Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practice:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
Edit: My suggestion to any who would like to see my opinion changed (see above quote) is to get on the Wikipedia and work towards changing the page. My upvote goes to Flying Squid for reminding us “does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship”
Edit 2: practicality changed to practice
The problem with this thinking is it cedes the historical figure to the crazies following the BS version of events drafted to undermine that original figure.
For example, have you ever wondered why the public saying of the sower parable, about how seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn’t multiply and only the seeds which reproduce multiply, is the only parable in Mark and Luke given a secret explanation in private?
Why was a saying about seeds so dangerous it needed to be explained concretely?
You probably don’t know that the only other explanation for this parable before the middle ages was the one recorded among the Naassenes, who thought it was about seeds scattered at the dawn of the cosmos through which the universe was completed. This same group was saying the mustard seed parable about the smallest seed was in reference to an indivisible point as if from nothing.
If you aren’t familiar with Leucretius, you might miss that what’s being discussed here is Epicurean atomism as he rendered it in his epic poem in Latin 50 years before Jesus was born. Not having the Greek word atomos (‘indivisible’) to rely on, he instead called the same concept in De Rerum Natura ‘seeds.’
Given that book is the only extant work from antiquity to describe survival of the fittest, this means he was writing about how these indivisible seeds randomly scattered at the beginning of the cosmos interacted to gradually develop the Earth and then plants and animals, and how only the things which survived to reproduce continued on. In fact, in book 4 he explicitly refers to failed biological reproduction as “seed that falls by the wayside of the path.”
So here’s Jesus 80 years after this is written, in a conservative religious theocracy, talking publicly about how randomly thrown seed which falls by the wayside of a path doesn’t reproduce and the seed which does survive to reproduce multiples like crazy. He ends up allegedly the enemy number one of that religious theocracy who eventually have him killed, his followers are persecuted by Jerusalem, and his movement ends up co-opted outside Jerusalem’s influence by the guy persecuting them. And that co-opted version of the story offers up a secret explanation for the above parable, as well as secret claims of having been the Jewish messiah, and later on he’s said to have been claiming to not have been changing one word of the Jewish law.
And the version of his sayings that doesn’t say anything about being a messiah, ridiculed following religious law, and includes things like “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels” ends up declared heresy and buried in a jar for millennia because even owning it becomes punishable by death.
But 99.9% of the population doesn’t know any of the above because a third believes in the BS version with the secret explanations and the other two thirds are so tired of having that BS version shoved down their throats they assume there’s nothing worthwhile in looking into the historical figure which caused the BS version to exist in the first place.
What makes you think any version of the events isn’t bullshit? Even if he existed? The gospels were written decades after he supposedly died. They weren’t written by historians and they didn’t have primary sources to work from.
The fact is that Christians worship a fictional being that may or may not have been based on a real person. I don’t see why it matters if there was a real person because we know essentially nothing about him with any certainty and he wasn’t the guy with magic powers who came back from the dead. That is the guy who Christians worship, not some historical figure.
The canonical version of Jesus is pretty much a dime a dozen in many large ways. There were numerous people in Judea at the time coming forward claiming to fulfill messianic prophecy.
What was not a dime a dozen were people in Judea taking Epicurean naturalism as a foundation and then layering Plato’s demiurge and eikon concepts on top to argue against Epicurean surety of final death.
That’s a remarkably unique philosophical perspective in the Mediterranean, its existence means someone needs to have come up with it, and given elements of it even predate Paul’s letters and are baked into the two sayings regarded by scholars as most likely tracing back to a historical Jesus, a guy who was killed by the state in a state that would have looked very unfavourably on that philosophy, the attribution that makes the most sense is to the figure it’s literally being attributed to.
We can’t know the full details given the evidence for it only still survives in the opposition to it within canonical sources, but there’s enough there to figure out the general picture.
So while I think pretty much anyone in Judea could have been coming up with “he was secretly the fulfillment of the Messiah prophecies and was exclusively extending Judaism” as dozens of others were recorded making the same claims, I just don’t see it as probable that a historical Jesus’s most likely authentic parables are directly paraphrasing Leucretius by accident and that later traditions continuing the interpretation of his sayings in the context of Leucretius do so by happenstance when Leucretius and Epicureanism in general goes from being mentioned in the Talmud as “why do you study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean” in the 1st century to having fallen from popularity in the 2nd century as Platonism gradually revives into Neoplatonism by the 3rd century.
Is it possible that the paraphrasing was coincidental and that this gets wrapped up in a unique philosophical outlook by the end of the first century by someone other than Jesus but then solely attributed to him even though he wasn’t even a particularly popular figure at the time? I guess? But I certainly wouldn’t put money on it against the alternative.