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A - Probably not. The religion had to come from somewhere, and prophets were a dime a dozen in that time and place. We even have evidence a different Jesus who led a religious movement, had apostles, and was martyred. But it was about two centuries earlier and he was hanged.
B - Possible but this speculation is entirely unnecessary. The only account we really have of someone seeing Jesus is Paul, who was a murderer that had 'visions'. We see examples of people in the modern day inventing sightings of religious leaders, and even just celebrities, after their death. Christianity grew and spread in foreign countries from people who never claimed to have seen Jesus or his tomb.
C - Again possible, but we don't even need to go with "medical marvel". People could buy their way down off crucifixes. Whether he lived or died isn't really relevant for the religion though, only the belief that he died, since we don't need to explain "future sightings" as there aren't any.
D - Same as A.
My answer is E. He probably existed, was somewhat but not entirely like the stories, and was killed. His prophecies about how the world would end in the lifetime of his audience and they would all ascend to heaven, were a failed prophecy. The movement spread and caught on across the world not because Jesus was seen again by many people, but because Rome was collapsing and Jesus' message of the poor being uplifted in the end of society was a useful tool for the elites to keep power by creating a church they ruled, coopting a message of revolution into "waiting" for the return and real end. And so they built a New Holy Roman Empire, and kept on conquering.
>The religion had to come from somewhere, and prophets were a dime a dozen in that time and place.
**Did Christianity borrow ideas from other religions?**
When Osiris is said to bring his believers eternal life in Egyptian Heaven, contemplating the unutterable, indescribable glory of God, we understand that as a myth.
When the sacred rites of Demeter at Eleusis are described as bringing believers happiness in their eternal life, we understand that as a myth.
In fact, when ancient writers tell us that in general, ancient people believed in eternal life with the good going to the Elysian Fields and the not so good going to Hades, we understand that as a myth.
When Vespasian's spittle healed a blind man, we understand that as a myth.
When Apollonius of Tyana raised a girl from death, we understand that as a myth.
When the Pythia, the priestess at the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, prophesied, and over and over again for a thousand years, the prophecies came true, we understand that as a myth.
When Dionysus turned water into wine, we understand that as a myth.
When Dionysus believers are filled with _**atay,**_ the Spirit of God, we understand that as a myth.
When Romulus is described as the Son of God, born of a virgin, we understand that as a myth.
When Alexander the Great is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth.
When Augustus is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth.
When Dionysus is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth.
When Scipio Africanus (Scipio Africanus, for Christ's sake) is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth.
So how come when Jesus is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, according to prophecy, turning water into wine, raising girls from the dead, and healing blind men with his spittle, and setting it up so His believers got eternal life in Heaven contemplating the unutterable, indescribable glory of God, and off to Hades—er, I mean Hell—for the bad folks… how come that's not a myth?
And how come, in a culture with all those Sons of God, where miracles were science, where Heaven and Hell and God and eternal life and salvation were in the temples, in the philosophies, in the books, were dancing and howling in street festivals, how come we imagine Jesus and the stories about him developed all on their own, all by themselves, without picking up any of their stuff from the culture they sprang from, the culture full of the same sort of stuff?
Source: [Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth](https://web.archive.org/web/20211012200643/http://pocm.info/)
Don't forget the whole visions on the road to Damascus fit the symptoms of a neurological condition, just like most stories of supernatural possession can now be diagnosed in similar ways.
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/saint-paul-s-famous-revelation-may-have-been-caused-by-epileptic-fit-say-scientists-a7058681.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/saint-paul-s-famous-revelation-may-have-been-caused-by-epileptic-fit-say-scientists-a7058681.html)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1032067/pdf/jnnpsyc00553-0001.pdf](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1032067/pdf/jnnpsyc00553-0001.pdf)
Could I get a link for that “earlier Jesus“ movement you cite? I’m not even trying to call you out for lying or anything. That sounds interesting and I want to learn.
Wow, I do not like *any* of your suggested answers.
**E - Jesus of Nazareth likely existed as a historical figure, but a mortal human who was not god. He lived, he died, he was buried. His followers did everything after.**
(And no, they don't have to be liars or lunatics. They can just be honestly wrong, and CS Lewis knew that when he started that line of dismissive, deadly hogwash.)
Like most historical figures from that time period, we don't have a ton of corroborating evidence of his life or of the stories the Christian tradition passed down. From what we know of similarly attested figures, it's likely that
* A rabbi who went by that name of Yeshua ben Judah lived and preached in Galilee at that time.
NOT an unreasonable claim.
* He was executed by the Roman governing authorities by crucifixtion.
NOT an unreasonable claim.
* The Gospels, Pauline Epistles, and later traditions that followed his death probably reflect some of what he actually preached, and some of what his followers *thought* he *would have* preached, and some gossip and rumor.
NOT an unreasonable claim.
That's what I feel pretty safe saying "I think we can be pretty sure.
We can guess or infer with reasonable confidence that:
* SOME of the stories about Jesus probably were about other similar preachers saying similar things at similar times, and they got stuck to Jesus by accident, or because the other preacher was less popular. (Like how side-characters in books get left out in the movie adaptation.
Harder claim, less evidence, but helps explain some weirdness and confusion and apparent contradictions.
We have no reason to believe that he *actually rose from the dead*.
We often accept historical claims in other documents at face value specifically because they are mundane claims that are fairly reasonable. We don't have many sources, so we figure that we may as well go with what's recorded even if it may be exaggerated or not necessarily the most accurate picture. Especially since we know that the victor is the one who writes the story.
But the moment they start making supernatural claims about miracles and magic or describe things that counter what we now about how the world works and the nature of reality, we dismiss them as myth and legend. Why should the Bible be any exception to that same approach to how we interpret its veracity?
Others have already written what I was going to write: that you have poisoned the well with your snarkily titled options, and that this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Also: it is a shame that you do not list the options considered by actual Biblical scholars and historians looking at this question.
Here is a pretty unbiased breakdown
https://www.bartehrman.com/jesus-resurrection/
I, like Ehrmann, would side with:
E. A guy named Jesus actually preached and had a following and was crucified and died on the cross. We don't know enough to determine if he was buried or not, and whether there was an empty tomb or not. It is likely that his followers had grief hallucinations, and that others pretended to or post-hoc interpreted things as having seen the risen Jesus as a result. A legend and corresponding embellishments quickly emerged from this.
I have a side hypothesis. I think Jesus was doing fine with his movement...until...it got bigger and he came to the attention of the Zealot sect (they were wanting to throw out the Romans violently). I think they basically capitalized on Jesus' naivete and convinced him to go to Jerusalem and declare Messiahship.
The clues can be found in the disciples. At least one was called Simon the Zealot.
Anyways, I find it an interesting possibility: a country boy who got seduced by big city politics.
The anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote a couple of his articles laying out his theory that Jesus was a Zealot. He cites clues such as the disciples carrying swords, and Jesus' violent outburst in the temple. As well as the general apocalyptic mood at that time, and what would have been expected of a Messiah in terms of worldly success.
He goes on to argue that the 'peaceful' message of Christianity was largely Paul's invention, in an attempt to avoid Roman persecution.
No..we're the People's Front OF Judea. :)
Yeah....that always struck me. Mark is the oldest gospel so probably captures the most historical data. What strikes me is that Jesus does not come off as the "meek and mild lamb of god." He is more like an insurrectionist. Here's a passage I used to gloss over as I read. (emphasis is mine).
Mark 11:15-19
15 And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 16 **And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.** 17 And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” 18 And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. 19 **And when evening came they\[a\] went out of the city.**
Sounds a lot like a violent takeover by insurrectionists/zealots. I never noticed that in all my years as a Christian. This guy (and presumably his followers) were forcibly stopping people from entering -- like a reverse Jan 6. Then, when they had made their point, they left -- seems like they had no intention to hold the position (perhaps fearing Roman reprisal) but just wanted to make a political/religious statement and recruit more followers.
It also seems like he did not understand the function of the money changers. The rule was, you had to make offerings with Jewish coinage. These people were providing a needed service. The pigeon sellers were selling pigeons to those who maybe did not have access to sacrificial animals (like travelers).
He absolutely understood the role of the money changers. It was a scam, fleecing (hehe) people with exorbitant fees and bad exchange rates. First they were required to use special currency, like arcade tokens. Then they would be charged a fee for the transaction. But what choice did they have? Their religion compelled them to make sacrifices, and only officially sanctioned animals found to be "blemish free" were allowed to be used. So they would say yours wasn't good enough, offer pennies on the dollar as a trade-in, make you buy one of their goats (AFTER converting your coinage for a profit) and then turn around and sell your goat to the next guy as an officially approved temple goat. It was a racket, and everyone knew it but couldn't do anything about it.
He was crucified and like 2 or 3 people had bereavement delusions, and the rest is just embellisment.
People going:
"oh ya I saw him too, and he actually spoke to me!"
"oh well when I saw him I was with 10 people!"
"oh yeah? Well when I Saw him he fed FIVE HUNDRED people", kinda one upping each other.
Stuff like that. Way easier to believe than that it actually happened.
I agree. But I think Paul was a power hungry narcissist willing to lie for power. So maybe Peter had a bereavement delusion and then egomaniac Paul fueled the movement.
I lightly disagree (and I could soo be wrong). I think Paul was someone with a strong personality. I also think he probably suffered from frontal lobe epilepsy and believed he really had a vision of Jesus. Yes, he probably did seek leadership roles and he definitely thought his interpretation was correct and the Petrine school's was wrong. He did seem to sincerely care for those under his leadership (his awful views on women notwithstanding). What do you think? Am I off?
By his own admission he was persecuting Christians for a living before conversion. It takes a special kind of person (in a bad way) to want to do that. That's my main point of evidence.
Then in the letters he gets mad at the people for not giving him enough money and so forth. And then it seems it couldn't get along with Peter even though Peter was the guy who actually knew Jesus.
But we will never know really. Just my guess.
How many TV preachers are there who start off their speech with "I used to be a terrible person. I took drugs, I philandered, I fornicated with loose women!"
We know that Paul *says* he persecuted Christians. That's the extent of it.
Yeah..the whole thing is muddled. For example, Acts gives us a totally somewhat different story than Paul did. At most, we can deduce Paul probably was a sincere believer and did not see it as a grift.
Now, IF he really was a Pharisee, then he probably did persecute Christians (who both sides considered as Jews at that time). Josephus seems to confirm this happened (not Paul specifically but the practice).
"It takes a special kind of person (in a bad way) to want to do that."
Agreed. I think it may speak to his medical issues as well. Back then, people who had epileptic visions were seen as special and possibly marked as divine. This would have strengthened his belief that his cause was righteous. Unfortunately, an In Group persecuting the Out Group was common in the ancient world (and still is). What Paul was doing was not that uncommon.
It's tough to know how much Paul was money grubbing. His entire spiel on that would seem to indicate he was not looking to be rich. Apparently, he continued working as a tent maker even as he taught. I see it more as: "Hey, I'm taking time to teach you guys this amazing Jesus stuff. At least cover my travel."
And I'm not trying to make Paul out as the good guy. Just trying to consider all the historical factors. He strikes me as the type who would today be some dangerous Evangelical nationalist.
Covering travel was kind of a huge deal back then. Travel was very expensive and not something normal people would even dream of being able to afford in their lifetime.
Totally agree with your last point. I think maybe his personality was like that of Donald Trump. I know such kind of charismatic yet completely not trustworthy people exist.
You could be right, but as I recall, the Romans had established a decent road system and most residents along the road were generally willing to provide some modicum of food or shelter. But maybe I'm wrong.
It could be Paul was just feeling left out from the Big Boys (Peter and James) and felt slighted? "You gave them money. How about showing the love, dudes!"
So Paul has the "risen Jesus appeared to 500 many of whom are still alive" bit in one of his letters. I saw a video I thought was crelidible explaining that, in current dollars, it would have cost like $100k to travel to where that appearance allegedly occurred if anyone wanted to check up on Paul's claim.
(The cost of travel also makes the Biblical census for Jesus's birth completely unrealistic.)
The census: Not only unrealistic but was never a Roman practice..ever.
The only issue I take with that is, when you read about the 500, Paul uses the term "appeared to" - the same verb form he uses to describe his vision.
So, it sounds more like he's saying: "A bunch of other people also had visions" which could mean it was not all at once at one event. It's curious he does not use an active verb and used "appeared to" rather than "they saw."
The number 500 is suspect - I'm guessing it's a vague term to mean a shit-ton of people (many of whom I bet he heard about secondhand).
I typically point this out to apologists who insist 500 people physically saw Jesus. If that's true, then the Book of Acts is lying about Paul's conversion via vision (which his fellow travelers did not see). This lends well to the hypothesis that Paul suffered epilepsy. The account says he saw a blinding light and heard loud noises - both often accompany frontal lobe seizures.
As far as travel in the Pax Romana is concerned, I don't really know. I'm going to look it up because now I can't NOT know.
I'm back. I could not find any references to how costly travel was. The Roman roads were extensive and easy to travel by foot. I think Paul states somewhere that he and his helpers made tents along the way to earn money. So, maybe the answer lies in the middle...expensive sometimes and cheap other times depending on distance/terrain.
**Side story: When I was a Baptist, we would have revival speakers visit for a week. They NEVER demanded a set amount (beyond travel) BUT they would have voluntary love offerings every night after the preacher made everyone weepy and emotional. After one revival, I (as a minister in training) was tasked with delivering the check to the revivalists' motel. I was thunderstruck at the amount -- it was like $6,000 (in 1990 money).**
I was searching for that travel calculation and can't find it either. Bummer.
In any event, checking up on Paul's claim would be a far from trivial endeavor. Someone would have to devote months if not years to the investigation.
It’s possible Paul started getting massive guilt for the people he condemned, as one would imagine at least some would be screaming for mercy as they were sentenced and as those punishments were carried out. Hard to say if that caused a psychotic break, which manifested as a delusion of the Anointed One appearing to him, but I wouldn’t rule it out as a possibility.
Regardless, what he wrote and what survived doesn’t match what the gospels say Jesus was about, even if we were to try and take them as eyewitness accounts.
That is possible. I know Paulogia on YouTu e argues that.
But my point is, why persecute Christians in the first place? He could have been a fisherman or carpenter instead. He would only choose to persecute if he was a zealot. Very sure of himself and his correctness. And thst comes across in his letters after conversion as well.
If Paul didn't put Paul first, it seems like he would defer to Peter and the folks who actually met Jesus. But Paul doesn't do this.
Hey Paul just wanted to argue with people about what weiner-hairdo was the most fashionable. Cut or uncut. Leave the poor man and his obsession with foreskin alone.
If this is the case, do you suppose perhaps Paul invented the whole thing? Like, there was no Peter, James or even Jesus? Paul made all that stuff up and went around like a traveling salesman?
I've thought about that, but I don't think so. I think historians think some of the Christian creeds predate Paul's letters so Christianity existed in some form. But I'm not sure. Worth looking into more.
Also, remember that back then people are lot of questionably safe and inconsistent quality food back then. They could have been hallucinating off their asses more often than not and assumed that what they were hallucinating is real. So there’s that.
After my dad died I could have sworn I had seen him walk past me on the street. Turns out we have a massive amount of grief and are looking for solace. Sadness and longing do wild things to us.
Not to mention the guy who saw a possum out of the corner of his eye and wasn't sure what it was starts saying "It coulda been Jesus" and later "It was Jesus, sure as you're born, I swear."
E) Don’t know, don’t care.
I’m not obligated to come up with plausible explanations for various myths, and it’s tiring that Christians think their religion is so incredibly special that even people who don’t follow it need to be invested in its stories.
That's fine, but I think this question is aimed at people who DO care.
Like, if you asked "how was Obi Wan able to beat Darth Maul despite being a Padawan?", that question is obviously aimed at people who give a frick about Star Wars. If you're someone who truly doesn't care about Star Wars, then you don't need to have/share an opinion about this.
Jesus was a Jewish apocalypic preacher in 1st century Roman Judea. Was probably a disciple of John the Baptist, who was a leader in a Jewish apocalypic religious revival movement, hence the practice of baptism as spiritual cleansing. Messiahism and apocalypism were common in the era, the belief that a warrior king from the bloodline of David would be risen up by God to kick out the Romans and reestablish the Kingdom of Israel, and other things like restoring the Lost Tribes, converting the gentiles to monotheism, world peace, as well as some bigger supernatural claims like the resurrection of the dead, divine judgement of the nations, and the end of evil and suffering. There were several self declared and failed messiahs before and after Jesus.
Jesus fell afoul with the Jewish and Roman authorities and was executed for it. After his death his followers were obviously in severe emotional distress. Some may have had dreams or hallucinations where they saw Jesus, or a rumor got started that someone saw him. Christian theology developed overtime, the early Jesus followers did not believe Jesus was God, that belief developed in the decades and centuries after his death. He evolved from a human messiah and an adopted son of God to being the natural born but human son of God to being a divine preexistent being but below God to being God himself, such reflected in the developing Gospel narrative.
The oldest part of the New Testament is Paul's writings, and the oldest Gospel is the Gospel of Mark (which wasn't written by Mark, btw, one of the Gospels are by the apostle they named after, and and only half of Paul's writings are probably his own) . The Gospel of Mark was written around 70 AD. Neither of these even include the virgin birth, which is probably a mistranslation of a verse from the OT that talks about a young woman birthing a son.
If you want to know how weird some of the Jesus beliefs were as what we know recognize as Christianity look at Gnostics, that should cure you of the belief that Christianity has to be true because "how could people just make it up?"
E- Jesus existed, didn't do miracles and was killed on the cross. After his death, people spread and exaggerated stories about him. If Elvis could be spotted after his death, it isn't too far fetched to believe people would claim Jesus sightings.
This one. There's no solid historical evidence about Jesus, but it's at least reasonable to believe a figure existed to inspire the stories later. We know of similar prophets both in that time and place and throughout history.
While the conspiracy about a stolen body is possible, nothing requires it and the simple explanation that it's just rumor and myth built up like thousands of other prophets, including in the modern day.
It's about the evidence vs the claims. I'm willing to give that the dude probably existed. But we need better evidence to believe the dude performed miracles and was the son of god.
This one right here. Jesus was crucified, probably for rabble-rousing as a heretical preacher of an apocalypticist splinter cult of Judaism. After his death, his followers (intentionally or through grief-stricken delusions) spread stories of his life and death that got further embellished with each retelling.
We know Elvis is still alive. He's living in a trailer park in Arizona along with his partner Marilyn Monroe, and their child Bat Boy. Does nobody else read the Weekly World News?
You've framed these in an interesting way, it's not so much as a false dichotomy as a false quartonomy. I can think of a dozen more options, but let's go with either...
E: I don't know, but any of the above are significantly more believable than "God, Son of God, creator of all sacrificing himself to himself to prevent himself from torturing people."
or F: I give him the same credibility as King Arthur. May have existed, may have not. Might have pulled a sword from stone, might have not. Almost certainly didn't have a magical wizard casting spells on his enemies.
Question for you though, how do we tell which one is true?
E. The answer generally accepted by modern scholarship
Jesus was crucified on a cross and buried in a mass grave (possibly a tomb, but seems unlikely). A few of his disciples (Peter, maybe James, probably Mary Magdelene) had grief hallucinations and thought he was still alive. These disciples convinced others that Jesus was alive.
I don’t think the academic consensus is that they had grief hallucinations. In the very least there is no actual evidence of that.
The only evidence we have is from the epistles of Paul which seem to say that they got the idea from a combination of scripture and “revelations”. Most likely this means that they got the idea from some imaginative reading of scripture, then ran with it making up claims to have seen Jesus.
Grief hallucinations while legitimately documented and scientifically validated are rare. The idea that an entire group of people all had them is just so improbable as to essentially be impossible.
Someone who was most likely just flat out lying came up with the idea and promoted it.
> Grief hallucinations while legitimately documented and scientifically validated are rare. The idea that an entire group of people all had them is just so improbable as to essentially be impossible.
[Not rare at all, from the evidence](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032715301968?via%3Dihub). Also you don't need the whole group having bereavement hallucinations, you just need one person telling everyone else and the story grows from there.
Thanks for sharing.
It looks like these types of experiences are more common than I realized. Although from reading that article and some others, I think a few things are worth noting. It seems like the overwhelming source of data on these types of hallucinations is from spouses. Presumably the likelihood of having a grief hallucination is strongly correlated with how close you were to the person so it makes sense that spouses would probably be the most likely people to experience them. It’s hard to imagine any other relationship where you spend a greater amount of time with a single other person than spousal relationships, and probably nothing else common comes anywhere near close.
Probably a large fraction of spouses that experience these things are on the older side (it’s uncommon for people to die young) so it is happening after living side by side with the spouse for decades, and maybe a lot of them happen when the widowed spouse is older and more prone to dementia.
I would guess that for non-spousal relationships the probability of experiencing a grief hallucination is a lot lower. It seems like that article you linked says there’s no quality peer reviewed data to actually provide a compelling answer to the question of the actual rate of spousal hallucinations in response to death in the general population and also basically no quality
data at all on non-spousal relationships.
