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.

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.

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.

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

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

He is already sick of the bullshit happening at work. Roll on Friday 5pm.

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.

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)

They aren’t binary options.

For example, it’s also possible that there was a real person, but that then a lot of biographical details were added in and made up.

But it’s quite unlikely that the entire story is made up, in large part because of how much of the narrative is dealing with trying to claim that other people are wrong about it.

The earliest records are from a guy known to his audience as persecuting Jesus’s followers. Who then complains that his audience has accepted a different version of Jesus.

The earliest canonical narratives in Peter’s own tradition are trying to explain why he was present in the area where a trial that required bringing witnesses before the accused where two or more needed to agree for testimony to be considered was reportedly denying him there.

You simply don’t see details like that with made up supernatural narratives. Where’s the story about Mithras keeping his status secret and only making claims of being a promised savior in private? In the story where Dionysus is captured by pirates is there a weird line about someone running down the street butt naked?

The earliest texts in the Christian corpus have very odd nuances compared to pretty much all other fully fictional traditions we’re aware of, but those nuances are in line with what we see with more modern cults around a figure who ends up dead or imprisoned where there’s then competing splits thereafter.

It is very, very unlikely the accounts are 100% true, even in matters separate from the magic stuff. They are even outright at odds with each other. For example, John 18:20 makes a claim nothing was said in secret but the Synoptics all have secret explanations for at least the sower parable.

But the idea there was no historical individual at the kernel of it all is quite unlikely as well. There’s too much evidence the first century tradition is battling over the details of a record regarding a real centralizing figure that does not occur with synecretized or fabricated mythos.

Just because L Ron Hubbard was not a great war hero as Scientology claims does not imply there was no historical person named L Ron Hubbard founding the tradition that later made stuff up about him.

Iirc the current consensus among critical/secular Bible scholars is that he was probably a real guy, but the stories about him in the Bible are mostly fictional (eg, he was probably born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, did not have any supernatural abilities, and did not resurrect after being executed). Pretty sure Josephus, a historian who wrote a few decades after the historical Jesus would have died mentioned him, and iirc there’s at least one or two other mentions of him in non-Christian sources (or non Christian adjacent, Christian orthodoxy hadn’t really formed yet) from the first century CE.

Imo the most likely scenario is that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who publicly opposed the Roman state and was executed for it, and most of what we consider modern Christianity was invented by Paul and his clique.

Oi

I want to read the banned books. Can you do that?

hOW dARe yOu jEsUs wAs a WHiTe AmERiCaN mAn anD thE BIbLe IS tHE wORd Of GOD!!!

Could be both tbh. He is literally described as man and God at the same time.

deleted by creator

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

How did Jesus die? I mean after he died and came back to life? He resurrected and so did tons of people in a nearby graveyard and they all walked through the nearest town (yes this is very literally what’s written about the resurrection in the bible) then what? He just went to a hill and floated away? What happens after that to him? Seems like a huge plot hole

Adapted along the time to please the people in power

He may have been an actual human, but a lot of the stories were taken from previous religions. It’s like a bad bunch of fanfic. Plus I read they voted on him being a god.

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

The guy in the bible who talked to a bush probably just did a bunch of mushrooms lmao

Okay. Look, it was documented, he was real, he existed. All the other stuff though, I’m not sure he did all that 😆. It’s basically all church propaganda. I mean the church obviously had an agenda and they divined up a natural speaker/teacher of morals.

Imagine giving birth to a 7 year old…

Roman censuses also didn’t make everyone return to their ancestral home because that would be inefficient and dumb. They almost certainly made that bit up to make Jesus fit prophecies about the Messiah (explaining how Jesus of Nazareth would be born in Bethlehem, even though it’s wayyyy more likely he was born in Nazareth)

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.

So on average our calendar is mostly close enough

Well, not so much. Because the bible doesn’t mention the dates of life and rule of the two figures, so you have to go outside the bible to find the problem - so it’s not a contradiction in the bible but a contradiction between the bible and other sources.

(And for biblical literalists, there is no contest of course!)

I wouldn’t say it is a contradiction in the bible because the bible doesn’t say e.g [Romans 67:420, ‘And henceforth ye shall keep a calendar of AD and the Datum between AD and BC shall be Jesus’ Birth/Jesus’ death. So speaks God’] - what I’m saying is it was a stylistic decision by the Roman Catholic state a good while after Jesus’ death.

(Unless someone can correct me on that.)

Luke I’m Your Fatha… sorry wrong fake story.

Jesus is a pretty well-documented historical figured

If you disagree and have evidence no other scholar is privy to, I recommend a PhD in history as a strong avenue to correct the record.

No one in antiquity would have thought he was born of a virgin, the word used in the original greek is parthenos, which also just means young woman. The virgin reading is just a translation error afaik.

Who asked?

The scholarly consensus is that a real Jesus existed, and it’s actually a really fascinating topic to read about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus?wprov=sfla1

It seems it was so common, at that time and this place to publicly claim religious things, that it is quite unlikely there is not at least one guy that matches less or more the one of the texts… texts which are written far after…

Anyway, the author isn’t the main character. The writers wrote texts, but the author who foundate the religion by making the bible as it is, is the one who collected texts, selected some, decided the order, and supervised the translation. Who is it?

How would a white guy have ended up in Northern India at the time?

But clearly a historical Poseidon existed or there wouldn’t have been so much literature written about him.

There are eye witness testimonies in the Illiad.