Was there a historical Jesus at all?

[HansMustermann]

I have recently run into a... hypothesis, basically that the Gospels, especially Mark as the earliest of them, really describe something else and rather unexpected: Julius Caesar. You can find the full text here:

http://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/jwc_e/crux.html

(I've linked to the part about the crucifixion, which I find the most interesting part, but you can start from the beginning if you have the time and inclination.)

Now it does sound like a bible-code kind of conspiracy theory, and maybe it even is, but the parallels are actually very interesting IMHO.

Don't get me wrong. I don't particularly subscribe to the view that it was some kind of just distortion or accident that started from the imperial cult of Caesar and ended up as the Christ. But it seems to me like the parallels, verbal ambiguities and outright puns in there, do make a case that it might have been all an allegory. I.e., much like The Wizard Of Oz is actually an elaborate allegory for some events at the time and the author's opinions of them, Mark or maybe the proto-Mark source, actually builds an allegory for Rome's transition into an Empire.

Why would they do that, is another good question.

A possiblity _I_ just can't ignore is that already by Mark's time, essentially they knew nothing at all about the "historical Jesus", if one even existed.

If you look at Paul's epistles, half of which are just about the only non-pseudepigraphic parts, he didn't seem very concerned with who Jesus was or what he has done, outside the fact that he was crucified and rose and deprecated the OT wholesale in the process. Paul, like so many very early Christians, seemed to be more of a doomsday cultist than a scholar. His focus was mainly on getting as many people as possible to accept Jesus's resurrection and be saved, than on writing a biography of the Christ.

I can imagine that after his death, essentially nobody knew any more who this Jesus guy even was, and by now probably enough people wanted to know more. Sure, he's the Messiah, but who was he as a man? Where did he come from? How did he find out he's a Messiah? Who was his mentor? Etc.

And basically it's a possibility that someone took the stories about Caesar and used them as a framework for the story of Jesus. It would need far less imagination and talent than starting from the scratch, if nothing else. Plus, it may have seemed fitting to base the story on such an illustrious figure.

And, since a common argument seems to be "Jesus must be true because it's too convoluted a story otherwise", it may well be that it's convoluted simply because it started from an already convoluted story and had to morph it into something unrelated.

Essentially, if that's the case, we have no way to reconstruct a "historical Jesus" at all. The way through Paul leads to just a hallucination, and the way through the Gospels leads us to a forgery based on Julius Caesar. Whatever information about a "historical Jesus" may have ever existed -- including if one actually existed -- is not to be found in the Bible.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Essentially, if that's the case, we have no way to reconstruct a "historical Jesus" at all. The way through Paul leads to just a hallucination, and the way through the Gospels leads us to a forgery based on Julius Caesar. Whatever information about a "historical Jesus" may have ever existed -- including if one actually existed -- is not to be found in the Bible.

Let's see: Caesar was cut from his mother's womb (Cesarean section, the original), hence she had no birth canal, and no vagina, hence she had no sex at conception, hence Julius is divinely conceived, hence Jesus and Julius are the same guy.

Sure, works for me. I will now order Jesus Salad, not Caesar Salad, and be content with what they bring me: a small mount of olives!

DR

 

[Trent Wray]

If it can't be proven that Jesus rose from the dead, then Jesus (even if he did exist) was just another philosopher/catalyst and that's all. His pre-death existence isn't as important as his supposed resurrected one and I'm not sure why more believers don't focus on that aspect.

 

[aggle-rithm]

stuff
.

I don't see any reason to doubt there was a historical Jesus who did at least some of the things described in the Gospels, but I think it's possible that he could have been confused with several other cult figures from around that time. Most of the sayings and parables attributed to Jesus come from a different source than the biographical info, and the Divine Christ described in the epistles doesn't necessarilly correspond with any actual person.

 

[Trent Wray]

Let's see: Caesar was cut from his mother's womb (Cesarean section, the original), hence she had no birth canal, and no vagina, hence she had no sex at conception, hence Julius is divinely conceived, hence Jesus and Julius are the same guy.

Sure, works for me. I will now order Jesus Salad, not Caesar Salad, and be content with what they bring me: a small mount of olives!