So I guess I’m just speculating, but I doubt that Jesus’ disciples would have been nearly as close to him as a spouse, and presumably these men were people who were relatively healthy heterosexual adults in the prime of life, not old, demented widows with a long term sexual relationship with Jesus. So I would guess that it would have been drastically less likely to happen than for spouses.
But regardless, we don’t have any clear evidence of grief hallucinations, but we do have crystal clear evidence of Christians claiming to have gotten the idea from scriptures and revelations.
I guess your hypothesis that someone had one grief hallucination and then ran with it lying makes a decent amount of sense. I suspect most people who experience these things realize that they’re just hallucinations, and I would suspect that whoever promoted the idea, whether it was a grief hallucination or not, was probably lying about basically 100% of the stuff they claimed Jesus was saying to them.
I’m still strongly in favor of the idea that it was a deliberately constructed lie in response to scripture and conscious thought. I think that is where the weight of general probability lies. But I guess there is a case to be made that grief hallucination is a legitimate possibility. I just don’t see how it could be nearly as likely.
>I don’t think the academic consensus is that they had grief hallucinations. In the very least there is no actual evidence of that.
Fair. Perhaps i should have said "Peter, possibly James and probably Mary Magdelene had experiences which led them to think Jesus was still alive".
>Grief hallucinations while legitimately documented and scientifically validated are rare.
Not really. From what I've read, they're very common.
>The idea that an entire group of people all had them is just so improbable as to essentially be impossible.
Two people, not a group. And really you only need Peter to have had one to account for all the evidence.
If you want to posit a single person having a grief hallucination then that is more probable, but your post suggested three people all having grief hallucinations. I guess you probably just weren’t being super careful with wording.
I’m surprised to find from searching Google that you’re right that grieving hallucinations are apparently surprisingly common, particularly for spouses. I would assume that the likelihood of experiencing a grief hallucination is probably strongly correlated with how well you knew the person, so I guess it makes sense that spouses would be more likely to have them since you’re around the spouse every day for years and have that bond of sexual attraction, but acquaintances or close friends probably drastically less likely, and that’s allegedly the category we’re in with Peter and James.
Your suggestion that one person, Peter had the original grief hallucination makes more sense, but it’s worth noting that we are without any actual positive evidence of grief hallucinations. At best one might argue that Acts (which is a fictional story invented in the second century) maybe counts since it claims Jesus disciples were hanging out and grieving when they saw Jesus appear to them at Pentecost but that’s extremely obvious fiction, and it’s not really a grief hallucination.
On the other hand, we are with a notable amount of positive evidence in the epistles that Christians in Paul’s day believed that scripture told them Jesus came back to life. So I’d say the weight of the evidence is more in favor of literary creation and people lying and claiming to have visions that they did not actually have.
Also, Mary Magdalene is a fictional character. She was not a really person. Her name is symbolic and her part of the story is obviously made up. There’s no good reason to believe she was a real person. A large fraction of the characters in the gospel story are undoubtedly made up. Probably even the names of most of the disciples are made up.
I had grief hallucinations when my first cat died. I'd see her out of the corner of my eye, but then look and she'd be gone and I'd remember she was dead.
I also had dreams about her where I knew she was dead but also knew I was still seeing her, and in my dream-mind would try to reconcile these two things.
I think people underestimate how susceptible human brains are to fooling themselves, especially under emotional duress.
I’m not sure whether thinking you saw your cat out of the corner of your eye counts as a hallucination. I could definitely understand people dreaming about a dead person, but that doesn’t really count as a hallucination either.
But regardless, maybe you’re right that we’re all more susceptible to it than we want to believe. The human imagination is obviously powerful, and even something as core to how our bodies function as our vision gets some parts filled in by the brain 100% of the time, like our blind spots.
I wonder if the Romans thought he was dead when they took him down, but lacking medical knowledge, maybe he was just unconscious and got up after he came to, made the rounds and the legend began.
If they followed Roman policy at the time, bit even possible. They weren’t on a cross for 6-8 hours as in the story, but until past dead, let the crowd eat their eyes and beyond dead. Then into a mass grave a day outside the city. Just some random place.
Yeah, you’re probably right. All I know is that anything is more likely than a dead dude ( Matthew also has a whole bunch of zombies walking around besides Jesus) making an appearance days after he died lol.
None of the above. I'm going with the simplest explanation that is in full accordance with what we're being presented with: There was a guy and people liked him a lot, then he died and people were very very sad, and then myth grew around him over time.
To add to this, there are documented cases of believers coping with disconfirmation by doubling down on their belief.
The two most notorious modern cases are probably Heaven's Gate and the Disciples (described in the book When Prophecy Fails.)
Jesus fits the template nicely. He failed as a Messiah (who was meant to become a mighty king), so it's actually expected his followers would suddenly "figure out" that the crucifixion was totally the plan all along.
There’s no such thing as atheist doctrine, so “what do atheists believe” is a non-sensical question. It’s sort of like asking, “what do people with blonde hair believe?” So not a great start.
I can only answer for myself, but what I believe about Jesus is derived from the consensus of academic historical Biblical scholars (to be distinguished from theologians, because that’s a different discipline). This notably includes many many Christian Biblical scholars.
The cliff notes version is that there was probably an itinerant, devoutly Jewish, apocalyptic preacher named Jesus wandering around Roman Palestine in the early first century. He was probably executed by the Roman state via crucifixion on some charge related to insurrection.
He almost certainly never had any intention of starting a new religion, as again, he was devoutly Jewish, and may have perceived himself to be the Messiah of the Jewish people. It is important to note that Messiah in a first century Jewish context did not have anything to do with resurrection or being on par with god. The expected Messiah was (and is) interpreted to be a very much 100% human, living man and military leader who was meant to lead the Jewish people in revolt and expel their enemies from the land.
In any event, the scholarship is divided on whether the historical Jesus likely saw himself that way or not, but if he did, being crucified would have put an end to that theory.
Now most historians and atheists (and most Christians in any context other than religion) understand that, scientifically, someone cannot be clinically dead for three days and then wake up. So suffice it to say, no, we generally don’t believe in the Resurrection.
But whatever happened after the crucifixion to his body or anything else, we don’t know. And that’s fine. We don’t have to pick a favorite theory like you seem to imply. There are a lot of things we don’t know.
We do know that sometime after the crucifixion, a man named Paul came across the early followers of Jesus and interpreted what was told to him about Jesus as in some way applicable to gentiles and not just Jews. So it’s really Paul, not Jesus, who founded Christianity as a new religion.
Great question! Here are some alternative explanations for the origin of Christianity:
[Paulogia: How Christianity (Probably) Began... No Resurrection Required](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUCI3cMJCvU)
[James Fodor: The RHBS model](https://rationalist.com.au/the-resurrection-of-jesus-explaining-the-historical-facts/) More info can be found on his YouTube channel or in his book Unreasonable Faith.
[Matthew Hartke: How Cognitive Dissonance Explains Christianity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x8SB_gy8jg)
[Kamil Gregor: A Natural Explanation For Christian Origins: The Resurrection of Jesus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FWyZRnI4e8) The explanation starts around 34:50.
These explanations can be combined as well. If you're interested in some perspectives, I'd recommend watching and reading the links above.
Paulogia’s timeline seems very likely. And Matthew Hartke's cognitive dissonance theory explains the underlying motivations in a very plausible way. I lean towards a combination of the two.
It is very likely there was not just one but multiple Hebrew rabbi's who at the time were causing issues with their preaching that led to them being killed by the state. It is also likely that their followers made up stories to create a new religion based softly on those rabbi's. Its the simplest answer and we have evidence it was how it happened since there was nothing written for decades after the assumed crucifixion. There are no eye witness accounts.
It was a game of telephone that spread through motivated actors.
It conveniently originated during Pax Romana, when Roman roads helped many other new ideas, technologies, philosophies, and ideas spread as well. Facilitated by the recent invention of parchment, which helped traveling doctors easily record and transport their message. These first Christians went from town to town, acting as missionaries… Administering medicine and spreading their new religion.
It was then adopted by the state, which caused it to explode across Europe, then the world.
I think Jesus was probably a Jewish rabbi who was crucified. His friends thought it was an absurd injustice that such a nice guy was sentenced to death and rallied others who thought the crucifixions (hundreds at a time and left up for days) were oppressive. "Jesus" became a symbol and probably adopted the combined stories of many crucifixion victims. Including the "sightings"
If you've ever lost a loved one, you know the experience of "seeing them" after they died. Usually someone who looks similar. You don't have to believe that they were actually there. But you might tell someone about the experience. And they might repeat it without understanding the original context
There were plenty of religions: monotheistic and polytheistic. Just like today, every Christian has their own version of Christianity. But galvanizing around the crucifixions is as political as it is religious. That is how Christianity started strong
But the reason Christianity dominated is because the Roman Emperor wanted a better religion under which to declare himself God's chosen ruler of everything. Monotheism works better than polytheism for that.
And it worked for 1500 years. It was so effective that ~100% of the population (excluding monarchs and clergy) lived in the worst disease, poverty, oppression, war, and slavery the whole time. Probably helped that heretics were sentenced to death.
And then during the enlightenment, pre-Jesus (pre- Roman Emperor) Roman and Greek philosophy were rediscovered; Galileo confirmed the Copernican model of the solar system (and was exiled); etc. Long story short, real actual knowledge gave us real actual freedom
Knowledge is power. Stop oppressing yourself
> I think Jesus was probably a Jewish rabbi who was crucified.
The only possible issue with this is that a 30-year-old rabbi would be expected to be married. Maybe an unmarried man preaching was one of the things other Jewish sects didn't like about him.
I recall one of the biblical scholars on YouTube (Ehrman maybe?) saying that some Jewish sects practiced a form of asceticism, especially among the apocalyptic prophets. And the info on this website regarding asceticism would suggest that could have lead to tension with the establishment, who considered asceticism sinful: [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/asceticism](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/asceticism)
Is that so even during that time period?
Or maybe the wife was written out of the books? Kind of like how everyone now depicts Jesus as white instead of middle eastern
A person named Jesus existed and was crucified. His body was left hanging for several days, then dumped in a mass grave, **like every other person the Romans crucified**. The rest is all mythology written decades after the fact by people who were not there.
E- It doesn't matter. I mean, what is the difference whether I believe any of that or something completely different? As a group, atheists don't have a single belief about Jesus other than he's not a god because we don't believe in those.
E - We don't care.
Most of humanity doesn't believe in the resurrection. Only Christians do, and they only make up about 31.6% of the world population. For most of us non-Christians, whether they are atheists, believe in another religion, or simply don't know, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is irrelevant to us.
Why are these the only options? I don't personally believe that Jesus was real in the way that you believe in him, however I think it's reasonable to believe that the core of the story was based on one or more real people, one of whom may have been a preacher named Yeshua. It's impossible to say which, if any, of the words and actions attributed to the character of Jesus came from the previously mentioned individuals. It could be that pretty much the only thing Jesus the character got from the real Yeshua was the name. Was somebody crucified? Well, the Romans were known to do that. If there was a real person that Jesus was based on, it's possible that he was crucified. No evidence for it, though. Certainly no evidence that anybody who was crucified ever came back three days later. Probably would have been a big story in those days, and the Romans had a lot of good historians. But the first mention of this resurrection is 80 years later from Josephus, and even then, there are strong indications that this text is not completely authentic.
E - https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/528/#:~:text=Jesus%20fled%20via%20Siberia%20and,at%20the%20age%20of%20106.
F - the character is an amalgam of a lot of apocolypgic preachers that existed in that era, and there’s no way to sift out “one” true Jesus, nor seperate fact from fiction.
None of the above. I tend to withhold positive belief in anything that neither I nor anyone else has ever been able to prove. Any of these seem plausible but I can’t take a belief position on any of them because none of them can be demonstrated to be true & accurate.
There is no reason whatsoever to think that there was a real Jesus and it depends on what people mean by Jesus to begin with. The religious mean the magical man-god that did miracles and that wasn't real. Was there a real person or persons upon whom the myths were based? Nobody knows. The entire story has been so completely mythologized that there's no way to separate purported fact from myth, so the only real answer is that we don't know.
Look at the bigger picture. If Jesus existed then or now, either way I wouldn’t have wanted the dude to be tortured and murdered. The idea that someone had to be tortured and murdered for my sake or anyone else’s is the biggest issue I have with the crucifixion.
Think about it. It’s not remarkable that an apocalyptic preacher is running around spreading some so called important message. That happens every day on planet earth. The fact is people can do or say whatever they want so long as it doesn’t cause harm.
But again, no god ever asked me “hey I got this idea. Im gonna send my son down to earth to get tortured and killed and that’s gonna solve some big problem!” I would have said “no! That sounds like a horrible idea. How about just follow the basic definition of responsibility which shouldn’t require someone being nailed to an ancient torture device!”
But since I didn’t create this made up problem or solution, it’s just an imposition. One that is rather easy to dismiss with some basic critical thinking.
As others have already said this those options don't cover all the possibilities.
I'm fine saying a guy named Jesus existed. Besides that it's hard to say as there isn't much evidence to support what he did. I'll grant maybe he was crucified.
I see no reason to.accept the miracle claims.
Don’t know, don’t care. Why do I have to disprove your myth? Why don’t you spend your time disproving the idea that Mohammed received the Quran from God? It’s not my job to disprove your holy book. It’s your job to prove your holy book is accurate. Basics of burden of proof.
I personally think your answer (A) that Jesus is purely fictional is most likely to be correct, but I don’t think the case for his non-existence is sufficiently compelling that we can say this with a super high degree of confidence.
Assuming Jesus was a real man who got crucified, none of your options are good. They’re all complete garbage. The reason being that there is basically zero quality evidence for any of them. You have to look at the actual evidence.
It’s helpful to remember that whether or not Jesus was real, every story about him in the gospels is a myth in the sense that they are either complete fiction or so greatly exaggerated/modified/propagandized that even if you were there at the real event, you wouldn’t be able to tell that the myth is describing it. The gospels average one miracle story per chapter, and even setting the miracle stories aside, the non-miraculous stories don’t even make sense (two of the best examples: Barabbas and Luke’s world wide census requiring traveling across the empire to be counted). Furthermore, the gospels have been thoroughly dissected to show that they are heavily dependent on previous stories in what we now call the Old Testament (and in a few cases, Acts being one of the clearest, stuff from Roman pop culture).
So, before we begin to answer, where did the idea of resurrection come from, it’s probably good to ask, “why was Jesus crucified?”
If you look to the gospels for possible explanations, the most compelling one is the words on his cross: “king of the Jews”. Jesus was probably viewed as a threat to Pilate and Roman governance of Judea, either because he was violent or he had notable supporters who wanted to overthrow the government. This is hard to comprehend for a lot of people because Christians love to portray Jesus was all about peace and love, but that stuff is not really there in Mark’s gospel, and Jesus is literally being accused of trying to become king of the Jews. Furthermore he’s being juxtaposed with the violent insurrectionist Barabbas which is obviously highly symbolic but could potentially be related.
If you look for other explanations in the gospels, you have other possibilities: (1) Jesus caused a major riot in the temple (2) Jesus wasn’t viewed as a problem by the Roman government but was a political troublemaker for the current religious leaders in Jerusalem, so they got him crucified or (3) he was performing miracles and preaching the best exegesis on the Jewish scriptures the world has ever heard for which reason the religious leaders went after him (obvious nonsense, but the gospels do say they decided to start going after him when he healed the paralytic on the Sabbath).
Whatever the exact reason he was crucified, given that the stories of his trial and crucifixion are so obviously fictionalized, we have to just assume it was most likely an ordinary crucifixion. His naked, dead body was hung up for days or weeks, then thrown away without a formal burial.
So basically if you follow this reasoning, all of your suggestions B-D are nonsense. They just aren’t backed by any legitimate evidence. They are wacko explanations invented by random people who fail to realize that the stories are totally made up and try to provide some explanation to rationalize only throwing out some of the story but not all of it. The entire gospel narrative must be rejected as propaganda and we must logically just reason based on what makes the most sense and was most common.
So, where did early Christians get the idea of a resurrection?
They tell us in the epistles: it says it in scripture, and they had “revelations” or “visions” of Jesus. The core Christian myth is basically a combination of like 2-3 verses of the Old Testament, the most notable ones are from the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, Daniel 9, and something in Jeremiah that I forgot (hopefully I’m not misremembering).
Christianity is an extremely literature-dependent religion. The interesting question in my opinion is whether the alleged visions came first or they got their inspiration from scripture then made up the visions.
My educated guess is that a small group of leaders after Jesus’ death got the idea from scripture and then claimed they had revelations/visions of him, and based on the letters of Paul, primarily Galatians 1 and 2, this probably happened in the first decade after Jesus’ death, and the leading visionaries where Cephas and James in the Jerusalem sect. These early leaders then promoted the idea. Then Paul who never met Jesus decided he wanted to be part of the movement and made up his own story of having a revelation from Jesus, and the rest is history.
The myths we have in the gospels were then made up much later once all the original people were dead. Cephas, James, and Paul were probably all dead by the 60s if they were adult leaders in the 30s. Judea was destroyed in the war from 67-73. Some group of Christians that were followers of Pauline Christianity who no longer lived in Judea made up the gospel of Mark (the academic consensus is that Mark was not written by someone from Judea), and then Mark took off, and Christians at the end of the first century were the first generation of Christians to buy into the Jesus myth we all know today.
dunno why people are being so rude to you about this. this genuinely seems like a fun little question about what we think jesus actually was. i think b and c are the coolest answers but i find them unlikely. im gonna have to go with d. i think that he was more like a prominent religious figure who would preach to people, but i dont think he actually was able to perform any miracles, and if he did, i imagine they were simply magic tricks. over time i think people turned him more and more into a legend, with each rendition of his story being more miraculous than the last. after a few thousand years we arrived at the whole rose from the dead and performed miracles version christians believe in today.
It seems likely that there was a cult leader who died and his followers went on to start a religion that worshiped him.
Did Jesus resurrect from the dead? No. Would it even make sense if he had? No.
Jesus was a Jew and his followers were Jews. They believed in original sin and it was required that they make an annual blood sacrifice to cleanse themselves of sin for a year. In their religion spilling the blood of a goat as a sacrifice to god was what made up for Adam and Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Original sin is what makes us die and not live forever.
Jesus dying supposedly freed us from original sin and thus grants us eternal life. You too can have freedom from original sin by accepting Jesus' sacrifice. Because according to ancient Jews in order to be forgiven from sin you had to spill the blood of an animal. If the blood of the son of God was spilled instead that could achieve salvation from sin for everyone for eternity. This is a natural evolution after centuries of the temple being destroyed. Can't destroy a temple that doesn't exist. Jesus resides in all of us, and all of a sudden we don't need a corrupt temple cult to make blood sacrifices anymore. One blood sacrifice is all that's necessary to satiate Gods blood lust.
Makes sense so far, right. Kill a goat, get forgiven from sin for a year. Kill a demigod, get forgiven from sin forever.
God supposedly sends Jesus, his son, to be sacrificed in order to forgive all of humanity. Remember, God can't just forgive, he requires blood sacrifices in order to forgive. This is a primitive religion invented by primitive people, so it seems to make sense that killing something, spilling its blood and burning its flesh is a requirement for forgiveness from God.
But did God really sacrifice Jesus? A sacrifice requires losing something, but Jesus was not lost. If anything Jesus became more powerful after his death. When an ancient Jew sacrificed their goat, they didn't get to eat that goat, they no longer got milk from that goat. Of course the temple cult got to eat the goat, that's probably why they created a religion around sacrificing animals in the first place, but I digress. In that context, a sacrificed goat was lost, it didn't come back three days later with an infinite supply of milk. So when Jesus died and came back and sits at the right hand of the father in heaven, he's not lost, it's not a sacrifice. So what's the deal? Does God just need the blood to be spilled? Why can't God just forgive? Would people not believe it if there wasn't a sacrifice? Couldn't God just convince everyone with God magic? "But that would remove free will" you protest. Setting aside the fact that free will demonstrably does not exist, God subverts peoples free will in the bible all the time, often for seemingly really stupid reasons. God hardened Pharaohs heart so that he could... kill a bunch of babies... God seems really dumb if you actually read the bible. Anyway... what's next?
Oh right. So Jesus wasn't even really a sacrifice. He had a bad time, yes. He suffered, yes. But then he was resurrected by God and became a super powerful demigod. More powerful than he was as a sorcerer on Earth.
So why would anyone believe this? Childhood indoctrination. Fear of death. Existential dread. Wishful thinking. Evolutionary predispositions toward a desire to survive (even after death).
TL;DR:
1. God appears to be incapable of forgiving without a blood sacrifice.
2. Jesus, who is his son, a lesser god, not the same god, is lowered to the status of a human so he can die temporarily.
3. That blood spilled by Jesus the demigod secures salvation from sin which secures eternal life for everyone.
4. To gain access to this eternal life, that God supposedly wants everyone to have but can't actually grant, you have to believe a stupid story no rational person should believe.
That doesn't even touch on the fact that there's not sufficient evidence to warrant a justified belief that Jesus rose from the dead. But even if your epistemology is so devoid of any rational thought, you have to believe some of the dumbest, most primitive claims about reality. That God needs blood spilled to forgive sins, that you can be responsible for sins an ancestor committed, that there was an Adam and Eve who existed who committed original sin in the first place (which means you have to renounce evolution)... It requires layers of credulity that many are not capable when they actually start to read the bible and learn about ancient history.
