[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by #-3

I generally don't have an issue with the idea that there was a first century Jewish prophet named Jesus. I am pretty skeptical that his surname was the anointed one, although I would not be surprised if he took that name in public. And I feel a great deal of certainty that almost all of the stories about him were drawn from tales about the other prophets you are mentioning, which leaves me a little incredulous to the idea most of the stories of the new testament are about that guy or that he was particularly unique at the time.

I am not sure if you are being cheeky about this, but it is patently ridiculous to think that the scholarship dedicated to the historical Jesus is in pursuit of a Jewish prohpet whose surname was "Christ." That's just juvenile. I hope you are not so naive as to recognize that "Christ": is a Greacised form of the Hebrew title "messiah," and effectively identified THIS Jesus for his Greek-speaking readers as the anticipated "Anointed One" widely expected in sizeable circles within Judaism of that day and time. More properly, the historical Jesus—who was called המשיח (ha-Messiaḥ) or "ο Χριστοϛ"—was actually ישוע בר־יוסף, Yeshua bar-Yoseph: an apolcapytic prophet from Nazareth in Galillee, who had a not-insigificant following around the mid-20s CE in the region up and down the Jordan River valley.

So then, in the interest of accuracy, here is a primer on the historical Jesus:

1. Who was Jesus?
The historical Jesus was almost certainly the son of a craftsman—a carpenter or a stone-worker—from the rural backwater of Roman-controlled Palestine, who lived in the first-quarter of the first century CE. In line with traditional social convention of the time, Jesus was most likely trained and apprenticed by his father, and by trade was also a skilled craftsman by vocation.

He was born into and grew up in a time of religious and political volatility. The Jews—as they had been known since the Persian period—were a surviving religious oddity in the Ancient Near East, which was dominated by a conventional polytheistic worldview which was generally widely adhered to. In part as a result of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple of Solomon in 567 BCE, Judaism had developed a strong sense of monotheism, and an increasingly apocalyptic worldview which promoted the ideas of supernatural forces of good and evil locked in an eternal conflict for cosmic control. But also, the idea that the one and only "God" was the god of the Jews, YHWH, and while the cosmic war raged he maintained total control of the universe and would ultimately intervene to save his people from foreign occupiers and persecutors in "the Last Days." It was believed that at some point in the near future an earthly Jewish ruler who was anointed by God would arise and drive out the pagan occupiers of the Yehud—or Palestine—and would usher in a golden age of global peace and prosperity and religious freedom for the Jews. These were beliefs that had developed for hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, and which intensified with the transition of global powers from the Persians, to the Greeks, and then to the Romans.

2. What do we know about him?
So, by the time Jesus was an adult, he was also thoroughly indoctrinated in this persecution narrative, and for whatever reason he became convinced of his own role in this story as the anticipated Jewish messiah, who would bring down the Roman empire. Jesus was almost certainly the disciple of a popular prophet and charismatic Jewish leader named John, who performed ritual purifications of his followers in the Jordan River, and who promoted this idea that the messiah was on the cusp of emergence. Whether or not John supported Jesus's claim to this office is open for debate, but there is little doubt that at some point in the 20s CE Jesus began to amass a group of his own followers with designs on fulfilling this expectation. His following grew large enough, and his own delusions of grandeur were sufficient to stage an attempted takeover of the Jerusalem Temple in the week leading up to Passover. This attempt was unsuccessful, and was likely the root cause of alarm on the part of Jewish religious leaders and national rulers. It also likely got the attention of the Roman legions, who were already on high alert at this time of Jewish celebration. Jesus was charged with blasphemy by the Jewish Sanhedrin, and for insurrection by the Roman administrators, and the Romans crucified him as an enemy and a threat to the Empire. His body was most likely tossed into a mass grave with undoubtedly dozens of other political dissidents.

So, the death of Jesus proved to be such a traumatic turn of events for his eager followers that at least one of them began to have bereavement fantasies in which he (they?) imagined that Jesus had risen from the dead, in accordance with Jewish apocalyptic teachings which held that in the Last Days the faithful, the persecuted and the martyred would rise bodily from death. These followers began to spread this story about Jesus, and internationalized his teachings about a Jewish salvation to include the entire world. At some point, a belief in his divinity—most likely imported from Greek religion and Roman mystery cults—began to dominate ideas of who Jesus was and what he had done. Within a decade of his death, the movement had grown sufficiently large enough to have warranted opposition by force on the part of the ruling Jewish aristocracy, who was doing their best to maintain a very tenuous peace with the increasingly irritated Roman imperial government. One of the movement's most staunch persecutors, Saul of Tarsus, eventually become one of its strongest proponents. He was largely responsible for syncretizing this one expression of Jewish apocalypticism with Roman religious ideas, and for popularizing it among the most marginalized groups in Roman society—women and slaves. By the time of the late first century, "Christianity"—as it had become known—was significant enough of a movement to have followers across the Roman Empire, and had begun to massively circulate its own writings and teachings on a global scale. By means of an historical accident, Christianity came to eventually dominate the religious landscape of the Roman Empire. The first cause for this was the two Jewish rebellions in 65 and then in 130, which led Rome to crack down on the region, destroy the Jewish Temple, and eventually to extricate Jews from Rome. Roman suspicions about the Jews extended to also include Christians who were viewed as a religious and cultural oddity, but then also came to be understood as dangerous for their rather audacious opposition to the Emporer. Persecution of already marginalized groups bred populism, and martyrdom became increasingly incorporated into persecution fantasy that is Christian theology. It took another two-hundred years before numbers among Christians grew powerful enough to infiltrate the Roman government, and eventually led to first the tolerance of the religion, then its incorporation into the Roman pantheon, and finally adoption as the official religion of the state.

