certain Phrygian" came to try to ransom him to Libya.
The Greek stories of the Exodus are that it involved many of the different pre-Greek ancestors, with the earliest (Hecataeus of Adbera) claiming the Jewish records of the event had recently been altered under the Persian and Macedonian conquests. And indeed, given the overlaps between Josiah's alleged reforms with the Biblical Exodus narrative and the anachronistic character of Josiah's reforms in light of the letters a century later between Jerusalem and Elephantine, there may be something to that.
This becomes much more interesting in light of archeology in just the past decade which has shown the "land of milk and honey" was importing bees from Anatolia, and that Tel Dan had Aegean style pottery made with local clay. See, back in the 50s an archeologist Yigael Yadin theorized that the lost tribe of Dan (said to have "stayed on their ships") was actually the Denyen sea peoples up in Adana in Anatolia. They claimed their leaders belonged to a "House of Mopsus" - Mopsus was a figure said by the Greeks to have conquered Ashkelon (archeology supported as having been conquered by the sea peoples ~1190 BCE).
In fact, in the Argonautica there's a prophet Mopsus who died in the desert as they were wandering back by foot from a conflict in North Africa. Shortly after this one of the local shepherds kills an elite pre-Greek warriors with the cast of a stone. Kind of weird that the Bible has their prophet Moses dying in the desert while wandering back from a conflict in North Africa and has a story about a shepherd killing an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone (thought by some scholars to be an earlier story reappropriated to David).
So while scholars have resolutely shown that the Israelites did not participate in an Exodus from Egypt and thus the Biblical version of that story did not occur as written, next to none have seriously looked into the extra-Biblical accounts, particularly in light of the recent archeological picture that's emerging.
The idea of an Exodus from Egypt which did not include the Israelites but was later appropriated from the peoples forcibly relocated to the Southern Levant who cohabitated with the Israelites is quite interesting.
There's a lot more to this, but to put it bluntly I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss all of Josephus's comments on an Exodus because of modern scholarship. Modern scholarship is pretty much actively ignoring a lot of the things said about the Exodus in Josephus because they don't match up with what's in the Bible and papers for or against an Exodus almost exclusively concern themselves with the Biblical account. And even a cursory look into what Josephus and his peers were saying about the Exodus has a lot more things check out than you might think.
While I do not disagree with a single bit of what you said, it does sum up perfectly why I am comfortable with my position.
The dearth of conclusive records and the necessity of making what are in all honesty very strong inferences on the basis of slim and to be quite honest generously interpreted textual evidence and without archeological evidence that goes beyond what would be expected of normal commercial exchanges among roughly adjacent civilizations at the time amounts to what I’d tend to categorize as interesting but speculative.
To try to align that oth what Josephus documented as Antiquities of the Jews goes beyond what is considered a generous interpretation and closes in on what I was originally commenting on, which is the propensity of modern and motivated historians to start with the idea that a mythology has to have had some basis in fact, rather than being just the kinds of mythologies we find from around the world where peoples are trying to explain where they came from and where they should be going.
George Washington as he exists in American mythology is a creation of myth. He was a slaver and he was “He who Burns Villages” among the Seneca, and he proudly referred to himself as such. But there is no end to the evidence he existed - what we have is an iconification, not a fabrication.
In the case of Jesus, most people like to claim the former and deny the latter, but in the case of Moses (and Abraham, and many others), it’s like trying to track down the “real” Romulus and Remus. I just can’t see it as anything more than speculative.
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I mean, it's really not hard to identify what Josephus is referring to in quoting Manetho:
Could this be in reference to Manetho, the successor of Ramses II, son of Seti I, who reigned for 66 years?
Might this be rehashing the details of the Papyrus Harris?
This was describing the end of the 19th dynasty before Setnakhte came to power in 1189 BCE, exactly 13 years after Amenmesse (going by the nickname 'Mose' in at least one document) overthrew the grandson of a Ramses who reigned 66 years and forced him to flee Egypt - just like how the Egyptian historian Josepus is quoting talked about how Moses conquering Egypt caused the grandson of a Ramses ruling 66 years to flee Egypt.