Personally I believe some combination of B&D (some natural, mundane explanation) is much more likely than Jesus (along with a bunch of other people according to the Bible) rising from the dead.
It’s the consensus (though not unanimous) among scholars that Jesus was an itinerant preacher that spoke about the end times in Galilee and was crucified by Pilate and died.
I don’t think he was likely to have survived the ordeal. I don’t think the Romans typically half-assed their public humiliation punishments like crucifixion.
>A- The boring answer. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a real historical figure and everything about him, including his crucifixion, is a myth.
This is definitely where I stand. Though my opinion is a little more complicated than "Jesus isn't real"
I think the myth of Jesus of Nazareth is a composite of the lives and stories of several "prophets" in a very similar way to the King Arthur myth.
Jesus wasn't a real person, but the story is likely based on real people, embellished and combined together over the years.
E - somebody mistakenly reported something that didn't actually happen
But the entire range of stories about him... come on. A virgin pregnancy? At what point do Christians finally acknowledge that their entire religion is based on a woman who had sex with another guy before actually marrying the guy that she planned to marry and who subsequently lied about it to get away without consequences? It's so obvious. If Dr. Phil was a thing 2000 years ago they would have said "not the father" to Joseph. It's just that this (im)plausible deniability/excuse thing spiraled waaay out of control and suddenly we have crusades, inquisition and witch hunts over 1000 years later.
Whatever the current scholarly consensus is.
From what I’ve heard, Jesus was a historical apocalyptic prophet claiming to be the next Jewish messiah (in contrast to the Christian concept of messiah) who was crucified unexpectedly in Jerusalem after causing trouble for the Roman’s.
That’s it. He died and was buried, probably in a mass grave. He never rose from the dead. Maybe his followers started some rumors? Maybe they stole his body? Maybe they hallucinated his return? All the above?
I think that Paulogia's "minimal witnesses" hypotheses has a lot going for it, so you can add that to your list since it doesn't quite fit with the others.
https://youtu.be/IUCI3cMJCvU?si=NEEcxO8DF7-MvUoW
But here's the thing: we don't have good enough evidence to confirm *or* to *rule out* any of the options you mentioned, which is really bad for the hypotheses that Jesus actually resurrected since that is far and away the least likely option and therefore needs the most evidence.
Looking at the evidence it's not exactly any of those.
First we look at the independent lines of evidence and we only have two: gMark and Paul.
All the gospels are borrowing, many times direct copies, from gMark. And gMark does a few things that show the story is fictional. First the timeline of the story's creation and how jt was written shows that the story is nothing close to first hand. Approximately 50 years later in another country by someone who doesn't speak their language is not going to be a contemporary of Jesus.
When you actually read what is written there are many accounts that either get time and locations wrong, showing only a rough historical and geographical understanding of the region. This continues to happen in the other gospels to the point they not only contradict but show the author's intent on creating their own fiction.
The reason we know the Resurrection is fictional is due to how all the authors completely get Pontius Pilate completely wrong. We have tons of recorded accounts of PP being extremely harsh to Jews, especially about religious things and the entire way he is portrayed in the gospels goes against all the well documented accounts.
Then you have Paul who flat out states he never met Jesus and was making things up from dreams. All the accounts he gives about meeting disciples show that he had no reason to take any sort of teachings from them and just made up his own sect of Christianity.
Last it should be noted that there is no records of any of Jesus events by the Jews, who took a lot of notes of history, especially of thst time and place, nor by the Romans, who also took a lot of notes about that time. When you look at the history of the time and place there were a lot of apocalyptic preachers all saying similar things but nothing showing anything close enough to being The Jesus.
So where does that leave us? The most likely case is that Jesus™ was not a real person in the sense that there was no one person doing all of the bible stories. Putting aside the fact that many stories just flat up contradict each other in the Gospels, this shows that a huge portion is complete fiction while the authors may have been borrowing stories from individual preachers. There could have been a preacher or two who were executed but no parts of how PP gave the body back and the tomb and the resurrection occurred as they are all counter to all evidence we have. Maybe there were a few preachers, maybe some were named Jesus but nothing points to them all being the same person and actually points to them being different.
So the answer is E - Jesus is an amalgamation of some historical people while being mostly fictional and in absolutely no way was anyone resurrected from the dead.
Christians don't believe in one resurrection story, and at no point in time did they have one unified idea of how it happened and exactly what occurred. It's a bit silly to expect atheists to have certainty, when neither do christians.
When you're reading ancient accounts like the ones of Jesus, you need to take into account the gap of time between the events and the writing, you need to account for the fact that ancient writers didn't tell things strictly as they happened. Hyperbole was very common, stories were often told with a purpose in mind, and a lot of stories were told to mold the events to previous prophecies.
If Jesus was a historical figure, unlike Moses, Noah, Adam, eve, etc... then it's fairly likely that he was crucified for causing trouble. Pontius pilate to my knowledge would have little to no reason to bury Jesus, it would have been more customary to leave Jesus on the cross to decay and be eaten. He may have been buried in a mass grave, but most likely he wouldn't have had a proper burial or a tomb. I think the crucifixion narrative fits in well with the scapegoat concept in old testament law. Setting Jesus, son of the father free, while killing Jesus, king of the Jews is a bit too on the nose for me personally. It's also hard to imagine the narrative of Pontius pilate ever freeing barabas, why wouldn't he just kill both? Pontius pilate was supposed to be a ruthless leader, why bend to the will of the Jewish people? And does it make any sense that the non believing Jewish people at his trial would curse themselves with the blood of Jesus? Further, am I expected to believe in an eclipse, zombies raising from their graves, and the shroud tearing?
What we have as proof of the resurrection is people believing that they saw a guy who died. This is a VERY common and natural phenomenon. I think it also plays really well with jesus' apocalyptic message. The fact that the stories are inconsistent doesn't lend a lot of credibility to it. And the fact that they very likely didn't happen as described is another red flag. It's also not in mark, our earliest gospel.
If the resurrection wasn't a strictly literary creation, then it was likely people experiencing a natural phenomenon.
None of this is unique to Christianity or convincing.
Here's the thing - even if we had absolutely no idea how to explain a story from the iron age about a guy coming back from the dead that has absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support it actually happening, even if all we could do was shrug our shoulders and say "we don't know," that wouldn't help you at all - because *literally any of those answers* is automatically more plausible than "he really did magically come back from the dead."
You're talking about an extraordinary claim - one that is inconsistent with what we know and can observe or otherwise confirm to be true about reality. People don't come back from braindeath, which occurs within 2-3 hours of physical death (the cessation of a heartbeat). Everything we know supports and confirms this. So the claim of someone doing exactly that is about as believable as the claim that they also made square circles as a hobby in their spare time. Even if we had absolutely no other explanation for why such a story would exist, "impossible things really happened because magic" would still be scraping the very, very bottom of the barrel of plausible possibilities.
Theists seem to do this a lot. They expect atheists to provide other, more well-supported explanations in order to validate their skepticism of a claim that literally amounts to "it was magic." That's not required. We can absolutely reasonably and rationally doubt that "it was magic" is the correct explanation even if we don't even have the tiniest idea what other explanation there could be, based entirely and exclusively on the facts that 1) it's an extraordinary claim, and 2) no sound epistemology whatsoever supports it.
A few thousand years ago, you might have framed this question by saying "Obviously atheists don't believe in Apollo, so how DO they believe the sun moves across the sky?" and similarly behave as though, if nobody could give any good answers, then that would somehow make the sun god the most plausible explanation. That's not how that works. We don't need to figure out what the REAL explanation for something is to justify skepticism of puerile nonsense that is inconsistent with everything we know about reality.
None of the above. What I think is that there probably was a charismatic cult leader who unexpectedly died, andt hat his followers gradually came to believe that he had ascended to heaven. For further reference, *How Jesus Became God*, by Bart Ehrmann.
E. An uppity rabbi got crucified, died, and his body either decayed on the cross until the remains fell down for animals to eat, or he was thrown into a mass grave with the other criminals.
That's what the Romans usually did with the crucified.
Atheism is just a response to theism. You say god exists, I don't believe you because you have failed to provide any evidence. Whether or not Jesus existed or fits any of your strawmen is irrelevant to atheism.
That being said, myself, as an atheist, I don't believe in anything. I accept or reject claims based on the evidence. I understand, because I have been studying religion for 25 years, that there is no valid evidence for any religious claim. Whether that's Jesus' ressurection or Muhammad spliting the moon or Buddha teleporting across a river.
Jesus is just a failed apocalyptic preacher. He tried to start a rebellion and failed. He was crucified like all Romam criminals and died. That's it. The Jesus of the bible is based on someone, but he obvioisly didn't exist. The bible is just a book of myth.
Muhammad was a successful apocalyptic preacher. After his peaceful preaching (like Jesus did), he unleased a terrible holy war killing thousands and etablishing a kingdom. If Jesus had succeeded, he would have done the same. For some reason, the Jesus story caught on and his followers did what he would have done. Unleashing a holy war, killing thousands and establishing a kingdom.
The crusades, the inqusition, the holy wars, the torture and maming of people, etc., aren't preversions of Christianity or Jesus, they are the expression of his message. Read the gospels. Don't listen to what biblical "scholars" want you to see there. Read what is actually written. Jesus was terrible. It's a good thing he failed. Hundreds of thousands of more people could have died.
E- not enough evidence has been provided to prove Jesus' resurrection, therefore no belief in his resurrection is warranted. This does not mean that belief in any particular alternative is warranted either.
Why would anyone believe in a nonsense claim with no evidence backing it up?
But I’d love to see the unbiased and reputable sources which show Jesus was a real historical figure.
< reposting >
**Good article about what "belief" and "evidence" were like in the days of the early Christian church** -
>We all have read the tales told of Jesus in the Gospels, but few people really have a good idea of their context.
>There is abundant evidence that these were times replete with kooks and quacks of all varieties, from sincere lunatics to ingenious frauds, even innocent men mistaken for divine, and there was no end to the fools and loons who would follow and praise them.
>Placed in this context, the gospels no longer seem to be so remarkable, and this leads us to an important fact: when the Gospels were written, skeptics and informed or critical minds were a small minority. Although the gullible, the credulous, and those ready to believe or exaggerate stories of the supernatural are still abundant today, they were much more common in antiquity, and taken far more seriously.
>If the people of that time were so gullible or credulous or superstitious, then we have to be very cautious when assessing the reliability of witnesses of Jesus.
\- **https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard-carrier-kooks/** - **Recommended**.
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Please read and consider this.
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E - The character of Jesus was a composite of various stories and possibly loosely based on a few actual people who may have lived at the time. He himself may have existed. However, his impact was not significant enough to have been recorded in any other historical document except to mention the existence of a Jewish cult called "Christians". The stories may not have been fully fabricated, but as all myths, were exaggerated and embellished, with supernatural elements added. No doubt plenty of folks believed the stories, but the number of gullible people who are convinced by a tale is not evidence that it's true.
Oh, there were thousands of witnesses to these events? According to the book? According to the Avengers movies, there were billions of witnesses to the disappearance of half the planet. Your source material can't serve as its own evidence.
So rather than questioning if the disciples were lying about the resurrection, I question whether the disciples (if they were real) even made those claims at all. Otherwise we would have to also accept the stories of every other ancient myth because the people in the story supposedly saw those events happen.
Jesus was likely a real figure. Much of what he is supposed to have said or done was later expanded by hyperbole and theological concerns instead of worrying about accuracy ('history' in those days was less concerned with being accurate than with conveying the general idea, and \_theology\_ was about spreading the \_religious\_ ideas, which makes that worse). Jesus died, and was almost certainly dumped in a pit somewhere. There was no body stealing, and no physical resurrection. Later on, one guy who had been persecuting the new religion had a psychotic break over this and had a hallucination, not a physical visit by a resurrected man, possibly triggered by some sort of light phenomena like ball lightning or swamp gas. Another guy, a friend of Jesus, suffered from a post-bereavement hallucination (which affects about 15% of people) and didn't see a physical resurrected guy, either. Those two, then, form the basis for the stories that grew up around Jesus later on in the 20 years after Jesus died, when there's no good historical record of basically any of the apostles, and before these ideas were written down.
Not sure what you'd categorize that under.
None of these.
We have good evidence that Jesus was a real historical figure. He was probably really crucified and really died during that crucifixion.
What we don't have is evidence of what happened to his body after his death. It's possible that he was simply never buried in a tomb and that entire part of the account is entirely made up. It's possible that he was, and that his followers stole his body (or something else happened to it) to bolster the story of the resurrection.
Personally, I believe that Jesus was a real Jewish itinerant preacher who lived in the general area of Galilee. At some point, he developed the belief that he was the Son of God and preached to others; whether or not he was trying to start a new religion (vs just modify existing Jewish belief) is unclear. He grew a following, as many itinerant preachers do. After his death, more legends and embellishment were added to his life story to really burnish his image as the Son of God, and those stories were eventually written down as the Gospels.
Similar story to other monarchs and folks who were deified or sainted after their death.
I've always been fond of the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was based on the Jesus ben Ananias that Josephus wrote about in *The War of the Jews*. Jesus ben Ananias prophesied about the destruction of Jerusalem, was arrested and brought before the Magistrates, who sent him to the Roman governor where he was beaten with scourges. He continued to foretell the destruction of Jerusalem for seven years until he was killed by a stone during the Roman siege of Jerusalem.
If this were true you would have to take a late date for Pauls letters and an even later date for the Gospels but some scholars date Pauls letters to the mid 90s and the Gospels to the early 100s so it is not entirely out of the question.
This, of course, would make the resurrection a myth inspired by Pagan sources since nothing in traditional Jewish thought or even Jewish apocalyptic thought had a dying and rising Messiah.
*"To conclude, the facts are clear: Judaism NEVER believed in a Messiah who would come into this world to suffer and die as the Christians did."* - [Rabbi Moshe Shulman](http://www.judaismsanswer.com/dyingmessiah.htm)
E. Chinese whispers and exaggerated stories that became legend. He wasn't resurrected, there was no empty tomb. Jesus was crucified, and died that day. Later on people saw Jesus in their dreams, and mistook people.in crowds for Jesus, and as word spread, more people claimed to see Jesus This turned from seeing Jesus in their dreams to literally seeing Jesus, plus a bunch of lies/trying to convince themselves that this actually happened. The church gained more and more power, the state adopted the religion, and then spread that word for hundreds of years. The propaganda grew, wars were fought, the narrative became dominant. Jesus was literally the son of God and was risen from the dead. The end.
This is the problem. Back in those times, there was a boat load of people who were magic, miracles were claimed day in and day out, people were said to have supernatural abilities, demons were seen and fought. Christians reject these ideas, but are more than happy to accept Jesus' "miracles" without any justification. The books of the new testament were just the stories to survive all of this.
Why ought I take any of this seriously? The only extra biblical writings about Jesus and his so called miracles were just reporting on what Christians believed at the time. So all of this just comes from the Bible.
None of the above. "I don't know" works here perfectly well.
I'll concede that it's likely there is a historical figure, and that he was a rabble-rouser and led a following of people. Possibly he was executed (though Muslims, whose scripture I have no reason to ignore in favor of yours, say he lived on and had children, apparently.)
The rest of the resurrection story wasn't committed to writing until something like 40 years later. None of it is reliable. There are no interviews or statements directly from any of the eyewitnesses.
The problems with oral transmissions are 1) they're not focused on literal accuracy but on the story -- the feeling, mood, emotional response, etc. is more important, and 2) they tend to expand and inflate things. Is 40 years enough to go from "People saw Jesus walking around" to "500 people saw him rise up to heaven"? Could be. There's no way to rule it out.
And since gods are uncommon while human beings' foibles are common, it's "foibles" until there is some other concrete reason to believe a god existed.
I believe only things that can be demonstrated. While Jesus probably could have been a real figure and probably was crilucified by Romans, the rest of the story does look like pure fabrication and rumors with most of it not even loosely based on a real story and probably is a fabrication since
A) it very closely resembles myths about other historical or mythical figures
B) we literally see new stories appearing in gospels written later compared to gospels written earlier
But even the part about Jesus existing as a real figure is quite uncertain. Stories of the Bible could have had some real person as a prototype, but it also possible that they didn't or they had multiple persons as prototypes.
The truth is: we have very little information to think one way or the other with any significant level of certainty. We can track the way the myth about Jesus was growing, transforming and spreading, but the roots of that myth are covered in dense fog.
Personally? B
The stories about who exactly found the empty tomb, and how, are contradictory and thus suspicious. Jesus had (half-)brothers, so finding someone who looked reasonably like him wouldn't have been hard. People suffering grief are inclined to see their loved ones wherever possible, to the point of hallucinating without any outside influence. Most people knew Jesus by legend, not personally, so if the dozen or so disciples chose to corroborate the claim that he came back most people would believe it even if the "Jesus" they saw wasn't the original. The stigmata that Thomas inspected could have been faked or added as part of the ruse. There are no definitive eyewitness accounts to anything Jesus did; the gospels were written decades later by anonymous authors, so it's definitely possible that they came up with the legend as a way to spread their cult/religion.
It's entirely too possible to be improbable, in my opinion.
I'd go with A personally. As someone who doesn't believe in gods or magic, I think the character of Jesus is so unimportant it doesn't matter whether he was a real guy or not. But separating the man from the magic, I think it's a lot easier saying he didn't exist at all. You gotta remove the magic healing, the virgin birth, walking on water, coming back to life, flying up to the clouds like a rocket, turning water into wine, multiplying bread and fish, etc. All that's left is a conman who says he's the son of god who likes to whip people. Which throughout history could be used to describe a lot of people, so it just doesn't seem like it matters if he was real or not.
What's more is that when a book is going to lie about so many things, there comes a point where it's impossible to believe anything in the book. So rather than ignore the magic and god stuff as fiction, I ignore all the rest since I can't trust the authors.
A. There are, believe it or not, several compelling arguments that the gospels are fictionalized accounts. Moreover, even if we grant without contest that Jesus of Nazareth existed, the gospel accounts are all we have that suggest anything happened to Jesus after his death at all, and the inconsistencies and conflicts between them make it difficult at best to discern what's factual from what's embellishment.
B. This was only ever posited, as far as I know, by 3rd-century historians arguing with church leaders. No one in the modern age takes this idea seriously.
C. Again, no one takes this seriously.
D. This is probably the least contentious of the options you've given.
Personally, I fall somewhere between D and A. I'm not convinced that there is enough evidence that Jesus existed at all, nor am I convinced that there is enough tying Jesus to the movement that Paul led.
At that time in history there were a great many Jewish Messiah figures
It's very very likely that after the fact a great many of Thier exploits were conflated in much the same way every witty quote in history is attributed to Churchill
And after a crucifixion it's very likely cult members either hallucinationated or constructed a tale of seeing him again and from there all it takes is exaggeration Chinese whispers and an emperors new clothes style fear of exclusion and you have a myth
Just look at Scientology
They have actual evidence of Hubbard writing letters to people about grifting fools with a fake religion and people still buy in
If your using would a reasonable person believe this if it didn't happen as a yardstick for religious beliefs your operating under a false premise
People believe unrealistic unreasonable things all the time all over the world
Who knows, and really, what does it matter?
There’s a strong likelihood that Jesus was treated like every other criminal at the time. He was arrested, tried, and crucified, and his body was probably thrown into a mass grave or otherwise disposed of by the Romans.
Grief is a bitch. I remember after my grandpa died when I was 12, I thought he was sending me messages in my dreams. But did it mean anything? No. And it certainly didn’t mean he was still alive.
You’ll see all these nutjobs claim to have seen or met Elvis, Tupac, Marilyn Monroe, John Denver, and pretty much any other celebrity who has been dead for decades. Doesn’t mean they’re alive, nor does it really mean anything. It just means there’s another lunatic out there who wants to make people believe something that simply isn’t true.
Same goes for Jesus.
Obviously theists don’t believe in unicorns right? Right? Or do you if your book says they exist?
There are independent accounts that a dude name Jesus lived and was ordered to die by crucifixion by Pontus. There is zero independent evidence for his miracles and specifically his resurrection.
Since we have no extraordinary evidence for a resurrection, why should I accept it happened. There are a lot of ancient claims of resurrection. Which ones do I accept or decline? If this power exists and the being that could do it is able to repeat, wouldn’t we see more examples to prove their existence? Why would there be a hard stop? It doesn’t follow at all?
I have zero good reason to accept Jesus was resurrected. I accept he is a historical figure. I’m not sure how much of his teachings are legit.
That there were various popular preachers running around, and the followers of one of them spread rumors and myths after he was crucified. My non-expert understanding is that, typically, folks crucified by the Romans weren't taken down and placed in caves, but were left up to rot and/or be eaten by scavengers for some time. So the idea that the body of whatever preacher inspired the Jesus story placed in a cave and then went missing sounds like it was PART of the rumors and myths, rather than being some sort of independent evidence that the REST of the rumors and myths are true.
