I would love to but I don’t think that the weather here in Seattle is good for lighting that bonfire… 
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Josephus did not even live during the time the mythical character Jesus allegedly lived.
His hearsay and gossip references to Jesus are based on exactly that, hearsay and gossip.
His short and in one case postcard size reference to Jesus is only considered credible by zealot Christian historians. His references have been debunked years ago.
Are you aware of the ways in which historical events and people are proven?
Hearsay and second hand gossip are not two of them.
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Actually, wouldn’t European versions of Christmas emerge out of the local pagan folkways? The Christmas tree and the Easter rabbit all have pre-Christian roots, as does Halloween, which came from Irish customs? Eastern orthodox practices are different from Western European holiday traditions. And of course, I’m sure the Ethiopian coptic church (which is kind of the oldest established branch of Christianity) drew on local practices, too.
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James and John the Baptist are mythical Biblica! characters.
You are citing mythical characters to prove the existence of another mythical character.
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But a majority of historians agree that people existed in the past! You are in the minority if you think that people didn’t exist!
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Josephus was born c 37 CE, Jesus died c 35 CE. There was a brief gap, but he’s as close to contemporary as could be hoped for. Josephus was a Jewish scholar and historian who gathered as reliable data as he could manage (and was very interesting in his own right for many reasons). The distance from the events to his account is very brief, historically speaking, and to suggest that his account is unreliable due to the fact that he was reporting what others were saying is to hold ancient history to a standard of historiography that isn’t used in the field.
Josephus’s Testimonium Flavianum has been analyzed and shown to be stylistically and chronologically inconsistent and is recognized as unreliable. This is not the only passage in which he refers to Jesus, and the other passage is recognized by scholars to be reliable (consistent linguistically, no evidence of corruption other than an added “christos” that doesn’t alter meaning. He also discusses other relevant topics like John the Baptist and the trial of Jesus’ brother James. To suggest that in such a short time a whole mythology was invented is thinking in terms of a massive conspiracy theory that’s impossible to explain and far less likely than assuming him referring to historic events.
I was a Classics student and worked on, though didn’t finish a PhD. I’m very aware of the methods of ancient historiography and the ways in which manuscripts and sources are vetted. Your use of legal terms when discussing historiography, misapplication of the idea of “gossip,” use of terms like “debunked,” and your blanket dismissal of a work due to a corruption in one passage suggest you aren’t familiar with ancient historiography. You would do well to learn about a topic before making bold pronouncements.
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Cut away the mythology and there must be a specific precedent of some kind of custom held about that time by Christians. Therefore it is Christian!
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I’m talking about the employment of specific practices in order to get people on board with the conversation process in Europe. You want people to worship you’re god, well, you need to convince them, not just force them. Otherwise, they’ll just continue to do what they do (which many Europeans did anyway, with pagan folkways still happening to the early modern period - as evidenced by the witch trials). Or the Irish believing in the faerie folk right up to modernity.
I’m not saying it’s not christian, just that it came from older folkways that weren’t christian and they then became christian, because people came to think of themselves as Christian…
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I was poking fun at the air of illogic permeating this thread. I agree with you completely.
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Can we please get a sockpuppet check on these two?
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Jesus is allegedly the most transformational figure in the history of the world.
He was supposed to have been a major thorn in the side of the Roman Empire–yet there are no historians, public officials or citizens who lived during the time Jesus allegedly lived, who wrote anything about Jesus.
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I’d argue the Jesus myth of being a transformative figure comes from the work done well after his life, in the spread of the religion across Europe and through parts of the middle east and into East Africa. Then finally, through the unholy alliance of faith and imperialism in the post-Columbian world.
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I believe in Jesus. I saw him do a gig recently with his band Mary Chain.
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How so? According to the gospel account, Pilate had to be persuaded to care about him. I’d expect some more evidence from the Jewish leaders, but even there most of the time the Gospels don’t mention him making enemies of powerful individuals. When he is captured, his followers run away, then they give up and go fishing after his death. His fame after his death is much more something that might be written about, so it’s not surprising that there’s not much evidence of his existence before then.
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That is funny daneel
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Does shoving things into gift bags* and watching the last episode of Game of Thrones count?
* not a “euphamism”
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Yes, but can I ask, do you think that the summated qualities attributed to the package ‘George Washington’ could possibly be applied to more than one human?
The man sure did seem to sleep around for uni-body package.
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I don’t think that everybody is using the word “mythical” in the same way you are.
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Light it inside. 
I still remember the year we had ~30 people over and there was a “leap over the bonfire” competition. And that is why I purchase liability insurance.
Regardless of the debate over Mr jebus, solstice is a special day. Only second to Robbie burns night.
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More properly, Jesus, John the Baptist, James, etc. are figures who were mythologized who may or may not have been actual people. There’s good reason to assume that there were actual figures who existed that were the basis of the legends that formed around them, which is what historians mean when the refer to the historical Jesus/John the Baptist.
You can either assume that the mythologies appeared out of thin air, or appeared on the basis of some actual historic events.
If you accept the former you’ve invented a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence, shift the assumptions along, and invent an account with many improbable assumptions that requires fairly tortured reasoning to be consistent with what evidence we have. To explain Jesus, Paul, James, John, etc. actually involves creating a new mythology about how those figures came to develop in the cults around them.
If you assume the latter it’s not too hard to build a consistent account without too many assumptions, those assumptions are more consistent with what evidence we have, and there’s no need to turn to a conspiracy theory. If you accept that position it doesn’t mean accepting the later mythology, it just means taking the assumption of the historicity of figures who appeared and sparked the future developments is much more likely than the assumption that they didn’t (ancient history often argues from probability due to the inaccessibility of the subject). If you do assume historicity then the question of what can reliably be assumed about those figures is a whole separate field of historical analysis.
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