You have it backwards.
Myth doesn't dictate history, but history does very frequently inform and dictate myth, particularly myth that is presented as having been historical.
There really was a Mose who conquered Egypt in a situation that bears striking resemblance to the story of Moses conquering Egypt in Josephus. That's a historical fact. As is his alleged doing so with help from without, and the subsequent eradication of Egyptian religious customs in primary sources at the time. Other details in the Manetho account are likely mythical or mistakes, but the core of it seems at least inspired by recorded history.
The much more interesting question is why the Biblical version of Moses doesn't conquer Egypt, or doesn't become the leader of another different foreign nation (another feature to the story found in Josephus and shared by Greek parallels). You'd think those would be things a tradition owing itself to the figure should want to claim or even embellish, not suppress.
Let me try explaining where I’m coming from using a different approach, because I feel like we’re focusing on different parts of the discussion and may be sometimes speaking past each other.
Let’s define a function, C(s1, s2) that takes as arguments a single possibly matching statement about two figures, historical or literary or both, and returns their correlation. There would be three classes of dimensions, let’s say. Historical (that is, the identity function in the historical record, in which the exactness and detail of the two records would describe a distance function in some metric space). Semantic - again a metric function that looks at conceptual overlaps in the idea-space concepts that capture the textual information surrounding the two statements. Semiotic - the cultural symbology surrounding the two statements. This function is a bit more complex because when some semiotic element is all but omnipresent (eg flood myths around societies that lived in flood plains) it’s actually evidence that the myths probably evolved independently and do not descend from a common ancestor, as it were.
So we could in theory take factual knowledge of Caesar and Augustus, compiled across a wealth of contemporary literature and exhaustive historical research, and compare them with the Caesar_2 and Augustus_2, which is how we will designate the characters in the Shakespearean play. We would expect C to return a value close but not equal to 1.
What is important is that any levels of indirection or redirection increase the metric space between the two variables in any of the dimensions, making identity less likely. That’s where you start to fall into the realm of historical coincidence and a generous interpretation to reach what might have been a predetermined conclusion.
We’d want to make a more complex function where we can weight with confidence factors and so on, but that’s the general idea as specifically as I can lay it out. Because I’ve left it largely descriptive and non-mathematical I’m concerned that there might still be a lot of opinion that you think can be factored in. I’m actually talking about realizing these concepts in a metric space and deriving a real distance function.
Does that help?
Two issues with your paradigm.
(1) What you are plugging into the function really changes the results. Are you plugging in the entire mythos, or only parts?
For example, in your Ceaser and Augustus examples you are selectively choosing a 'factual' picture of them, presumably leaving out stories like a baby Augustus climbing a tower when no one was looking to be found at its top staring at the sky.
If we pick and choose, something like Josephus's story looks very close to an identity function to the events at the end of the 19th dynasty with some extremely specific details. We just need to ignore things like the claim of getting the Hyskos in Jerusalem to attack Egypt, as that detail is almost certainly false.
Presumably given the way you are discussing it, you see it necessary to evaluate the stories as a whole, which I do not (and despite that not being the convention you chose when it is convenient to what you are trying to prove vs disprove).
(2) This then feeds into the second issue, which is your sense that a greater distance between overall stories means we can't trust sub-detail matches to be anything more than historical coincidence.
These texts are very heavily edited along the lines of "history is written by the victors." But details that are left can be highly specific in matching against details elsewhere and help reveal what's really going on under the layers of BS.
As a modern example, we can look at 9/11 conspiracy theories. Even though a bunch of crazy BS has been added to the history, while it in aggregate dilutes the identity between overall sets of claims and history, the part of the claims of "the two tallest towers in the US fell on Sept 11th" is very much grounded in truth and not coincidence.
There's added benefit in taking a partial look as well, as it's one of the only ways you can end up with testable predictions in this field.
