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It’s hard to be sure of anything that happened so long ago, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence, and scholars almost universally agree that there was at le
by wolfgang42 6y ago
It’s hard to be sure of anything that happened so long ago, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence, and scholars almost universally agree that there was at least a person by that name doing things in the area at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of... are two good places to start.
- finndark 6y agoAnecdotal evidence? Two thousand years later? "Consider the source!"
- wolfgang42 6y agoThe evidence which I described as ‘anecdotal’ starts a mere twenty or thirty years after Jesus’s death, and comes from sources who didn’t have any particular interest in promoting the Christian agenda. It seems that I may be unlikely to convince you, but if you’ve already got a strong opinion on this it might help to come at it from the other direction and start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#No_independent_eyewitness_accounts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#No_independ... first. Personally, I don’t really think it matters much either way (the events of a few decades being much less influential than the following two millennia of activities by people who did believe he existed), so I default to taking the word of people who’ve actually studied the matter in depth; but as he was one of several Roman-era Messiah claimants wandering around (we know of at least two others, and there were probably more whose names never made it into the histories we have) it seems reasonable that the group which happened to catch on would have also originally coalesced around an actual person.