(August 30, 2024 at 4:13 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: I guess before talking about the historical Jesus we should first ask which parts of the Gospels are supposedly historical, but it seems that h311inac311 thinks that everything in the Gospels is historical.The scholarly consensus is very trim. It posits a galilean jew in a messianic culture with apocalyptic expectations who was baptized by john and crucified by pilate. That's it.
The rest is christ. A story meant to tell us how the world should be, not how it was. Words that christ would have said or should have said according to disparate narrators with their own individual concerns...not words any "jesus" did. I think the mythicists hit on an excellent point about this, even if we decide that there was some guy. Had christianity as we now have it been different..and it could have been, the proto-christian melee is very well established in history, we'd be sitting here wondering about the "historical jesus" of that religion and that text with utterly different contents and convictions. Jesus, whoever he was, if he was, had little if anything to do with the creation, development, or maintenance of the body of work and culture that bears his honorific and purports to inform us today about his real life.
As far as apologetics go, it's all a farce. No one is interested in the historic jesus, only the mythical christ. There are similar historical theories for the mythologies of zues and hercules and odin and thor and lugh lamfada and cu chulainn. There was "some guy" - and myths are traditional ways of relating historical events that have utility far greater than a list of facts from the past-front ever could. We can retroactively alter our mythological history to suite our real present to the advantage of our imagined future.
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