Atheism

Jesus likely existed. It's easier to imagine the steps from an influential cleric to messiah-myth than an early church conspiracy to weave a savior whole cloth.

There is little evidence, but that's exactly what you'd expect from a 2,000 year old narrative. What we know about emperors of the time is scant and largely mythical. If an accurate record of the life of an impoverished Rabbi from 1st Century were available, that'd be miraculous in itself.

Plus there is the textual argument that u/BrotherL0v3 makes.

Okay look. I am an atheist, I think magical thinking in general and Christianity in particular are harmful and unnecessary.

BUT

I also enjoy learning about new testament history as a hobby. I've actually read the book How Jesus Became God that the article mentions, and they do a sneaky thing that annoys the shit out of me: they quote things being said by someone who disagrees with them that appear to completely demolish their own position, without quoting the explanation and nuance that inevitably follows. Ehrman obviously doesn't see the quoted text as a problem for the idea of a historical Jesus, and usually explains as much after saying something like that.

I won't nit-pick all the little over-simplifications, but I want to make an example out of one of them:

The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing "life of Jesus," and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark and added their own corrections and new material. But they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree contradict the much later gospel of John, because they were written with different objectives for different audiences. The incompatible Easter stories offer one example of how much the stories disagree.

The incompatible Easter stories are actually something many secular scholars point to as evidence in favor of a historical Jesus.

I'll go into more detail if anyone cares, but the broad strokes are this: the nativity narratives in both Matthew and Luke contradict not only each other but also known history and even basic plausibility. We're pretty confident they were both made up.

So, why? Why would two different authors working from the same source material both tell weird lies about Jesus' birth?

Well, the expectation of the Jewish public at the time was that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Mark doesn't talk about Jesus' birth, but it does say he was from Nazareth of Galilee. That presents a problem: how is this guy who people are calling Jesus of Nazareth also the messiah from Bethlehem?

That's where we get Matthew and Luke trying to smooth things over: Matthew makes up a story about how Jesus was totally born in Bethlehem, trust me bro but Herod the Great tried to kill him so Joseph and Mary hid in Egypt until he died but then his son took over Judea so they moved to Nazareth. True story bro.

Then in Luke, the author says that Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, but Caesar ordered a census of the whole Roman empire where everyone had to return to their ancestral homeland because reasons. So they go to Bethlehem because David was Joseph's... great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? Why they stopped at exactly twenty generations (and how the fuck Joseph would have known that before ancestry.com) is never specified.

Even if we grant miraculous intervention, these stories are both ridiculous on their face (at least, to a modern audience). If Jesus was fabricated whole cloth, why include these bullshit Easter narratives in the first place? Why not just say "He was born in Bethlehem" and be done with it? To my mind, these stories make the most sense as a post-hoc ass-covering to explain how the guy who was walking around calling himself "Jesus from Nazareth" was actually totally from Bethlehem the whole time.

I describe it like this... the earliest presumed mention of Jesus is in the work of Josephus around 93 AD.

Now, there is evidence that this mention is, itself, a 3rd century "insertion" by the Christian transcriber Eusebius, but aside from that, let's take 93 AD as "gospel" ;)

So from the time of Jesus, to 93 AD, there is not one, single, contemporary reference. If you take the dating of his death sometime around 33 AD as accurate, that means, even following his death, nobody mentioned him for SIXTY YEARS.

If you are to believe that story, you have to believe nobody was talking about a guy who did miracles. Or leave that aside as a later invention, nobody was talking about The Sermon on the Mount, which was likely his biggest claim to fame in his lifetime.

The comparison I like to use is Elvis. We know Elvis existed because we have the photographs, recordings, contemporary evidence, and so on.

Now, imagine NONE of that exists. Not only that, Elvis died in 1977. We would be, right now, 13 years away from the first written record of Elvis. (1977 + 60 = 2037).

Unlikely doesn't BEGIN to cover it.

More on how Josephus may have been "modified" around the 3rd century to meet Christian ideas:

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437

https://vridar.org/2015/01/16/fresh-evidence-the-jesus-passage-in-josephus-a-forgery/

FWIW, the article is describing the standard "mythicist" position. A well-known argument that has been described many times before. There is nothing new being presented here, and all sources cited appear to be over a decade old. If you are familiar with this debate, you probably do not even need to read the article to know who the sources are. They are very familiar names to anyone that have read past articles on this subject.

Honestly, it doesn't really matter. We're talking about faith, which is basically a socially acceptable mental illness that can bypass logic and facts entirely regardless of subject matter. We've seen true believers ignore video evidence of cops commiting murder, flat earthers determine that somehow their own evidence that proves the earth to be round must be wrong, conservatives believing that somehow Trump cares about them, UFO weirdos believing they've been abducted, cryptid hunters failing to understand that they're quarry had vanished in the age of ubiquitous high-def cell phone cameras, and climate deniers haven't accepted proof yet. Hell we're talking about the same idiots that think Jesus loves guns. Or the ones that got COVID and swore on their subsequent deathbeds that the vaccine was somehow worse.

They sure as hell aren't gonna believe that there's no proof that Jesus didn't exist.

Until somebody finally finds a way to cure blind faith, we're gonna just be saddled with a huge permanent population of delusional idiots.

I think the historical signifigance of jesus lends more credibility to his existence, its just his supernatural abilities that are not credible theories

Next on the news: centaurs have no historical basis.

man I love stuff like this, nothing upsets them more than just pointing out how unlikely even the non-miraculous shit would be, all piled into one person's lifetime. and the lack of contemporaneous evidence, and the fact that most of the jesus brand is adopted from other origin stories wholecloth.... they get cranked though lol, it's hilarious