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Real Jesus
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Atheism
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I thought the consensus was that Jesus was a very real person, but just a normal dude?
At that point, does it matter? I'm quite sure there was a Harry Potter born in England matching the year given by the books. But if they match in name only, the book version is not real. Same with Jesus.
That is absolutely a fair point: Jesus, as Christians believe in him, did not exist, even if there was a religious teacher named Jesus (or Yeshu, whatever) who was alive at that time.
But, there's a part B for that point, and I think it's an important one: there is no "book version" of Jesus. The Bible isn't one book, it's a collection of many separate writings, written over many years by many different people, and they didn't even agree on what they were writing about. Christians like to think of the Bible as one consistent work, and it isn't. (The scholarly term for that is "univocality" -- the Bible is not univocal.) So it's not even possible to point to a Jesus figure as described in the Bible, since there is not a singular, consistent Jesus described in the Bible.
The general consensus among historians is that there probably was a real Jesus. Not the walk-on-water Jesus, but some kind of Jewish religious leader, and he was executed. Which means that some of the books of the New Testament describe a real-ish version of him, especially the earlier books. Then, as the messiah narrative starts to take off, the later books in the New Testament get increasingly magical and describe a very unrealistic version of him.
The Wikipedia page about historically-accurate Jesus is a good starting point for info about "real Jesus." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus
I also recommend looking for podcasts and YouTube videos featuring Bart Ehrman.
What I'm saying here does not at all contradict your comment, I just think it's a good idea if we atheists are always very keen on the fact that the Bible doesn't consistently describe much of anything. That does mean, though, that some parts of the Bible may describe something historically accurate, and that gives no credibility to the more magical parts of the Bible. Seems like the consensus in this thread is to throw away the whole idea of Jesus, and that doesn't match what real historians believe.
Wiki says: "born between 7 and 2 BC" how is that possible ;)
If he can manage to resurrect himself, he can manage to be born before his birthday. It checks out.
The monks who made the calendar where shooting for 2 BC (or AD?) As the birth year. Only issue is they didn't really have a lot to go on and guessed basically.
He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy!
There isn't. No one's ever found any actual evidence.
Even the earliest writers in the bible wrote about him only decades after his supposed death. Outside the bible the earliest is Josephus 50 years after his death and it is a single sentence which doesn't quite fit in with its surroundings so it might have been inserted later. Usually you would not consider that convincing evidence of a historical person.
While that's true that the earliest non-Christian source was Josephus, that doesn't mean Paul (very contemporary figure) or the Bible aren't good sources. We can read around the obvious fabrications and their bias doesn't per se remove all historical value.
The standard for historians (even critical ones) strongly support treating Jesus as a real person.
This isn't at all a win though for Christians. The Dead Sea scrolls are very indicative of Jesus as a non-unique figure. It was common for there to be Jewish apocalyptic teachers. Jesus was one of those.
The better way of thinking about him in my opinion is that he was a real Jewish teacher who never claimed to be the son of God, that was mythologized by early Christians.
Highly recommend a Marginal Jew by Meier or anything by Bart Erhman for Atheists.