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Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed?

The thing is that compared to other historical people we kid of have similar evidence. Like we have records of Socrates existing and we have records of some Joshua existing.

The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death, which is a extraordinary claim, we just say he was a very smart guy, we se very smart guys on a daily basis, nothing special with that so we can just believe it and even if we are wrong it has no real life implications.

For the Joshua guy, that's quite a different story. The claims about him are extraordinary and need extraordinary evidence. But we only have normal evidence. If the claims about him were true it would contradict almost everything we think we know about the universe, how it behaves, etc.

So again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death,

To use a more modern example, pretty much everyone agrees that Grigori Rasputin was a real person who played a crucial role in the court of the last Czar of Russia.

But there are some positively wild and unexplainable stories that have a decent amount of corroborating evidence that they happened. The story about him healing the prince via a phone call sounds like actual magic. However we all know magic isn’t real, there is definitely some kind of logical explanation. But that explanation is lost to time.

So where do historians land on Rasputin? Well, there was definitely a guy called Rasputin. Some of the stories about him are true. Some are probably false or exaggerated. There isn’t even a consensus on what colour the dude’s eyes were. But that doesn’t mean we dispute his existence.

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- Krono@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  But that explanation is lost to time.
  
  One translation I read suggested a probable explanation.
  
  Rasputin’s phone advice was the same as many modern quacks: keep the patient away from modern medicine and doctors.
  
  So the hemophiliac prince was no longer given his normal cocktail of drugs, which probably included a new medicine for the time: aspirin.
  
  Stop giving a blood thinner to a hemophiliac and his condition (temporarily) improved. The best explanation for the people at the time was “magic”.
  
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  - bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah I’ve heard that one too. It seems plausible. But we’ll never know.
    
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- sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It was a shame how he carried on.
  
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- clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  His schlongs is in a jar somewhere. Best that, Jesus!
  
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  - bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That was a sea cucumber
    
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    clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’re a sea cucumber.
    
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kromem@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death

Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.

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uienia@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
We have a lot more contemporay primary sources for the existence of Socrates than we have of Jesus (of which the number of contemporary primary sources is 0).

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