DR

And I'll have a bloody Mary as well

 

[Simon39759]

I have recently run into a... hypothesis, basically that the Gospels, especially Mark as the earliest of them, really describe something else and rather unexpected: Julius Caesar. You can find the full text here:
http://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/jwc_e/crux.html
(I've linked to the part about the crucifixion, which I find the most interesting part, but you can start from the beginning if you have the time and inclination.)
Now it does sound like a bible-code kind of conspiracy theory, and maybe it even is, but the parallels are actually very interesting IMHO.
Don't get me wrong. I don't particularly subscribe to the view that it was some kind of just distortion or accident that started from the imperial cult of Caesar and ended up as the Christ. But it seems to me like the parallels, verbal ambiguities and outright puns in there, do make a case that it might have been all an allegory. I.e., much like The Wizard Of Oz is actually an elaborate allegory for some events at the time and the author's opinions of them, Mark or maybe the proto-Mark source, actually builds an allegory for Rome's transition into an Empire.
Why would they do that, is another good question.
A possiblity _I_ just can't ignore is that already by Mark's time, essentially they knew nothing at all about the "historical Jesus", if one even existed.
If you look at Paul's epistles, half of which are just about the only non-pseudepigraphic parts, he didn't seem very concerned with who Jesus was or what he has done, outside the fact that he was crucified and rose and deprecated the OT wholesale in the process. Paul, like so many very early Christians, seemed to be more of a doomsday cultist than a scholar. His focus was mainly on getting as many people as possible to accept Jesus's resurrection and be saved, than on writing a biography of the Christ.
I can imagine that after his death, essentially nobody knew any more who this Jesus guy even was, and by now probably enough people wanted to know more. Sure, he's the Messiah, but who was he as a man? Where did he come from? How did he find out he's a Messiah? Who was his mentor? Etc.
And basically it's a possibility that someone took the stories about Caesar and used them as a framework for the story of Jesus. It would need far less imagination and talent than starting from the scratch, if nothing else. Plus, it may have seemed fitting to base the story on such an illustrious figure.
And, since a common argument seems to be "Jesus must be true because it's too convoluted a story otherwise", it may well be that it's convoluted simply because it started from an already convoluted story and had to morph it into something unrelated.
Essentially, if that's the case, we have no way to reconstruct a "historical Jesus" at all. The way through Paul leads to just a hallucination, and the way through the Gospels leads us to a forgery based on Julius Caesar. Whatever information about a "historical Jesus" may have ever existed -- including if one actually existed -- is not to be found in the Bible.

Caesar was a general; Jesus mostly preached peace.
Caesar was well-born; Jesus came from humble origins.
Caesar was the most powerful man in his time; Jesus was poor.
Caesar had mad booty; Jesus is not remembered to get lucky even a single time...
Caesar rules alone and share his power with no one; Jesus had a bunch of followers and lived in communism with them.
Caesar died old and sick; Jesus was 33.
Caesar's death tore the empire into a civil war; Nobody seemed to notice Jesus' death until the 2nd century CE.


If you have two narratives big and detailed enough to include enough details, it almost is a given that some of these details will coincide by sheer accident.
Cherry picking these details can often lead to a mistaken impression... that's where conspiracy theries come from.


ETA: I only wrote about the theory presented in the OP here, I don't know if the OP wants to get into the more general question of "Did Jesus exists?".

 

[bluskool]

Then why did Josephus and Tacidus think he was real?

Besides, if Paul just hallucinated the idea of Jesus, why did he write letters to churches he started telling them to not listen to other missionaries with alternative messages? Who were these other missionaries? Did they also have hallucinations of Jesus?

I find the Jesus never existed hypotheses difficult to swallow. I am not saying that the stories in Mark aren't legendary fiction or just made up comparisons to other figures like Julius Caesar, but I still think there was a real Jesus even if we can never really know much of anything about him.

 

[Simon39759]

Josephus is not conclusive, the main one of the two citations is clearly a later fake by Christians.
The second one is a passing reference to James, the brother of the one they call Christ. It is also quite likely to be an interpolation.
At any rate the whole Antiquity of the Jews is too suspicious and marred to be considered.

