According to the Bible, over 500 people.
Mystical reincarnations of the Creator of the Universe are so pedestrian. Pff, let someone else tweet about it.
If you allow yourself to make interpolative assumptions, then you can justify anything at all.
Do you have any actual justification for the claim, “Judas was cut down and survived?” Very, very obviously you have no such thing. By making up new ideas, you risk violating the jot and tittle prohibition, as you are essentially adding new things to scripture.
“All of the letters” ? Most people were illiterate. Papyrus was expensive and usually disintegrated within a few decades. Parchment, according to one source, was even more expensive than papyrus in 1st century Judaea.
I’ve asked at SDMB before for cites on John the Baptist’s contemporary “fame” and received a total of Zero (0) responses. I did learn here that the famous Pontius Pilate, has a grand total of One (1) non-Biblical reference, discovered only recently.
So Paul gave silver to a family of prostitutes and beggars to preach in Jesus’ name? Preaching that avoided details of his family background? I think Occam has simpler suggestions for creating fiction.
Excellent post #77, Sage.
If it is not too much trouble, could anyone post quick cites to support
I readily admit that as a cynical atheist, I have likely paid more attention to evidence citing the lack of evidence of his even existence. Also, I’m not a trained historian, so I don’t know what standards are generally applied, but most of the supportive arguments I’ve encountered seemed to boil down to “so many folk believe it, some portion of it must be true.”
I thought Jesus was not an uncommon name back then, and there was no shortage of preachers. Always struck me as more likely that a small group decided to promulgate a story, based on an amalgamation of individuals and legends.
Sorry, I realize this has been done to death many times before. Apologies for resurrecting it. 
John was an impartial, independent witness? JOHN? One of Jesus’s inner circle? I don’t think so.
And let’s not forget Paul wrote women should sit down and keep quiet in church.
You never gave us an update on these cites that you threw into the mix, Hector_St_Clare-What can you tell us about them?
My anthology with the Mandaean sources is at home so it will have to wait a couple hours, but I’ll get back to you later today.
Most writers about historical events aren’t purely impartial in the strict sense. Where do you think you could find an impartial historical account of the history of the Iraq War for example? It’s not necessary to be impartial to be accurate.
[A] Jesus was taken down from the cross before death (e.g. with the help of a soldier secretly a fan of Jesus) and lived for at least a few more days. : 0,5%
** Jesus and his disciples were masters of hypnotism. The spottings of resurrected Jesus were the result of hypnotic, post-hypnoptic, or self-hypnotic suggestions. : 0.001%
[C] Some group of disciples decided to concoct a resurrection story. Decided? 19.499%
[D] God gave the world his only begotten son, who suffered was crucified, dead and buried, but rose again to sit on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. : 0%
[E] Other : 80%
And it’s not hard to tell when a person with a vested interest because of direct connection to a story is pushing an agenda.
I didn’t post the text you quoted, but it was (probably) an accurate statement.
I almost entirely read the ancient sources and not the writings of historians, beyond Wikipedia summaries while searching around for more ancient sources, so I can’t conclusively say that historians generally agree that Jesus was a real person who was crucified. But I would expect them to as it explains what we see from what remains fairly well.
There are two things that I think we can be relatively certain on, with Jesus. He was baptised by John the Baptist and he was crucified. And I should note that I’m not using those terms as umbrella terms to refer to a baby baptismal nor a trial, being called the King of the Jews, etc. All of the specific details are up for grabs. All we can be certain of is the minimal declaration, that he was baptized at some point in his life by John, and he was crucified.
For both of these, we would tend to believe them because of all of the various competing organizations with different takes on the life of Jesus, where everything else changes, those two points remain constant. They’re true across the Orthodox gospels and across all of the Gnostic and Jewish-Christian gospels and writings that we have or are summarized for us by the early Christian commentators.
Much of the early writing, while “lost”, is pretty geared around stamping out heresies - Jewish-Christian and Gnostic sects. Much of what is in the Bible is Paul and others in his circle writing letters to discourage these heresies either by warning against them or clarifying the “orthodox” beliefs. And we know (though I don’t recall from where at the moment) that the “heresies” were writing similar works at the same time. We have a couple of names of works that were setting out to declare Paulian Christian a heresy and lay out the alternative orthodoxy.
Just from the Bible, it’s relatively clear that before 100 AD, there were already large schisms of belief, and that these groups were actively hostile to one another. And they’re not just hostile to other Christian groups, they’re also hostile to other groups which are descended from John the Baptist.
