• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    We don’t really have evidence of Jesus’ historicity.

    We have multiple written testimonials, period artwork, and documentation of the resulting mass movement.

    Almost nothing that would point to historicity in the gospels is corroborated by archeology… like was Pilot a person who existed? Yes, very likely he was. Is there biographies of him? Yes, there are contemporaneous sources showing him to be real. Is there anything, outside of the gospels, recount him meeting Jesus in any capacity let alone a whole trial and execution? No, there’s nothing like that.

    You could play the same game with Socrates. Dismiss the fragmented reproductions of - periodically contradictory and occasionally fantastical - accounts of the pupils of his pupils and he doesn’t exist either. Indeed, there Socratic problem tackles the root challenge of reconstructing the veracity of a 2000 year old figure’s existence. To complicate things, some of the earliest writings on Socrates known to exist are Gnostic Gospels (which contains fragments of a transcribed copy of Plato’s Republic).

    You disabuse yourself of historical Christian accounts at the peril of ignoring the accumulated history of the ancient world.

    just because New York exists it doesn’t mean Spiderman is real.

    We have real life video accounts of people in costumes identical to that of the cartoon character climbing buildings. What’s the line here? Are we saying nobody’s ever gained superpowers from a radioactive spider? Or that nobody’s ever dressed up in a costume like that to chase after petty criminals? Or that nobody’s ever climbed a building in that iconic outfit?

    If, two-thousand years from now, we discovered a written account of one of these performers along with a handful of comic book fragments discovered in a book case buried in a cave in the deserted island of Manhattan… what kind of conversation would you have?

    If we then somehow managed to resurrect a snippet of footage what would be concluding, then?

    You can dispute Magical Jesus with the same cavalier attitude as Spiderman. But this is more akin to disputing the existence of Eliot Ness by pointing to a stack of Dick Tracey cartoons and saying “Unbelievable!”