So as an example, in the above comment regarding the Denyen being the tribe of Dan, we had two 'coincidences' - Dan are referred to as staying on their ships in Judges 5 and there's Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Iron Age Tel Dan. These might be happenstance coincidences, but if we consider the bubble of these details, we can hypothesize that if there's something more to this identification, we might expect to find additional details in line with such an identification outside that bubble.
And indeed, in Ezekiel 27:19, the only other place the same form of Dan is used outside Judges 5, it's in reference to Dan and the Greeks together trading with Tyre. Which fits pretty well with identifying Dan as the Denyen in Adana given the Denyen were right next to the Ahhiyawa (pre-Greeks) and the mentioned trade goods are in line with what would have been coming from that area of Anatolia.
But there's a ton of historical inaccuracies surrounding these sections, so if we collect the Bible together in aggregate it's not going to match pretty much anything as a historical "identity function".
So there's value in looking at the overlaps between multiple sources piecemeal, as if things are only random coincidence there shouldn't be a collection of similar piecemeal details across multiple sources including emerging archeological details.
In the other direction too. If you look at the Noah story in the Bible in its entirety you might conclude that it's a flood myth like other flood myths, much like in your comment. And yet if you look at the piecemeal details, instead it looks like a famine mythos that was reworked into a flood myth due to Babylonian influence.
So it's more productive to look at details over the overall stories.
Make sense?
You misunderstand. I'm not saying the sea peoples were Jews. I'm saying that after Ramses III forcibly resettled the sea peoples into the Southern Levant and were cohabitating with the Israelites that aspects of their history ended up syncretized into the Isrealites' traditions and beliefs.
And technically at the time the type of circumcision practiced in Egypt was a partial circumcision, like the dorsal slit. The passage about the sea peoples is unique in all Egyptian records, literally translated as "without horns" and interpreted by scholars as without foreskins given the context about the hands.
The partial circumcision in Egypt wouldn't have resulted in being without a foreskin at all.
And as you can see in Joshua 5:2 after leaving Egypt there's an instruction to circumcise a second time. This is explained in 5:4 onwards, but that pattern of a thing being said and then an secondary explanation after is often a later interpolation to try to explain something that existed earlier on.
Given the practice in Egypt was partial circumcision and the sea peoples were fully circumcised, had any of them been the captives taken after Kadesh (such as the Lukka appearing in both instances), going from a partial circumcision in Egypt to a full circumcision would have meant having a second circumcision after leaving Egypt.
And there's a ton more information than just that bit.
If you are interested, there's a thread that starts here where I mention a lot of it, and a different angle I'd discussed in a post here.
P.S. Speaking of Herodotus, he also said the Thesomophoria, a multi-day women only ritual celebrated all around the Mediterranean, had originated with the daughters of Danaus fleeing Egypt.
You might notice that in Judges 11 there's a multi-day women's only ritual (this is its only real mention in Judaism, it seems to have disappeared from the historical record and was no longer practiced among the Israelites later on). You might also notice that the explanation given for why it was taking place is remarkably similar to the story of Idomenus's return home to Crete where he sacrificed his own child as the first thing he saw upon his return.
There were a number of things going on at the time, from climate and natural disaster, famine, to pandemics.
But there were also definitely groups of different people banded together conquering areas, and in a number of cases it seems they were conquering their own homelands.
So the first mention of any kind of 'sea' peoples is actually the Merneptah Lybian war inscriptions we were just talking about.
Later on, there's letters between a Hittite town and Cyprus where the town is asking for help defending against the naval attacks of the sea peoples, and Cyprus responds that it's their own ships attacking.
Looking at the comments Ramses III makes about the end of the 19th dynasty, the ruling by city governors and "making the gods like men" seems to be Phonecian in character. The former was their style of government, and the latter corresponds with the alleged religious mystery of Sanchoniathon that the Ugartic pantheon simply represented humans who had invented stuff deified after death.