Overall, theories that Jesus was a fictional character made up by Paul don’t seem very plausible, because it seems strange for widely spread groups to take over a character created by him and then compete with him on it, so differently. Paul never gives any indication of knowing about or caring about John the Baptist, and it’s not clear why he would invent a past about prosecuting Christians if he’s the inventor of Christianity.
Similarly, it’s unclear why a group of Jews would create a fictional successor of John the Baptist. And note that early Jewish Christian/Gnostic works did not include the virgin birth, the trip to Bethlehem, etc. They largely stated things along the lines that Jesus was imbued with the power of John upon John’s death (similarly to how Paul claimed divine revelation from Jesus). Why create a realistic sounding leader, putting him in competition with Simon, Dositheos, and other competing successors of John? Presumably James the Just would have been the one to lead such an enterprise. But Jesus, minus the magical birth, gives no better story than James claiming the title for himself. They were brothers after all.
And this brings us to an area of historical criticism called the criterion of embarrassment. So whereas the interaction with John the Baptist is simply attested to from multiple, antagonistic groups, in the case of the crucifixion, we can go one step forward and point out that it’s a rather embarrassing eventuality for the early church.
As I noted, the description of what all occurred is not flattering to Jesus in any way. He almost literally cusses out a bunch of people at the temple, and topples over some pots of money, like an angry toddler. When the police come to pick him up, all of his followers flee the city and no one is willing to come to court to try and argue in his favor. After his judgment is proclaimed, the people of the city show no awareness of who this man - who supposedly has already crafted a number of miracles, affecting hundreds or thousands of people - and they choose to let some other bastard survive rather than Jesus - who they make fun of for his purported egotism.
Obviously, the Bible presents this all in the best terms. And the Christian argument that this was all some poetic end that had all sorts of religious importance seems to have been strong enough to pull a lot of people in (by which, I would assume that Paul is to thanks for the presentation, since he was the Man). But the reality is that someone like Mohammed or Joan of Arc can point to actual, verifiable results in the real world. Jesus barely had any impact outside of his immediate family, from what we can tell from the Gospels. If Paul hadn’t come along, it’s likely that Mandaeism and other religions descended from John the Baptist would have swamped out the same territory (in Jewish circles). Instead, one presumes that Paul’s success helped to raise Jesus’ cred among the Jews to start taking up Jewish Christianity and Christian Gnosticism.
Jesus’ death, at the hand of the Jews, is a really hard hurdle to leap. You’ve got to explain why the Messiah didn’t become the King of the Jews except by self-declaration. You’ve got to explain why God had him killed just a few months into his ministry. You’ve got to explain why, if Jesus was a Jew and the Jews killed him, that all that stuff in the Old Testament about the Jewish people being the select precious children of God is up on its head now.
If Jesus had become the King of Israel and rebuilt the temple, that would make everything so much easier. Instead, his end is sort of ignominious and sort of justified.
There’s really nothing good about it that an author would choose to work with if he wanted to create an ideal founder for founding the Christian religion.
Wow - thanks. Makes a lot of sense.
I think what I’m realizing is a fallacy in the development of my thinking over time. Firmly accepting that the supernatural is BS, I think the same of Christianity. At some point as a young adult I realized the paucity of contemporaneous evidence of Jesus’ very existence. (Of course, many accepted historical events lack strong contemporaneous documentation.)
I think my reasoning began as, “there is very little evidence that Jesus the man existed, but even less evidence of Jesus the God” - as one aspect of my musing why otherwise intelligent people choose to accept this one irrational belief. Over time I think I lost some of whatever nuance my interpretation previously had.
Thanks. It is always nice to have the opportunity to revisit something that you believe you’ve knows so strongly for so long, that you’ve lost track of the fact that you are not thinking of it the same way as before.
The Bible
Josephus’s The Antiquities of the Jews
The Mandaean works (Ginza Rba, Book of John, etc.)
The Gnostic and Jewish Christian works
Granted, outside of Josephus, these could all be considered to be relics of what originally may have been a smallish community. But that community was large enough to start a few different religions that lasted a couple centuries, even if we exclude Christianity (which we can probably mostly attribute to Paul), and large enough that even Jesus was able to gain a handful of followers off of them.
And ultimately, there’s nothing particularly suspicious in the basic account of John. He had a reasonable sized group of followers that was large enough to make him get noticed, such that when he opposed the divorce of the local bigshot, he got executed.
With the standards of the time, it might be reasonable to conclude that even a hundred followers would be sufficient to earn you notice (getting executed as a political dissident wasn’t a high bar in those days). But, as noted, it needed to be a following big enough that 4-5 of them would be crazy and desperate enough to go follow Jesus around, so it couldn’t have been too small.
