Zos_Kia

I think you may have personal feelings against christianity mixed up with the historical stuff and it doesn’t make for interesting discourse.

Yeah well fuck those platitudes you must have me mistaken for a 13 year old on TikTok.

I don’t see how baiting a conversation then refusing to partake in it is “living your life” but hey good job Kerouac you’ve got this

I honestly don’t understand the point here and your sarcastic mode makes the whole experience tedious and confusing.

You seem to be arguing that Jesus shouldn’t be considered a historical figure, for reasons that somehow do not apply to other historical figures, but you don’t wish to engage with actual discussion on the matter. I’m at a loss here and suspect you may be experiencing a critical shortage of slack.

Yeah i don’t understand what’s so controversial here. This time and place was home to a million apocalyptic militant movements, and Jesus’s just was the most successful of his generation.

Such criteria is commonly applied to virtually EVERY significant figure in history

That is simply not true. There’s a lot of historical figures from Antiquity for whom we have zero archeological evidence, it’s kind of the norm in fact. Literary evidence is fine if it can be corroborated from multiple independent sources. If we go by your standards then Socrates and Pythagoras are not historical figures, neither is Tacitus, or Hannibal, or most people who were not kings and did not have steles or coin to their name.

Y’shua ben Josef during his lifetime, who later got turned in to an almost impossibly, legendary figure by political, financial and religious institutions

A couple centuries before his embellishment by the roman state, the so-called Jesus movement was flourishing and started to expand in pretty much every direction. The existence of this movement is abundantly attested in independent sources from very distant places.

Are you saying this movement did not exist and the sources that attest to it are not reliable ? Are you saying there was a movement but it wasn’t founded by a guy named Y’shua ben Josef from Galilee ? Why would that be ? Do you think they lied, or forgot the name and origin of their founder ? I understand the idea but what would be the point, and how would those various sub-groups, some of which were very distant geographically, have coordinated their lie so perfectly ?

At one point Okham’s razor says the most probable thing is that a guy named Y’shua from Galilee did indeed start a religious movement. It’s happened before, it’s happened again, why would this specific occurrence need an esoteric explanation ?

Actually no, they have some sort of “circuits” that approximate math, which is even more interesting imo. Still not reliable in the slightest, of course.

But then you’re making up new standards of evidence for historical characters, and only applying them to Jesus.

All evidence points to a jew who, under roman occupation, organized a political and religious movement around his person with a message so powerful that it immediately started replicating. Otherwise, how can we explain the sudden outflow of missionaries from Galilee ? Whose message were they spreading, which travelled as far as Asia and Ethiopia with relative unity and consistence ? What reason do we have to doubt that a revolutionary mystical prophet such as Jesus existed (they were legion at the time in that region), and why should we subscribe to some more exotic, laborious explaination ?

The question is not whether Jesus’ story was embellished and distorted, because it was, with 100% certainty. But then that’s true of everything we know from that time period. We have 0 archeological evidence of most historical characters existence, only hearsay and unreliable testimony. But we don’t doubt their existence because the alternative would have to be far fetched and contrived to fit the evidence.

When I learned that MacGyver was American, knowing full well I saw him speak French in every episode, it made me very angry for some reason.

I don’t think I could cause I lack strategic thinking and would get easily outmaneuvered by some other faction