I think Lemmy has a problem with history in general, since most people on here have degrees/training in STEM. I see a lot of inaccurate “pop history” shared on here, and a lack of understanding of historiography/how historians analyze primary sources.
The rejection of Jesus’s historicity seems to be accepting C S Lewis’s argument - that if he existed, he was a “lunatic, liar, or lord,” instead of realizing that there was nothing unusual about a messianic Jewish troublemaker in Judea during the early Roman Empire.
What Jesus are they talking about? That needs to be defined first. Not the one depicted in the bible that’s for sure.
A Jesus who had an apocalyptic ministry, some amount of followers, was executed by the Roman state and said at least some of the things recounted in the Gospels. Matthew and Luke are clearly pulling from some sort of earlier source, which likely had at least some accurate accounts of his teaching.
Could also be teachings of some of the other messianic cults just misattributed to Jesus, but either way he was clearly the only one that managed to maintain relevance much past their death.
TLDR: “The one in my head, that I cherry picked from a contradictory fictional source”
Have you ever read a document from before 1400? Just curious, because you seem to be under the illusion that reading primary sources means that you either take everything they say literally, or dismiss them as entirely made up. This is exactly what I mentioned with regard to ignorance of historiography and method earlier.
Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes all say contradictory things about Socrates. Will you argue that Socrates was fictional?
The letter J wasn’t even invented until the year 1524, so formally speaking, Jesus, Jews, Judges, January, June, July, and every other word including the letter J did not exist in the 1400s or before.
Therefore, Jesus never existed.
Lower case letters are medieval too, so only IESUS existed. Case closed.
That’s just orthography; the letters and words didn’t exist, which is unrelated to whether the things they represent did. There was in fact a judge, a January, and a Julius Caesar in Rome.
The joke ->
💨
-> you
You realize that books like the First Epistle to the Corinthians were actual letters written and sent to those churches? That’s one example, but there is plenty of history to be pulled from the Bible. Shitloads of New Testament books are Apostles sending Jesus’ words to various churches and governments. Look up “epistle”.
Look at the Old Testament for more history. Books like Leviticus, where we can pick out loads of weird proscriptions, were the records of law as the Tribe of Levi saw it.
A scholar can spend a lifetime unpacking the Bible without believing in ghosts, holy or otherwise. You’re doing the “I’m too smart for this bullshit!” thing. Stop. You’re having the opposite effect.
Also the fact that modern scholars recognize that not all of the Epistles were even written by Paul! You’d think if all of these Bible scholars were fervent Christians hellbent on ignoring historical evidence, they wouldn’t be arguing that Paul didn’t write Ephesians or Colossians, or that the Pentateuch was probably a compilation from four different authors!
I never knew they had all been ascribed to Paul, always thought there was various authors.
Ephesians and Colossians explicitly claim to have been written by Paul.