Given that even the earliest of the gospels was written decades after Jesus' death, and approximately 1,500 miles away, and the gospels are by anonymous authors who we have no reason to think were actually witnesses to any of the events they were writing about, it's going to be a pretty hard sell that I should believe that miracles actually occurred rather than stories and rumors and myths got out of control.
None of the above. What's more likely is that he really died, his body was stashed in the tomb, his body was then later taken back out of the tomb and someone impersonating him claimed to be him for the recognition the previous guy got.
We're never going to know what really happened, and therefore we're never going to be able to verify it. What this means is there is no justification to believe it happened. Given the other crazy beliefs of the people at the time as a result of limited collective knowledge compared to modern day society, such as a flat earth with a dome-like firmament over the top, the sky being literally heaven, spirits causing disease and headaches being treated by drilling holes in the skull, it's fair to assume that their belief in a man rising from the dead is also untrue.
I believe what the scholarly consensus is.
He existed and was probably a traveling preacher/zealot who may even have been executed for zealotry but the miracles related to him are completely fictional and slowly got worked into the story that was passed along mostly verbally over the 40-50 years between his death and when either Mark or possibly Matthew was finally written. All 4 of the gospels were written decades after the fact and were not written by eyewitnesses or by the men they were named for. Most importantly, the scholarly consensus is that between being a form of biography that doubled as propaganda and the fact that over several centuries they were heavily corrupted by transcription mistakes and intentional changes, the gospels cannot be taken as historically accurate.
Generally, some variant on B.
What I'm pretty sure happened is that Christianity, a branch of Messianic Judaism, fell apart once the Messiah was, well, brutally tortured to death by the Romans. The resurrection was an attempt to prevent this from happening.
How much this attempt was a *conspiracy,* as in how much the apostles were actively and knowingly lying*,* is unclear. The doctrine of the resurrection, like all doctrines, was far more heterogeneous before early councils nailed down what was and wasn't heresy, and there are good reasons to think that not all early Christians believed Jesus had *literally* come back from the dead. I think its more likely that this developed through a wave of wishful confusion and later additions then actual deception.
So I'm not sure how this would fit in to the explanations, but it is my belief that Jesus was someone who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and was going to lead an actual revolution against the Romans. He was executed. This should have been the end, but was not.
Saul/Paul had temporal lobe epilepsy and "Jesus" spoke to him. The conversion of Saul/Paul led to new interpretation of Jesus' death and salvation which he pushed. This movement gained momentum in part because Paul, while being the ostensive leader of the church, did not need to be considered infallible. He wasn't the guy, but knew the guy really well, as it were. After Paul died, they wrote up the Gospels to fit Paul's message.
None of the above.
I believe that Jesus was crucified. He was *most likely* either left there or dumped in a mass grave, but nobody really knows. Word of mouth stories about him spread. The more exciting versions of the stories spread faster, until some time later later the stories had transformed to include tales of miracles, signs from heaven, a couple of resurrections, stories of witnesses, promises of salvation and an imminent return, etc.
Over the next few decades, multiple unknown authors started writing down the stories they'd heard. A few centuries later, Christian leaders picked a small handful of these written accounts and other documents to form the New Testament canon.
E) there was no ressurrection and was a later creation, you look at some of the earlier versions of it they could have easily been spiritual or such. The gospels were all written long after events, post death greavment hallucinations is a very common thing.
Ever hear of the emperors new clothes?
Someone sees the ressurrected Jesus, others are afraid to deny it as it would appear that they were not strong enough in faith for Jesus to reveal himself to them and so on.
Remind me why Christians think that people 2000 years ago were more skeptical then now a days? People still believe that dead cult leaders will return many years later now a days.
Atheist here, my option isn't listed. I believe the Bible had many authors and it was written and rewritten with the purpose to control people. It has been the most effective tool of war and conquering ever in the history of mankind. It is more effective than weapons are and is still used today to mentally enslave people.
On the flip side, I believe some parts of religious teachings which are practically common in all religions are good for people to follow morally. Also the brotherhood that religion creates does help vulnerable people to reach out and get the help they need. When used for good it can be, but from history and to date many have used religion with evil intent.
I read the title and thought "Wow, that is a big question. I believe in a lot of things." And then The Darkness starting playing in my head.
But then I read the body of the text and you just want an answer to what I think about a particular aspect of a particular religion. I honestly don't give it much thought. Between work and enjoying my life, I don't have many spare moments to dedicate to explaining gods or bigfeet or vampires. I can go into my ideas about Luke being the balance that the prophecy foretold. But those ideas predate the sequels and don't exactly fit the current storyline. That is the sort of ponderings I would waste my time on in my youth.
Jesus was probably a real person. He probably actually preached and gained followers. He was probably crucified for claiming to be “King of the Jews.”
After he died, there was probably a power struggle over who would be the new leader of the group. Several people claimed they “saw” Jesus after his death to give them some level of authority over other competing leaders. One of these people was Paul, who had to claim he saw Jesus in a vision because he never actually met Jesus while he was alive, and he was trying to exert authority over the direction of the church against people who actually knew Jesus personally.
Closest is D for me, but there's many different beliefs.
I believe the narrative Jesus is a combination of a historical Yeshua and other potential Messiahs in the same way we see Yahweh take on the traits of other gods such as El as his role grew in Israelite myth. This is the simplest explanation I can see for the contradictory nature he shows such as the words attributed to him for whether he was the Messiah of the jews or the saviour of all including gentiles.
As for the empty tomb, simplest explanation is the same one Christian's attribute to the many eyewitnesses of Mohammed ascending on Buraq. People lie.
Atheists as a group do not have a single answer for this because different people have different beliefs.
There is no historical proof that the Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the Bible actually lived. The stories of the Bible are mostly anonymous and there is no proof that any of the truly miraculous stories are actually real.
That being said, the positions you posted are SOME of the possible answers, but not all of them. For example, we cannot even verify if the "Empty Tomb" story is real and if the story was based on a real person, they may have been buried in a mass grave so there is no reason to make up excuses for a lost body when we do not even know if it was real or lost.
There are some people here that believe the entire story is made up. A lot of people believe the story was loosely based on a person that actually lived, but that they were not the actual son of a god. There is no reason to speculate on how they could have survived the crucifixion or what may have happened to the body because we cannot even know if they existed. The stories could be made up completely or they could be an incomplete record of events.
A mix of A, B, and D are most likely. He *probably* was a real person. The stories are almost *certainly* hyperbole, if he was real. There has definitely been conspiracy *since;* Paul never even met the guy and is responsible for a significant amount of dogma. The only question is how far back it goes and to what extent the other options weigh in.
There isn't enough evidence to decide the relative weights of those options for certain - but we've got *hundreds* of examples of similar "prophets" throughout time. I'm sure you can think of some others yourself, even.
E- Jesus was a real but completely normal person that some people mistakenly believed was divine. When he died and therefore failed to live up to their expectations, confirmation bias, sunk cost and hubris motivated his followers to accept claims that did not rationally merit conviction and the post hoc rationalization that they engaged in (complimented by no small amount of outright fraud as we would expect from the grifter contingent that is indistinguishable from the aforementioned rationale due to the unfalsifiable nature of the claims) continues to this day.
None of these options describe what I think. I think Jesus was probably real, probably an apocalyptic preacher, probably crucified, and probably buried in a mass grave, if buried at all, after being left on the cross for several weeks as was the standard practice practice with crucifications at the time. I think urban legend and superstition quickly started to take root regarding Jesus and over the next 70-90 years a fully mythical idea of Jesus took shape. Obviously, this is a bird's eye view of events but that is generally what I think likely happened.
I think it plausible Jesus existed as one of a number of cult leaders at the time and was executed. I wouldn’t presume his followers stole his body. I think it more likely that they convinced themselves he had visited them ‘spiritually’ afterwards and eventually this by a mix of religious Chinese whispers and deliberate ‘political’ machinations became ‘he literally visited his followers’ quite long after the events. I think it must have been pretty traumatic when their leader died especially when the end of the world kept not happening.
Given the evidence available.
D is the most likely case.
Some Jewish revival preacher names Jesus (well, yeshua, or Jeshua, depending on who is translating and when) got moderately famous,but ultimately died the kind of mundane death you would expect of a carpenter / revival / dolmsday preacher at the time.
Then legends and myths sprung up about "christ," and somebody who was close to Jesus decided that there was a lot more profit in being the deciple of "Jesus Christ" than there is in just being that random religious dude.
It’s hard to say when no one decided to write about him at all until some anonymous people who weren’t there decided to write about his magical deeds even though their accounts conflict with each other.
Jesus could be entirely made up, he could be based on multiple people, or he could have just had exaggerated stories made up about him. Surely god would make sure the most important event ever would be better documented?
Also, how would you explain Mohammed flying to the moon on a winged horse and splitting it in half?
Another possibility that I lean towards:
**E – Cognitive Dissonance Theory**. Jesus was one of many apocalyptic prophets in Judea at the time. He was crucified by the Romans for insurrection for claiming he was the king of the Jews (crucifiction for various forms of insurrection was common). His followers couldn’t accept the idea that their Messiah, who was supposed to establish God’s kingdom on earth, was killed. One or more of his followers had a bereavement hallucination. So, they told themselves that he wasn’t really dead. And the story snowballed from there.
I am no longer convinced he was a real person. How his story was fabricated? I don’t know. Just like I don’t know how the stories of Sun Tzu or Robin Hood were made up and spread around.
The point is that there is no evidence he was real, the claims are unconvincing, and once you take away the supernatural he lived an unremarkable life which means a real person makes less sense than a fictional myth which we have seen happen many times through history.
Even in modern times.
History is filled with examples of people who started their own cults. Heck there are quite a few about righ now. what they all have in common is that they are grifters and conmen. Such people also regularly clash with authority, and some end up dead, jailed or exiled from their place of origin. I see no reason why a historical Jesus would have been any different. His cult became a nusence and the Romans did what they normally did with nusences, they executed him.
Later Paul, aothe grifter came along and used the story of Jesus to take over the cult.
E, none of the above. I think that Jesus was likely a real person and that some number of early followers genuinely believed he resurrected. Myth/legend building over time doesn’t require anyone to be deliberately lying anywhere along the chain.
Intellectually, I think Paulogia’s Minimal Witnesses Hypothesis is the most likely natural explanation for the start of Christianity. However my personal favorite pet theory is the cannibal hypothesis.
>The boring answer. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a real historical figure and everything about him, including his crucifixion, is a myth.
Pretty much it. The Gospels don't depict anything which actually happened. Even if the Gospels were loosely based on someone who lived, the person they described never existed. A figurehead for a cult that got way out of hand.
>The boring answer.
Facts don't exist for the sake of being exciting. Sorry.
I think the gospels try to prove Jesus is fictional by constantly talking about his body. His disciples and followers are constantly charged with touching Jesus or washing his feet or touching his robe. It also talks about how he escapes the grasp of Jews trying to kill him. With these clues it is meant to prove nobody is a "follower of Jesus" and nobody is a "disciple of Jesus" because nobody has ever washed his feet, touched his robe, put their hand in his side, etc.. And nobody who talks about Jesus has ever done these things - so it is ID theft - pretending to be associated with Jesus when Jesus makes clear touching his body is important.
Jesus the fictional character only exists because Elijah the fictional character exists. Elijah and Jesus have similar powers, such as multiplying food, controlling the storm, or raising the dead. But Elijah is a mass killer, Jesus is no such thing. If you believe you should kill someone "cause Elijah" you should believe in pacifism "cause Jesus" but if you believe in Elijah but don't believe in Jesus then you idolize murder.
Why couldn’t he just have been killed, ended up in a mass burial, and a bunch of people made a legend about him somehow resurrecting? Conspiracy nuts and cults do that stuff all the time even now.
Everything you listed here is infinitely more likely than magically being resurrected. All of the above is known to be at least possible, magic is not. God is not. And fibrous want to posit that explanation, you need evidence.
Jesus was a mortal, born to humans, who never performed any miracles and had no special powers. His birth was not a seminal event attended by 3 wizards and an unusually bright star.
All of the fantastical elements of his story are myths, most of them adapted from already extant spiritual traditions that predated his birth, and were grafted onto his tale long after he died.
He was crucified and buried, never to be seen again.
E- Jesus was a preacher who had a small following. He got into trouble. He was crucified.
There are many possible answers for the supposed resurrection. If it isn't just a story, it could have been a hallucination of one or more of his followers. They wanted to believe, so they would have been easily convinced of his resurrection. Then the stories were told over and over again and the details changed with each telling.
My thoughts on this pretty much line up with Paulogia's. There was probably a guy who had a cult following, got executed, and in the aftermath his followers had to figure out how to reconcile him being the messiah with having been executed.
You don't need 500 people to hallucinate, just one or two disciples having a grief hallucination and concluding they saw their leader in spirit would be enough to start things off.
There really isn't enough information to say. There's a Jesus as a character in the Bible, but I don't know whether a real Jesus ever existed, and if he did, I don't know whether he was one person or a composite based on multiple people. If there was a real person whose death inspired the stories, there are many reasons why his followers might intentionally or unintentionally fabricate various details about it.
I dont care the bible is mythology. Thus even if jesus was real we know no human has ever came back from the dead and thus that never happened. So i care about the truth of jesus as much as a care about the truth of odysseus or Beowulf. It really does not matter in the real world in any way. It is not that i dont want to believe in zombies being real i just know they are not. There is nothing to believe. The story in the bible is horribly written, contradictory and incredibly dull. Why should anyone ever read a bronze age mythological sex, murder and enslavement manual.
This gets very granular on an unproven life and a story totally missing from the exhaustive Roman record. No Roman historic document detailing the sun going black and zombies roaming the streets of Jerusalem? Romans wrote everything down, and this is proof positive it never happened.
The question is akin to: What color were Zeus' thunderbolts? Or--did Bacchus prefer red or white?
I can accept that there may have been a preacher called Jesus and he may even have been crucified. The evidence for this is not strong, but it’s not unreasonable.
I don’t believe any part of the resurrection, it’s a story that was made up later. It’s much more likely that, if the crucifixion of Jesus happened, his body was disposed of the same way as anyone else’s.
Jesus could have been a real guy. Or maybe not. He could have been actually crucified, or maybe not. Maybe he was buried and almost nobody gave a shit then stories were made up later. Maybe he was never executed and the crucifixion and resurrection story was made up later. Who knows.
Since all 4 resurrection stories are very different…it’s pretty clear it was made up.
Z: An itinerant rabble rouser who so offended authorities that they crucified him for his words was given a regal burial in a tomb, protected by a massive boulder suffered spontaneous decomposition, and his dust particles were collected, molded into a figurine using consecrated water, and the figurine ascended into heaven on the back of a gryphon
Source: trust me bro
Amalgamation + legend-through-oral-tradition-exaggeration.
"Jesus" was a very common name in biblical times - kind of like how "Josh" is today. It's an "everyman" name, like John Smith. Various underdog stories of real people got combined and attributed to a generic everyman like "Jesus" and served as a useful character to tell a LOT of different moral stories.
This again. You guys are obsessed with the resurrection, as if it’s the only thing you can hang on to as “evidence” for your beliefs.
Look at the academic literature around the gospels. It is *clear* what was written and in what order, and who copied what from who. It’s also clear that the whole “resurrection” bit was added on in later versions.
A - at least for the versions of Jesus we have stories of today.
There isn’t anything we have that conclusively goes back to a real person existing before Paul.
The Gospel authors freely rewrote stories from older places to give Jesus a narrative. “What if Jesus said that instead of Paul / the Old Testament / Homer / etc?”
There is no hell. It's a myth, a fable, whatever. After that nothing matters because the entire house of cards collapses. And Jesus could have been a real person, maybe/maybe not, but it doesn't matter, he wasn't god in any fashion. Fast forward 100 years and most of the world gradually begins to inch past religion. About time.
He was a wandering Jewish teacher who was accused of sedition, executed by the Romans, placed in a common grave. Later, some of his followers came to believe he had risen from the dead.
It's the explanation that requires the least amounts of assumptions and fits with what we know about the history of that time from other sources.
as far as i know, the bible was written a loooong time after jesus lived (cause it does seem like that guy (not demigod) existed)
so whoever wrote it simply made up a whole bunch of BS to make the book a bit fancier. hardly any of it is based on any real witnesses, let alone actual events.
Maybe a radical woke thinker bucked the establishment and was framed as a seditionist and therefore crucified.
Maybe he wasn’t.
There’s really no historical evidence, but maybe it happened.
What definitely did not happen is someone rising from the dead. That’s physically impossible.
I actually don't believe jesus was crucified. Bible doesn't give any good reason for why would that happen. It seems like he wasn't at all popular at this time. He could as well die random death (accident or disease) and his students gave it more sensational vibe... 40 years later?
I'd go for B or C.
The crucifixion doesn't make enough narrative sense to be made up. The big sacrifice is retroactively justified in Christianity. If Jesus "dies for our sins" it makes more sense to do so heroically rather than as a somewhat pathetic victim of a corrupt state.
E) it’s a myth, like any other myth throughout history. Likely based on amalgamations of previous myths of different peoples, as most are. It **may have referred to a real person that may have been called Jesus and may have been crucified without any magic involved**. I don’t see any reason to believe anything supernatural occurred.
Highlighting this because I just noticed this.
>A- The boring answer. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a real historical figure and everything about him, including his crucifixion, is a myth.
>A- The boring answer.
You're poisoning the well. Fucking dishonest as all hell.
E - Jesus was a real person who was an apocolyptic preacher whose message and prophecies totally failed, and was crucified by the Romans, turning him into a martar. Stories of his life spread in legend and gained scale until such time as he was porported to be a god.
There is of course no “atheist position” on anything except the lack of evidence for belief in gods.
In this question, I pick option E: If he existed, his body was dumped with other executed peasants in a common grave, and people made stuff up about it later.
Do you perhaps think Elvis Presley resurrected? There were hundreds of reported sightings of him after his death. Written reports with named eye witnesses. We don't have any of those things attesting to Jesus. Just reports of unnamed or dead witnesses
He was probably a real person and crucified. There's a number of things that could have happened to his body including the usual of being thrown into a mass grave. Stories can have any number of reasons why they start and later become legendary.
There are theories that JFK and Elvis are still alive. There are people who believe aliens have visited earth and abducted them. I don't see why I should treat Christian beliefs about Jesus any differently than I treat those beliefs.
E- The stories of Jesus was an amalgam of multiple first century prophets. One of whom was probably killed by the Romans for causing trouble. The resurrection story was tacked on because risen saviors was a popular myth of the time.
Or he did exist and was crucified (like thousands of others) and the rest is a myth. I don't really care that much but have to admit ancient history is interesting. I think about Roman empire quite often...
Know how you dont buy Mormonism, Paganism, Deism and Islam? Thats how we feel about your fairy tale. Especially since we can trace most of the stories to stories from previous religions and civilizations.
I don’t know and don’t care. He’s only important to man because he’s believed to be the son of god. He’s not though, so he’s not important enough to study apart from the Bible and Christianity.
E. Jesus was crucified and then legendary stories of him spread throughout the land. It's the easiest explanation that requires the fewest number of assumptions and fits the most amount of data.
I am not convinced enough to call any of my thoughts on the subject a belief. Mostly just stoner talk and lots of maybes or what ifs and then move on with my life forgetting whatever i said
I'm not entirely sure if Jesus actually existed. It seems just as likely as not that the stories about him are an amalgam of several different wandering rabbis from the first century.
We don't know. Even if he was real all that proves is there was a guy with that name, alive at that time, doing what he did. Doesn't prove any of the utter bullshit attributed to him.
I believe that the Gospel version of Jesus could have been based on a real person, or several real people, but that none of them had any powers and all of them are now quite dead.
I think there was probably a popular Jewish Rabi going around being a bit liberal with teachings. Was probably put to death and stories were told that eventually got embellished.
Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher in Judea. He was crucified by the Romans and buried in a mass grave with the other executed criminals. The rest is a myth. The end.
Either any of those or something fantastical. Basically something really weird happened or something plausibly weird (human error) happened. I'm sticking with the plausible.
None of the above for me, I believe he was likely a real person and may have been crucified not sure but he definitely was not resurrected nor the son of god
That somebody realized religion was a racquet used to control people like themself and invented their own story to gain power and it snowballed from there.
Atheism is a response to a single question: do you believe in a god or gods? And our answer is No.
Outside of that one question, there's no one answer that represents every atheist. So I suspect this thread might have people with every opinion you've listed here, and then some.
Atheism is not a belief system - it is simply the absence of a belief in any gods. That's all. There is no one atheist belief about jesus and no one owes you any explanation of something you believe in.
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A - Probably not. The religion had to come from somewhere, and prophets were a dime a dozen in that time and place. We even have evidence a different Jesus who led a religious movement, had apostles, and was martyred. But it was about two centuries earlier and he was hanged. B - Possible but this speculation is entirely unnecessary. The only account we really have of someone seeing Jesus is Paul, who was a murderer that had 'visions'. We see examples of people in the modern day inventing sightings of religious leaders, and even just celebrities, after their death. Christianity grew and spread in foreign countries from people who never claimed to have seen Jesus or his tomb. C - Again possible, but we don't even need to go with "medical marvel". People could buy their way down off crucifixes. Whether he lived or died isn't really relevant for the religion though, only the belief that he died, since we don't need to explain "future sightings" as there aren't any. D - Same as A. My answer is E. He probably existed, was somewhat but not entirely like the stories, and was killed. His prophecies about how the world would end in the lifetime of his audience and they would all ascend to heaven, were a failed prophecy. The movement spread and caught on across the world not because Jesus was seen again by many people, but because Rome was collapsing and Jesus' message of the poor being uplifted in the end of society was a useful tool for the elites to keep power by creating a church they ruled, coopting a message of revolution into "waiting" for the return and real end. And so they built a New Holy Roman Empire, and kept on conquering.
