Ask a Catholic

[pocaracas]

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.

My take is that Tim O'Neill nailed this on his blog. Responding to the italicized bit below, Tim provides a pretty solid answer.

Another possible alternative take is that "Jesus" was actually the Jesus the Pharisee leader crucified by Alexander Jannaeus about 110 years ago before the alleged NT Jesus allegedly was crucified.

Lots of things are merely "possible". Historians leave writing about things that are merely "possible" to novelists and stick to what is rendered "most probable" via analysis of the evidence and cogent argument.

The "possibility" that Jesus was "really" the Yeshu executed by Alexander Jannaeus faces the same problem as many of these theories that Jesus was "really" someone else - if the Jesus in the gospels was that Jesus, why did they set their stories 130 years later? That needs an explanation that accounts for the all the elements in the later stories better than the far more parsimonious idea that there was another guy called Jesus executed in the 30s AD.

First up: I've searched for it and it seems there's a great controversy over who the teacher of righteousness may have been... however, the names "Yeshu" and "Jesus the pharisee" are never even candidates:
http://www.ida.net/graphics/shirtail/deadsea.htm
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso...19666.html

I could also not find a reference to that "Jesus the pharisee" anywhere, in the 10 minutes I spent googling that guy and Alexander Jannaeus. This later dude does seem to have crucified or hung some 800 pharisees... if one of them was called Jesus... well.... why not?

So, it seems that, once more, Tim O'Neil is not aware of the teacher of righteousness... Oh, but he is!
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/christ...-2560.html

In all this discussion, little is mentioned of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a "Teacher of Righteousness", and a "Wicked Priest".
Why are these documents ignored here as well as other discussions about the origins of christianity?

Could it be that christianity " borrowed" from these ancient papers?

Or that Jesus and his followers were part of the same socio-religious environment that produced the DSS. How would you determine the difference between "borrowing" from them and simply being from the same culture as them angelo?

Which brings us back to the similarities in the extraordinary details of both tales. That's how, Tim.
WUT?! Both guys resurrect after 3 days?!

Second up: I agree.... Why set up the stories some 100 years after the fact? Indeed, it needs explaining... but if the tale is told a few decades after the real fact, where no fact-checking is possible, it could have happened 10, 20, 100 years before... no one would know.... and no one who maybe could fact-check it was interested in the story (the pharisee priests? the romans?).
Maybe (and here I go into pointless speculation) the person telling the tale just didn't know... and used some elements from memory - some roman guy that was the big boss when the storyteller was a kid... or something. I'd like to know how things happened back then, but, except for the use of a time machine, there's no way we can find out, is there?