For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

The existence of Jesus Christ is a historical fact that is attested by many scholars, even scholars that are hostile to Christianity. Bart Erhman just wrote a book on it, himself not a Christian.

I thought everyone by now had just accepted that Jesus was a human being?

I don't want to type it all out again so see Post #268 and read about Antinous and Alexander the Great.

In Post #278 there's more related to the deification of humans.

But we don't know how many steps there were in that process. Ignoring the xtian writings ( biased and edited as they are) we seem to go from chrestus to christus to "jesus" itself a derivation of yeshua meaning "god is salvation."

My reply -

This just leaves a couple of references by pagan Roman historians which may or may not be genuine. The main reason why Christians are supposed to have got up Roman noses is their refusal to worship other gods etc. If they hadn't been so obstinate, nobody would have cared about their beliefs because what was one more deity associated with Bacchus/Dionysys and Osiris?

Once the Christians really got going they wanted everything - divine father, virgin mother, sacrificial king, resurrection, anything they thought fitted from the cult of Mithras plus a biography which fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. If there ever was a real man buried under that lot it's impossible to find him now.

Trying to get any details of a real man from the deified Jesus story is like trying to write a factual biography about Alexander the Great from information in later versions of the Alexander Romance.

Even if there was a real man somewhere, can we be sure that his name was Yeshua? What if he was only referred to as Christ or the Lord so that people forgot what his actual name was? When deified Christ was given a biography where he fulfilled Old Testament prophecies he'd have needed a name so Yeshua could have been chosen because of its meaning.

All we can be certain of is any real man didn't lead a revolt which was put down by the Romans because that would have been recorded. Maybe he just caused enough of a local disturbance for the authorities to think, "Here comes trouble. Get rid of him now before it goes any further." As far as the majority of the population was concerned it would have been a non-event.

"Another Messiah wannabe got arrested this morning."

"That's the third this year. When are we going to get a real one?"