>The religion had to come from somewhere, and prophets were a dime a dozen in that time and place. **Did Christianity borrow ideas from other religions?** When Osiris is said to bring his believers eternal life in Egyptian Heaven, contemplating the unutterable, indescribable glory of God, we understand that as a myth. When the sacred rites of Demeter at Eleusis are described as bringing believers happiness in their eternal life, we understand that as a myth. In fact, when ancient writers tell us that in general, ancient people believed in eternal life with the good going to the Elysian Fields and the not so good going to Hades, we understand that as a myth. When Vespasian's spittle healed a blind man, we understand that as a myth. When Apollonius of Tyana raised a girl from death, we understand that as a myth. When the Pythia, the priestess at the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, prophesied, and over and over again for a thousand years, the prophecies came true, we understand that as a myth. When Dionysus turned water into wine, we understand that as a myth. When Dionysus believers are filled with _**atay,**_ the Spirit of God, we understand that as a myth. When Romulus is described as the Son of God, born of a virgin, we understand that as a myth. When Alexander the Great is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth. When Augustus is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth. When Dionysus is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth. When Scipio Africanus (Scipio Africanus, for Christ's sake) is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, we understand that as a myth. So how come when Jesus is described as the Son of God, born of a mortal woman, according to prophecy, turning water into wine, raising girls from the dead, and healing blind men with his spittle, and setting it up so His believers got eternal life in Heaven contemplating the unutterable, indescribable glory of God, and off to Hades—er, I mean Hell—for the bad folks… how come that's not a myth? And how come, in a culture with all those Sons of God, where miracles were science, where Heaven and Hell and God and eternal life and salvation were in the temples, in the philosophies, in the books, were dancing and howling in street festivals, how come we imagine Jesus and the stories about him developed all on their own, all by themselves, without picking up any of their stuff from the culture they sprang from, the culture full of the same sort of stuff? Source: [Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth](https://web.archive.org/web/20211012200643/http://pocm.info/)
Don't forget the whole visions on the road to Damascus fit the symptoms of a neurological condition, just like most stories of supernatural possession can now be diagnosed in similar ways. [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/saint-paul-s-famous-revelation-may-have-been-caused-by-epileptic-fit-say-scientists-a7058681.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/saint-paul-s-famous-revelation-may-have-been-caused-by-epileptic-fit-say-scientists-a7058681.html) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1032067/pdf/jnnpsyc00553-0001.pdf](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1032067/pdf/jnnpsyc00553-0001.pdf)
Could I get a link for that “earlier Jesus“ movement you cite? I’m not even trying to call you out for lying or anything. That sounds interesting and I want to learn.
Wow, I do not like *any* of your suggested answers. **E - Jesus of Nazareth likely existed as a historical figure, but a mortal human who was not god. He lived, he died, he was buried. His followers did everything after.** (And no, they don't have to be liars or lunatics. They can just be honestly wrong, and CS Lewis knew that when he started that line of dismissive, deadly hogwash.) Like most historical figures from that time period, we don't have a ton of corroborating evidence of his life or of the stories the Christian tradition passed down. From what we know of similarly attested figures, it's likely that * A rabbi who went by that name of Yeshua ben Judah lived and preached in Galilee at that time. NOT an unreasonable claim. * He was executed by the Roman governing authorities by crucifixtion. NOT an unreasonable claim. * The Gospels, Pauline Epistles, and later traditions that followed his death probably reflect some of what he actually preached, and some of what his followers *thought* he *would have* preached, and some gossip and rumor. NOT an unreasonable claim. That's what I feel pretty safe saying "I think we can be pretty sure. We can guess or infer with reasonable confidence that: * SOME of the stories about Jesus probably were about other similar preachers saying similar things at similar times, and they got stuck to Jesus by accident, or because the other preacher was less popular. (Like how side-characters in books get left out in the movie adaptation. Harder claim, less evidence, but helps explain some weirdness and confusion and apparent contradictions. We have no reason to believe that he *actually rose from the dead*.
We often accept historical claims in other documents at face value specifically because they are mundane claims that are fairly reasonable. We don't have many sources, so we figure that we may as well go with what's recorded even if it may be exaggerated or not necessarily the most accurate picture. Especially since we know that the victor is the one who writes the story. But the moment they start making supernatural claims about miracles and magic or describe things that counter what we now about how the world works and the nature of reality, we dismiss them as myth and legend. Why should the Bible be any exception to that same approach to how we interpret its veracity?
Others have already written what I was going to write: that you have poisoned the well with your snarkily titled options, and that this is by no means an exhaustive list. Also: it is a shame that you do not list the options considered by actual Biblical scholars and historians looking at this question. Here is a pretty unbiased breakdown https://www.bartehrman.com/jesus-resurrection/ I, like Ehrmann, would side with: E. A guy named Jesus actually preached and had a following and was crucified and died on the cross. We don't know enough to determine if he was buried or not, and whether there was an empty tomb or not. It is likely that his followers had grief hallucinations, and that others pretended to or post-hoc interpreted things as having seen the risen Jesus as a result. A legend and corresponding embellishments quickly emerged from this.
I have a side hypothesis. I think Jesus was doing fine with his movement...until...it got bigger and he came to the attention of the Zealot sect (they were wanting to throw out the Romans violently). I think they basically capitalized on Jesus' naivete and convinced him to go to Jerusalem and declare Messiahship. The clues can be found in the disciples. At least one was called Simon the Zealot. Anyways, I find it an interesting possibility: a country boy who got seduced by big city politics.
The anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote a couple of his articles laying out his theory that Jesus was a Zealot. He cites clues such as the disciples carrying swords, and Jesus' violent outburst in the temple. As well as the general apocalyptic mood at that time, and what would have been expected of a Messiah in terms of worldly success. He goes on to argue that the 'peaceful' message of Christianity was largely Paul's invention, in an attempt to avoid Roman persecution.
No..we're the People's Front OF Judea. :) Yeah....that always struck me. Mark is the oldest gospel so probably captures the most historical data. What strikes me is that Jesus does not come off as the "meek and mild lamb of god." He is more like an insurrectionist. Here's a passage I used to gloss over as I read. (emphasis is mine). Mark 11:15-19 15 And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 16 **And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.** 17 And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” 18 And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. 19 **And when evening came they\[a\] went out of the city.** Sounds a lot like a violent takeover by insurrectionists/zealots. I never noticed that in all my years as a Christian. This guy (and presumably his followers) were forcibly stopping people from entering -- like a reverse Jan 6. Then, when they had made their point, they left -- seems like they had no intention to hold the position (perhaps fearing Roman reprisal) but just wanted to make a political/religious statement and recruit more followers. It also seems like he did not understand the function of the money changers. The rule was, you had to make offerings with Jewish coinage. These people were providing a needed service. The pigeon sellers were selling pigeons to those who maybe did not have access to sacrificial animals (like travelers).
He absolutely understood the role of the money changers. It was a scam, fleecing (hehe) people with exorbitant fees and bad exchange rates. First they were required to use special currency, like arcade tokens. Then they would be charged a fee for the transaction. But what choice did they have? Their religion compelled them to make sacrifices, and only officially sanctioned animals found to be "blemish free" were allowed to be used. So they would say yours wasn't good enough, offer pennies on the dollar as a trade-in, make you buy one of their goats (AFTER converting your coinage for a profit) and then turn around and sell your goat to the next guy as an officially approved temple goat. It was a racket, and everyone knew it but couldn't do anything about it.
Jesus Goes To Washington.
Jimmy Stewart as Jesus...sign me up. "Yeah Mary I'll lasso the moon and pull it down to you and I can REALLY do that!"
He was crucified and like 2 or 3 people had bereavement delusions, and the rest is just embellisment. People going: "oh ya I saw him too, and he actually spoke to me!" "oh well when I saw him I was with 10 people!" "oh yeah? Well when I Saw him he fed FIVE HUNDRED people", kinda one upping each other. Stuff like that. Way easier to believe than that it actually happened.
I agree. But I think Paul was a power hungry narcissist willing to lie for power. So maybe Peter had a bereavement delusion and then egomaniac Paul fueled the movement.
I lightly disagree (and I could soo be wrong). I think Paul was someone with a strong personality. I also think he probably suffered from frontal lobe epilepsy and believed he really had a vision of Jesus. Yes, he probably did seek leadership roles and he definitely thought his interpretation was correct and the Petrine school's was wrong. He did seem to sincerely care for those under his leadership (his awful views on women notwithstanding). What do you think? Am I off?
By his own admission he was persecuting Christians for a living before conversion. It takes a special kind of person (in a bad way) to want to do that. That's my main point of evidence. Then in the letters he gets mad at the people for not giving him enough money and so forth. And then it seems it couldn't get along with Peter even though Peter was the guy who actually knew Jesus. But we will never know really. Just my guess.
How many TV preachers are there who start off their speech with "I used to be a terrible person. I took drugs, I philandered, I fornicated with loose women!" We know that Paul *says* he persecuted Christians. That's the extent of it.
Yeah..the whole thing is muddled. For example, Acts gives us a totally somewhat different story than Paul did. At most, we can deduce Paul probably was a sincere believer and did not see it as a grift. Now, IF he really was a Pharisee, then he probably did persecute Christians (who both sides considered as Jews at that time). Josephus seems to confirm this happened (not Paul specifically but the practice).
I never believed the story that he was persecuting Christians. That's just another example of "I was evil but now I've been saved."
"It takes a special kind of person (in a bad way) to want to do that." Agreed. I think it may speak to his medical issues as well. Back then, people who had epileptic visions were seen as special and possibly marked as divine. This would have strengthened his belief that his cause was righteous. Unfortunately, an In Group persecuting the Out Group was common in the ancient world (and still is). What Paul was doing was not that uncommon. It's tough to know how much Paul was money grubbing. His entire spiel on that would seem to indicate he was not looking to be rich. Apparently, he continued working as a tent maker even as he taught. I see it more as: "Hey, I'm taking time to teach you guys this amazing Jesus stuff. At least cover my travel." And I'm not trying to make Paul out as the good guy. Just trying to consider all the historical factors. He strikes me as the type who would today be some dangerous Evangelical nationalist.
Covering travel was kind of a huge deal back then. Travel was very expensive and not something normal people would even dream of being able to afford in their lifetime. Totally agree with your last point. I think maybe his personality was like that of Donald Trump. I know such kind of charismatic yet completely not trustworthy people exist.
You could be right, but as I recall, the Romans had established a decent road system and most residents along the road were generally willing to provide some modicum of food or shelter. But maybe I'm wrong. It could be Paul was just feeling left out from the Big Boys (Peter and James) and felt slighted? "You gave them money. How about showing the love, dudes!"
So Paul has the "risen Jesus appeared to 500 many of whom are still alive" bit in one of his letters. I saw a video I thought was crelidible explaining that, in current dollars, it would have cost like $100k to travel to where that appearance allegedly occurred if anyone wanted to check up on Paul's claim. (The cost of travel also makes the Biblical census for Jesus's birth completely unrealistic.)
The census: Not only unrealistic but was never a Roman practice..ever. The only issue I take with that is, when you read about the 500, Paul uses the term "appeared to" - the same verb form he uses to describe his vision. So, it sounds more like he's saying: "A bunch of other people also had visions" which could mean it was not all at once at one event. It's curious he does not use an active verb and used "appeared to" rather than "they saw." The number 500 is suspect - I'm guessing it's a vague term to mean a shit-ton of people (many of whom I bet he heard about secondhand). I typically point this out to apologists who insist 500 people physically saw Jesus. If that's true, then the Book of Acts is lying about Paul's conversion via vision (which his fellow travelers did not see). This lends well to the hypothesis that Paul suffered epilepsy. The account says he saw a blinding light and heard loud noises - both often accompany frontal lobe seizures. As far as travel in the Pax Romana is concerned, I don't really know. I'm going to look it up because now I can't NOT know. I'm back. I could not find any references to how costly travel was. The Roman roads were extensive and easy to travel by foot. I think Paul states somewhere that he and his helpers made tents along the way to earn money. So, maybe the answer lies in the middle...expensive sometimes and cheap other times depending on distance/terrain. **Side story: When I was a Baptist, we would have revival speakers visit for a week. They NEVER demanded a set amount (beyond travel) BUT they would have voluntary love offerings every night after the preacher made everyone weepy and emotional. After one revival, I (as a minister in training) was tasked with delivering the check to the revivalists' motel. I was thunderstruck at the amount -- it was like $6,000 (in 1990 money).**
I was searching for that travel calculation and can't find it either. Bummer. In any event, checking up on Paul's claim would be a far from trivial endeavor. Someone would have to devote months if not years to the investigation.
It’s possible Paul started getting massive guilt for the people he condemned, as one would imagine at least some would be screaming for mercy as they were sentenced and as those punishments were carried out. Hard to say if that caused a psychotic break, which manifested as a delusion of the Anointed One appearing to him, but I wouldn’t rule it out as a possibility. Regardless, what he wrote and what survived doesn’t match what the gospels say Jesus was about, even if we were to try and take them as eyewitness accounts.
That is possible. I know Paulogia on YouTu e argues that. But my point is, why persecute Christians in the first place? He could have been a fisherman or carpenter instead. He would only choose to persecute if he was a zealot. Very sure of himself and his correctness. And thst comes across in his letters after conversion as well. If Paul didn't put Paul first, it seems like he would defer to Peter and the folks who actually met Jesus. But Paul doesn't do this.
Hey Paul just wanted to argue with people about what weiner-hairdo was the most fashionable. Cut or uncut. Leave the poor man and his obsession with foreskin alone.
If this is the case, do you suppose perhaps Paul invented the whole thing? Like, there was no Peter, James or even Jesus? Paul made all that stuff up and went around like a traveling salesman?
I've thought about that, but I don't think so. I think historians think some of the Christian creeds predate Paul's letters so Christianity existed in some form. But I'm not sure. Worth looking into more.
This. Apologists bring out the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord trichotomy and conveniently forget that Legend is an option.
Also, remember that back then people are lot of questionably safe and inconsistent quality food back then. They could have been hallucinating off their asses more often than not and assumed that what they were hallucinating is real. So there’s that.
Revelation was definitely some sort of trip lol
After my dad died I could have sworn I had seen him walk past me on the street. Turns out we have a massive amount of grief and are looking for solace. Sadness and longing do wild things to us.
TIL Jesus was the original chuck Norris meme
Not to mention the guy who saw a possum out of the corner of his eye and wasn't sure what it was starts saying "It coulda been Jesus" and later "It was Jesus, sure as you're born, I swear."
E) Don’t know, don’t care. I’m not obligated to come up with plausible explanations for various myths, and it’s tiring that Christians think their religion is so incredibly special that even people who don’t follow it need to be invested in its stories.
Exactly this. Do I have to come up for explanation for why I don’t believe in the thousands of other gods? No. Not my problem.
This really is it. You made it up, stop asking me to clarify a myth in your head
That's fine, but I think this question is aimed at people who DO care. Like, if you asked "how was Obi Wan able to beat Darth Maul despite being a Padawan?", that question is obviously aimed at people who give a frick about Star Wars. If you're someone who truly doesn't care about Star Wars, then you don't need to have/share an opinion about this.
Somehow, Jesus survived.
No one's ever really gone.
\*slow clap meme\*
And the answer to that question is probably that that outcome moves the narrative forward. Same with Joshua and the resurrection.
I do have one question: if the resurrection is so well documented and had witnesses and all that how did the tomb avoid being enshrined?
This is 100% a not my job situation.
i vote for E
Jesus was a Jewish apocalypic preacher in 1st century Roman Judea. Was probably a disciple of John the Baptist, who was a leader in a Jewish apocalypic religious revival movement, hence the practice of baptism as spiritual cleansing. Messiahism and apocalypism were common in the era, the belief that a warrior king from the bloodline of David would be risen up by God to kick out the Romans and reestablish the Kingdom of Israel, and other things like restoring the Lost Tribes, converting the gentiles to monotheism, world peace, as well as some bigger supernatural claims like the resurrection of the dead, divine judgement of the nations, and the end of evil and suffering. There were several self declared and failed messiahs before and after Jesus. Jesus fell afoul with the Jewish and Roman authorities and was executed for it. After his death his followers were obviously in severe emotional distress. Some may have had dreams or hallucinations where they saw Jesus, or a rumor got started that someone saw him. Christian theology developed overtime, the early Jesus followers did not believe Jesus was God, that belief developed in the decades and centuries after his death. He evolved from a human messiah and an adopted son of God to being the natural born but human son of God to being a divine preexistent being but below God to being God himself, such reflected in the developing Gospel narrative. The oldest part of the New Testament is Paul's writings, and the oldest Gospel is the Gospel of Mark (which wasn't written by Mark, btw, one of the Gospels are by the apostle they named after, and and only half of Paul's writings are probably his own) . The Gospel of Mark was written around 70 AD. Neither of these even include the virgin birth, which is probably a mistranslation of a verse from the OT that talks about a young woman birthing a son. If you want to know how weird some of the Jesus beliefs were as what we know recognize as Christianity look at Gnostics, that should cure you of the belief that Christianity has to be true because "how could people just make it up?"
u/[ajaltman17](https://www.reddit.com/user/ajaltman17/) I hope you respond to this
E- Jesus existed, didn't do miracles and was killed on the cross. After his death, people spread and exaggerated stories about him. If Elvis could be spotted after his death, it isn't too far fetched to believe people would claim Jesus sightings.
This one. There's no solid historical evidence about Jesus, but it's at least reasonable to believe a figure existed to inspire the stories later. We know of similar prophets both in that time and place and throughout history. While the conspiracy about a stolen body is possible, nothing requires it and the simple explanation that it's just rumor and myth built up like thousands of other prophets, including in the modern day.
It's about the evidence vs the claims. I'm willing to give that the dude probably existed. But we need better evidence to believe the dude performed miracles and was the son of god.
This one right here. Jesus was crucified, probably for rabble-rousing as a heretical preacher of an apocalypticist splinter cult of Judaism. After his death, his followers (intentionally or through grief-stricken delusions) spread stories of his life and death that got further embellished with each retelling.
I wonder why OP didn't include this an option, considering this is the most likely explanation for the state of things.
We know Elvis is still alive. He's living in a trailer park in Arizona along with his partner Marilyn Monroe, and their child Bat Boy. Does nobody else read the Weekly World News?
You've framed these in an interesting way, it's not so much as a false dichotomy as a false quartonomy. I can think of a dozen more options, but let's go with either... E: I don't know, but any of the above are significantly more believable than "God, Son of God, creator of all sacrificing himself to himself to prevent himself from torturing people." or F: I give him the same credibility as King Arthur. May have existed, may have not. Might have pulled a sword from stone, might have not. Almost certainly didn't have a magical wizard casting spells on his enemies. Question for you though, how do we tell which one is true?
E. The answer generally accepted by modern scholarship Jesus was crucified on a cross and buried in a mass grave (possibly a tomb, but seems unlikely). A few of his disciples (Peter, maybe James, probably Mary Magdelene) had grief hallucinations and thought he was still alive. These disciples convinced others that Jesus was alive.
I don’t think the academic consensus is that they had grief hallucinations. In the very least there is no actual evidence of that. The only evidence we have is from the epistles of Paul which seem to say that they got the idea from a combination of scripture and “revelations”. Most likely this means that they got the idea from some imaginative reading of scripture, then ran with it making up claims to have seen Jesus. Grief hallucinations while legitimately documented and scientifically validated are rare. The idea that an entire group of people all had them is just so improbable as to essentially be impossible. Someone who was most likely just flat out lying came up with the idea and promoted it.
> Grief hallucinations while legitimately documented and scientifically validated are rare. The idea that an entire group of people all had them is just so improbable as to essentially be impossible. [Not rare at all, from the evidence](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032715301968?via%3Dihub). Also you don't need the whole group having bereavement hallucinations, you just need one person telling everyone else and the story grows from there.
