Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months agoif we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died
Hardly the first instance of a historical figure with unreliable historical accounts. You could make the same criticism of Egyptian pharaohs. They were deified in their eras, too. Their monuments were not completed until many of them were long dead. I guess we should just ignore them and pretend they had no impact on the course of history.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Where on Earth do you get the idea that monuments to pharaohs were not built within their lifetime? That’s absolutely untrue.
It also misses my point.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Consider the Boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. He was dead at the age of 17, before the completion of his tomb. And thanks to repeated grave robberies, his tomb had to be repaired and refortified on subsequent occasions. His elderly successor and family advisor, Ay, was buried who died four years after his own ascension to the throne, effectively swapped Tutankhamen’s intended tomb and claimed it as his own, but never lived long enough to see it completed.
Numerous unfinished or partially completed tombs dot the Valley of Kings. And even the Great Pyramids have several chambers that were started but never filled out before the builders were retasked to the next Pharaoh in line.
The standards by which we hold “historical Jesus” would disqualify a litany of other historical figures of antiquity, as the bulk of our knowledge comes from reprints of reprints of surviving accounts of other accounts which are themselves often politicized documents intended to score contemporary points.
The Hellenistic Era might as well not exist, for all the first party accounts of the era that survive. Herodotus was dead before Darius the Great was even born, and yet his histories are fundamental to understanding the Achaemenid Empire during his reign. The only surviving copy is dated fifty years after the events it claims to document. That’s roughly as reliable as The Gospel of Mark, which is dated some 30 to 80 years after the death of its primary subject matter.
If you want to hold historical figures to equal standing, you’re going to write off everyone from Archidamus II to Cyrus I. Obliterating huge swaths of history with a single pen stroke, because Herodotus is an unreliable narrator.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s a terrible argument. That was one pharaoh and the monument would have been finished within his lifetime if he had lived a normal lifespan for a pharaoh… Most Pharaohs had monuments to them- not just tombs, but temples- built within their lifetime. We know because they tell us so right on the walls.
And, again, I was talking about the Jesus of the Bible, which is obviously who OP is asking about. That Jesus, who has magic powers and is the son of a god, did not exist. So there is no evidence for him even if he was based on a real person. A point you are still missing because you seem to think I am saying that there was no real person the character was based on, I am not. I thought I made that clear when I mentioned Bloefeld.
If there was a real Jesus, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, said about him in the Bible actually happened or was something we said because there is no evidence of it outside the Bible and the Bible cannot be trusted. Which is why I maintain it doesn’t matter if the Jesus of the Bible was based on a real person, because it tells us nothing about that person that we can confirm as being true.
So, to answer OP’s question, there is no real physical proof that Jesus Christ ever existed. The name OP gives is a hint. “Christ” means messiah and “Jesus” is the Greek version of the name. A real Jesus would have a name similar to Yeshua and his full name would have been similar to Yeshua bin Yosef. Nazareth might be appended to the end. That wasn’t who OP was asking about though. They were asking about a messiah.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s two pharaohs and the mega-monuments completed over 27 years that Ramses lived to see were the exception rather than the rule.
The Gospel of Mark is part of the Bible. That makes Jesus at least as historical as anyone in Herodotus’s Histories. Significantly more so in many respects, as Herodotus writes on The Trojan War, some 800 years before his birth.
You could say the same of the Anatolian tribes or the Achaemenid dynasty or Sparta.
Go back far enough and there is vanishingly little biographical evidence that any singular person existed. From the Mayan Empire to the Australian Aboriginal People, you can wave your hands and dismiss them all, due to the lack of first party written accounts of their existence.