Do you believe Jesus existed?

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on June 7, 2010 at 4:38am

Indeed, as Danny says, the documents are by no means evenly distributed amongst those years: the majority are very much First Century BCE works.
And then again, the Essenes were a sect that chose strict isolation from the outside world as one of the paths to God. Why would they be mentioning things that happened in the outside world?

That's why the Dead Sea scrolls are hardly good historical material: they are theological works that can teach us a lot about how the Essenes thought, but not much about history in terms of how many preachers there were in Judea and Galilee.

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Permalink Reply by Ben Gold on June 4, 2010 at 6:53pm

A. I took a really interesting class a while back called "The Origins of Western Morality," and for my final paper I wrote about something called the Jewish Cynic Jesus Theory. Although this doesn't go too far into the question of whether or not Jesus actually existed, it looks at the historical, philosophical, and religious context underlying the parables and teachings that are attributed to him. Basically, I think that there was a Jesus (like the popular rabbi/prophet mentioned by Doug here), and that he was even a pretty revolutionary guy, influenced by the Cynic philosophers that preached revaluation and anti-establishment. I think he combined ideas like those with his understanding of Judaism, and a desire to loosen the bonds of Roman governance. Although there are several contradictions in the four canonic gospels regarding his words and acts, and though these were all written long after Jesus supposedly died, there are also a great amount of consistencies, which have led scholars to point to a "Q" source that the four writers must have had in common. This source would have obviously predated all four gospels, and thus it would have been written much closer to the supposed time of Jesus. For these reasons, I think Jesus did exist, and gained significant attention for his new ideas during his life. However, I think this "Q" source was written after his death by a group of people unconnected with him who realized they could use him to combat the Romans, based on the revolutionary idea that power lied not in money but in faith: something the Jews could finally have more of than the Romans. So they found a way to associate him with the prophecies of Ezekiel and other Old Testament prophets, started calling him the Son of Man, and... well the rest is perhaps the darkest period of intellectual history known to man.

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on June 6, 2010 at 11:01am

Some good points there, but it's got one major flaw: the people who wrote the gospels and other Christian documents (who supposedly realised they "could use him to combat the Romans") were invariably Romans.
In fact, early Christianity did as much as it could to distance itself from anything anti-Roman, and they go through a great deal of trouble to make Jesus look as a friend (or at least not an enemy) of the Roman establishment: we see him healing the son of a Roman centurion, the saying 'render unto Caesar' is underlined, and we see him getting real chummy with Pontius Pilate who thinks Jesus is a decent guy. On the other hand, the Pharisees and the Sadducees (many of whom would later become revolutionairies) get cast as the bad guys: we see them constantly trying to get dirt on Jesus by asking tough questions, Jesus regularly gets upset with them, and it's the Jewish establishment that eventually hands Jesus over to the Romans and convinces Pilate to execute him.

The message here is obvious: Jesus is portrayed as non-revolutionairy as can possibly be. The reason is obvious. When the gospels were written, Judea and Galilee had just rebelled against their Roman conquerors. Rome had to fight a long and extremely bloody war to suppress them and bring the area under control again. It was hard enough trying to sell a Jewish religion to Romans anyway, let alone if those treacherous Jews had just tried to fight the Empire: that's why the gospel writers (who were Romans) make it clear that Jesus had nothing whatsoever to do with that revolt.

So Christianity was not born out of revolutionairy zeal at all: many of Christian theology is an attempt to downplay any potential association with revolutionairy ideas.

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Permalink Reply by Ben Gold on June 6, 2010 at 10:52pm

Thanks for the close read, Matt, and for the new information. I get that the early Christians did a lot to dissociate their movement from other problem groups like the Pharisees, but I wonder if this wasn't done just to publicly cover their tracks. In other words, were quotes like "render unto Caesar" a way of appeasing Roman governors like Pilate? I don't know, I'm just asking. The reason I'm so stuck on my "anti-Roman rebels" hypothesis is because of the overall philosophy common to the four gospels, found in moments when Jesus tells his followers they have to abandon their families (the backbone of any societal structure) to be with him, or that "it's easier for a camel to pass through they eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" (wealth, or the economic force underlying the status quo of a society, is evil). The lessons and parables taught by Jesus (or the earliest Christians, depending on what you believe) are some pretty mind-blowing ideas, and I think the early Christians might have looked for a way to spread rebellion among the Jews while keeping things quiet with the Romans. But that's just my perspective, and it wouldn't be right if I held onto that deaf to reason. I'm curious to hear what you have to say, especially since I admit most of this is my own speculation.

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on June 7, 2010 at 4:59am

It's of course always possible that they covered their tracks, but I think there's a more likely explanation which I choose because it is clear simply from reading the gospels, why the Romans wouldn't have liked what Jesus had to say. Whether he was a revolutionairy or not wouldn't really have mattered to them: the ideas of Jesus that we see in the gospels would have been more than enough reason to nail him to a cross.

First off, every single one of Jesus' teachings makes more sense of you keep in mind that he was an apocalyptic preacher: he was, like many Jewish teachers of the time, convinced that an imminent apocalyps is coming ("this generation will not pass away before they see the kingdom of God") that would introduce a Kingdom of Yahweh where the Romans would be swiped away by God's righteousness. Second, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, which means that he effectively was the guy that would lead the people of Israel into this glorious kingship.