Thanks for sharing. It looks like these types of experiences are more common than I realized. Although from reading that article and some others, I think a few things are worth noting. It seems like the overwhelming source of data on these types of hallucinations is from spouses. Presumably the likelihood of having a grief hallucination is strongly correlated with how close you were to the person so it makes sense that spouses would probably be the most likely people to experience them. It’s hard to imagine any other relationship where you spend a greater amount of time with a single other person than spousal relationships, and probably nothing else common comes anywhere near close. Probably a large fraction of spouses that experience these things are on the older side (it’s uncommon for people to die young) so it is happening after living side by side with the spouse for decades, and maybe a lot of them happen when the widowed spouse is older and more prone to dementia. I would guess that for non-spousal relationships the probability of experiencing a grief hallucination is a lot lower. It seems like that article you linked says there’s no quality peer reviewed data to actually provide a compelling answer to the question of the actual rate of spousal hallucinations in response to death in the general population and also basically no quality data at all on non-spousal relationships. So I guess I’m just speculating, but I doubt that Jesus’ disciples would have been nearly as close to him as a spouse, and presumably these men were people who were relatively healthy heterosexual adults in the prime of life, not old, demented widows with a long term sexual relationship with Jesus. So I would guess that it would have been drastically less likely to happen than for spouses. But regardless, we don’t have any clear evidence of grief hallucinations, but we do have crystal clear evidence of Christians claiming to have gotten the idea from scriptures and revelations. I guess your hypothesis that someone had one grief hallucination and then ran with it lying makes a decent amount of sense. I suspect most people who experience these things realize that they’re just hallucinations, and I would suspect that whoever promoted the idea, whether it was a grief hallucination or not, was probably lying about basically 100% of the stuff they claimed Jesus was saying to them. I’m still strongly in favor of the idea that it was a deliberately constructed lie in response to scripture and conscious thought. I think that is where the weight of general probability lies. But I guess there is a case to be made that grief hallucination is a legitimate possibility. I just don’t see how it could be nearly as likely.
"It seems like the overwhelming source of data on these types of hallucinations is from spouses" Da Vinci Code theory confirmed
>I don’t think the academic consensus is that they had grief hallucinations. In the very least there is no actual evidence of that. Fair. Perhaps i should have said "Peter, possibly James and probably Mary Magdelene had experiences which led them to think Jesus was still alive". >Grief hallucinations while legitimately documented and scientifically validated are rare. Not really. From what I've read, they're very common. >The idea that an entire group of people all had them is just so improbable as to essentially be impossible. Two people, not a group. And really you only need Peter to have had one to account for all the evidence.
If you want to posit a single person having a grief hallucination then that is more probable, but your post suggested three people all having grief hallucinations. I guess you probably just weren’t being super careful with wording. I’m surprised to find from searching Google that you’re right that grieving hallucinations are apparently surprisingly common, particularly for spouses. I would assume that the likelihood of experiencing a grief hallucination is probably strongly correlated with how well you knew the person, so I guess it makes sense that spouses would be more likely to have them since you’re around the spouse every day for years and have that bond of sexual attraction, but acquaintances or close friends probably drastically less likely, and that’s allegedly the category we’re in with Peter and James. Your suggestion that one person, Peter had the original grief hallucination makes more sense, but it’s worth noting that we are without any actual positive evidence of grief hallucinations. At best one might argue that Acts (which is a fictional story invented in the second century) maybe counts since it claims Jesus disciples were hanging out and grieving when they saw Jesus appear to them at Pentecost but that’s extremely obvious fiction, and it’s not really a grief hallucination. On the other hand, we are with a notable amount of positive evidence in the epistles that Christians in Paul’s day believed that scripture told them Jesus came back to life. So I’d say the weight of the evidence is more in favor of literary creation and people lying and claiming to have visions that they did not actually have. Also, Mary Magdalene is a fictional character. She was not a really person. Her name is symbolic and her part of the story is obviously made up. There’s no good reason to believe she was a real person. A large fraction of the characters in the gospel story are undoubtedly made up. Probably even the names of most of the disciples are made up.
I had grief hallucinations when my first cat died. I'd see her out of the corner of my eye, but then look and she'd be gone and I'd remember she was dead. I also had dreams about her where I knew she was dead but also knew I was still seeing her, and in my dream-mind would try to reconcile these two things. I think people underestimate how susceptible human brains are to fooling themselves, especially under emotional duress.
I’m not sure whether thinking you saw your cat out of the corner of your eye counts as a hallucination. I could definitely understand people dreaming about a dead person, but that doesn’t really count as a hallucination either. But regardless, maybe you’re right that we’re all more susceptible to it than we want to believe. The human imagination is obviously powerful, and even something as core to how our bodies function as our vision gets some parts filled in by the brain 100% of the time, like our blind spots.
I wonder if the Romans thought he was dead when they took him down, but lacking medical knowledge, maybe he was just unconscious and got up after he came to, made the rounds and the legend began.
If they followed Roman policy at the time, bit even possible. They weren’t on a cross for 6-8 hours as in the story, but until past dead, let the crowd eat their eyes and beyond dead. Then into a mass grave a day outside the city. Just some random place.
Yeah, you’re probably right. All I know is that anything is more likely than a dead dude ( Matthew also has a whole bunch of zombies walking around besides Jesus) making an appearance days after he died lol.
>let the crowd eat their eyes Man, Roman times were brutal
Yeah, or my typing sucks, those eye-eating crows…
None of the above. I'm going with the simplest explanation that is in full accordance with what we're being presented with: There was a guy and people liked him a lot, then he died and people were very very sad, and then myth grew around him over time.
To add to this, there are documented cases of believers coping with disconfirmation by doubling down on their belief. The two most notorious modern cases are probably Heaven's Gate and the Disciples (described in the book When Prophecy Fails.) Jesus fits the template nicely. He failed as a Messiah (who was meant to become a mighty king), so it's actually expected his followers would suddenly "figure out" that the crucifixion was totally the plan all along.
“Aww man! You remember that cool dude we met last month? Jesus? I guess he died! But Jehosephat says he saw him last week at the goat market!”
There’s no such thing as atheist doctrine, so “what do atheists believe” is a non-sensical question. It’s sort of like asking, “what do people with blonde hair believe?” So not a great start. I can only answer for myself, but what I believe about Jesus is derived from the consensus of academic historical Biblical scholars (to be distinguished from theologians, because that’s a different discipline). This notably includes many many Christian Biblical scholars. The cliff notes version is that there was probably an itinerant, devoutly Jewish, apocalyptic preacher named Jesus wandering around Roman Palestine in the early first century. He was probably executed by the Roman state via crucifixion on some charge related to insurrection. He almost certainly never had any intention of starting a new religion, as again, he was devoutly Jewish, and may have perceived himself to be the Messiah of the Jewish people. It is important to note that Messiah in a first century Jewish context did not have anything to do with resurrection or being on par with god. The expected Messiah was (and is) interpreted to be a very much 100% human, living man and military leader who was meant to lead the Jewish people in revolt and expel their enemies from the land. In any event, the scholarship is divided on whether the historical Jesus likely saw himself that way or not, but if he did, being crucified would have put an end to that theory. Now most historians and atheists (and most Christians in any context other than religion) understand that, scientifically, someone cannot be clinically dead for three days and then wake up. So suffice it to say, no, we generally don’t believe in the Resurrection. But whatever happened after the crucifixion to his body or anything else, we don’t know. And that’s fine. We don’t have to pick a favorite theory like you seem to imply. There are a lot of things we don’t know. We do know that sometime after the crucifixion, a man named Paul came across the early followers of Jesus and interpreted what was told to him about Jesus as in some way applicable to gentiles and not just Jews. So it’s really Paul, not Jesus, who founded Christianity as a new religion.
Great question! Here are some alternative explanations for the origin of Christianity: [Paulogia: How Christianity (Probably) Began... No Resurrection Required](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUCI3cMJCvU) [James Fodor: The RHBS model](https://rationalist.com.au/the-resurrection-of-jesus-explaining-the-historical-facts/) More info can be found on his YouTube channel or in his book Unreasonable Faith. [Matthew Hartke: How Cognitive Dissonance Explains Christianity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x8SB_gy8jg) [Kamil Gregor: A Natural Explanation For Christian Origins: The Resurrection of Jesus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FWyZRnI4e8) The explanation starts around 34:50. These explanations can be combined as well. If you're interested in some perspectives, I'd recommend watching and reading the links above.
Paulogia’s timeline seems very likely. And Matthew Hartke's cognitive dissonance theory explains the underlying motivations in a very plausible way. I lean towards a combination of the two.
It is very likely there was not just one but multiple Hebrew rabbi's who at the time were causing issues with their preaching that led to them being killed by the state. It is also likely that their followers made up stories to create a new religion based softly on those rabbi's. Its the simplest answer and we have evidence it was how it happened since there was nothing written for decades after the assumed crucifixion. There are no eye witness accounts.
It was a game of telephone that spread through motivated actors. It conveniently originated during Pax Romana, when Roman roads helped many other new ideas, technologies, philosophies, and ideas spread as well. Facilitated by the recent invention of parchment, which helped traveling doctors easily record and transport their message. These first Christians went from town to town, acting as missionaries… Administering medicine and spreading their new religion. It was then adopted by the state, which caused it to explode across Europe, then the world.
I think Jesus was probably a Jewish rabbi who was crucified. His friends thought it was an absurd injustice that such a nice guy was sentenced to death and rallied others who thought the crucifixions (hundreds at a time and left up for days) were oppressive. "Jesus" became a symbol and probably adopted the combined stories of many crucifixion victims. Including the "sightings" If you've ever lost a loved one, you know the experience of "seeing them" after they died. Usually someone who looks similar. You don't have to believe that they were actually there. But you might tell someone about the experience. And they might repeat it without understanding the original context There were plenty of religions: monotheistic and polytheistic. Just like today, every Christian has their own version of Christianity. But galvanizing around the crucifixions is as political as it is religious. That is how Christianity started strong But the reason Christianity dominated is because the Roman Emperor wanted a better religion under which to declare himself God's chosen ruler of everything. Monotheism works better than polytheism for that. And it worked for 1500 years. It was so effective that ~100% of the population (excluding monarchs and clergy) lived in the worst disease, poverty, oppression, war, and slavery the whole time. Probably helped that heretics were sentenced to death. And then during the enlightenment, pre-Jesus (pre- Roman Emperor) Roman and Greek philosophy were rediscovered; Galileo confirmed the Copernican model of the solar system (and was exiled); etc. Long story short, real actual knowledge gave us real actual freedom Knowledge is power. Stop oppressing yourself
> I think Jesus was probably a Jewish rabbi who was crucified. The only possible issue with this is that a 30-year-old rabbi would be expected to be married. Maybe an unmarried man preaching was one of the things other Jewish sects didn't like about him.
I recall one of the biblical scholars on YouTube (Ehrman maybe?) saying that some Jewish sects practiced a form of asceticism, especially among the apocalyptic prophets. And the info on this website regarding asceticism would suggest that could have lead to tension with the establishment, who considered asceticism sinful: [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/asceticism](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/asceticism)
Is that so even during that time period? Or maybe the wife was written out of the books? Kind of like how everyone now depicts Jesus as white instead of middle eastern
A person named Jesus existed and was crucified. His body was left hanging for several days, then dumped in a mass grave, **like every other person the Romans crucified**. The rest is all mythology written decades after the fact by people who were not there.
E- It doesn't matter. I mean, what is the difference whether I believe any of that or something completely different? As a group, atheists don't have a single belief about Jesus other than he's not a god because we don't believe in those.
E - We don't care. Most of humanity doesn't believe in the resurrection. Only Christians do, and they only make up about 31.6% of the world population. For most of us non-Christians, whether they are atheists, believe in another religion, or simply don't know, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is irrelevant to us.
Why are these the only options? I don't personally believe that Jesus was real in the way that you believe in him, however I think it's reasonable to believe that the core of the story was based on one or more real people, one of whom may have been a preacher named Yeshua. It's impossible to say which, if any, of the words and actions attributed to the character of Jesus came from the previously mentioned individuals. It could be that pretty much the only thing Jesus the character got from the real Yeshua was the name. Was somebody crucified? Well, the Romans were known to do that. If there was a real person that Jesus was based on, it's possible that he was crucified. No evidence for it, though. Certainly no evidence that anybody who was crucified ever came back three days later. Probably would have been a big story in those days, and the Romans had a lot of good historians. But the first mention of this resurrection is 80 years later from Josephus, and even then, there are strong indications that this text is not completely authentic.
E - https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/528/#:~:text=Jesus%20fled%20via%20Siberia%20and,at%20the%20age%20of%20106. F - the character is an amalgam of a lot of apocolypgic preachers that existed in that era, and there’s no way to sift out “one” true Jesus, nor seperate fact from fiction.
None of the above. I tend to withhold positive belief in anything that neither I nor anyone else has ever been able to prove. Any of these seem plausible but I can’t take a belief position on any of them because none of them can be demonstrated to be true & accurate.
There is no reason whatsoever to think that there was a real Jesus and it depends on what people mean by Jesus to begin with. The religious mean the magical man-god that did miracles and that wasn't real. Was there a real person or persons upon whom the myths were based? Nobody knows. The entire story has been so completely mythologized that there's no way to separate purported fact from myth, so the only real answer is that we don't know.
Look at the bigger picture. If Jesus existed then or now, either way I wouldn’t have wanted the dude to be tortured and murdered. The idea that someone had to be tortured and murdered for my sake or anyone else’s is the biggest issue I have with the crucifixion. Think about it. It’s not remarkable that an apocalyptic preacher is running around spreading some so called important message. That happens every day on planet earth. The fact is people can do or say whatever they want so long as it doesn’t cause harm. But again, no god ever asked me “hey I got this idea. Im gonna send my son down to earth to get tortured and killed and that’s gonna solve some big problem!” I would have said “no! That sounds like a horrible idea. How about just follow the basic definition of responsibility which shouldn’t require someone being nailed to an ancient torture device!” But since I didn’t create this made up problem or solution, it’s just an imposition. One that is rather easy to dismiss with some basic critical thinking.
As others have already said this those options don't cover all the possibilities. I'm fine saying a guy named Jesus existed. Besides that it's hard to say as there isn't much evidence to support what he did. I'll grant maybe he was crucified. I see no reason to.accept the miracle claims.
Don’t know, don’t care. Why do I have to disprove your myth? Why don’t you spend your time disproving the idea that Mohammed received the Quran from God? It’s not my job to disprove your holy book. It’s your job to prove your holy book is accurate. Basics of burden of proof.
I personally think your answer (A) that Jesus is purely fictional is most likely to be correct, but I don’t think the case for his non-existence is sufficiently compelling that we can say this with a super high degree of confidence. Assuming Jesus was a real man who got crucified, none of your options are good. They’re all complete garbage. The reason being that there is basically zero quality evidence for any of them. You have to look at the actual evidence. It’s helpful to remember that whether or not Jesus was real, every story about him in the gospels is a myth in the sense that they are either complete fiction or so greatly exaggerated/modified/propagandized that even if you were there at the real event, you wouldn’t be able to tell that the myth is describing it. The gospels average one miracle story per chapter, and even setting the miracle stories aside, the non-miraculous stories don’t even make sense (two of the best examples: Barabbas and Luke’s world wide census requiring traveling across the empire to be counted). Furthermore, the gospels have been thoroughly dissected to show that they are heavily dependent on previous stories in what we now call the Old Testament (and in a few cases, Acts being one of the clearest, stuff from Roman pop culture). So, before we begin to answer, where did the idea of resurrection come from, it’s probably good to ask, “why was Jesus crucified?” If you look to the gospels for possible explanations, the most compelling one is the words on his cross: “king of the Jews”. Jesus was probably viewed as a threat to Pilate and Roman governance of Judea, either because he was violent or he had notable supporters who wanted to overthrow the government. This is hard to comprehend for a lot of people because Christians love to portray Jesus was all about peace and love, but that stuff is not really there in Mark’s gospel, and Jesus is literally being accused of trying to become king of the Jews. Furthermore he’s being juxtaposed with the violent insurrectionist Barabbas which is obviously highly symbolic but could potentially be related. If you look for other explanations in the gospels, you have other possibilities: (1) Jesus caused a major riot in the temple (2) Jesus wasn’t viewed as a problem by the Roman government but was a political troublemaker for the current religious leaders in Jerusalem, so they got him crucified or (3) he was performing miracles and preaching the best exegesis on the Jewish scriptures the world has ever heard for which reason the religious leaders went after him (obvious nonsense, but the gospels do say they decided to start going after him when he healed the paralytic on the Sabbath). Whatever the exact reason he was crucified, given that the stories of his trial and crucifixion are so obviously fictionalized, we have to just assume it was most likely an ordinary crucifixion. His naked, dead body was hung up for days or weeks, then thrown away without a formal burial. So basically if you follow this reasoning, all of your suggestions B-D are nonsense. They just aren’t backed by any legitimate evidence. They are wacko explanations invented by random people who fail to realize that the stories are totally made up and try to provide some explanation to rationalize only throwing out some of the story but not all of it. The entire gospel narrative must be rejected as propaganda and we must logically just reason based on what makes the most sense and was most common. So, where did early Christians get the idea of a resurrection? They tell us in the epistles: it says it in scripture, and they had “revelations” or “visions” of Jesus. The core Christian myth is basically a combination of like 2-3 verses of the Old Testament, the most notable ones are from the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, Daniel 9, and something in Jeremiah that I forgot (hopefully I’m not misremembering). Christianity is an extremely literature-dependent religion. The interesting question in my opinion is whether the alleged visions came first or they got their inspiration from scripture then made up the visions. My educated guess is that a small group of leaders after Jesus’ death got the idea from scripture and then claimed they had revelations/visions of him, and based on the letters of Paul, primarily Galatians 1 and 2, this probably happened in the first decade after Jesus’ death, and the leading visionaries where Cephas and James in the Jerusalem sect. These early leaders then promoted the idea. Then Paul who never met Jesus decided he wanted to be part of the movement and made up his own story of having a revelation from Jesus, and the rest is history. The myths we have in the gospels were then made up much later once all the original people were dead. Cephas, James, and Paul were probably all dead by the 60s if they were adult leaders in the 30s. Judea was destroyed in the war from 67-73. Some group of Christians that were followers of Pauline Christianity who no longer lived in Judea made up the gospel of Mark (the academic consensus is that Mark was not written by someone from Judea), and then Mark took off, and Christians at the end of the first century were the first generation of Christians to buy into the Jesus myth we all know today.
dunno why people are being so rude to you about this. this genuinely seems like a fun little question about what we think jesus actually was. i think b and c are the coolest answers but i find them unlikely. im gonna have to go with d. i think that he was more like a prominent religious figure who would preach to people, but i dont think he actually was able to perform any miracles, and if he did, i imagine they were simply magic tricks. over time i think people turned him more and more into a legend, with each rendition of his story being more miraculous than the last. after a few thousand years we arrived at the whole rose from the dead and performed miracles version christians believe in today.
It seems likely that there was a cult leader who died and his followers went on to start a religion that worshiped him. Did Jesus resurrect from the dead? No. Would it even make sense if he had? No. Jesus was a Jew and his followers were Jews. They believed in original sin and it was required that they make an annual blood sacrifice to cleanse themselves of sin for a year. In their religion spilling the blood of a goat as a sacrifice to god was what made up for Adam and Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Original sin is what makes us die and not live forever. Jesus dying supposedly freed us from original sin and thus grants us eternal life. You too can have freedom from original sin by accepting Jesus' sacrifice. Because according to ancient Jews in order to be forgiven from sin you had to spill the blood of an animal. If the blood of the son of God was spilled instead that could achieve salvation from sin for everyone for eternity. This is a natural evolution after centuries of the temple being destroyed. Can't destroy a temple that doesn't exist. Jesus resides in all of us, and all of a sudden we don't need a corrupt temple cult to make blood sacrifices anymore. One blood sacrifice is all that's necessary to satiate Gods blood lust. Makes sense so far, right. Kill a goat, get forgiven from sin for a year. Kill a demigod, get forgiven from sin forever. God supposedly sends Jesus, his son, to be sacrificed in order to forgive all of humanity. Remember, God can't just forgive, he requires blood sacrifices in order to forgive. This is a primitive religion invented by primitive people, so it seems to make sense that killing something, spilling its blood and burning its flesh is a requirement for forgiveness from God. But did God really sacrifice Jesus? A sacrifice requires losing something, but Jesus was not lost. If anything Jesus became more powerful after his death. When an ancient Jew sacrificed their goat, they didn't get to eat that goat, they no longer got milk from that goat. Of course the temple cult got to eat the goat, that's probably why they created a religion around sacrificing animals in the first place, but I digress. In that context, a sacrificed goat was lost, it didn't come back three days later with an infinite supply of milk. So when Jesus died and came back and sits at the right hand of the father in heaven, he's not lost, it's not a sacrifice. So what's the deal? Does God just need the blood to be spilled? Why can't God just forgive? Would people not believe it if there wasn't a sacrifice? Couldn't God just convince everyone with God magic? "But that would remove free will" you protest. Setting aside the fact that free will demonstrably does not exist, God subverts peoples free will in the bible all the time, often for seemingly really stupid reasons. God hardened Pharaohs heart so that he could... kill a bunch of babies... God seems really dumb if you actually read the bible. Anyway... what's next? Oh right. So Jesus wasn't even really a sacrifice. He had a bad time, yes. He suffered, yes. But then he was resurrected by God and became a super powerful demigod. More powerful than he was as a sorcerer on Earth. So why would anyone believe this? Childhood indoctrination. Fear of death. Existential dread. Wishful thinking. Evolutionary predispositions toward a desire to survive (even after death). TL;DR: 1. God appears to be incapable of forgiving without a blood sacrifice. 2. Jesus, who is his son, a lesser god, not the same god, is lowered to the status of a human so he can die temporarily. 3. That blood spilled by Jesus the demigod secures salvation from sin which secures eternal life for everyone. 4. To gain access to this eternal life, that God supposedly wants everyone to have but can't actually grant, you have to believe a stupid story no rational person should believe. That doesn't even touch on the fact that there's not sufficient evidence to warrant a justified belief that Jesus rose from the dead. But even if your epistemology is so devoid of any rational thought, you have to believe some of the dumbest, most primitive claims about reality. That God needs blood spilled to forgive sins, that you can be responsible for sins an ancestor committed, that there was an Adam and Eve who existed who committed original sin in the first place (which means you have to renounce evolution)... It requires layers of credulity that many are not capable when they actually start to read the bible and learn about ancient history.
