Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
Not that it matters much to this thread or is likely to be what your acquaintences had in mind, but just because I think it's fun: there actually are Egyptian records of something that looks Exodusy to me. They say they threw out a group of foreign conquerors called "Hyksos" who had taken over part of northeastern Egypt for a few centuries. The Hyksos spoke a Semitic language (I think even NW Semitic, which is Hebrew's branch) and had names to match, even including a king named "Jacob". And although the idea that they were conquerors and got thrown out might sound like it doesn't fit with the Bible's claim that they were slaves and escaped, it actually does. Early in Exodus, it says the Israelites were doing very well for themselves there and Egypt turned against them because they became too successful & powerful, and later, in the chapters leading up to the final departure, there are multiple references to needing to hurry because their neighbors wanted them to go and might attack if they didn't go fast enough, so the Bible gives us actually a combination of escaping and getting driven out. (It's even used as the explanation for why the Feast of Unleavened Bread is the Feast of Unleavened Bread! The story goes that they left without any yeast because they were suddenly packing up in such a rush to get going.) So we have not just independent corroboration, but competitor/opponent corroboration, of several parts of the Bible story, but not other parts. And the Egyptian tale apparently even caps it off with some kind of calamity like a huge violent storm or such because it was just Egyptian storytelling tradition for big important human events to be marked by nature like that, so we even have agreement on a presumably supernatural aspect of it too.
The last time I went through a list of sources like that, it turned out that not a single one of them other than Josephus (see below) would have been expected to talk about Jesus even if Jesus were real, so the fact that they didn't means nothing. It's like saying a certain principle in aircraft engineering must not be real because a certain group of marine biologists never mentioned it.
If you have any this time for whom talking about Jesus would actually be expected, and not doing so would actually be conspicuous/strange, which are they?
And Josephus (excluding the obviously fake Testimonium) only makes the "it's all nothing but fiction" case even worse anyway. He gives us a couple of wandering doomsday preachers in whom most aspects of a plausible real-world version of the Christian Jesus can be found. One whose name was unknown to Josephus became quite famous in that area in his time, gathered a large following, preached Jesusy-sounding stuff primarily at the Mount of Olives, and had his career ended in a Roman attack which killed or scattered his crowd (a battle which surprisingly fits the Bible scene involving a Roman cohort and Disciples with swords and an ear getting cut off), but is said to have escaped. Another a bit later on is named Jesus, was captured & beaten by Jewish authorites and then handed over to the Romans who beat him again, never offered any defense of himself in either case, and was personally interviewed by the governor, who found that he was innocent and not a threat and should be released, only to end up getting killed by Romans afterward anyway. Why do the "it was all simply made up just to create a new religion out of the lie" people never comment on those guys?
The Christian god is not argued against based only on absence of evidence. It comes with testable real-world predictions, and those have all failed.
Which made-up "foundational character(s)" do you have in mind that are said to be humans whose life stories are similar to how we know some human lives go in their place & time, not aliens like Zenu or spinoffs from established major religions like Moroni?
As I'm pretty sure you already knew, nobody's claiming that that's what the gospels called him. They're claiming that that's what he probably was in reality, which the gospels distort.
Those really are nowhere near analogous. Harry Potter was never said to be real and used as a religious figure. Samson and Solomon are just Israelite kings said to live in a time when Israel had kings, so there's no particular reason to think they're entirely fictional rather than just embellished. The gods you named are personifications of aspects of nature or life, not supernaturalizations of humans. Noah and Moses are characters whom it would be reasonable to suspect were embellished from real people, but they also come with easy explanations for why such characters might have been invented if there were no such real people: they're icons in large-scale stories that work better if a central focal character is invented to represent humanity or a specific subset of humans through the story, like what modern movie reviewers call a "point-of-view character" or "audience surrogate". (In other words, a tale of global destruction needs a survivor, and a tale of captive people being led to freedom needs a leader.) Jesus fits none of those descriptions. The one he comes closest to is Samson & Solomon: alleged real people of a type that we know did exist in the given place & time, whom it would thus be unreasonable to declare made-up on the basis of only some supernatural stuff getting included in their stories.
That the insistence that he was made up doesn't make much sense on the face of it and is thus in need of explanation & justification to show how it would make more sense than it seems to at first.
That's another one of those global-scale stories that would benefit from having human characters as stand-ins for the rest of us to make its point about the way the world works. A tale of sin entering human life demands a first sinner, and a tale of the switch from wandering around eating what you find to farming benefits hugely from having a first farmer. Jesus started out as an utterly ordinary (as they were seen back then) guy just like several other guys, not a representative of humanity or the tribe in a grand tale of a transformation in the way life works.
No. You depict the progression of versions of the story exactly backward. The later his story was rewritten, the more supernatural it got. The oldest stuff about him is the most mundane, the most like other wandering Jewish doomsday dudes.
The oldest form of his story just has him wander around preaching for a while & get killed. There's some stuff like blindness-curing along the way, but that's routine, included in the package; all those guys like him were (said to be) miracle-workers. He doesn't even seem to have originally been said to have gotten resurrected (and even that would have been a not-very-remarkable trope of the time if he had). The Epistles that aren't universally agreed to be late fakes predate the Gospels, and those only have him appearing in visions after dying, not his body walking around. The earliest Gospel ends with only an implication that he might maybe have been resurrected but no follow-up confirmation, as if to leave it an open question precisely because the author knew some readers/listeners wouldn't buy that, and even that was written decades after the events it depicts, which is decades in which for the tale to have already gotten embellished in word-of-mouth relay. Later Gospels, as if in response to that cliffhanger, then tack on a bit of an "oh, ya, he totally did some other stuff too" addendum.
A historical Jesus wouldn't even need to be the basis of each specific story that now has him in it. He'd just need to be somebody to whom those stories could be attached to.
of Alexandria wrote many technical works, including astronomy in mid 1st C. 