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Maybe he existed... but only as a common human and all the supernatural things were added later.
Oooohhhh
I mean, yes, obviously. It all of a sudden makes the other commenter's steadfast insistence against me make sense, if they thought that I meant this person actually existed who could do real life magic tricks and came back from the dead and he still watches to see if you're masturbating.
Yes, I was talking about the historical figure, not the superhero. I thought that went without saying but maybe not.
(Edit: What the heck, their original argument is clearly saying that they think there's no evidence that the historical figure existed. But whatever, we got there in the end, I guess.)
Dude, I did nothing of the kind.
Wow, it's almost like you managed to copy-paste the known fact that the body of Christian scholars agrees that someone existed, later known as "Jesus," and then seemingly couldn't deal with a rebuttal upon your notion of 'that clearing up everything.'
So now you're getting weird about the fact that I had to re-do my comment, simply because I responded to the wrong commenter at the time? So, did not see my rebuttal at all? Did you not see my attempt to explain that?
Go ahead, tho-- consider this your opportunity to fairly reply to what I said above. Sound good?
EDIT: Hahaha, instant downvote!
For the record, the downvote was from me, and it was because you are being an ass.
Do you mean, being just like you... my fellow freakazoid? :D
Hahaha, nice!
Yeah, I realized after that you were talking about archaeology up in your original reply to me, not in the pre-editing version of some other comment. Sorry about that, I had already edited my comment to take out the accusation (within 5 minutes of originally posting it.)
I pretty much agree with this comment of yours. I have absolutely no reason why that would mean we have to continue to bicker. I do think that comment is pretty firmly in contradiction to your earlier statements ("King Arthur / Robin Hood"), but whatever, I see no profit at all in us having a dispute about that part of it.
Yes, but why are we 'bickering' in the first place, and why the need to accuse me of re-editing a comment? (which never happened)
What you are seemingly trying to tell me here, "PhilipTheBucket," is that you're not really able to countenance the actual arguments I'm making above.
Now would you say that's a fair or unfair statement? If unfair, could you give me some facts & reality-based reasons as to why not?
You edited this comment after I posted my reply to it which talked about archaeology. I thought you'd edited the comment to remove mention of archaeology, but I was wrong, that mention came from this comment of yours.
But then, I realized I'd been wrong, and retracted the wrong thing I'd said, and apologized about it. Not sure how you even managed to see my wrong accusation within the ~2 minutes or whatever that it was on Lemmy, but in any case, my bad.
I don't know how to upload an image within a comment in Piefed. Presumably it's not that hard and I'm just thick. Anyway, please in the meantime enjoy this ASCII art of a sea lion:
Have a good day. Like I said, I have no interest in continuing a dispute with you about this.
Congratulations! Not only do you manufacture stuff that never happened, but you're about as disingenuous a religious creep as I've ever encountered, so far upon the FV.
Hehe, the 'donkey-ears' fit well, amirite?
Lets consider that jesus did exist and did someone have a cure for leprosy. Why didn't he give that cure to everyone??? We still have leprosy today, kinda proves he didnt have the cure. But again lets say he did and he only gave it to a couple people, not a very godly thing to do, to withhold that cure from the entirety of humanity.
Maybe he cured a strong headache (maybe some herbal remedy) but they grew the anecdote and he ended up "curing leprosy".
As I see it, there's pretty much a landslide of evidence, from almost every studied angle, that points to what you just postulated.
Which is fine as far as it goes, yet does very little if anything to address the body of the above concerns.
While "Jesus" likely had something to do with an actual person who once lived, nailing down the details of his life and history seems highly problematic from a scholarly & historical POV, and as for embellishment, amalgamation and distortion... all such things are highly possible, and even highly likely, AFAIK.
But then you're making up new standards of evidence for historical characters, and only applying them to Jesus.
All evidence points to a jew who, under roman occupation, organized a political and religious movement around his person with a message so powerful that it immediately started replicating. Otherwise, how can we explain the sudden outflow of missionaries from Galilee ? Whose message were they spreading, which travelled as far as Asia and Ethiopia with relative unity and consistence ? What reason do we have to doubt that a revolutionary mystical prophet such as Jesus existed (they were legion at the time in that region), and why should we subscribe to some more exotic, laborious explaination ?
The question is not whether Jesus' story was embellished and distorted, because it was, with 100% certainty. But then that's true of everything we know from that time period. We have 0 archeological evidence of most historical characters existence, only hearsay and unreliable testimony. But we don't doubt their existence because the alternative would have to be far fetched and contrived to fit the evidence.
I think that it is worth noting that the person who did most of the successful evangelizing in the beginning that led to the explosion of the movement was actually Paul, who had his own message that wasn't quite the same as Jesus's apostles--in fact, he started spreading the message without talking to them first because he figured that he already knew everything that he needed to know, which led to conflict that required Acts to work really hard to make it seem like they were all on the same side all along.
But regardless, it is peculiar that people seem to think that starting a widely successful cult is a particularly hard thing to do if the founder has enough charisma (and luck), given that all you have to do is look around at the numerous modern examples. For example, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966 by a guy banging drums in New York, and has since grown into a huge movement with hundreds of dedicated temples. So it is far more plausible that this is what happened in the case of Christianity than that some other more complicated process synthesizing the existence of a fake founder.
Yeah i don't understand what's so controversial here. This time and place was home to a million apocalyptic militant movements, and Jesus's just was the most successful of his generation.
