• jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I describe it like this… the earliest presumed mention of Jesus is in the work of Josephus around 93 AD.

    Now, there is evidence that this mention is, itself, a 3rd century “insertion” by the Christian transcriber Eusebius, but aside from that, let’s take 93 AD as “gospel” ;)

    So from the time of Jesus, to 93 AD, there is not one, single, contemporary reference. If you take the dating of his death sometime around 33 AD as accurate, that means, even following his death, nobody mentioned him for SIXTY YEARS.

    If you are to believe that story, you have to believe nobody was talking about a guy who did miracles. Or leave that aside as a later invention, nobody was talking about The Sermon on the Mount, which was likely his biggest claim to fame in his lifetime.

    The comparison I like to use is Elvis. We know Elvis existed because we have the photographs, recordings, contemporary evidence, and so on.

    Now, imagine NONE of that exists. Not only that, Elvis died in 1977. We would be, right now, 13 years away from the first written record of Elvis. (1977 + 60 = 2037).

    Unlikely doesn’t BEGIN to cover it.

    More on how Josephus may have been “modified” around the 3rd century to meet Christian ideas:

    https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437

    https://vridar.org/2015/01/16/fresh-evidence-the-jesus-passage-in-josephus-a-forgery/

        • Hypx@fedia.io
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          1 year ago

          We do not. Almost no written records from that time period has survived. Everything that we “know” comes from a copy of a copy, often made many centuries after the event.

            • Hypx@fedia.io
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              1 year ago

              Those are a handful of fragmentary texts. That actual proves my point.

              You are conflating the biblical version of Jesus and the historical version of him. The mythicist position has always been that neither existed, but the historical view has always been that the latter (and only the latter) existed.

                • Hypx@fedia.io
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                  1 year ago

                  You’re just another brain dead mythicist. Might as well claim all historical figures are comic book characters.