The Sun is not God!
- The cry of the Abdl
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In Spanish-speaking cultures, Lunes (Monday) is the first day of the week, and Domingo (Sunday, literally God’s day) is the final day of the week. Although Saturday is still called Sábado (Literally, Sabbath).
There’s an awful lot of Spanish-speaking Christians, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that style of weekday numbering is common to all the romance-language speaking cultures too.
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I agree with your point, mostly. But I think that the more important explanation of Jesus is that the Jews needed to syncretize in order to separate their tradition from the temple.
Richard Carrier argues that Jesus started out as a celestial being, who was crucified in outer space
“just below the moon” in the mythology. That is, in the original mythology he never came to earth. In later writings that are evidently an arms-race between different, rival sects of christianity, we end up with people euhemerizing Jesus to the point where Mark has him walking around on earth. The earliest we can date anything mentioning Jesus is, of course, long after anyone who would have known him would be dead. So we might as well call him entirely synthetic/myth, since none of the stuff surrounding his birth, his ministry, and his death made it into any historical accounts outside of what was clearly written by people who had an interest in him being a real person.
We don’t even need all the sun god stuff. The bible states that when he died zombies literally came out of their graves and walked among the people of Jerusalem. And the sun went out. If no unrelated party recorded that then it absolutely didn’t happen. And even if they did, it’d be a single piece of evidence. But at least it’d be third party evidence.
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Has someone been watching Zeitgeist again? That movie is the bane of historians and religious scholars everywhere.
Okay, so first of all, the vast majority of historians agree that Jesus was in fact a real dude. The historical method can’t be applied to the Son of God question which means Christ’s divinity is firmly in the realm of theology. Let’s not open that particular can of worms for this topic.
Can you offer up peer-reviewed, academic sources that make this argument? This is not a view held by any historian or religious scholar held in high esteem.
The root of the Jesus=Egyptian Gods claim comes from Gerald Massey, a 19th century English poet who literally made shit up. Egyptologists have called Massey’s writings “fringe nonsense”.
For example, Jesus=Horus was a popular Internet atheist talking point in 2007 when Zeitgeist came out. Well, problem is, Horus is actually nothing like Jesus. At all. One claim made was that Horus was born of a virgin birth, just like Jesus was.
Here’s Horus’ origin story:
Horus was born to the goddess Isis after she retrieved all the dismembered body parts of her murdered husband Osiris, except his penis which was thrown into the Nile and eaten by a catfish, or sometimes by a crab, and according to Plutarch’s account (see Osiris) used her magic powers to resurrect Osiris and fashion a golden phallus to conceive her son (older Egyptian accounts have the penis of Osiris surviving).
Sooooo… Yeah. Not quite like the Jesus story we’re all familiar with.
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Jesus was a real dude?
Name one historian, public official, or any citizen who lived during the time that the mythical Jesus was supposed to have lived, who wrote anything about him?
Have you ever heard of the British Museum and other museums around the world?
What proof do you have that Jesus was a real person?
Judaism does not believe in Jesus and he was allegedly Jewish.
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http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_for_the_historical_existence_of_Jesus_Christ
The increasingly common view of Jesus among New Testament scholars as of 2007 is that “historical research can indeed disclose a core of historical facts about Jesus” but “the Jesus we find at this historical core is significantly different from the legendary view presented in the New Testament”. Some scholars maintain there were several possible “Jesus” candidates with no indication of which of them (if any) is “the” historical Jesus. Ironically, based on some of the definitions provided, these could be said to qualify as Christ Myth Theory positions.
A small minority, past and present, believe there is insufficient justification to assume any individual human seed for the stories, representing an extreme in the other end of belief. It should be noted that at least one anthropology paper states in both its abstract and main text “there is not a shred of evidence that a historical character Jesus lived”. In June 2014, Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN 1-909697-49-2 became “the first comprehensive pro-Jesus myth book ever published by a respected academic press and under formal peer review”.
I think, at the very most, you could make the argument that there were several self-claimed, prophet-like figures doing the rounds at about the time that Jesus was supposedly stomping about and that later sources, none of whom can be considered primary and almost all of whom had a vested interest in misleading people concerning the historicity of the figure, attributed mythical properties to one, or more likely more than one, of the dim memories of those self-claimed prophets.
But to deal directly with your claim see the section of the rationalwiki:
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I tend to lean towards the “Jesus was not a real person” camp for a number of reasons, but you’re not helping when you say things like:
Judaism does not believe in Jesus and he was allegedly Jewish.