So if you have a collection of tens of thousands of people brought into Egypt who have a greater allegiance to each other than to their home governments, who reject rule by appeal to divine will because they think the gods were just men, and have been expelled from the only place they've known as home, facing natural disaster, famine, and plagues all around - what do you have on your hands?
The seeds of revolution.
It only lasts for about two generations, but during that time areas from Greece to Turkey to the Gaza strip to even potentially Egypt itself all end up conquered.
But nothing about those people end up in a lasting written record.
But you do have two different cultural myths with some remarkable overlaps between both actual history and with each other. One among the Geeks, and the other among the Isrealites.
After Alexander the Great conquered both as well as Egypt, after comparing notes of the written records of the time (few of which survived to today), the unanimous opinion of the Greek historians writing about the events through the rest of antiquity was that this was a shared cultural history between themselves and the Jews.
Some of the things said back then are wild in how they line up with what seem to be unexplainable modern discoveries. For example, look at Tacitus:
After the 2017 sampling of 3,500 year old graves in Crete, those samples were added to a DNA database. A year later on a genetics forum, an Ashkenazi user posted confused by the fact that out of every single sample in the database their closest match was 3,500 year old graves in Crete, [leading to over 10,000 pages of discussion.](https://web.archive.org/web/20210105141636/https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?14484-Could-Western-Jews-(Ash-and-Seph-)-descend-from-Aegeans-and-Levantine-admixture) Notably their result seems to be absent the steppe DNA that entered the Greek lineage with the Doric invasion.
The similarity between Cretean DNA and the Ashkenazi turned up again in published research in a 2019 study.
And yet the Ashkenazi have a particular gene mutation that originated in the Lybian Berbers ~5,000 years ago and isn't found in any other populations at nearly the frequency of those two, and puzzlingly the Ashkenazi genetic lineage seems to have picked this up between 3250–6425 years ago, the nearest end of which is right around the 1250 BCE events of the 19th dynasty where Aegean sea peoples and Libya were fighting against Egypt.
Herodotus had been talking about the daughters of Danaus.
Danaus was allegedly the Lybian brother of a Pharoh with 50 sons.
How curious that Ramses II, the Pharoh with ~50 recorded sons was described as appearing as a Lybian Berber in his 1987 forensic report.
Danaus was said to have gone off from North Africa and become king of the Achaeans, who at this time would have been the Ahhiyawa in southwest Anatolia.
A similar Greek story is that of Eumolpus ("good singer") who was put in the water as a babe and raised by a different family before leaving North Africa to become king of the Thracians (who at this time would have been in the Troad region of western Anatolia).
Moses too in Josephus and the medieval Book of Jashar was said to have become a trusted advisor to a king of a foreign nation who eventually made him the king when he died.
TL;DR: Yes, I agree that there were likely broad migrations during this period of time which led to cultural influence in a number of places. Though I think there was a bit more than just climate going on.
The problem with this thinking is it cedes the historical figure to the crazies following the BS version of events drafted to undermine that original figure.
For example, have you ever wondered why the public saying of the sower parable, about how seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn't multiply and only the seeds which reproduce multiply, is the only parable in Mark and Luke given a secret explanation in private?
Why was a saying about seeds so dangerous it needed to be explained concretely?
You probably don't know that the only other explanation for this parable before the middle ages was the one recorded among the Naassenes, who thought it was about seeds scattered at the dawn of the cosmos through which the universe was completed. This same group was saying the mustard seed parable about the smallest seed was in reference to an indivisible point as if from nothing.
If you aren't familiar with Leucretius, you might miss that what's being discussed here is Epicurean atomism as he rendered it in his epic poem in Latin 50 years before Jesus was born. Not having the Greek word atomos ('indivisible') to rely on, he instead called the same concept in De Rerum Natura 'seeds.'
Given that book is the only extant work from antiquity to describe survival of the fittest, this means he was writing about how these indivisible seeds randomly scattered at the beginning of the cosmos interacted to gradually develop the Earth and then plants and animals, and how only the things which survived to reproduce continued on. In fact, in book 4 he explicitly refers to failed biological reproduction as "seed that falls by the wayside of the path."