Absolutely false, right from the get-go, Bob.
(hmm, "gecko..?," but anyway)
The whole point of what I said above is to understand things from an historians and archeologists' POV. You know-- the ones who generally try their best to strictly adhere to known facts & reality?
Such criteria is commonly applied to virtually EVERY significant figure in history, Bob. So then, are you actually (haha) asking for a special exception for someone possibly known as Y'shua ben Josef during his lifetime, who later got turned in to an almost impossibly, legendary figure by political, financial and religious institutions...?
You know, that "Jesus Christ" figure, later whitewashed in to being a tall, pale Euro-type dude, and not the actual short, Semitic dude which he almost certainly was. (if he ever existed in the first place)
I sure hope not, anyway, because that would not be the "Bob" we all know and love.
That is simply not true. There's a lot of historical figures from Antiquity for whom we have zero archeological evidence, it's kind of the norm in fact. Literary evidence is fine if it can be corroborated from multiple independent sources. If we go by your standards then Socrates and Pythagoras are not historical figures, neither is Tacitus, or Hannibal, or most people who were not kings and did not have steles or coin to their name.
A couple centuries before his embellishment by the roman state, the so-called Jesus movement was flourishing and started to expand in pretty much every direction. The existence of this movement is abundantly attested in independent sources from very distant places.
Are you saying this movement did not exist and the sources that attest to it are not reliable ? Are you saying there was a movement but it wasn't founded by a guy named Y'shua ben Josef from Galilee ? Why would that be ? Do you think they lied, or forgot the name and origin of their founder ? I understand the idea but what would be the point, and how would those various sub-groups, some of which were very distant geographically, have coordinated their lie so perfectly ?
At one point Okham's razor says the most probable thing is that a guy named Y'shua from Galilee did indeed start a religious movement. It's happened before, it's happened again, why would this specific occurrence need an esoteric explanation ?
Haha, and later on, some group of assholes tried to make hay with the original guy... to the extent that whatever he might have actually said (remember the Gnostics?) to the message of bullshit "Christianity?"
I think you may have personal feelings against christianity mixed up with the historical stuff and it doesn't make for interesting discourse.
Hey, at least you tried! 😉
(And don't think too harshly of the other poster; we were all 14 once, after all!)
Sorry for giving that impression, mssr.
What I know for sure is that absolutely everyone in life forms a belief system in order to sort out reality.
Me, it's not so much that I dislike 'Christians' in any particular way, as much as the fact that I don't like seeing others push people around via their 'wrong' beliefs, and so forth...
Wow, it is as if you need something to be true, in the deepest sense, in order to validate your life?
Dude-- and THAT'S the part I always try to confirm. Live your life!
Enjoy our silly, mutual existence, if you can!
WE ARE HERE F0R A LITTLE WHILE, and also we like our animal friends et al.
The ride will be over soon, my friend. So let's enjoy...
Yeah well fuck those platitudes you must have me mistaken for a 13 year old on TikTok.
I don't see how baiting a conversation then refusing to partake in it is "living your life" but hey good job Kerouac you've got this
Hahaha... now there you go!
Now THAT'S the way we do things, mate! XD
Looks like you tried to reply to my actual response, and then sort of went all Gonzo-weird ness for motivational purposes?
Well, HELLO THERE, fellow freakazoid!
(I mean, that's what the point is here, right..?)
I honestly don't understand the point here and your sarcastic mode makes the whole experience tedious and confusing.
You seem to be arguing that Jesus shouldn't be considered a historical figure, for reasons that somehow do not apply to other historical figures, but you don't wish to engage with actual discussion on the matter. I'm at a loss here and suspect you may be experiencing a critical shortage of slack.
Again-- a very whitewashed theory.
So what you're telling me there is that you didn't actually read it there, Bob?
You are thinking about this the wrong way. From the scraps of information that we do have, which includes volumes of work by Jesus's followers, there are two extremes one could take: we know absolutely nothing about Jesus or whether he even existed, or we know absolutely everything about Jesus. I agree that the later extreme is wrongheaded, but surely treating it as a binary choice so that the only other possibility is that we can say nothing at all about Jesus is also wrongheaded.
You might argue reasonably, of course, that his followers cannot be trusted, so we can learn nothing from their writings. This is not true, however, because if nothing else we can learn from the editorial choices that they made; for example, when a Gospel goes out of is way to explain a detail that would have been embarrassing to contemporaries, this actually provides potential evidence that this detail was true and widely known at the time so that it needed to be explained, because otherwise it would just have been left out.
At the end of the day, scholarship is essentially about weighing probabilities rather than certainties, and good scholars do not pretend otherwise.
I consider that a terrible way of framing things, and then to make matters worse, you propose only a binary set of conclusions.
Please do better then that if you want to debate fairly.
Thank you.
It must be very convenient to be able to declare victory in a discussion without hanging to present an actual argument. 😉
Except for the fact that... I did indeed present multiple arguments, and the fact that at no point did I 'signal victory?'
EDIT: Ruh-roh, downvotes! :D
Whoops; apologies.
I borked up my last reply-comment, and so deleted that, and re-created from scratch.
What? Of course it does. A near-unanimous consensus by experts in the field is worth more than whatever you are bringing up in your Lemmy comment.
I mean, it would be possible to lay out logic so compelling that even if experts in the field felt one particular way about it you could make a case otherwise, but weird strawmen like wanting archaeological evidence of Jesus's specific skeleton or something is not that.