this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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The "Did Jesus Exist" question (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
64 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Lately I've heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like "Jesus wasn't real" or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it's basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn't real.

I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn't work in theory but is great in practice:

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.

Edit: My suggestion to any who would like to see my opinion changed (see above quote) is to get on the Wikipedia and work towards changing the page. My upvote goes to Flying Squid for reminding us "does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship"

Edit 2: practicality changed to practice

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.