this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
250 points (90.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35928 readers
948 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Joshi@aussie.zone 51 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm by no means an expert but I was briefly obsessed with comparative religion over a decade ago and I don't think anyone has given a great answer, I believe my answer is correct but I don't have time for research beyond checking a couple of details.

As a few people have mentioned there is little physical evidence for even the most notable individuals from that time period and it's not reasonable to expect any for Jesus.

In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus. Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus mentions him twice, once briefly telling the story of his crucifixion and resurrection. The second is a mention in passing when discussing the brother of Jesus delivering criminals to be stoned.

I think it is reasonable to conclude that a Jewish spiritual leader with a name something like Jesus Christ probably existed and that not long after his death miracles are being attributed to him.

It is also worth noting the historical context of the recent emergence of Rabbinical Judaism and the overabundance of other leaders who were claimed to be Messiahs, many of whom we also know about primarily(actually I think only) from Josephus.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago

The part mentioning Jesus's crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either 'Jesus' or 'Christ' is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there's no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it's the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

[–] frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus

Misinformation.

There's Tacitus's Annals (year 117), Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews (93-94), Mara bar Serapion's letter to his son.

Seutonius (Lives of the Twelve Cæsars) and Pliny wrote about the conflict between the Romans and the followers of Christ (or Chrestus) around that era.

[–] uienia@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You are the one who is doing the misinforming. All of the sources you mention, except Josephus, were written up to more than a century after his supposed existence. With Josephus being written around half a century after his existence.

And as mentioned, the specific quotes from Josephus are of a dubious nature.

[–] Joshi@aussie.zone 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here but both Suetonius and Pliny are talking about Christians in the 2nd century, Tacitus speaks about Christ only in the context of Nero blaming Christians for the great fire. These are literary evidence for the existence of Christians in the second century but are not direct literary evidence of the existence of Christ as an individual which was the question I was addressing.

I'd be delighted to be shown to be wrong but I believe my original post stands.