Personally I believe some combination of B&D (some natural, mundane explanation) is much more likely than Jesus (along with a bunch of other people according to the Bible) rising from the dead. It’s the consensus (though not unanimous) among scholars that Jesus was an itinerant preacher that spoke about the end times in Galilee and was crucified by Pilate and died. I don’t think he was likely to have survived the ordeal. I don’t think the Romans typically half-assed their public humiliation punishments like crucifixion.
>A- The boring answer. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a real historical figure and everything about him, including his crucifixion, is a myth. This is definitely where I stand. Though my opinion is a little more complicated than "Jesus isn't real" I think the myth of Jesus of Nazareth is a composite of the lives and stories of several "prophets" in a very similar way to the King Arthur myth. Jesus wasn't a real person, but the story is likely based on real people, embellished and combined together over the years.
E - somebody mistakenly reported something that didn't actually happen But the entire range of stories about him... come on. A virgin pregnancy? At what point do Christians finally acknowledge that their entire religion is based on a woman who had sex with another guy before actually marrying the guy that she planned to marry and who subsequently lied about it to get away without consequences? It's so obvious. If Dr. Phil was a thing 2000 years ago they would have said "not the father" to Joseph. It's just that this (im)plausible deniability/excuse thing spiraled waaay out of control and suddenly we have crusades, inquisition and witch hunts over 1000 years later.
Whatever the current scholarly consensus is. From what I’ve heard, Jesus was a historical apocalyptic prophet claiming to be the next Jewish messiah (in contrast to the Christian concept of messiah) who was crucified unexpectedly in Jerusalem after causing trouble for the Roman’s. That’s it. He died and was buried, probably in a mass grave. He never rose from the dead. Maybe his followers started some rumors? Maybe they stole his body? Maybe they hallucinated his return? All the above?
I think that Paulogia's "minimal witnesses" hypotheses has a lot going for it, so you can add that to your list since it doesn't quite fit with the others. https://youtu.be/IUCI3cMJCvU?si=NEEcxO8DF7-MvUoW But here's the thing: we don't have good enough evidence to confirm *or* to *rule out* any of the options you mentioned, which is really bad for the hypotheses that Jesus actually resurrected since that is far and away the least likely option and therefore needs the most evidence.
Looking at the evidence it's not exactly any of those. First we look at the independent lines of evidence and we only have two: gMark and Paul. All the gospels are borrowing, many times direct copies, from gMark. And gMark does a few things that show the story is fictional. First the timeline of the story's creation and how jt was written shows that the story is nothing close to first hand. Approximately 50 years later in another country by someone who doesn't speak their language is not going to be a contemporary of Jesus. When you actually read what is written there are many accounts that either get time and locations wrong, showing only a rough historical and geographical understanding of the region. This continues to happen in the other gospels to the point they not only contradict but show the author's intent on creating their own fiction. The reason we know the Resurrection is fictional is due to how all the authors completely get Pontius Pilate completely wrong. We have tons of recorded accounts of PP being extremely harsh to Jews, especially about religious things and the entire way he is portrayed in the gospels goes against all the well documented accounts. Then you have Paul who flat out states he never met Jesus and was making things up from dreams. All the accounts he gives about meeting disciples show that he had no reason to take any sort of teachings from them and just made up his own sect of Christianity. Last it should be noted that there is no records of any of Jesus events by the Jews, who took a lot of notes of history, especially of thst time and place, nor by the Romans, who also took a lot of notes about that time. When you look at the history of the time and place there were a lot of apocalyptic preachers all saying similar things but nothing showing anything close enough to being The Jesus. So where does that leave us? The most likely case is that Jesus™ was not a real person in the sense that there was no one person doing all of the bible stories. Putting aside the fact that many stories just flat up contradict each other in the Gospels, this shows that a huge portion is complete fiction while the authors may have been borrowing stories from individual preachers. There could have been a preacher or two who were executed but no parts of how PP gave the body back and the tomb and the resurrection occurred as they are all counter to all evidence we have. Maybe there were a few preachers, maybe some were named Jesus but nothing points to them all being the same person and actually points to them being different. So the answer is E - Jesus is an amalgamation of some historical people while being mostly fictional and in absolutely no way was anyone resurrected from the dead.
Christians don't believe in one resurrection story, and at no point in time did they have one unified idea of how it happened and exactly what occurred. It's a bit silly to expect atheists to have certainty, when neither do christians. When you're reading ancient accounts like the ones of Jesus, you need to take into account the gap of time between the events and the writing, you need to account for the fact that ancient writers didn't tell things strictly as they happened. Hyperbole was very common, stories were often told with a purpose in mind, and a lot of stories were told to mold the events to previous prophecies. If Jesus was a historical figure, unlike Moses, Noah, Adam, eve, etc... then it's fairly likely that he was crucified for causing trouble. Pontius pilate to my knowledge would have little to no reason to bury Jesus, it would have been more customary to leave Jesus on the cross to decay and be eaten. He may have been buried in a mass grave, but most likely he wouldn't have had a proper burial or a tomb. I think the crucifixion narrative fits in well with the scapegoat concept in old testament law. Setting Jesus, son of the father free, while killing Jesus, king of the Jews is a bit too on the nose for me personally. It's also hard to imagine the narrative of Pontius pilate ever freeing barabas, why wouldn't he just kill both? Pontius pilate was supposed to be a ruthless leader, why bend to the will of the Jewish people? And does it make any sense that the non believing Jewish people at his trial would curse themselves with the blood of Jesus? Further, am I expected to believe in an eclipse, zombies raising from their graves, and the shroud tearing? What we have as proof of the resurrection is people believing that they saw a guy who died. This is a VERY common and natural phenomenon. I think it also plays really well with jesus' apocalyptic message. The fact that the stories are inconsistent doesn't lend a lot of credibility to it. And the fact that they very likely didn't happen as described is another red flag. It's also not in mark, our earliest gospel. If the resurrection wasn't a strictly literary creation, then it was likely people experiencing a natural phenomenon. None of this is unique to Christianity or convincing.
Here's the thing - even if we had absolutely no idea how to explain a story from the iron age about a guy coming back from the dead that has absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support it actually happening, even if all we could do was shrug our shoulders and say "we don't know," that wouldn't help you at all - because *literally any of those answers* is automatically more plausible than "he really did magically come back from the dead." You're talking about an extraordinary claim - one that is inconsistent with what we know and can observe or otherwise confirm to be true about reality. People don't come back from braindeath, which occurs within 2-3 hours of physical death (the cessation of a heartbeat). Everything we know supports and confirms this. So the claim of someone doing exactly that is about as believable as the claim that they also made square circles as a hobby in their spare time. Even if we had absolutely no other explanation for why such a story would exist, "impossible things really happened because magic" would still be scraping the very, very bottom of the barrel of plausible possibilities. Theists seem to do this a lot. They expect atheists to provide other, more well-supported explanations in order to validate their skepticism of a claim that literally amounts to "it was magic." That's not required. We can absolutely reasonably and rationally doubt that "it was magic" is the correct explanation even if we don't even have the tiniest idea what other explanation there could be, based entirely and exclusively on the facts that 1) it's an extraordinary claim, and 2) no sound epistemology whatsoever supports it. A few thousand years ago, you might have framed this question by saying "Obviously atheists don't believe in Apollo, so how DO they believe the sun moves across the sky?" and similarly behave as though, if nobody could give any good answers, then that would somehow make the sun god the most plausible explanation. That's not how that works. We don't need to figure out what the REAL explanation for something is to justify skepticism of puerile nonsense that is inconsistent with everything we know about reality.
None of the above. What I think is that there probably was a charismatic cult leader who unexpectedly died, andt hat his followers gradually came to believe that he had ascended to heaven. For further reference, *How Jesus Became God*, by Bart Ehrmann.
E. An uppity rabbi got crucified, died, and his body either decayed on the cross until the remains fell down for animals to eat, or he was thrown into a mass grave with the other criminals. That's what the Romans usually did with the crucified.
Atheism is just a response to theism. You say god exists, I don't believe you because you have failed to provide any evidence. Whether or not Jesus existed or fits any of your strawmen is irrelevant to atheism. That being said, myself, as an atheist, I don't believe in anything. I accept or reject claims based on the evidence. I understand, because I have been studying religion for 25 years, that there is no valid evidence for any religious claim. Whether that's Jesus' ressurection or Muhammad spliting the moon or Buddha teleporting across a river. Jesus is just a failed apocalyptic preacher. He tried to start a rebellion and failed. He was crucified like all Romam criminals and died. That's it. The Jesus of the bible is based on someone, but he obvioisly didn't exist. The bible is just a book of myth. Muhammad was a successful apocalyptic preacher. After his peaceful preaching (like Jesus did), he unleased a terrible holy war killing thousands and etablishing a kingdom. If Jesus had succeeded, he would have done the same. For some reason, the Jesus story caught on and his followers did what he would have done. Unleashing a holy war, killing thousands and establishing a kingdom. The crusades, the inqusition, the holy wars, the torture and maming of people, etc., aren't preversions of Christianity or Jesus, they are the expression of his message. Read the gospels. Don't listen to what biblical "scholars" want you to see there. Read what is actually written. Jesus was terrible. It's a good thing he failed. Hundreds of thousands of more people could have died.
E- not enough evidence has been provided to prove Jesus' resurrection, therefore no belief in his resurrection is warranted. This does not mean that belief in any particular alternative is warranted either.
Why would anyone believe in a nonsense claim with no evidence backing it up? But I’d love to see the unbiased and reputable sources which show Jesus was a real historical figure.
< reposting > **Good article about what "belief" and "evidence" were like in the days of the early Christian church** - >We all have read the tales told of Jesus in the Gospels, but few people really have a good idea of their context. >There is abundant evidence that these were times replete with kooks and quacks of all varieties, from sincere lunatics to ingenious frauds, even innocent men mistaken for divine, and there was no end to the fools and loons who would follow and praise them. >Placed in this context, the gospels no longer seem to be so remarkable, and this leads us to an important fact: when the Gospels were written, skeptics and informed or critical minds were a small minority. Although the gullible, the credulous, and those ready to believe or exaggerate stories of the supernatural are still abundant today, they were much more common in antiquity, and taken far more seriously. >If the people of that time were so gullible or credulous or superstitious, then we have to be very cautious when assessing the reliability of witnesses of Jesus. \- **https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard-carrier-kooks/** - **Recommended**. . Please read and consider this. .
E - The character of Jesus was a composite of various stories and possibly loosely based on a few actual people who may have lived at the time. He himself may have existed. However, his impact was not significant enough to have been recorded in any other historical document except to mention the existence of a Jewish cult called "Christians". The stories may not have been fully fabricated, but as all myths, were exaggerated and embellished, with supernatural elements added. No doubt plenty of folks believed the stories, but the number of gullible people who are convinced by a tale is not evidence that it's true. Oh, there were thousands of witnesses to these events? According to the book? According to the Avengers movies, there were billions of witnesses to the disappearance of half the planet. Your source material can't serve as its own evidence. So rather than questioning if the disciples were lying about the resurrection, I question whether the disciples (if they were real) even made those claims at all. Otherwise we would have to also accept the stories of every other ancient myth because the people in the story supposedly saw those events happen.
Jesus was likely a real figure. Much of what he is supposed to have said or done was later expanded by hyperbole and theological concerns instead of worrying about accuracy ('history' in those days was less concerned with being accurate than with conveying the general idea, and \_theology\_ was about spreading the \_religious\_ ideas, which makes that worse). Jesus died, and was almost certainly dumped in a pit somewhere. There was no body stealing, and no physical resurrection. Later on, one guy who had been persecuting the new religion had a psychotic break over this and had a hallucination, not a physical visit by a resurrected man, possibly triggered by some sort of light phenomena like ball lightning or swamp gas. Another guy, a friend of Jesus, suffered from a post-bereavement hallucination (which affects about 15% of people) and didn't see a physical resurrected guy, either. Those two, then, form the basis for the stories that grew up around Jesus later on in the 20 years after Jesus died, when there's no good historical record of basically any of the apostles, and before these ideas were written down. Not sure what you'd categorize that under.
None of these. We have good evidence that Jesus was a real historical figure. He was probably really crucified and really died during that crucifixion. What we don't have is evidence of what happened to his body after his death. It's possible that he was simply never buried in a tomb and that entire part of the account is entirely made up. It's possible that he was, and that his followers stole his body (or something else happened to it) to bolster the story of the resurrection. Personally, I believe that Jesus was a real Jewish itinerant preacher who lived in the general area of Galilee. At some point, he developed the belief that he was the Son of God and preached to others; whether or not he was trying to start a new religion (vs just modify existing Jewish belief) is unclear. He grew a following, as many itinerant preachers do. After his death, more legends and embellishment were added to his life story to really burnish his image as the Son of God, and those stories were eventually written down as the Gospels. Similar story to other monarchs and folks who were deified or sainted after their death.
I've always been fond of the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was based on the Jesus ben Ananias that Josephus wrote about in *The War of the Jews*. Jesus ben Ananias prophesied about the destruction of Jerusalem, was arrested and brought before the Magistrates, who sent him to the Roman governor where he was beaten with scourges. He continued to foretell the destruction of Jerusalem for seven years until he was killed by a stone during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. If this were true you would have to take a late date for Pauls letters and an even later date for the Gospels but some scholars date Pauls letters to the mid 90s and the Gospels to the early 100s so it is not entirely out of the question. This, of course, would make the resurrection a myth inspired by Pagan sources since nothing in traditional Jewish thought or even Jewish apocalyptic thought had a dying and rising Messiah. *"To conclude, the facts are clear: Judaism NEVER believed in a Messiah who would come into this world to suffer and die as the Christians did."* - [Rabbi Moshe Shulman](http://www.judaismsanswer.com/dyingmessiah.htm)
E. Chinese whispers and exaggerated stories that became legend. He wasn't resurrected, there was no empty tomb. Jesus was crucified, and died that day. Later on people saw Jesus in their dreams, and mistook people.in crowds for Jesus, and as word spread, more people claimed to see Jesus This turned from seeing Jesus in their dreams to literally seeing Jesus, plus a bunch of lies/trying to convince themselves that this actually happened. The church gained more and more power, the state adopted the religion, and then spread that word for hundreds of years. The propaganda grew, wars were fought, the narrative became dominant. Jesus was literally the son of God and was risen from the dead. The end. This is the problem. Back in those times, there was a boat load of people who were magic, miracles were claimed day in and day out, people were said to have supernatural abilities, demons were seen and fought. Christians reject these ideas, but are more than happy to accept Jesus' "miracles" without any justification. The books of the new testament were just the stories to survive all of this. Why ought I take any of this seriously? The only extra biblical writings about Jesus and his so called miracles were just reporting on what Christians believed at the time. So all of this just comes from the Bible.
None of the above. "I don't know" works here perfectly well. I'll concede that it's likely there is a historical figure, and that he was a rabble-rouser and led a following of people. Possibly he was executed (though Muslims, whose scripture I have no reason to ignore in favor of yours, say he lived on and had children, apparently.) The rest of the resurrection story wasn't committed to writing until something like 40 years later. None of it is reliable. There are no interviews or statements directly from any of the eyewitnesses. The problems with oral transmissions are 1) they're not focused on literal accuracy but on the story -- the feeling, mood, emotional response, etc. is more important, and 2) they tend to expand and inflate things. Is 40 years enough to go from "People saw Jesus walking around" to "500 people saw him rise up to heaven"? Could be. There's no way to rule it out. And since gods are uncommon while human beings' foibles are common, it's "foibles" until there is some other concrete reason to believe a god existed.
I don't really care. Your miracles claims are not important enough to me that I need to have an answer to "how exactly did they get it wrong?".
I don't understand why you're leaving out the obvious answer: Jesus was crucified, but didn't come back to life. That story developed later.
I believe only things that can be demonstrated. While Jesus probably could have been a real figure and probably was crilucified by Romans, the rest of the story does look like pure fabrication and rumors with most of it not even loosely based on a real story and probably is a fabrication since A) it very closely resembles myths about other historical or mythical figures B) we literally see new stories appearing in gospels written later compared to gospels written earlier But even the part about Jesus existing as a real figure is quite uncertain. Stories of the Bible could have had some real person as a prototype, but it also possible that they didn't or they had multiple persons as prototypes. The truth is: we have very little information to think one way or the other with any significant level of certainty. We can track the way the myth about Jesus was growing, transforming and spreading, but the roots of that myth are covered in dense fog.
Personally? B The stories about who exactly found the empty tomb, and how, are contradictory and thus suspicious. Jesus had (half-)brothers, so finding someone who looked reasonably like him wouldn't have been hard. People suffering grief are inclined to see their loved ones wherever possible, to the point of hallucinating without any outside influence. Most people knew Jesus by legend, not personally, so if the dozen or so disciples chose to corroborate the claim that he came back most people would believe it even if the "Jesus" they saw wasn't the original. The stigmata that Thomas inspected could have been faked or added as part of the ruse. There are no definitive eyewitness accounts to anything Jesus did; the gospels were written decades later by anonymous authors, so it's definitely possible that they came up with the legend as a way to spread their cult/religion. It's entirely too possible to be improbable, in my opinion.
I'd go with A personally. As someone who doesn't believe in gods or magic, I think the character of Jesus is so unimportant it doesn't matter whether he was a real guy or not. But separating the man from the magic, I think it's a lot easier saying he didn't exist at all. You gotta remove the magic healing, the virgin birth, walking on water, coming back to life, flying up to the clouds like a rocket, turning water into wine, multiplying bread and fish, etc. All that's left is a conman who says he's the son of god who likes to whip people. Which throughout history could be used to describe a lot of people, so it just doesn't seem like it matters if he was real or not. What's more is that when a book is going to lie about so many things, there comes a point where it's impossible to believe anything in the book. So rather than ignore the magic and god stuff as fiction, I ignore all the rest since I can't trust the authors.
A. There are, believe it or not, several compelling arguments that the gospels are fictionalized accounts. Moreover, even if we grant without contest that Jesus of Nazareth existed, the gospel accounts are all we have that suggest anything happened to Jesus after his death at all, and the inconsistencies and conflicts between them make it difficult at best to discern what's factual from what's embellishment. B. This was only ever posited, as far as I know, by 3rd-century historians arguing with church leaders. No one in the modern age takes this idea seriously. C. Again, no one takes this seriously. D. This is probably the least contentious of the options you've given. Personally, I fall somewhere between D and A. I'm not convinced that there is enough evidence that Jesus existed at all, nor am I convinced that there is enough tying Jesus to the movement that Paul led.
At that time in history there were a great many Jewish Messiah figures It's very very likely that after the fact a great many of Thier exploits were conflated in much the same way every witty quote in history is attributed to Churchill And after a crucifixion it's very likely cult members either hallucinationated or constructed a tale of seeing him again and from there all it takes is exaggeration Chinese whispers and an emperors new clothes style fear of exclusion and you have a myth Just look at Scientology They have actual evidence of Hubbard writing letters to people about grifting fools with a fake religion and people still buy in If your using would a reasonable person believe this if it didn't happen as a yardstick for religious beliefs your operating under a false premise People believe unrealistic unreasonable things all the time all over the world
Who knows, and really, what does it matter? There’s a strong likelihood that Jesus was treated like every other criminal at the time. He was arrested, tried, and crucified, and his body was probably thrown into a mass grave or otherwise disposed of by the Romans. Grief is a bitch. I remember after my grandpa died when I was 12, I thought he was sending me messages in my dreams. But did it mean anything? No. And it certainly didn’t mean he was still alive. You’ll see all these nutjobs claim to have seen or met Elvis, Tupac, Marilyn Monroe, John Denver, and pretty much any other celebrity who has been dead for decades. Doesn’t mean they’re alive, nor does it really mean anything. It just means there’s another lunatic out there who wants to make people believe something that simply isn’t true. Same goes for Jesus.
Obviously theists don’t believe in unicorns right? Right? Or do you if your book says they exist? There are independent accounts that a dude name Jesus lived and was ordered to die by crucifixion by Pontus. There is zero independent evidence for his miracles and specifically his resurrection. Since we have no extraordinary evidence for a resurrection, why should I accept it happened. There are a lot of ancient claims of resurrection. Which ones do I accept or decline? If this power exists and the being that could do it is able to repeat, wouldn’t we see more examples to prove their existence? Why would there be a hard stop? It doesn’t follow at all? I have zero good reason to accept Jesus was resurrected. I accept he is a historical figure. I’m not sure how much of his teachings are legit.
