What do we know about Historical Jesus?

Anyone can reach those conclusions from the gospels

His father was a cuck.

Yeah.

You'll have to articulate a bit better than that how on Earth "anyone" would reach those conclusions from the gospels, which aren't a primary source anyway.

>REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE YOU CANNOT TRUST ANYTHING THING GOSPELS SAY THEY WERE WRITTEN BY EVIL CHRISTIANS WHO INVENTED LIES ABOUT EVERYTHING DONT EVER TALK ABOUT THE GOSPELS TO ME OR MY SON EVER AGAIN REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Yawn.

...

What?

At least try and make some small modicum of sense.

The gospels are a perfectly fine source of information, but have to be taken with a grain of salt. Remember that the authors literally worshipped Jesus. There is a significant amount of bias in play. The "Christ Myth" theory is bullshit and everyone knows it, yet getting all of your information on him from people who thought he walked on water isn't particularly legitimate.

*ahem* ah yes my good gentlesquire please do excuse the rather ambiguous opacity created by my rather esoteric communications per se you see i was merely trying to elucidate the necessity for a poster such as yourself to return to the paranormal board where such absurdities such as make believe sky daddies may be discussed with impunity without soiling the august halls of this history board with trite inanities as has become common practice as of late. are we not rational men employing our reasonable intelligence to deduce the truths of the cosmos then why i ask why must we waste our neural processing power on discussions of phantasmagorical effluvia when there remains new species to be discovered?!

I'm not an atheist and there is no need to try and trash Veeky Forums with shitposting.

Last "you" for you. Fuck off back to /b/ or whatever low quality board you came from.

Your posts are completely nonsensical.

>we don't have absolute certainty that there was a historical jesus

we also don't have certainty that Homer was real or that Socrates existed. However, we still take them to exist.

The theological argument behind Jesus is not whether or not he existed, because he did. The argument is whether or not he was a fraud or actually the son of God/God exists.

mind your temper for one musnt allow ones emotions to cloud the pristine fire of their logical reasoning abilities without which we would have no recourse for navigating the environment we find ourselves in. if you do not wish to continue to drink deeply from the fountain of reason which i proffer to thee then so beist it however i shall not allow thine own intellectually skullduggery to dissuade me from my own path of scientific inquiry so you must excuse me now for i have experiments to attend to in my laboratory.

good day.

We don't know anything. I'm fairly open minded about whether Jesus existed or not. The positive arguments from the "Jesus Myth" crowd seem weak, but in the other direction the positive historical evidence for his existence seems close non-existent.

I guess we'll have to just wait and see if any archaeologists dig up any evidence one way or another.

>we also don't have certainty that Homer was real or that Socrates existed. However, we still take them to exist.

No, we assume them to exist. Homer, in particular, is contested to have actually existed; and there's far stronger evidence for socrates than there is for Jesus, such as writings mentioning him by contemporary primary sources.

>The theological argument behind Jesus is not whether or not he existed,

Who the hell brought up a theological argument? OP asked if there was a historical Jesus and if so what he was like, and I gave an answer.

This is top quality shitposting, bless you user

Nazareth, the place where Jesus grew up, was an illiterate agricultural village. Jesus most likely could not read and even if he could, Jews weren't allowed to read the Torah at the time. This privilege was granted only to the priest class.

So if Jesus existed, it's safe to say he was not knowledgeable of any of the prophecies about the Jewish Messiah which he would claim described himself.

Historians do believe Jesus was a real person but disagree largely on the particulars. The Catholic Church seems to believe Jesus was born in 4 C.E.

The Bible claims Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Judea. But this is almost certainly false. The Gospels claim Joseph needed to travel to the place of his birth in order to fulfill a census requirement under order of the Roman government. The Bible claims Joseph was born in Bethlehem and Jesus was born there during the census. The reality is that there was a census in 6 C.E. but it would not have required Joseph to go to Bethlehem. The only reason the Bible shoehorns in Bethlehem is so that Jesus fulfills the prophecy of being born to the lineage of King David. Jesus is referred to as "Jesus, the Nazarene" because he was born in Nazareth. The Bethlehem birth story is historical revisionism conducted by those who literally worshipped Jesus.

>Jesus most likely could not read and even if he could, Jews weren't allowed to read the Torah at the time. This privilege was granted only to the priest class.

What the hell are you talking about? Guys like Philo and Josephus weren't priests, and the rabbinate certainly wasn't restricted to such. Not to mention there were numerous literate non-rabbis, like again, Josephus.