So here's Jesus 80 years after this is written, in a conservative religious theocracy, talking publicly about how randomly thrown seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn't reproduce and the seed which does survive to reproduce multiples like crazy. He ends up allegedly the enemy number one of that religious theocracy who eventually have him killed, his followers are persecuted by Jerusalem, and his movement ends up co-opted outside Jerusalem's influence by the guy persecuting them. And that co-opted version of the story offers up a secret explanation for the above parable, as well as secret claims of having been the Jewish messiah, and later on he's said to have been claiming to not have been changing one word of the Jewish law.
And the version of his sayings that doesn't say anything about being a messiah, ridiculed following religious law, and includes things like "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels" ends up declared heresy and buried in a jar for millennia because even owning it becomes punishable by death.
But 99.9% of the population doesn't know any of the above because a third believes in the BS version with the secret explanations and the other two thirds are so tired of having that BS version shoved down their throats they assume there's nothing worthwhile in looking into the historical figure which caused the BS version to exist in the first place.
What makes you think any version of the events isn't bullshit? Even if he existed? The gospels were written decades after he supposedly died. They weren't written by historians and they didn't have primary sources to work from.
The fact is that Christians worship a fictional being that may or may not have been based on a real person. I don't see why it matters if there was a real person because we know essentially nothing about him with any certainty and he wasn't the guy with magic powers who came back from the dead. That is the guy who Christians worship, not some historical figure.
The canonical version of Jesus is pretty much a dime a dozen in many large ways. There were numerous people in Judea at the time coming forward claiming to fulfill messianic prophecy.
What was not a dime a dozen were people in Judea taking Epicurean naturalism as a foundation and then layering Plato's demiurge and eikon concepts on top to argue against Epicurean surety of final death.
That's a remarkably unique philosophical perspective in the Mediterranean, its existence means someone needs to have come up with it, and given elements of it even predate Paul's letters and are baked into the two sayings regarded by scholars as most likely tracing back to a historical Jesus, a guy who was killed by the state in a state that would have looked very unfavourably on that philosophy, the attribution that makes the most sense is to the figure it's literally being attributed to.
We can't know the full details given the evidence for it only still survives in the opposition to it within canonical sources, but there's enough there to figure out the general picture.
So while I think pretty much anyone in Judea could have been coming up with "he was secretly the fulfillment of the Messiah prophecies and was exclusively extending Judaism" as dozens of others were recorded making the same claims, I just don't see it as probable that a historical Jesus's most likely authentic parables are directly paraphrasing Leucretius by accident and that later traditions continuing the interpretation of his sayings in the context of Leucretius do so by happenstance when Leucretius and Epicureanism in general goes from being mentioned in the Talmud as "why do you study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean" in the 1st century to having fallen from popularity in the 2nd century as Platonism gradually revives into Neoplatonism by the 3rd century.
Is it possible that the paraphrasing was coincidental and that this gets wrapped up in a unique philosophical outlook by the end of the first century by someone other than Jesus but then solely attributed to him even though he wasn't even a particularly popular figure at the time? I guess? But I certainly wouldn't put money on it against the alternative.
The general 'undeniables' are that a man named Jesus existed, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified. It's presumably safe to say that he was preaching something that was upsetting to the local Jewish and/or Roman authorities, given his crucifixion. While we'll obviously never know precisely what he was saying, it is important to remember that the New Testament is a collection of independent documents, and so you can extract some common themes from them. He was clearly a reformer of some kind, something of a hippy, and appears to have emphasized some level of personal humility and charity. It should also be kept in mind that this era was a time of massive religious turmoil in the region, and Jesus was far from being the only radical reformer going around and preaching. He just happened to become very popular after dying.
While he obviously wasn't a magician and didn't come back from the dead, I do think there are certainly some themes in his message that are positive, and it's not a coincidence that you see them echoed in other independent religious traditions. Of course, most Christians don't live up to those values to any meaningful degree at all, but that's another matter.