What was the recent discovery?
I don’t think that Jesus and his family were living quite the life of a beggar. They were probably a notch or two above. Traveling showman/mystic is probably more realistic given some other things we know. But it seemed worth pointing out that it is completely plausible that they were simple beggars and con-men from the information we do know.
Once that kind of reasoning has been accepted (Judas was taken down from his noose and lived for a least a few more days) then, yeah, you can put any idea forward and have it remain “scriptural.”
Jesus was secretly a woman. (Well, go ahead, prove otherwise!)
I was in a hurry with my earlier response. Let me add some extra info.
You’re taking my words a bit more literal than I was intending, though we have found caches of letters (e.g., the Elephantine Papyrii or the Hadrian’s Wall letters). My point was that, unless you believe that magic has somehow slowly faded out of existence over the course of history, then we should expect clear proof of amazing acts to have been historically noteworthy. If there was a guy raising people from the dead, the local rich people would be bribing him to raise their loved ones from the grave, or whatever else. They’d be beating down the doors of the local government, begging to let them intercede on Jesus’ behalf, so that they wouldn’t execute him and instead let him save people. There are a lot of ramifications to genuine miracles that we tend to ignore when reading fiction.
It’s safe to say that nothing magical has ever happened anywhere, ever, in the whole history of humankind. On the day it actually started to occur, that wouldn’t just be noteworthy, it would be revelatory.
I think I misread what you wrote, and it sounds like I misread what you wrote.
But no, here’s what I am suggesting occurred:
- Jesus starts a cult.
- Jesus dies.
- James takes over the cult.
- Paul persecutes some of Jesus’ cult.
- Paul falls gravely ill. One of Jesus’ followers takes him in and nurses him back to health.
- Somewhere in there, Paul decides that Jesus was awesome and that he knows exactly what the message was that Jesus wanted to preach all along (despite only having a vague impression from his interactions in court).
- Paul starts up a church, preaching “Jesus’s” message.
- Some years later, during a famine, Paul goes to save the original cult.
- While there, he convinces James to give Paul’s version of Christianity his blessing, and they haggle out a compromise where the differences between the two religions are split along racial lines.
Paul was not paying James to preach Paul’s religion. He was paying James to approve Paul’s religion as an official, stamped sub-franchise of the Jesus religion. Before that, Paul had to contend with the issue that what he was teaching was in conflict with what the people who had actually spoken to Jesus were teaching.
Judaism doesn’t consider Jesus to be anything but one in a long list of messianic pretenders.
I know he’s sometimes jokingly referred to as a rabbi, but it’s just a joke.
None of the people (and there were at least three) who wrote the Gospel of John were the disciple known as John, unless he lived to be like, 110, and even then, he’d still be only the earliest contributor, not the final redactor.
Cripes, John is a common name, and has been for more than 2000 years. My son’s name is John, and I know he didn’t write any gospels. There hasn’t been just one John in the history of the world.
Yup. (Guess I should’ve used a smilie face).
It is traditionally believed that John was the youngest of the apostles and survived them. He is said to have lived to an old age, dying at Ephesus sometime after AD 98. By which point he’d be around 90. Not that old. By most modern scholars The Apostle John is considered the primary source for that Gospel.
John 21:24 sez that the Gospel of John is based on the written testimony of the “Beloved Disciple”- ie. John.
Now sure, his disciples at Ephesus likely served as scribes, editors and perhaps even put finishing touches.
You are operating under a very specific assumption here, that Christianity is “founded on” the New Testament and that the New Testament contains everything we can reliably know about the life, times and teachings of Jesus and those around him. This is a peculiarly Protestant position (sola scriptura) that isn’t even shared by all Protestants, and I don’t think it makes sense either historically or theologically. Certainly there’s no reason I should accept it, since most Christians today and just about all of them pre-Luther didn’t. For one thing, John’s Gospel itself states that the New Testament is not a comprehensive guide, and for another thing, Christianity existed for several decades before the Gospels were written, even if you subscribe to early dates for the Gospels.
I think the much more accurate view is that Christianity, like any other religion, grows out of a set of traditions, some of which were later written down and codified as inspired scripture, others of which weren’t. Christianity is founded on scripture and tradition the same way islam is based on both Quran and hadiths, Hinduism is based on ‘heard’ and ‘remmebered’ texts, and so forth. The traditions that Judas survived hanging is quite old, going back to Papias who died in 130.
I’m not an inerrantist so it’s possible that either Luke or Matthew made an error about the death of Judas. It’s not for sure that they did though, it’s quite possible that both provide correct but partial accounts of his death.