3. How do we know it?
Admittedly, the sources for the life of Jesus are not great, and are entirely restricted to the sympathetic testimony of Christian writings from the first century. Having said that, it is important also to recognize that the biased nature of these sources does NOT completely invalidate them on historical grounds. Biblical scholars and ancient Near Eastern historians are all in near universal agreement about the fact that the writings of Paul (c. 50–60 CE), and the gospels (c. 65–120 CE) provide useful historical information about the existence and nature of early Christianity, and the existence of an apocalyptic Jewish prophet named Jesus. So then, serious historians reject the miraculous aspects of the Gospels, and also take a VERY nuanced approach to the narratives they promote, which have frequently recasted the role of Jesus and his deeds in the form of much more ancient Jewish prophetic figures like Moses, Elijah and Elisha, and Jeremiah. Of course, this not at all unexpected for historical figures. This is what the early second-century BCE Jewish scholar Ben Sira did; Josephus—the Roman Jewish historian of the first century CE—does PRECISELY the same thing for a number of actual historical figures such as Ezra, the High Priest Simon, and the Hasmonaean priest kings of the second century BCE. Good historians are keen enough to recognize the aspects of the story which have most likely been embellished, the reasons for these embellishments, and the likely historical personages and events behind the embellishments. The Gospels and the writings of Paul are no different in this regard. That is, they contain elements of useful historical information about Jesus that historians can confidently use to reconstruct an approximate semblance of the person Jesus, behind the movement that became Christianity.

4. Why are we confident about what we know?
Historians are confident about the reconstruction I have provided above, and the relative value of the sources in the New Testament because these provide the MOST HISTORICALLY PLAUSIBLE picture of the period, the people involved, and the resultant sociopolitical and religious situation in second–fourth century Rome. I am painfully aware of hackneyed attempts by jaded, self-important or poorly trained "historians" to reconstruct a purely mythical Jesus, and to suggest that the historical Jesus did not ever exist. Every one of the small handful of alternative theories are deeply flawed, and have been summarily rejected by the scholarly community NOT because of some underlying religious biases, but rather because the theories are all laughably poorly informed and argued. The most successful is perhaps that of Richard Carrier, who is the ONLY scholar in history to have had a Jesus-myth theory published by an academic publisher. His incredibly boring, poorly written and tedious two books have been universally panned by scholars because he very obviously does not understand early Jewish history and religion. Carrier does not even read Hebrew and Aramaic! And as a result, he is limited only to English translations of all of the relevant primary literature, which has led to numerous tragically terrible misinterpretations in his own writings. The theory forwarded by David Fitzgerald is better written, but like Carrier's also suffers for being completely ignorant of the Jewish literature and history. At least Carrier is a scholar; Fitzgerald is a hobbiest.

So when I say it's controversial to Jesus existed, I'm of course not talking about the existence of guys named Jesus, I'm sure there was a guy in that area at the time named Jesus. I am saying the character of the new testament divine or not is probably mostly legendary rather than historic. This is where I think King Arthur is probably a good comparison, It generally starts with a guy like Aurelius Ambrosius a ex Roman War lord controlling the ethnically Latin people of the UK as the empire fell, then with every generation you layer in stories of Welsh kings, and Anglo-Saxon war bands until the story is codified ~600 years later. Likely whatever image of Jesus anyone is conjuring was probably formed in a similar fashion.

The Arthurian Legend is a terrible analogue because an actual Yeshua bar-Yoseph actually existed. His own teachings and deeds were most definitely greatly embellished, but I hope you can see that these stem from something much more credibly detailed than merely some first-century guy named Jesus. Unlike Arthur, the story of Jesus is not some piece-meal amalgamation cobbled together from earlier stories about legendary figures. The stories of Jesus are somewhat comparable to Josephus's Antiquities, or from a Medieval perspective, perhaps the writings of historians like Aethelwaerd or Bede. That is to say, the Gospels are "histories" in their own regard, but like all ancient histories also contain their own agenda-driven embellishments and literarily contrived a-historical structures. Now, while the Gospels are quite clearly NOT true histories by definition, they certainly are historical retellings of a sort whereby the principle figure is crafted into a MEANINGFUL narrative, and by which his virtues are exaggerated.