I’m firmly in the mythicist camp. I don’t believe there was ever a historical Jesus. The Jesus character is an amalgamation of many other, older myths that were well-established in the area two millenia ago, with a plentitude of dying-and-rising demi-gods in circulation.
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Here is the writer of that documentary…
She’s a “spiritual adviser”, so I would take whatever she’d pushing with a grain of salt… a large one perhaps.
Also…
An enjoyable book about the historical Christ and what he might have done in reality can be found here:
And no, believing that there was a historical Jesus doesn’t prove jack or shit about the religious, faith-based claims found in the interpretations of the new Testament… But people who are historians (both secular, atheists, and fully qualified religious scholars) tend to fall on the side of there being a man that Jesus the Christ was based on and whose mythology was built around. I suspect that there mysticism arguments are rooted in something else, though I’m not sure what.
But think about how we mythologize and whitewash even RECENT figures in history - how we Dr. King into a far less radical figure, and more palatable to white people, or how we ignore the more problematic aspects of Wintson Churchill (his role in colonialism) to remember the war time Churchill? Why would ancient founders of the Christian church be any less liable to mythology the person they consider the founder of their faith? Especially since this was at a time where they did not have a sense of “objectivity” in historical work as we do today.
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Interestingly, the better funerary portraits were often done in wax.
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I thought there was a passage mentioning olive-colored skin, but web searches aren’t helping me find it.
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You left Kenneth Colley off the list of actors playing Jesus. It was a brief appearance, so you’re forgiven.
ETA this:
Will Farrell? Please. 
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Is our popular image of Jesus overly westernized and untrue to historical reality?
From an art-historical perspective we know that the iconography of Jesus had literally nothing to do with what any actual person looked like. It wasn’t even the purpose of the images. All the images of Jesus, from the very start, were re-purposed pagan images used for their meaning within the culture. The popular image of Jesus is a Northern European adaptation of an image directly taken from earlier depictions of Jupiter/Zeus, as a bearded patriarch, the head of the church. It was a symbol conveying meaning, not a portrait of a person.
I’m of the multiple Jesuses (Jesii?) camp. It was a popular name at the time, so it would have been weird if there had been no religious leaders with that name, and the Biblical text has some contradictory narratives about “Jesus’s” early life that suggest they’re drawn from stories of at least two different people. Of course, that doesn’t mean much - the final stories could bear absolutely no relation to the reality of any real Jesus’s life, outside a few inconsequential details.
@FGD135
The irony here is that both Buddhism and Christianity came out of aniconic traditions - that is, there was a prohibition against depicting those religious figures. In both religions, the earliest images are purely symbolic - in Buddhism, you have depictions of scenes from his life, with a conspicuous blank spot where the Buddha should be, some object representing him, instead.
In both cases, the earliest images of the actual figure are completely the opposite of the later, more popular images. Christ is shown as a beardless youth, a shepherd of men; the earliest image of Buddha as an almost skeletal figure, showing him in his starving ascetic period.
And in both cases the eventual images that “went viral” were purely about conveying meaning - the image of Buddha is just a collection of “auspicious physical signs” (a bump on the head, a mole between the eyes, golden skin) that, as Buddha, a highly important figure, he obviously must have had all of them. The popular image of Jesus came about after the formation of the church, so they needed a bearded patriarch to be sky-daddy of the organization, so they took familiar pagan iconography that conveyed that meaning.
I think a lot about how modern, well-documented events like a balloon crash in Roswell get quickly turned into total fictions that mash-up multiple events, with slight inconsistencies and oddities in the real events spun off into elaborate fantasies with imaginary witnesses. And that’s for events that were documented, where you can look at the documentation (and see how it completely aligns with the banal version of events), and then you think about how these things get warped when there is no documentation, just people telling each other stories for a couple generations before writing anything down.
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Wow! Thank you 
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@MrShiv I’m surprised that Dr Kermode didn’t spare any love for The Last Temptation of Christ? As Ann Magnuson stated, “…it’s a lot easier to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour when He looks like Willem DaFoe”
Robert Powell mentioned going in to a church, and being surprised to see a magazine photo of himself being used as an icon; a photo of him as Jesus, of course, not a picture of him as David Briggs.
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If he did have short hair, hopefully not a fashy cut.
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You forgot the very Nordic Max von Sydow. He didn’t even try to cover his accent.
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Much of the actual theology in the New Testament comes from Paul, whose epistles (some of which are, these days, considered genuine and others, likely or definite forgeries) predate the Gospels by a few decades, who hardly talks about Jesus as a person at all, and who is strangely uninterested in associating with other apostles. (Remember that according to the Bible, Paul never actually got to meet Jesus – except for the road-to-Damascus incident, which was somewhat one-sided –, and given Paul’s obvious zeal as an apostle it would not be in any way unreasonable for him to get in touch with others who actually spent a lot of time with the guy, in order to find out more about the central personality of the cult. But no, not really his thing.)
Judea and Galilee at the time were teeming with itinerant Jewish preachers and it is not at all unlikely that there was one called Jesus (this would be like being called “Joe” today) who got together a bunch of followers and perhaps even made himself unpopular enough with the Powers that Be to be eventually executed. Remember that the first gospel (from which all the others have been cribbed to a lesser or greater extent) was only written down more than a generation after the events it describes, and after all its author(s) had something to sell. You want your guy to stick out from the competition, of course after a while he can walk on water and raise the dead. It’s the ultimate fish story.
The main reason why Christianity is still a thing today is that it had an incredibly lucky break 200-odd years later when the Roman emperor Constantine made it the state religion. If that hadn’t happened we might all be sacrificing bulls to Mithras for our holidays.
Why indeed. There were pretty reasonable historians around at the time, but the writers of the New Testament were in no way interested in being historians, they were propagandists. The fact that no reasonable contemporary historian had anything at all to say about the events around Jesus’s crucifixion, which – if the Gospels are anything to go by – would have been pretty hard to miss, should tell us something already.
The Gospels are pretty thin on biographical detail in any case. It’s reasonable to assume that between the time of Jesus’s (or the Jesuses’) purported ministry and the writing down of the Gospels the collection of stories only grew and the miracles became more impressive with every retelling. And if someone else told you some miracle story you hadn’t yet heard, what’s to say it wasn’t about the same guy? Even in the Gospels themselves Jesus morphs from the fire-and-brimstone apocalyptic preacher of Mark to the ethereal being of John.
Imagine trying to write, say, a history of the Vietnam War strictly based on what you could find out from stories told by the grandchildren of the people who actually fought there. That gives you the situation the authors of the Gospels were in, except that the authors of the Gospels weren’t interested in producing accurate historical research – they were interested in producing advertising material for their cult. So, imagine trying to write a history of the Vietnam war as before but where the US forces are the good guys and win in the end.
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cute story. certainly more believable than golden tablets telling of jesus in north america.
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His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.
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