Atheism

Kind of reminds me of Boidicca. Except we actually have evidence that Boidicca was based on a real person. Unlike Jesus.

My personal take is that being agnostic as to the existence of Jesus is an intellectually supportable position.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

Whether or not he was based on a real person does not matter at all because that's not who Christians worship.

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.

You take that back about ALVH

Why would a scientist have any reason to have a professional opinion on that matter? What scientific method could be applied to this question? How could it be tested? How could you ever scientifically confirm if some random dude existed 100+ generations ago?

The reason it says scholars is because it is people who read, cross reference and analyze historical texts and eye witness accounts to make inferences and draw conclusions about events of the past. They are historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and yes, theologians. Being a theologian is not the same as being a religious apologist or even religious at all. Many Christian theology experts are not Christian themselves. Many are atheists, Jews, Muslims, etc. It just means that their body of work and focus is on studying theology as a subject. Being an atheist doesn't mean you need to reject the opinions of theologians or, indeed, religious people, on matters of history. It's a bad position to reject anyone's opinion out of hand based on their title or personal beliefs or culture. That goes for everyone.

Jesus not existing should operate as the null hypothesis until his historicity is proven

This standard of proof invalidates a massive chunk of historical figures that are commonly accepted as having existed.

I mean, how do you know that Alexander the Great existed? We don't have his body. All the major sources about him wrote long after he died. The only evidence we have of Socrates existing comes from his students; how do you know Plato and Xenophon didn't make him up? Sure, Julius Caesar wrote some books, but maybe they were later forgeries, since it's not like we have parchment that he wrote on.

It is not a reasonable null hypothesis to state that all sources describing a historical figure were lying, misled, or delusional. That is a positive claim that should not be accepted without evidence.

I have no problem with the notion that the book has some historical accuracy and some embellishment (and some outright fabrication).

What I have a problem with is people insisting that everything in the book is real and they'll kill you for sorting yourself into the wrong Hogwarts house.

Since they can't play nice with their fan-fiction, I'd prefer to shut the whole site down.

(sorry devolved into too many metaphors there)

There's not many scholars because mythicism is nuts.

Literally the earliest primary documents we have are a set of letters by someone known to be persecuting followers of Jesus (in areas he had authority) writing to areas he doesn't have authority to persecute in, claiming he's joined the cause, telling them to ignore other versions of Jesus or other gospels, and acknowledging his peers are claiming he and his followers are doing evil in the name of good.

You just don't see that within decades of a mythical invention of a religion. Those other versions of the tradition have clear and concise beliefs reflected in Paul's opposition to them which line up with popular apocryphal texts likely dated to the first century.

This sort of split is seen over and over with cults built up around a real person within years of them ending up imprisoned or dead.

What's typically seen with mythical figures instead is syncretism where the legends combine and grow. It's not "no, Dionysus didn't conquer India, he was instead kidnapped by pirates in the Mediterranean" but "oh, he conquered India too? Did you know he was kidnapped by pirates?"

This only happens for Jesus much later on. The early days are characterized by infighting and schisms. It's nearly what all the letters and nuances of the gospels are about. "Oh, he said this parable in public - but then in private he told us it was really about X." "There was a race between that unnamed disciple and Peter and though the unnamed guy got there first, he waited and it was Peter who went inside the tomb first." "That Thomas guy was doubting he physically resurrected but then changed his mind." "They wanted to claim the seat at his right hand in heaven, but he said the last would be first and it was reserved for someone who was slave to all (like Paul, the last apostle who said in his letters he made himself a slave to all)." "Hey Corinth, why did you depose Rome's appointed elders? Also, isn't it awesome when young people defer to the old and women keep silent?"

Additionally, the mythicists are so dogmatically committed to their views that it interferes with their scholarship. So as an example Carrier thinks the mentions of cosmic generative seed in Gnosticism relates to a "cosmic sperm bank" rather than recognizing it as the influence of Leucretius's "seeds of things" from De Rerum Natura where 50 years before Jesus is born he happened to describe survival of the fittest and naturalist origins of life as randomly scattered seeds which develop into the life we see by way of what survived to reproduce, even describing failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path."

Which is a much more interesting angle for a guy who goes on to have a canonical "secret explanation" for a public saying about how only the randomly scattered seeds which survive to reproduce multiply and the seed that falls by the wayside of a path does not. A parable located in apocrypha right after a saying about how no matter if lion ate man or man ate lion man would be the inevitable result and how the human being was like a large fish selected from many small fish. That apocrypha elsewhere seems to refer to Leucretius's ideas and even explicitly calls the idea that spirit arose from flesh the greater wonder compared to the idea flesh arose from spirit.

But no, instead he could only see a cosmic sperm bank because the idea canonical Christianity was a conservative retcon of a very different early set of ideas would have meant it likely there was an original historical figure with those transgressive ideas that needed to be reworked with things like secret explanations in private for public sayings.

Conversely the name could be gotten entirely wrong like in the case of Boidicca. Boidicca being just a nickname given by the Romans and we don't know the British woman's real name

The proof of it is in the holy gourd.

I am definite that folks with the name yeshua existed around that time. Many jesus's nowadays to. That im certain. biblical jesus. not so much.

Mainstream scholars are rejecting this book but they don't give a valid reason too.

I read Wikipedia, the burns of historians reviewing this book are fantastic

The question of the historicity of Jesus does not deal with any of the supernatural claims. It attempts to answer how Christianity started from a historical perspective. It is a debate between a real but ordinary person; or a fictional creation, the angel Jesus, from which the apostles "received revelation" in much the same way as Joseph Smith did from Moroni, Mohammad from Gabriel, and many modern pastors do from Jesus.

So, no, the virgin birth narrative is irrelevant to any historical Jesus. That was created decades after the beginning of Christianity as a response to the gospel of Mark saying Jesus was from Nazareth, but some readers and authors of the later gospels thought prophecy said the messiah would be from Bethlehem.

Why do we believe that Mary was a virgin? It's usually said as a joke, but it's entirely possible that she cheated on Joseph and when she became pregnant from that, she came up with this story of the angel and the Virgin Birth...