Tacitus wrote decades after the alleged events and was only considered about the presence of Christians in Romes (even then, he might have made a mistake, being unfamiliar with the subject, and misidentified Jews as Christians, the documents he refers to do not appear to mention Christianity specifically).
At any rate, his testimony is only evidence of the presence of Christians in the late first century, which was never in doubt and says nothing about the existence of Jesus himself...

 

[Rasmus]

Then why did Josephus and Tacidus think he was real?

Besides, if Paul just hallucinated the idea of Jesus, why did he write letters to churches he started telling them to not listen to other missionaries with alternative messages? Who were these other missionaries? Did they also have hallucinations of Jesus?

I find the Jesus never existed hypotheses difficult to swallow. I am not saying that the stories in Mark aren't legendary fiction or just made up comparisons to other figures like Julius Caesar, but I still think there was a real Jesus even if we can never really know much of anything about him.

But then the term "real Jesus" becomes irrelevant.
The stories in the Bible should be about one specific person that has actually lived. No matter what happened to them over time, in the beginning someone should have really sat down and decided to tell / write / record / whatever the tales of *this guy*.

Then, it is equally important that enough of the original story survives that if you were looking at *this guy's* actual live, you should be able to say - with confidence - that the stories about the bible re-tell his actual life.

If these two factors are getting smaller and smaller, then eventually it just doesn't make sense anymore to speak of the historical Jesus at all, just like it doesn't make sense to speak of the historical Dorothy we learn about in Wizard of Oz.

And the entire discussion becomes utterly pointless, anyway. What would it tell us if we discovered that there actually was a guy named Jesus? Do you think he ever healed the sick, turned water into wine, brought the dead back to the living and walked on water? Do you think he really did rise from the dead himself?

If no, then it doesn't matter ***** if the real Jesus was more real than the real Dorothy, or more fabricated than Harry Potter. We know Ron Hubbard was real. We know Joseph Smith Jr was real. Does that incline anyone to become a Mormon or Scientologist? Should it?

 

[HansMustermann]

Caesar was a general; Jesus mostly preached peace.
Caesar was well-born; Jesus came from humble origins.
Caesar was the most powerful man in his time; Jesus was poor.
Caesar had mad booty; Jesus is not remembered to get lucky even a single time...
Caesar rules alone and share his power with no one; Jesus had a bunch of followers and lived in communism with them.
Caesar died old and sick; Jesus was 33.
Caesar's death tore the empire into a civil war; Nobody seemed to notice Jesus' death until the 2nd century CE.

If you actually read the analysis there (and I know, it's a lot), at least some of those are actually explained, and there are more similarities too. Starting with the fact that although murdered, Caesar ultimately won and became a god. (Was deified.) Or that Caesar was called saviour too. And so on.

That said, as I was saying, I'm not saying that Julius Caesar _is_ Jesus Christ. While the authors seem to go for basically "it was just distortions in an oral story" slant, I'm not particularly buying that. But it seems to me very possible that someone constructed their Jesus midrash starting from the structure of Caesar's story. It's a powerful story of the hero coming against all odds as the saviour, being betrayed and apparently defeated, then ultimately winning even from beyond the grave. It's not the worst starting point, if you want to do a quick job of inventing the biography of another messiah who won even from beyond the grave.

 

[Simon39759]

Yes; I did not have the impression you were particularly buying.
But, still, the coincidence are, in my opinion, just that, coincidences and the tendency of people to fall back into the same pattern of idealization.

I am sure you could find quite a few similarities between Jesus and MLK, for example, of even Jesus and Lady Di...

 

[bluskool]

Josephus is not conclusive, the main one of the two citations is clearly a later fake by Christians.
The second one is a passing reference to James, the brother of the one they call Christ. It is also quite likely to be an interpolation.
At any rate the whole Antiquity of the Jews is too suspicious and marred to be considered.

Clearly the one passage contains Christian additions, but that doesn't mean it was made up entirely. Also, more specifically, why do you think we should throw out Josephus as a source entirely?