>So if Jesus existed, it's safe to say he was not knowledgeable of any of the prophecies about the Jewish Messiah which he would claim described himself.

And since most likely, if he did exist, he was a leader of a theological movement, which implies a rabbinic title, that implies that he was literate.

Is this a 'bot or a person?

>we also don't have certainty that Homer was real or that Socrates existed. However, we still take them to exist
It's not necessary to enter into whether or not Homer or Socrates existed to gain value from works attributed to them or featuring them.
Neither the Odyssey nor the Platonic dialogues fall apart if Homer and Socrates are proved to be fictional characters. Those works stand on their own. The bible, however, is a garbled peasant tier philosophy that requires a belief in an omnipotent punisher in the next world, and a totalitarian potentate in this one, to maintain its relevance.
The question of whether the greeks of antiquity existed or not, and the question of whether Jesus existed or not, is an apples and oranges comparison.

I was under the impression we knew he existed from some execution record.

As far as I'm aware, there has never been any sort of official execution record for Jesus.

"""Homer""" was an illiterate moron who didn't know what color water was, or how big the Mediterranean was despite living next to it.

Without the proven existence of homer and the Muses, the work falls into total irrelevance.

The idea that Jesus was an eschatological preacher is more of a theological judgement than a historical one.

Getting caught was part of his plan

He had a big nose.

Lol he was not at all fucking literate. He came from an extremely poor family and I highly doubt Nazareth was a town wealthy enough to afford scrolls.
We translate "tekton" as carpenter but it's actually closer to "someone who works with wood and stone." He was a day laborer below even the lowest farmers and fishermen. Joseph was literally those beaners you pick up at Home Depot.

And Hillel was a woodchopper and water-carrier, and yet managed to get himself an education and become a very significant rabbi. What the fuck is your point?

His father was the Roman Soldier "PANTERA". This would have been a PROFOUNDLY important part of his mythos, where Jesus was the synthesis of Roman and Christian culture, the son of man was an imperfect meld of the two cultures.

Christianity Post Roman empire is a synthesis of "Pagan" and traditional Christian ideology, that became known as Catholicism. A church of "works" capable of warfare, statebuilding and Governance, AS WELL AS forgiveness, fullfillment and love.

>The "Christ Myth" theory is bullshit and everyone knows it
Pretty much this. Even Richard Carrier, who presents what is probably the most credible mythicist case, and acts like he's certain Jesus was a myth, always backpeddles in discussions with other academics and ends up saying stuff like "all I'm saying is we can't be sure either way."

The Panthera thing is a claim that was apparently made by Jews of the 3rd/4th centuries to shame Jesus. There's really no reason to take it seriously, especially considering that early Christians didn't really seem to think there was anything special about Jesus's birth. Two of the Gospels don't mention it and it seems like it was accepted that Joesph was his father until people decided that he wasn't because it had to be God. Claiming that Jesus's father was a Roman is just making connections that don't need to exist.

There may have been a dude around whom a myth began to form. Any resemblance to an actual fella was run over and done away with by the time the gospel got wrotten.

what do you mean, the Romans were EXCELLENT record keepers. After the Christianization of the Empire, and the development of Papal power, revisions to both Church history and doctorine went to great lengths to craft a singular narrative to build mythological foundation of the newly, 'state' backed Catholocism. Like many of the stricken books of the bible, and the countless revisions over 2 millenia, you will not find "proof" of this lest you had access to the most secure reaches of the Vatican library, where lay the truth of humanity.

>and based on extremely little
So little in fact that any other person would be dismissed as a myth

Depends what you take for "historical" many people will debate points on what really happened and what we try to put together as a historical view of events which are as follows:

He was probably from Nazareth, it doesn't make sense that that would be made up since you would just say he is from Bethlehem instead.

He was a follower of John the Baptist who preached an apocalyptic worldview as told in the scriptures of Daniel.

He was baptisted by John, the gospels are uncomfortable with it and try and minimize the implications as it goes against the Messianic story that they're trying to tell.

That's probably all that most knew of him and that he became famous as a student of John and then started his own ministry. It's debatable if he started his own before or after John was arrested, I tend to think he did before and had disagreements with John as he started to set himself up as the "Son of Man"

He probably did refer to himself as the "Son of Man" meaning that he claimed Davidic heritage and that he was the one spoken of in Psalms. This of course meant he was claiming in other words to be "king of the Jews"

Whether this manifested in actual rebel rousing or a bunch of guys walking around walls a few times is impossible to know.

