One Theory I like is that the Jesus we know is an amalgamation of multiple Messiah figures that were walking around around that time, one of them was the basis for the religion and then other stories about those other Messiahs were folded in over the years
I like this reasoning a lot, however:
#2. In terms of there being a real-life Y’shua, AFAIK it’s hard to know if such a person ever really existed in the first place, or if they were in fact more of an amalgamated ‘King Arthur’ / ‘Robin Hood’ type, very much inspired by earlier legends & mythology, and greatly elaborated upon in later years, via oral traditions, before finally being documented hither & tither by various writers scattered around the region.
AFAIK there is no archeological evidence whatsoever for that exact person’s existence, and no contemporaneous writing from the time, describing his life.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Almost like every lauded, ‘perfect’ figure across history?
In fact, “The Messiah” is a concept that certainly goes back long before some dude allegedly named “Y’shua” was branded that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah
Now, modern humans being ~300Kyrs old, I would guess that it’s not just an ancient fixation, but even endemic to our very species… our very way of hoping and wanting and longing for a return to ‘the good times,’ directly embodied in a mythological figure.
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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 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.
bitcrafter@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
bufalo1973@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Maybe he existed… but only as a common human and all the supernatural things were added later.
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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?
KneeTitts@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
bufalo1973@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Maybe he cured a strong headache (maybe some herbal remedy) but they grew the anecdote and he ended up “curing leprosy”.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
As I see it, there’s pretty much a landslide of evidence, from almost every studied angle, that points to what you just postulated.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Whoops; apologies.
I borked up my last reply-comment, and so deleted that, and re-created from scratch.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.