For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Minimalist]

Or, this shit was cobbled together in the period AFTER Augustus/Tiberius when things had definitely started to change. The Romans were not innocent in this. Some of the procurators definitely provoked the Jews and the repeated Roman installations of Herod Agrippa and Herod Agrippa II as kings were obviously not lost on them, either.

But in the period of time that the fabricators of the holy horseshit sought to set their story, the Jews were hardly being oppressed. ( This realization, btw, was what set my feet firmly on the road to atheism. If they could lie about that, they could lie about anything.)

[Confused Ape]

[Zone]

Jesus probably didn't plan on creating a new religion, he seemed to believe he was living in the end times and that the world was about to come to an end.

[Minimalist]

In this case just some man who was regarded as a Messiah by a few people in Judea.

Ah, yes...the funniest bit of a very funny film.

[DeistPaladin]

But in the period of time that the fabricators of the holy horseshit sought to set their story, the Jews were hardly being oppressed. ( This realization, btw, was what set my feet firmly on the road to atheism. If they could lie about that, they could lie about anything.)

I didn't mean to hit any hot buttons by my use of the word. Hope you understand what I was trying to say earlier about their motives to look for their "promised kingdom" in a "higher world" and hence how JC was born in their imaginations.

Jesus probably didn't plan on creating a new religion, he seemed to believe he was living in the end times and that the world was about to come to an end.

End-timers and doom-criers abounded at that time and Yeshua was a common name. A mortal JC could have been almost anybody. Maybe there were several.

[Zone]

End-timers and doom-criers abounded at that time and Yeshua was a common name. A mortal JC could have been almost anybody. Maybe there were several.

The Essenes the Jewish sect who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls were around at this time and they like Jesus/Yeshua had this notion of the end of times being imanent. So I can easily see a historical figure of a wandering heretical first century Rabbi coming from this background.

[Minimalist]

[Confused Ape]

I didn't mean to hit any hot buttons by my use of the word. Hope you understand what I was trying to say earlier about their motives to look for their "promised kingdom" in a "higher world" and hence how JC was born in their imaginations.

End-timers and doom-criers abounded at that time and Yeshua was a common name. A mortal JC could have been almost anybody. Maybe there were several.

So let's take this as being the basis for your urban legend idea. Back to Tacitus -

Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome,

Some possibilities here -

1: Could Tacitus have believed in the urban legend of someone being executed during the time when Pilate was prefect of Judea? Was there no way of checking if someone called Jeshua had been executed?

2: Is it possible that somebody called Jeshua had been executed and Tacitus assumed it was the person the Christians were talking about even though it wasn't? After all, Jeshua was a very common name at the time.

3: The urban legend Messiah didn't acquire a name and background until later. Tacitus had no way of checking records for somebody who was just referred to as Christus.

I think we can safely say that most people in Judea didn't believe in the urban legend because it didn't really take off as a religion until somebody like Paul decided to do his own thing.

[downbeatplumb]

Were they? Because in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius the Jews had it pretty good. They were exempt from certain taxes and military obligations. When the Jews petitioned Augustus to remove Archelaus and become a Roman Prefecture ( 6 AD) Augustus agreed. The country was prospering as part of the empire and after Herod built Caesarea they were part of the commercial links to the rest of the empire. They had a measure of home rule as the Prefect made his headquarters in Caesarea and the high priest and sanheddrin were allowed to handle local matters in Jerusalem. Finally when large scale rioting broke out in Alexandria it was because the Greco-Roman citizens were angry at the Jews' special treatment.

Just where was all this "oppression?"

Didn't stop another group of ingrates railing against the empire they lived under in 1776. those colonists were some of the most lightly taxed people in the empire.

[Minimalist]