this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
975 points (95.3% liked)
Political Memes
5413 readers
2879 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The historical Jesus was not a child refugee. He was from Nazareth, period. The stories of the family traveling to Bethlehem are not in the oldest gospel (Mark) and almost certainly got added in to explain why the messiah was not from Bethlehem when prophecy said he would be, the same home town as King David.
Haha you actually believe the things written in any of those books are real?
Yeah I believe they are not entirely fabricated. There was a historical Jesus who had a following. A lot of the listed details are up for debate but the core of it is too hard to fabricate well enough to fool modern biblical scholars.
The Book of Daniel is from the 2nd century BC but it claims to be from the 6th century BC predicting events through to the 2nd century BC and beyond. One reason we can tell is the language usage and how the predictions are spookily accurate until the 2nd century BC and then they get way off. It was good enough to trick the people deciding the biblical canon so they included it even though it was written way later than all the other books, but not good enough to trick us in the 21st century AD.
Prove it.
Go read some actual scholarship on it, I can mention a non-Christian account of Jesus and his brother in Josephus and the historical letters from the historical Paul and the value of the gospel (and non-Biblical Christian writings from the same time period) as history sources in their own right (they are still extremely old written sources, there is value even if you're not saying they are 100% accurate). But I'm just some guy on Lemmy there's no reason to listen to me.
It has been proven to the extent these things can be. If you are declaring the method wrong and everything faked you are being as ahistoric as the people declaring the miracles proven fact. Maybe you're right, but that is not what the large majority of logical people come to while viewing a preponderance of the evidence.
Oh let's do this.
Paul never saw anything he admits as much. He claims to have met James who claims to be in the brotherhood of Christ, from the Greek word christus or annoited ones.
Josphius has two passages of interest. The first one is a known forgery. It has him expressing Trinity ideas that didn't exist at the time, it doesn't fit in the context of the page, is not in his writing style, and doesn't get mentioned to almost 3 centuries after publication. The second mention is also a very likely a forgery. If you read the entire section you can see that Josphius was talking about two different people one happened to be named James and the other happened to be named Jesus. It doesn't fit the chronology (James would be like 70 years old) and it doesnt fit the culture since it would require James to be an orthodox pharisse. Meanwhile the same exact words used to describe him are the same used by Matthew.
The Gospels are even worse. John copied from Luke, Luke from Matthew, and Matthew from Mark, and Mark from Paul. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Each writer pushing their own agenda and willing to lie get it. There is maybe 4 or so sentences in Mark alone that can't be traced back to the OT, Paul, and popular Greek literature of the time. The supposed oral tradition could fit on a single page. Even that is questionable since ~99% of Greek writings are lost to us we don't know if the supposed oral tradition was part of that.
Nice attempt to sneak in an argument from authority with an argument ad populism. Now if you got any good evidence let me know. The simplest explaination of the data we have is that James was running a mystery cult and Paul took it seriously. Jesus is as historical as Batman.