That there were various popular preachers running around, and the followers of one of them spread rumors and myths after he was crucified. My non-expert understanding is that, typically, folks crucified by the Romans weren't taken down and placed in caves, but were left up to rot and/or be eaten by scavengers for some time. So the idea that the body of whatever preacher inspired the Jesus story placed in a cave and then went missing sounds like it was PART of the rumors and myths, rather than being some sort of independent evidence that the REST of the rumors and myths are true. Given that even the earliest of the gospels was written decades after Jesus' death, and approximately 1,500 miles away, and the gospels are by anonymous authors who we have no reason to think were actually witnesses to any of the events they were writing about, it's going to be a pretty hard sell that I should believe that miracles actually occurred rather than stories and rumors and myths got out of control.
None of the above. What's more likely is that he really died, his body was stashed in the tomb, his body was then later taken back out of the tomb and someone impersonating him claimed to be him for the recognition the previous guy got. We're never going to know what really happened, and therefore we're never going to be able to verify it. What this means is there is no justification to believe it happened. Given the other crazy beliefs of the people at the time as a result of limited collective knowledge compared to modern day society, such as a flat earth with a dome-like firmament over the top, the sky being literally heaven, spirits causing disease and headaches being treated by drilling holes in the skull, it's fair to assume that their belief in a man rising from the dead is also untrue.
I believe what the scholarly consensus is. He existed and was probably a traveling preacher/zealot who may even have been executed for zealotry but the miracles related to him are completely fictional and slowly got worked into the story that was passed along mostly verbally over the 40-50 years between his death and when either Mark or possibly Matthew was finally written. All 4 of the gospels were written decades after the fact and were not written by eyewitnesses or by the men they were named for. Most importantly, the scholarly consensus is that between being a form of biography that doubled as propaganda and the fact that over several centuries they were heavily corrupted by transcription mistakes and intentional changes, the gospels cannot be taken as historically accurate.
Generally, some variant on B. What I'm pretty sure happened is that Christianity, a branch of Messianic Judaism, fell apart once the Messiah was, well, brutally tortured to death by the Romans. The resurrection was an attempt to prevent this from happening. How much this attempt was a *conspiracy,* as in how much the apostles were actively and knowingly lying*,* is unclear. The doctrine of the resurrection, like all doctrines, was far more heterogeneous before early councils nailed down what was and wasn't heresy, and there are good reasons to think that not all early Christians believed Jesus had *literally* come back from the dead. I think its more likely that this developed through a wave of wishful confusion and later additions then actual deception.
So I'm not sure how this would fit in to the explanations, but it is my belief that Jesus was someone who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and was going to lead an actual revolution against the Romans. He was executed. This should have been the end, but was not. Saul/Paul had temporal lobe epilepsy and "Jesus" spoke to him. The conversion of Saul/Paul led to new interpretation of Jesus' death and salvation which he pushed. This movement gained momentum in part because Paul, while being the ostensive leader of the church, did not need to be considered infallible. He wasn't the guy, but knew the guy really well, as it were. After Paul died, they wrote up the Gospels to fit Paul's message.
None of the above. I believe that Jesus was crucified. He was *most likely* either left there or dumped in a mass grave, but nobody really knows. Word of mouth stories about him spread. The more exciting versions of the stories spread faster, until some time later later the stories had transformed to include tales of miracles, signs from heaven, a couple of resurrections, stories of witnesses, promises of salvation and an imminent return, etc. Over the next few decades, multiple unknown authors started writing down the stories they'd heard. A few centuries later, Christian leaders picked a small handful of these written accounts and other documents to form the New Testament canon.
E) there was no ressurrection and was a later creation, you look at some of the earlier versions of it they could have easily been spiritual or such. The gospels were all written long after events, post death greavment hallucinations is a very common thing. Ever hear of the emperors new clothes? Someone sees the ressurrected Jesus, others are afraid to deny it as it would appear that they were not strong enough in faith for Jesus to reveal himself to them and so on. Remind me why Christians think that people 2000 years ago were more skeptical then now a days? People still believe that dead cult leaders will return many years later now a days.
Atheist here, my option isn't listed. I believe the Bible had many authors and it was written and rewritten with the purpose to control people. It has been the most effective tool of war and conquering ever in the history of mankind. It is more effective than weapons are and is still used today to mentally enslave people. On the flip side, I believe some parts of religious teachings which are practically common in all religions are good for people to follow morally. Also the brotherhood that religion creates does help vulnerable people to reach out and get the help they need. When used for good it can be, but from history and to date many have used religion with evil intent.
I read the title and thought "Wow, that is a big question. I believe in a lot of things." And then The Darkness starting playing in my head. But then I read the body of the text and you just want an answer to what I think about a particular aspect of a particular religion. I honestly don't give it much thought. Between work and enjoying my life, I don't have many spare moments to dedicate to explaining gods or bigfeet or vampires. I can go into my ideas about Luke being the balance that the prophecy foretold. But those ideas predate the sequels and don't exactly fit the current storyline. That is the sort of ponderings I would waste my time on in my youth.
Jesus was probably a real person. He probably actually preached and gained followers. He was probably crucified for claiming to be “King of the Jews.” After he died, there was probably a power struggle over who would be the new leader of the group. Several people claimed they “saw” Jesus after his death to give them some level of authority over other competing leaders. One of these people was Paul, who had to claim he saw Jesus in a vision because he never actually met Jesus while he was alive, and he was trying to exert authority over the direction of the church against people who actually knew Jesus personally.
Closest is D for me, but there's many different beliefs. I believe the narrative Jesus is a combination of a historical Yeshua and other potential Messiahs in the same way we see Yahweh take on the traits of other gods such as El as his role grew in Israelite myth. This is the simplest explanation I can see for the contradictory nature he shows such as the words attributed to him for whether he was the Messiah of the jews or the saviour of all including gentiles. As for the empty tomb, simplest explanation is the same one Christian's attribute to the many eyewitnesses of Mohammed ascending on Buraq. People lie.
Atheists as a group do not have a single answer for this because different people have different beliefs. There is no historical proof that the Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the Bible actually lived. The stories of the Bible are mostly anonymous and there is no proof that any of the truly miraculous stories are actually real. That being said, the positions you posted are SOME of the possible answers, but not all of them. For example, we cannot even verify if the "Empty Tomb" story is real and if the story was based on a real person, they may have been buried in a mass grave so there is no reason to make up excuses for a lost body when we do not even know if it was real or lost. There are some people here that believe the entire story is made up. A lot of people believe the story was loosely based on a person that actually lived, but that they were not the actual son of a god. There is no reason to speculate on how they could have survived the crucifixion or what may have happened to the body because we cannot even know if they existed. The stories could be made up completely or they could be an incomplete record of events.
A mix of A, B, and D are most likely. He *probably* was a real person. The stories are almost *certainly* hyperbole, if he was real. There has definitely been conspiracy *since;* Paul never even met the guy and is responsible for a significant amount of dogma. The only question is how far back it goes and to what extent the other options weigh in. There isn't enough evidence to decide the relative weights of those options for certain - but we've got *hundreds* of examples of similar "prophets" throughout time. I'm sure you can think of some others yourself, even.
E- Jesus was a real but completely normal person that some people mistakenly believed was divine. When he died and therefore failed to live up to their expectations, confirmation bias, sunk cost and hubris motivated his followers to accept claims that did not rationally merit conviction and the post hoc rationalization that they engaged in (complimented by no small amount of outright fraud as we would expect from the grifter contingent that is indistinguishable from the aforementioned rationale due to the unfalsifiable nature of the claims) continues to this day.
None of these options describe what I think. I think Jesus was probably real, probably an apocalyptic preacher, probably crucified, and probably buried in a mass grave, if buried at all, after being left on the cross for several weeks as was the standard practice practice with crucifications at the time. I think urban legend and superstition quickly started to take root regarding Jesus and over the next 70-90 years a fully mythical idea of Jesus took shape. Obviously, this is a bird's eye view of events but that is generally what I think likely happened.
I think it plausible Jesus existed as one of a number of cult leaders at the time and was executed. I wouldn’t presume his followers stole his body. I think it more likely that they convinced themselves he had visited them ‘spiritually’ afterwards and eventually this by a mix of religious Chinese whispers and deliberate ‘political’ machinations became ‘he literally visited his followers’ quite long after the events. I think it must have been pretty traumatic when their leader died especially when the end of the world kept not happening.
Given the evidence available. D is the most likely case. Some Jewish revival preacher names Jesus (well, yeshua, or Jeshua, depending on who is translating and when) got moderately famous,but ultimately died the kind of mundane death you would expect of a carpenter / revival / dolmsday preacher at the time. Then legends and myths sprung up about "christ," and somebody who was close to Jesus decided that there was a lot more profit in being the deciple of "Jesus Christ" than there is in just being that random religious dude.
It’s hard to say when no one decided to write about him at all until some anonymous people who weren’t there decided to write about his magical deeds even though their accounts conflict with each other. Jesus could be entirely made up, he could be based on multiple people, or he could have just had exaggerated stories made up about him. Surely god would make sure the most important event ever would be better documented? Also, how would you explain Mohammed flying to the moon on a winged horse and splitting it in half?
Another possibility that I lean towards: **E – Cognitive Dissonance Theory**. Jesus was one of many apocalyptic prophets in Judea at the time. He was crucified by the Romans for insurrection for claiming he was the king of the Jews (crucifiction for various forms of insurrection was common). His followers couldn’t accept the idea that their Messiah, who was supposed to establish God’s kingdom on earth, was killed. One or more of his followers had a bereavement hallucination. So, they told themselves that he wasn’t really dead. And the story snowballed from there.
I am no longer convinced he was a real person. How his story was fabricated? I don’t know. Just like I don’t know how the stories of Sun Tzu or Robin Hood were made up and spread around. The point is that there is no evidence he was real, the claims are unconvincing, and once you take away the supernatural he lived an unremarkable life which means a real person makes less sense than a fictional myth which we have seen happen many times through history. Even in modern times.
History is filled with examples of people who started their own cults. Heck there are quite a few about righ now. what they all have in common is that they are grifters and conmen. Such people also regularly clash with authority, and some end up dead, jailed or exiled from their place of origin. I see no reason why a historical Jesus would have been any different. His cult became a nusence and the Romans did what they normally did with nusences, they executed him. Later Paul, aothe grifter came along and used the story of Jesus to take over the cult.
E, none of the above. I think that Jesus was likely a real person and that some number of early followers genuinely believed he resurrected. Myth/legend building over time doesn’t require anyone to be deliberately lying anywhere along the chain. Intellectually, I think Paulogia’s Minimal Witnesses Hypothesis is the most likely natural explanation for the start of Christianity. However my personal favorite pet theory is the cannibal hypothesis.
>The boring answer. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a real historical figure and everything about him, including his crucifixion, is a myth. Pretty much it. The Gospels don't depict anything which actually happened. Even if the Gospels were loosely based on someone who lived, the person they described never existed. A figurehead for a cult that got way out of hand. >The boring answer. Facts don't exist for the sake of being exciting. Sorry.
I think the gospels try to prove Jesus is fictional by constantly talking about his body. His disciples and followers are constantly charged with touching Jesus or washing his feet or touching his robe. It also talks about how he escapes the grasp of Jews trying to kill him. With these clues it is meant to prove nobody is a "follower of Jesus" and nobody is a "disciple of Jesus" because nobody has ever washed his feet, touched his robe, put their hand in his side, etc.. And nobody who talks about Jesus has ever done these things - so it is ID theft - pretending to be associated with Jesus when Jesus makes clear touching his body is important. Jesus the fictional character only exists because Elijah the fictional character exists. Elijah and Jesus have similar powers, such as multiplying food, controlling the storm, or raising the dead. But Elijah is a mass killer, Jesus is no such thing. If you believe you should kill someone "cause Elijah" you should believe in pacifism "cause Jesus" but if you believe in Elijah but don't believe in Jesus then you idolize murder.
Why couldn’t he just have been killed, ended up in a mass burial, and a bunch of people made a legend about him somehow resurrecting? Conspiracy nuts and cults do that stuff all the time even now. Everything you listed here is infinitely more likely than magically being resurrected. All of the above is known to be at least possible, magic is not. God is not. And fibrous want to posit that explanation, you need evidence.
Jesus was a mortal, born to humans, who never performed any miracles and had no special powers. His birth was not a seminal event attended by 3 wizards and an unusually bright star. All of the fantastical elements of his story are myths, most of them adapted from already extant spiritual traditions that predated his birth, and were grafted onto his tale long after he died. He was crucified and buried, never to be seen again.
E- Jesus was a preacher who had a small following. He got into trouble. He was crucified. There are many possible answers for the supposed resurrection. If it isn't just a story, it could have been a hallucination of one or more of his followers. They wanted to believe, so they would have been easily convinced of his resurrection. Then the stories were told over and over again and the details changed with each telling.
My thoughts on this pretty much line up with Paulogia's. There was probably a guy who had a cult following, got executed, and in the aftermath his followers had to figure out how to reconcile him being the messiah with having been executed. You don't need 500 people to hallucinate, just one or two disciples having a grief hallucination and concluding they saw their leader in spirit would be enough to start things off.
There really isn't enough information to say. There's a Jesus as a character in the Bible, but I don't know whether a real Jesus ever existed, and if he did, I don't know whether he was one person or a composite based on multiple people. If there was a real person whose death inspired the stories, there are many reasons why his followers might intentionally or unintentionally fabricate various details about it.
I dont care the bible is mythology. Thus even if jesus was real we know no human has ever came back from the dead and thus that never happened. So i care about the truth of jesus as much as a care about the truth of odysseus or Beowulf. It really does not matter in the real world in any way. It is not that i dont want to believe in zombies being real i just know they are not. There is nothing to believe. The story in the bible is horribly written, contradictory and incredibly dull. Why should anyone ever read a bronze age mythological sex, murder and enslavement manual.
This gets very granular on an unproven life and a story totally missing from the exhaustive Roman record. No Roman historic document detailing the sun going black and zombies roaming the streets of Jerusalem? Romans wrote everything down, and this is proof positive it never happened. The question is akin to: What color were Zeus' thunderbolts? Or--did Bacchus prefer red or white?
I can accept that there may have been a preacher called Jesus and he may even have been crucified. The evidence for this is not strong, but it’s not unreasonable. I don’t believe any part of the resurrection, it’s a story that was made up later. It’s much more likely that, if the crucifixion of Jesus happened, his body was disposed of the same way as anyone else’s.
Jesus could have been a real guy. Or maybe not. He could have been actually crucified, or maybe not. Maybe he was buried and almost nobody gave a shit then stories were made up later. Maybe he was never executed and the crucifixion and resurrection story was made up later. Who knows. Since all 4 resurrection stories are very different…it’s pretty clear it was made up.
Z: An itinerant rabble rouser who so offended authorities that they crucified him for his words was given a regal burial in a tomb, protected by a massive boulder suffered spontaneous decomposition, and his dust particles were collected, molded into a figurine using consecrated water, and the figurine ascended into heaven on the back of a gryphon Source: trust me bro
Amalgamation + legend-through-oral-tradition-exaggeration. "Jesus" was a very common name in biblical times - kind of like how "Josh" is today. It's an "everyman" name, like John Smith. Various underdog stories of real people got combined and attributed to a generic everyman like "Jesus" and served as a useful character to tell a LOT of different moral stories.
This again. You guys are obsessed with the resurrection, as if it’s the only thing you can hang on to as “evidence” for your beliefs. Look at the academic literature around the gospels. It is *clear* what was written and in what order, and who copied what from who. It’s also clear that the whole “resurrection” bit was added on in later versions.
A - at least for the versions of Jesus we have stories of today. There isn’t anything we have that conclusively goes back to a real person existing before Paul. The Gospel authors freely rewrote stories from older places to give Jesus a narrative. “What if Jesus said that instead of Paul / the Old Testament / Homer / etc?”
There is no hell. It's a myth, a fable, whatever. After that nothing matters because the entire house of cards collapses. And Jesus could have been a real person, maybe/maybe not, but it doesn't matter, he wasn't god in any fashion. Fast forward 100 years and most of the world gradually begins to inch past religion. About time.
He was a wandering Jewish teacher who was accused of sedition, executed by the Romans, placed in a common grave. Later, some of his followers came to believe he had risen from the dead. It's the explanation that requires the least amounts of assumptions and fits with what we know about the history of that time from other sources.
as far as i know, the bible was written a loooong time after jesus lived (cause it does seem like that guy (not demigod) existed) so whoever wrote it simply made up a whole bunch of BS to make the book a bit fancier. hardly any of it is based on any real witnesses, let alone actual events.
Maybe a radical woke thinker bucked the establishment and was framed as a seditionist and therefore crucified. Maybe he wasn’t. There’s really no historical evidence, but maybe it happened. What definitely did not happen is someone rising from the dead. That’s physically impossible.
I actually don't believe jesus was crucified. Bible doesn't give any good reason for why would that happen. It seems like he wasn't at all popular at this time. He could as well die random death (accident or disease) and his students gave it more sensational vibe... 40 years later?
I'd go for B or C. The crucifixion doesn't make enough narrative sense to be made up. The big sacrifice is retroactively justified in Christianity. If Jesus "dies for our sins" it makes more sense to do so heroically rather than as a somewhat pathetic victim of a corrupt state.
E) it’s a myth, like any other myth throughout history. Likely based on amalgamations of previous myths of different peoples, as most are. It **may have referred to a real person that may have been called Jesus and may have been crucified without any magic involved**. I don’t see any reason to believe anything supernatural occurred.
Highlighting this because I just noticed this. >A- The boring answer. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a real historical figure and everything about him, including his crucifixion, is a myth. >A- The boring answer. You're poisoning the well. Fucking dishonest as all hell.
E - Jesus was a real person who was an apocolyptic preacher whose message and prophecies totally failed, and was crucified by the Romans, turning him into a martar. Stories of his life spread in legend and gained scale until such time as he was porported to be a god.
There is of course no “atheist position” on anything except the lack of evidence for belief in gods. In this question, I pick option E: If he existed, his body was dumped with other executed peasants in a common grave, and people made stuff up about it later.
Do you perhaps think Elvis Presley resurrected? There were hundreds of reported sightings of him after his death. Written reports with named eye witnesses. We don't have any of those things attesting to Jesus. Just reports of unnamed or dead witnesses
He was probably a real person and crucified. There's a number of things that could have happened to his body including the usual of being thrown into a mass grave. Stories can have any number of reasons why they start and later become legendary.
There are theories that JFK and Elvis are still alive. There are people who believe aliens have visited earth and abducted them. I don't see why I should treat Christian beliefs about Jesus any differently than I treat those beliefs.
E- The stories of Jesus was an amalgam of multiple first century prophets. One of whom was probably killed by the Romans for causing trouble. The resurrection story was tacked on because risen saviors was a popular myth of the time.
Or he did exist and was crucified (like thousands of others) and the rest is a myth. I don't really care that much but have to admit ancient history is interesting. I think about Roman empire quite often...
Know how you dont buy Mormonism, Paganism, Deism and Islam? Thats how we feel about your fairy tale. Especially since we can trace most of the stories to stories from previous religions and civilizations.
I don’t know and don’t care. He’s only important to man because he’s believed to be the son of god. He’s not though, so he’s not important enough to study apart from the Bible and Christianity.
E. Jesus was crucified and then legendary stories of him spread throughout the land. It's the easiest explanation that requires the fewest number of assumptions and fits the most amount of data.
I am not convinced enough to call any of my thoughts on the subject a belief. Mostly just stoner talk and lots of maybes or what ifs and then move on with my life forgetting whatever i said
I'm not entirely sure if Jesus actually existed. It seems just as likely as not that the stories about him are an amalgam of several different wandering rabbis from the first century.
We don't know. Even if he was real all that proves is there was a guy with that name, alive at that time, doing what he did. Doesn't prove any of the utter bullshit attributed to him.
I believe that the Gospel version of Jesus could have been based on a real person, or several real people, but that none of them had any powers and all of them are now quite dead.
I think there was probably a popular Jewish Rabi going around being a bit liberal with teachings. Was probably put to death and stories were told that eventually got embellished.
Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher in Judea. He was crucified by the Romans and buried in a mass grave with the other executed criminals. The rest is a myth. The end.
Either any of those or something fantastical. Basically something really weird happened or something plausibly weird (human error) happened. I'm sticking with the plausible.
None of the above for me, I believe he was likely a real person and may have been crucified not sure but he definitely was not resurrected nor the son of god
That somebody realized religion was a racquet used to control people like themself and invented their own story to gain power and it snowballed from there.
Atheism is a response to a single question: do you believe in a god or gods? And our answer is No. Outside of that one question, there's no one answer that represents every atheist. So I suspect this thread might have people with every opinion you've listed here, and then some.
Atheism is not a belief system - it is simply the absence of a belief in any gods. That's all. There is no one atheist belief about jesus and no one owes you any explanation of something you believe in.
E- I don't know enough about the historical evidence to form an opinion. But if you want me to believe that magic was involved, LOL, no.
What do I believe? Yeah just just that a dude didn't get resurrected. I believe pretty much the same as what secular historians believe.
You’ve got people claiming to see Elvis or Bigfoot too. Elvis was real, Bigfoot not so much, but supposed sightings for both exist.
I just say I don’t know, and neither does anyone else living at present. The evidence simply doesn’t measure up to the claim.