One event I take for historical is, some fucker that followed Jesus around was armed. You do not have Jews walking around in Roman era Judea with a sword. That's insurrection, that can get you crucified. It's not something the writers would mention unless that was something other people knew or were told by eye witnesses that it actually happened.

Then Jesus was killed on Pilate's orders, no trail. If the charge is treason that's enough to have a Jew killed next morning straight away.

No tomb, his body was probably dumped in a mass grave. Jews would not bear to stomach the idea of the Messiah's body being anywhere but a tomb and so invented one.

>primary source
There are no primary sources on Jesus

Let's be thankful then, that most people don't base their morals and life choises on those writings. I wish we could say the same about the Bible.

Have you never heard of the Gospels? It's all in there.

I was inclined to believe you, but I did some research. While Pantera's fatherhood of Jesus showed up in Talmudic literature dated at the time mentioned in your post, there are also mentions of the same in the Jerusalem Talmud, dated as early as the second century, which would fall right in line with the idea you were trying to refute.

(Wikipedia, I know, but it was literally the best source I could find) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Julius_Abdes_Pantera
robinhl.com/2011/11/06/jesus-son-of-pantera/

...

>second century,
That's also the time of Celcus, a Greek write I forgot about who said the same thing.

I don't see how it proves anything, though. A really common way of discrediting a movement is by slandering its founder (people even still do it with Jesus, just look at mythicists), and at the time, saying someone was the product of rape was a popular way of doing that. If it was true, and was widely known, you'd expect to see early mention of it in the Roman sources from the same period which aren't exactly positive about him. The second century is pretty late for that kind of thing to pop up if it was known, and it's conspicuous that they start after the nativity stories do. Because of that, it really seems like they're the result of non-Christians accepting the Christian narrative there was something strange about his birth, but explaining it shamefully. Early Christians don't even seem to accept that something strange was about it, so there isn't much of a reason to believe later anti-Christian speculation.

I'm not the same guy you were talking to but...

It's important to remember that there were distinct differences between the socioeconomic status of both Philo and Josephus compared to the position that Jesus would have held. While the former were not members of a priestly class they were certainly of the social elite, Philo was a blatant Platonist and did not observe Jewish tradition in the same vein as the Pharisees did at the time. Jesus would not have been afforded any opportunity like that, due in part to the geographic isolation of the place of his birth and the class of people that he was born to.

The he wasn't named Jesus.
>hfw He comes back, gets lynched again because His name was not Jesus and Murrica couldn't swallow it

And again, you have plenty of folklore from the time of people rising from poverty to become famous and important rabbis. The Raish Lakish, Hillel, Elazar ben Simeon, probably others I can't mention off the top of my head.

Granted, we don't have ironclad historical sources for any of them, but this notion that "oh well, he grew up poor he must have been illiterate and uneducated" doesn't seem to have any basis in what scanty information we do have in the period.

Without doubt Paul whitewashed a lot of Jesus's life so it's difficult to say much beyond "he existed"

This is great pasta

Look at the New Testament. That's all you need - all first hand accounts.

Also, YouTube or read up on William Lane Craig.

Jesus was real, poor, a philospher, and heavily influenced the Levant. He also died on the cross and - EVEN BIBLICAL SCHOLARS AGREE - some whacked up shit happened and he reappeared on numerous occasions to numerous people.

>all first hand accounts.
Stories about first hand accounts are called second hand accounts

>William Lane Craig

>William Lane Craig
>someone who isn't a semantics bullshitting con artist

Pick one

Please kill yourself

Jesus has a valuable message for anyone about tradition, moral degeneracy, and hypocrisy.

notarguments.jpeg

I only pointed out that you are mistaken if you consider the NT a first hand account or a primary source

And that WLC belongs in Both are true statements

So basically there is next to no primary sources and all we know is what cool aid drinkers wrote up 50+ years after Jesus death?

Pretty much. It's to be expected for a grassroots religion in the 1st century.

We know a lot about the historical Mohamed.

See: I am not that user, but Richard Carrier is pretty much the guy to seek on this topic.

Carrier basically approaches the argument that the NT is complete bullshit and has zero grounding in reality, can't be trusted as a primary source, and is mostly filled with forgeries/copies of other works already in the NT. Like Paul being copied over and over in the Gospels, for instance.