1.) “Judaism” doesn’t believe anything, because it is not a sentient being.
2.) Your point, I assume, is that Jesus is not a figure in the Jewish faith. Neither is Rodney Dangerfield, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t exist.
3.) Allegedly Jewish?
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I always get those two mixed up!
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That’s not how ancient history works. You realize by this standard, you’d have to discount nearly every figure in ancient history including Socrates and Alexander the Great?
Yes? I don’t understand what this has to do with the discussion though?
We have tons of evidence.[quote=“MakedaQueenofSheba, post:6, topic:71023”]
Judaism does not believe in Jesus and he was allegedly Jewish.
[/quote] First-hand accounts are not necessary to determine the historicity of a person or event, though they certainly help. The “autobiography or nothing” horse is so old and beaten that it’s practically fossilizing.
“Belief” is not required for veracity. Evidence is.
Really? You’re using RationalWiki as a source for historicity?
Also, you might want to finish reading that Historicity of Jesus article on Wikipedia, particularly the part where it says:
Although there is “near universal consensus” among scholars that Jesus existed historically,[5][6][7][nb 1][nb 2][nb 3][nb 4] although biblical scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the details of his life that have been described in the gospels.[nb 5][13][nb 6][2]:168–173 While scholars have sometimes criticized Jesus scholarship for religious bias and lack of methodological soundness,[nb 7] with very few exceptions, such critics do support the historicity of Jesus, and reject the theory that Jesus never existed, known as the Christ myth theory.[16][nb 8][18][19][20] Certain scholars, particularly in Europe, have recently made the case that while there are a number of plausible “Jesuses” that could have existed, there can be no certainty as to which Jesus was the historical Jesus, and that there should also be more scholarly research and debate on this topic.[21][22]
Bolded emphasis mine. Every historian worth their salt acknowledges that Jesus was a real person. The only real debate is how accurate the accounts of his character are. Again, the Son of God thing is irrelevant to the interest of historians because it can’t be put through the historical method. That makes it a question for philosophers and theologians, not historians.
No, dude. He really existed. And if by “vested interest” you mean to imply that it’s insidious Christian scholars trying to push some narrative, you’d also be wrong on that front since a large chunk of historians who do scholarship on Jesus are actually self-proclaimed agnostics and atheists.
Tim O’Neill is one of those guys and, funny enough, he constantly gets accused of being an undercover theist trying to undermine THE TRUUUUUUTH.
I mean these are the talking points we regularly make fun of over at /r/badhistory. The vast majority of us there are atheist/agnostic and some of the people submitting those threads are bonafide academic historians. Or we could be yet another clandestine cog in the Jesus Conspiracy.
It’s true. Almost all historians agree that Jesus existed. I don’t know what else to tell you, but then again, we live in a world where people still don’t believe in climate change despite the fact that nearly every environmental scientist acknowledges that yes, global warming is a thing and we’re causing said thing.
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LOL ok, perhaps you’ve read into what I wrote exactly what you expect to hear.
My position is that there are a number of unspecified candidates to whom the Jesus myth is applied.
I have no doubt, given the way in which the myth is applied and the number of candidates going about at the time, that the case 'There existed a real person or persons to whom later figures attribute ownership of the Jesus myth but that that person cannot be specified (and in fact a single person cannot be specified over a collection)" can be made but nothing stronger than that very weak argument.
smh
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You sure about that? Let me quote you:
You said at the VERY most, you could argue that there are several candidates that could qualify as a historical Jesus. This is not the consensus among historians. The consensus among historians is that it’s a GIVEN that there was a historical Jesus and at the VERY least there could be several candidates who qualify. That’s completely different than what you wrote, which suggests that the strongest case for Jesus is that he was multiple people which implies that the Jesus Myth theory would be somewhere in the middle of that.
Except that isn’t true, either. As I pointed out before, the Jesus Myth theory is considered complete nonsense, and the fact that there could have been multiple Jesus candidates is actually the fringe theory.
Sorry, I think it’s clear you’re moving the goalposts. Look, I even used RationalWiki just for you!
I mean it’s fine for you to hold that view, you just have to understand it’s historically untenable because the vast majority of peer-reviewed historians do firmly believe Jesus was a real individual. Asserting that Jesus was real is the strong argument. You’re the one that has the burden of proof placed on you.
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I’m not making the argument that there was not a person or persons to whom the name Jesus could be applied.
Can you point to the individual? Can anyone?