It also shows why apocalyptic preachers weren't that compatible with the revolutionairies, or with anything else for that matter: the corollary of believing in an imminent apocalyps means that you shouldn't care for your family (that's why he says to abandon them), for wealth or material possessions (like the camel through a needle metaphor), revenge (turn the other cheek), oppression, etcetera; these things are all pointless if the apocalyps is coming: you need to stop caring about familiy, politics, wealth and start making sure that you're going to be regarded as one of the good guys when God comes out of the clouds!
That's why apocalyptic preaching of this nature is incompatible with any material goals like striving for an actual revolution against the Romans. That's not to say it never happened, but the two different mindsets make it unlikely: other apocalyptic preachers tended to think that angels would descend from heaven to do the fighting for them.

That said, these theological niceties didn't bother the Romans. It didn't matter that Jesus emphasised that "his kingdom was not of this world". Anyone preaching about how the Kingship of God was coming to do away with the Romans, was doing a very dangerous thing. Anyone preaching about how the Kingship of God was coming and they themselves - the Messiah - were going to lead the Jews there, was (for the Romans) inciting to rebellion and was asking for a death penalty.
In other words, while Jesus would not technically have been a revolutionairy (because of the spiritual rather than material goal) that wouldn't have mattered to the Romans.

And in fact, when you look at the records we have of the period, we see that there are relatively few people who claimed to be the Messiah (contrary to popular perception) precisely because it was so dangerous: you were effectively declaring war on Rome. Not surprisingly, of the 27 (or something, I have the precise list lying around here somewhere) only 1 died a natural death. All the others were hunted down, arrested and executed by the Romans, for inciting to rebellion. The penalty of which is - you guessed it - crucifixion.
The gospel writers try to downplay this by pretending that claiming to be the Messiah was really not a big deal to the Romans, and that Pilate totally understood and cared for the theological niceties that detailed why this man wasn't really advocating physical violence. This is ahistorical to the point of being laughable: Pilate was quite possibly one of the most violent Roman rulers we know of (he was abdicated for being too violent. By Caligula! Caligula!!) and he would have nailed first and asked questions later. Which is probably what happened.

That's why I doubt anything was downplayed at all. The reason for Jesus' crucifixion was most likely preaching to be the Messiah - just that would have done it.

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Permalink Reply by Ben Gold on June 7, 2010 at 9:47am

This all makes a lot of sense. Paul also ran into trouble assuming the apocalypse was near, recommending the Ephesians not to bother marrying or concerning themselves with other worldly concerns like family only to find himself still walking and breathing (and changing his mind) 20 years later.

But if the gospel writers were Romans as you say they were, writing between 100 and 400 years after Jesus' death, were they still awaiting the apocalypse? And it's one thing to stop caring about family, wealth, and the rest, but another to completely avoid them, isn't it? I mean, Jesus doesn't just recommend abandoning family and money, he says it's impossible for someone to get into heaven if they still love their family and money.

I understand that the early Christians weren't all working together, and that even the canonical gospel writers (especially the John writer/s) weren't on the same page, but supposedly they all had an agenda and unfortunately that agenda ended up working insofar as it convinced a lot of people to do a lot of crazy things. I'm just fascinated by the ability of a movement that started with so many loose ends and such a disorganized infrastructure (and decentralized too, because even if Jesus did exist he probably wasn't used as the rallying point of the movement until a little while after his death anyway, since his "resurrection" was necessary to prove his "divinity") to grow to take hold of the human race as powerfully as it did. It's a quiet revolution when the philosopher preaches loving the neighbor as yourself in a greedy, selfish world, or when the very institution that denies the importance of wealth grows to become the richest and most powerful organization in the world. What part did Jesus and the gospels play in this movement? I don't know, but I suspect that they weren't after the same things, and I doubt that any of them pictured anything like the Roman Catholic church at all. So to get back to the original question on this thread, I think Jesus existed and was used for a variety of different reasons, but I don't claim to know what all those reasons were or what he himself actually thought about his teachings. Any ideas?

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Wheaton on June 4, 2010 at 7:02pm

A

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Permalink Reply by Olga Spelts (Human Bean) on June 6, 2010 at 11:27am

Def C

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Permalink Reply by William Rolling on June 6, 2010 at 11:34am

C. Jesus was just like all the other "Sun Gods" before him. There is a very well structured ebook which, through a very realistic satire very subtlety demonstrates the holes in religion and particularly the afterlife. It has gone over the heads of many religious people who have read it as they thought it was actually true. They thereby completely miss the point. Anyway, everyone should check it out. Last time I saw it was free. google Doe's Account.

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Permalink Reply by Dheeraj on June 6, 2010 at 12:47pm

What is the follow up question!
i.e. existence of absence of something in the past does not have much value as a question, if it is already and active point of debate with no certain answer. I hope we are not basing things of "believe" here as well
:)
i.e.
I believe that Jesus was one of the slaves my ancestors had who stole their cattle to partly do charity and party to build his own farm. However they caught up to him and decided the obvious punishment of crucifixion which I "believe" was a popular method to punish thieves during that time.
Now if I "believe" that it does answer your question as choice B, but is that relevant?

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on June 6, 2010 at 6:12pm

So... you figured you'd come to an atheist networking site to share the good news with us?

We've heard it before, darling. Please leave: inter-religious debate is not the purpose of this site; there's enough places for that as it is.

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Permalink Reply by nick altman on June 8, 2010 at 4:43am

You gain nothing by coming to this site and preaching to us. You lied already when you agreed to join the site by claiming you are not a religious believer. Do you really want to continue looking foolish to everyone here, see who can play the more clever game of semantics? You have nothing to debate or argue, your position of authority disqualifies that, so do us all a favor and stop posting here if you're just going to be telling us how wrong and lost we are for not agreeing with you. You believe in free will I assume, how about you respect ours and focus on preaching to those who seek you out.

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