What other Academics pose is arguments from physical evidence. Of which there is just enough to cast dispersion upon Carrier's works. Ultimately Carrier has a very strong argument in that the NT cannot be trusted at all, and a lot of stuff that wasn't included in the NT can't be trusted either. Basically, zero historical evidence to found there. Meanwhile there is a few pieces of evidence that exist like some guy with a similar name to Jesus, around the same time, claiming to be the Messiah being killed by Pilate. We know that there is actual veracity to be found in this because the Roman's documented it, not the Jews or the Christians. The problem is... is that enough? And this is more or less where Carrier and everyone else finds themselves, in a stalemate.

Did the nigga exist? Maybe. And if he did, what we know about him is almost certainly incorrect.

Christians do not seem to be bothered much by the fact that their religion is likely made up and syncretic as fuck.

What did Jesus do to be worshiped as a god? Unless you want to say simply that he died

You've never read his book then because that's literally mostly what he says, he's a lot more liberal with historicity than people give him credit for
But you don't actually want to read his book, you want to read refutations of his work by people who probably also never read his book.

He's under the assumption that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses and people close to eyewitnesses

Two things they're for sure happened in the life of Jesus:

1. He was baptized by John the Baptist
2. He was crucified by Pontius Pilate

But the methods they use to reach these conclusions are ridiculous ad hoc explanations and questions on the character of the people who wrote the Gospels, that they wouldn't lie in the face of embarrassment so it's not made up. People in antiquity made up embarrassing things all the time so that wouldn't be surprising if the Christians made up theirs.

Right, but it does make for some interesting speculations, such as what Jesus' connection was to the Essenes and stuff like that

Not him, but a few months back, I saw an user post a bunch of statements from Jesus in the NT (with the caveat that they might not actually be Jesus's words and only attributed to him), and stuff as to how it aligned with other religious denominations of then-contemporary Judaism, to reach a conclusion that he was essentially a Pharisee-Essene syncretic.

I'll trawl through archives, see if I can find it.

Apparently John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin, at least that's how I heard it reasoned

Source please

>was Jewish

>lead an apocalyptic death cult that wanted its members to become "Martyrs" and dedicate themselves completely and totally to it

>cults were really popular at the time and all over the place

>probably was intending to scam a lot of people with his cult mostly by just making them join as the entry price was ones life and dedication

>he was doing lots of shady tricks like "look at me turn water in wine" "look at this walk on water trick I can do lol" "hey everyone you're full from that tiny crust of bread you got right"

>Romans caught onto this scamming and lying and arrested this scam artist little shit and punished him accordingly, local Rabbis were even aware of it and didn't contest the execution because they knew it was true

>after he was killed a whole bunch of ??? happened and then all his death cult club members (which must have been quite a few) claimed he was alive but then came up with the excuse "he ascended to heaven tho"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterion_of_embarrassment

No John the Baptist there, no Pontius Pilate there. Nice "source".

Notice how the only examples of any "historian" using that as a tool relate to the gospels. That's because it ain't exactly standard historical methodology, just fallacious "methodology" that NT scholars have come up with.

"The crucifixion of Jesus is an example of an event that meets the criterion of embarrassment. This method of execution was considered the most shameful and degrading in the Roman world, and advocates of the criterion claim this method of execution is therefore the least likely to have been invented by the followers of Jesus."

I'm showing you the methods they use

christiancadre.blogspot.com/2010/03/criteria-of-embarrassment-and-jesus.html

wtf are they serious? Judah fucking Tamar should meet this criteria too. I mean if Jesus existed this probably happened but jesus christ this justification...

Sorry guys, thats not a source, thats cool aid drinkers circle jerk on why it was likely that that part of the story not made up.
A source would be a period Roman account on how they sentenced a guy called Jesus to death.
Sorry, but thats how history works.

These are the methods they use with the Bible as the source

Well, the Bible, at least the NT, was written 50-90 years after Jesus death by cool aid drinkers. So we have cool aid drinkers debating about cool aid drinkers scriptures and what was likely not fully made up. Now thats a circle jerk.

please leaving the fedoraing to us grown ups

He was an Arab who dindu nuffin when the White Roman legion killed him for a bullshit charge.

#HolyLivesMatter

Nice argument. Really convinced me.

