Today I Learned

Saying this as an atheist: we do know that this person existed. He's been named Jesus Christ, do not know if that was his actual name.

In fact there hundreds of Messias in those days, some more popular then others.

We also know that not all the stories we have was linked to this one dude. Probably not. Probably multiple different messias-sayings have been attributed to him

Nothing proves the existence of a god though. Just a couple of people back then wanting people to not be dicks and don't get rich (that's not a good person they said).. and somehow THOSE stories have not been followed...

Or better still 3BCE

The theorem to do that was not yet proven.

Adapted along the time to please the people in power

He may have died in reality, but can a man this swole really die?

Nah, he walked over water and everything and it was great. I guess you had to be there.

Everything about the Holy Roman Empire was a clusterfuck

And its pretty much impossible to pin all the stories in the various gospels to any single individual reliably. And the younger he gets, the more nebulous and fuzzy the stories are.

Historians also have a rule for any historical figure that we are unsure if they really existed, if that person also has lots of stories about him involving magic or him personally doing anything supernatural, ya that guy is probably a myth.

Oh, and a fun story about the crucifixion darkness.

So in Luke, the easiest copies described as the sun being eclipsed. Which was a huge controversy. Origen claimed it was the work of "agents of Satan."

Why? Because the Passover occurs on a full moon and solar eclipses cannot happen at those times.

What can happen are lunar eclipses. In fact they are pretty common on Passover. And those actually match a lot of the details. Last for hours and not minutes. Seen around the world vs a small band.

The problem is that this was in the middle of the day, so it would not have been visible in the area.

What a lot of people don't know is that at the time this was written, people knew how to calculate eclipses in the same Saros cycle. The Greeks even built a clockwork computer centuries earlier that did so.

As well, at the time the leading explanation was the (correct) one that lunar eclipses occurred because the Earth eclipsed the sun. Lucretius in 50 BCE wrote that it was so common it was basically presumed and he was encouraging keeping a more open mind for alternative explanations.

And there was a historical lunar eclipse on Passover in 33 CE, which would not have been visible in Judea. But importantly, this eclipse was in the same Saros cycle as visible lunar eclipses before and after.

It is not all that implausible that people, particularly Greek or Chaldean astronomers, would have known that there was a several hour long eclipse of the sun during the day on Passover in 33 CE.

My guess is that knowledge of a calculated lunar eclipse ended up incorporated into the early Synoptic circles (potentially even by the author of Luke given the mention of the Joel blood moon prophecy in Acts) and then further mythologized having lost the original context as if an eyewitness event like in Matthew where the author added earthquakes and zombies.

TL;DR: There probably was a daytime lunar eclipse on a Passover around that time which would have been fairly trivially calculable as having occurred given its earlier and later 51 CE visible occurrences in the cycle.

Edit: Some relevant links.

• NASA lunar eclipses 1st century table
• Antikythera mechanism
• Lucretius book 5 (it's right at line 750)

TIL Jesus was real and he was a combination of mystics and prophets and other holy men that were all transmutated into an evil chimera homonculus with alchemy and he had 8 arms and 7 legs and 3 heads and it was really gross and creepy.

I also like how Jesus has two different lineages depending on which gospel you read. Apologists try to say one of them is about Mary's parents and not Joseph's, but the text is explicit.

Matthew 1: "Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus..."

Luke 3: "Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli."

So was Joseph's father Jacob, or Heli?

There are many more. The bible is literally unbelievable. Chapter 2 lists a different creation order from chapter 1. Anyone claiming it contains no contradictions is drinking the kool-aid. It would be funny if people weren't dying for it.

My understanding is that any sort of a census of the sort described in Luke (requiring males to return to the towns of their birth for registration) probably did not actually occur, as it would have created impractical logistical issues.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius

Most critical biblical scholars agree that the Gospel of Luke is erroneous.[10] Its author seems to have invoked the census as Joseph and Mary's motivation for departing "their own city"[11] of Nazareth, Galilee, for Bethlehem.[12][13][14] Additionally, the author may have wished to contrast Joseph and Mary's obedience to the Roman edict with the rebelliousness of the Zealots, and also to find a prophetic fulfilment of Psalm 87:6: "In the census of the peoples, [princes] will be born there."[12][b][c] (Luke and Matthew also give different accounts of the family's departure from Bethlehem.)[17][d] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer states:[20]

It is clear that the census is a purely literary device used by him to associate Mary and Joseph, residents of Nazareth, with Bethlehem, the town of David, because he knows of a tradition, also attested in Matthew 2, that Jesus was also born in Bethlehem. He is also aware of a tradition about the birth of Jesus in the days of Herod, as is Matthew; Luke's form of the tradition, unlike Matthew's, tied the birth in a vague way to a time of political disturbance associated with a census.

Scholars point out that there was no single census of the entire Roman Empire under Augustus and the Romans did not directly tax client kingdoms; further, no Roman census required that people travel from their own homes to those of their ancestors. A census of Judaea would not have affected Joseph and his family, who lived in Galilee under a different ruler; the revolt of Judas of Galilee suggests that Rome's direct taxation of Judaea was new at the time.[21] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown postulates that Judas's place of origin may have led the author of Luke to think that Galilee was subject to the census.[22][e] Brown also points out that in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke the Evangelist (the traditional author of both books) dates Judas's census-incited revolt as following the rebellion of Theudas, which took place four decades later.[22][f][g] Protestant theologian and biblical scholar E. P. Sanders concedes that, because revolts followed both Herod's death and the census, Luke's author may have "decided to elaborate the event [as] a reason for Joseph to travel ... to Bethlehem", calling this "a relatively slight historical error for an ancient author".[8]

It's an early form of a 419 scammer's typo-riddled email or letter. Filter out anyone who pays attention to inconsistencies and you can squeeze some easy money from the gullible leftovers.

"Just rose from the dead, feeling kinda zombie, might delete later."

Turned his hair into weed and then did the fish trick on it.

Roman: Dude it's 3BC, you can't be born yet, look at the calendar! It is quite clear, 3 more years. I swear to gods, Augustus will hear of this.