Ask one of Jehovah's Witnesses

[pocaracas]

So you're a JW... I think I'm going to ask you the same I asked Carson. You think you're up to the challenge?

I'll even allow myself to be lazy and copy the question itself.

Since I'm going to delve into history, how about we consider the very real possibility of fabrication of the concept of Jesus? Perhaps as an amalgamation of other pre-existing deities and some other real people. I'm not even going into other gods (egyptians, greek or romans, or assyrians) who were claimed to be born of virgins, died and resurrected and other tri-parted heads of pantheons.... I'm going into my favorite simple and evidenced Teacher of Righteousness:

Michael O. Wise posits that the Teacher of Righteousness was the "first messiah", a figure predating Jesus by roughly 100 years.[9] This figure - who Wise believes was named Judah - rose to prominence during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, and had been a priest and confidant to the king. However, he became dissatisfied with the religious sects in Jerusalem, and in reaction, founded a "crisis cult". While amassing a following, the Teacher (and his followers) claimed he was the fulfillment of various Biblical prophecies, with an emphasis on those found in Isaiah. The Teacher was eventually killed by the religious leadership in Jerusalem, and his followers hailed him as messianic figure who had been exalted to the presence of God's throne. They then anticipated that the Teacher would return to judge the wicked and lead the righteous into a golden age, and that it would take place within the next forty years. Wise explains that dating of manuscript copies among the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that the Teacher's postmortem following drastically increased in size over several years, but that when the predicted return and golden age failed to materialize, his following dissipated rapidly.

The story does sound familiar, does it not? The troubling bit is that it pre-dates Jesus by over 100 years. It could have been revived some time before the Council of Nicaea and found its way into some text that would later be considered a gospel.

I then gave him some more info on where this comes from, because just providing a link in the middle of the text is not enough:

This is a figure described in the Habakkuk Pesher, one of the dead sea scrolls, "written sometime in the later half of the 1st century BC". If this is when the guy get's written about, then the events (if true) happened prior to that.
At the very least, the story is of such a man who gathers a following, confronts the established religious authority, who waste no time getting him crucified... And then he resurrects, 3 days later.

So we have two potential situations here:
- The historical Jesus is a copycat of this teacher... but I see too many extraordinary details for someone to successfully copy. Both resurrect 3 days after being crucified?
- This teacher IS the historical Jesus and year one on the catholic calendar is misplaced by, at least, 50 years. Of course, this would render some of the canonical gospels as wrong on a few key details - namely, the roman leaders of the region where things happen, both the birth (which is already wrong by a few years) and the crucifixion.

And just to make the question a bit more obvious than I did to Carson on my first go:

My question remains the same: How do you fit in your head the information that a writing exists, predating the canonical date of the birth of Jesus, which presents a figure whose life contains details that match very closely to the life attributed, in the canon, to Jesus?

This question is about YOU. What is your personal take on this.
Had you ever come across this detail of 1970's archeology?