Actually Paul's Epistles are almost 20 years after the supposed death of Jesus and he's so far removed from the Gospels that you can't say he believed anything the Gospel writers believed or were trying to push. Paul is the earliest account we have and he calls Jesus "God"

There are places in which you could make it seem like he was talking about a historical Jesus, like he mentions James, the Brother of the Lord. There's a creed that says he was exalted to the top rank in the Heavens by god after his crucifixion.. A passage that mentions the Rulers of this age killing him. A passage that says he was born of a woman under the law and another passage that says he was
'descended' from the sperm of David according to the flesh.

Then you have Josephus' James passage which is barely disputed that mentions James the brother of one called Christ.

There are all problems with these things but I don't want to get into them.

And you have Tacitus that said he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, but he names no source for how he got the information. Christians often say he was a trustworthy historian to excuse the fact that he doesn't name his source so people have to speculate on what his source was and whether or not he actually wrote "Christians" instead of Chrestians

Tacitus was born 15 years after Jesus death.
We simply do not have a reliable historic source on the historic Jesus. So far it is equally likely that the whole story was made up by Paulus and there never was a Jesus.

There's no Jewish expectation in the ancient world that the Messiah would suffer and die. Modern Christians think, well that's all the way through the Old Testament, but those prophecies weren't taken to be about the Messiah they were taken to be about other prophets, or holy men of God who might have to suffer, who might be persecuted. The Messiah passages don't have suffering and death in them; they just refer to this coming King, the descendent of David. No Jews in the first century this time expected that the Messiah would be crucified. It just was absolutely against common sense. Messiahs don't suffer, Messiahs aren't crucified, Messiahs aren't beaten.

The purpose of the Gospels, especially Mark, was the redefine the Messiah and justify why the Messiah had to die. What's crazy is there is no reason why Mark would choose crucifixion. There is no reason why the Messiah had to suffer like that other than what Mark does to justify it.

Why would Mark invent a death like that and spend half the book trying to justify it and redefine the Messiah?

That doesn't mean there was no historical Jesus, you need supporting arguments like a plausible reason they would make up the Gospels or alternate hypothesis on the origins of Christianity because otherwise the Christians are right when they say "How did Christianity come about then?"

Actually, they got it from the Suffering Servant thing is Isiah

Mark didn't invent the dying Messiah thing because Paul wrote about it and he's the earliest account, they could have used Paul as a inspiration for their Gospel, which we know they did because they used the 3 pillars names

there's no need for it to be in the scriptures, just for it to be in the theology of a particular jewish sect. you can see the theological justification in the epistle of hebrews where the messiah acts as a perfect sacrifice to replace regular sacrifices at the temple.

Richard Carrier has something to say here.
But even if there was a historic impact, he seems not to have no immediate impact, likely he was simply not a big thing back then.
He only became important when Paul decided to build a religion on him. And so all sources we have is from cultists that never met Jesus in person, so they are highly unreliable.

But Paul says he used only scripture and revelation to know about Jesus, so obviously it was expected and warranted.
Richard Carrier talks about the expectation of a dying Messiah in his book, it's more whether that Messiah was celestial or a real person he's concerned with

Also, to say Paul built a religion on Jesus is to call him a founder, which he wasn't, he talks about the three Pillars of the faith which are most likely the ones who first had visions of Jesus

Not much. The closest non-biblical sources are a short passage by jewish historian Josphus and a passage by Roman historian Tacitus. There's more evidence for John the Baptist who was definitely a contemporary, most historians therefore think there was a real connection between the ministry of John and the Jesus movement.

The Tacitus passage is from the 60s AD, within living memory of Jesus' life, but it only mentions Jesus ("Christus") second-hand when discussing the persecution of Christians.

The Josephus passage is from the 90s AD, but it's pretty suspect, since it calls Jesus the messiah and praises his miracles, in the middle of a section on calamities that befell the jewish people. Also Josephus was pretty orthodox as far as we know, there's no indication he was a Jesus-following jew. Historians think there was a genuine nucleus to the passage, but it was altered by a later christian editor.

The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest gospel, written down around the 60s AD. Christian scholars of course say it's an accurate eyewitness account, but considering it's likely an adaptation of oral stories plus a religious text, it's not good history to take it as fact.

So IF Jesus is a myth, his story was invented whole cloth within about 30 years of his death. To me, it seems pretty likely he was a real preacher, but the inconsistencies and historical innacuracies in the gospels (plus lack of any corroborating evidence of his ministry) means that what he actually did and said is a moot point.

My mans said Tacitus was in the 60s AD

So he wrote that shit when he was 2? What the fuck is wrong with you?

You're being real liberal on that Gospel date, that shit was written in 70+ AD