You really have to tie yourself in knots to stake out a position that’s different from mine whilst appearing to disagree with me. There is no evidence of an individual called Jesus. There may very well have been one, cross referencing studies and histories probably imply such a person or persons to have existed. This does not a Jesus make.
And for fuck’s sake, get off your condescending high horse.
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That’s fine. Yours is still the fringe view though while the view that there was one, specific Jesus is the dominantly accepted one among historians.
Yes. Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and Joseph. Born some time around 7-2 BC in the province of Judea, Roman Empire. Here, let me quote the intro of the Wikipedia article for you:
Jesus (/ˈdʒiːzəs/; Greek: Ἰησοῦς Iesous; 7–2 BC to AD 30–33), also referred to as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ,[e] is the central figure of Christianity, whom the teachings of most Christian denominations hold to be the Son of God. Christianity regards Jesus as the awaited Messiah (or Christ) of the Old Testament.[12]
Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically,[f] and historians consider the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) to be the best sources for investigating the historical Jesus.[19][20][21][22] Most scholars agree that Jesus was a Galilean, Jewish rabbi[23] who preached his message orally,[24] was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[25] In the current mainstream view, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher and the founder of a restoration movement within Judaism, although some prominent scholars argue that he was not apocalyptic.[20][26]
Like I said, the specific Jesus of Nazareth indeed being the same Jesus of the Christian Bible is the mainstream historical view. When you’re saying that it’s a stretch to claim that, you’re going against the vast majority of historical consensus.
I’m not the one who brought a Sam Jackson meme and RationalWiki into this so don’t start pointing fingers at me when I come at you with evidence.
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Dude, seriously, don’t go on about what historians accept and then use Wikipedia as a source.
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Well, there’s Josephus:
The Testimonium Flavianum is clearly corrupt, but that’s not the only point where he mentioned Jesus. Antiquities of the Jews Book 20, Chapter 9 mentions Jesus while discussing the trial of his brother James. There’s a minor corruption of the MSS tradition with the “Christ” insertion, but not in any way that diminishes the fact that he discusses Jesus and the language of the passage with the word “Christ” yanked is fully consistent with the rest of the text.
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Jesus Christ!
At core, what are we disagreeing about?
I ask for a person and you provide me with qualities that might be attributed to one or more individuals.
Someone or several someones were real people at the time. There is a name ‘Jesus’. It might be attributed to one or more people who lived at that time. No evidence for a particular, recorded individual exists. There are several likely properties that can be attributed to one or more individuals that likely existed at about the right time. There is no direct evidence for one or more people to which these likely properties can be specifically attached.
Your definition of what scholars are specifically saying about a specific person is at best a smudge to gloss over the gaping holes in historical record of any such particular individual.
I agree. This does not mean that there was a Jesus.
Perhaps you’ve been in the trenches for too long.
The fine line of differentiation that exists between us seems to be that I think that there is no direct evidence of an individual, Jesus. You seem to agree but then go on to summate that there must therefore be a Jesus… but maybe there were several people to whom the name is being applied… ??? That’s not evidence, or even an argument, that there was a Jesus. It’s evidence that particular properties that have been packaged as ‘Jesus’ might be applied to one or more people for whom there is no direct evidence.
Your reflex to fall back on accusations of conspiracy is trenchant and unbecoming. Stick with your scholarship and admit uncertainty where it exists. And it does exist.
Laugh it up.
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The fact you said AT THE VERY MOST, Jesus could be one of several figures when the consensus is that all the accounts of Jesus are referring to a single Jesus of Nazareth. Now you’re moving the goalposts.
Bolded emphasis mine. This is absolutely, 100% wrong. Like I said, the majority consensus is that Jesus of Nazareth is the individual that all the Gospel accounts are referring to.
Again, false.
http://www.strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the-evidence-for-jesus-part-1-of-2/
http://www.strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the-evidence-for-jesus-part-2-of-2/
No, and I think it’s quite telling that you’re cherry-picking my posts instead of actually addressing the links I posted or owning up to the statements I quoted from you.
Like I said, believe what you want, but don’t pretend like you’re holding the more rational view. There’s about as much uncertainty that Jesus of Nazareth was a real individual as there is in assuming that Alexander the Great actually referred to several kings and not the monarch that came out of Macedon and conquered the Persian Empire.
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Can I ask, do you think that the summated qualities attributed to the package ‘Jesus’ could possibly be applied to more than one human?
…I see. I didn’t realise we were in competition for such status.
I hereby own up to all of my previous posts.
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