Tacitus wrote decades after the alleged events and was only considered about the presence of Christians in Romes (even then, he might have made a mistake, being unfamiliar with the subject, and misidentified Jews as Christians, the documents he refers to do not appear to mention Christianity specifically).
At any rate, his testimony is only evidence of the presence of Christians in the late first century, which was never in doubt and says nothing about the existence of Jesus himself...

From The Annals
"Christus, from whom their name is derived was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilot in the reign of Tiberius."
"

 

[Cainkane1]

I have recently run into a... hypothesis, basically that the Gospels, especially Mark as the earliest of them, really describe something else and rather unexpected: Julius Caesar. You can find the full text here:

http://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/jwc_e/crux.html

(I've linked to the part about the crucifixion, which I find the most interesting part, but you can start from the beginning if you have the time and inclination.)

Now it does sound like a bible-code kind of conspiracy theory, and maybe it even is, but the parallels are actually very interesting IMHO.

Don't get me wrong. I don't particularly subscribe to the view that it was some kind of just distortion or accident that started from the imperial cult of Caesar and ended up as the Christ. But it seems to me like the parallels, verbal ambiguities and outright puns in there, do make a case that it might have been all an allegory. I.e., much like The Wizard Of Oz is actually an elaborate allegory for some events at the time and the author's opinions of them, Mark or maybe the proto-Mark source, actually builds an allegory for Rome's transition into an Empire.

Why would they do that, is another good question.

A possiblity _I_ just can't ignore is that already by Mark's time, essentially they knew nothing at all about the "historical Jesus", if one even existed.

If you look at Paul's epistles, half of which are just about the only non-pseudepigraphic parts, he didn't seem very concerned with who Jesus was or what he has done, outside the fact that he was crucified and rose and deprecated the OT wholesale in the process. Paul, like so many very early Christians, seemed to be more of a doomsday cultist than a scholar. His focus was mainly on getting as many people as possible to accept Jesus's resurrection and be saved, than on writing a biography of the Christ.

I can imagine that after his death, essentially nobody knew any more who this Jesus guy even was, and by now probably enough people wanted to know more. Sure, he's the Messiah, but who was he as a man? Where did he come from? How did he find out he's a Messiah? Who was his mentor? Etc.

And basically it's a possibility that someone took the stories about Caesar and used them as a framework for the story of Jesus. It would need far less imagination and talent than starting from the scratch, if nothing else. Plus, it may have seemed fitting to base the story on such an illustrious figure.

And, since a common argument seems to be "Jesus must be true because it's too convoluted a story otherwise", it may well be that it's convoluted simply because it started from an already convoluted story and had to morph it into something unrelated.

Essentially, if that's the case, we have no way to reconstruct a "historical Jesus" at all. The way through Paul leads to just a hallucination, and the way through the Gospels leads us to a forgery based on Julius Caesar. Whatever information about a "historical Jesus" may have ever existed -- including if one actually existed -- is not to be found in the Bible.

Aw cmon. Ain't you got no faith in nuthin?

 

[Simon39759]

Clearly the one passage contains Christian additions, but that doesn't mean it was made up entirely. Also, more specifically, why do you think we should throw out Josephus as a source entirely?

We know that at least part of it is made up.
We don't know what and to what extent.

It's not reliable (on that particular subject) and, even if it was, it does not bring any new information (Jesus preached, was a nice guy, got executed, we know that already).
So, there is not much reason to keep it outside of apologetists wanting an non-Christian source to bolster their belief in Jesus' historicity...

From The Annals
"Christus, from whom their name is derived was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilot in the reign of Tiberius."
"

Yeah, as I said, it's not about Jesus, it's about Christian with a short reference to their belief.
It's also a mistake, Pilate was prefect. It is sometime considered doubtful that Tacitus would make such an error. That, and the fact that nobody refers to this passage until a few centuries also suggests that it might be a later addition...

It also comes from the Christian tradition, Tacitus did not go there and investigate, his source has to be Christian traditions. Once again, it is a testament to the presence of Christians in Romes at the time and the fact they believed in Jesus, not much else.

 

[HansMustermann]

Yes; I did not have the impression you were particularly buying.
But, still, the coincidence are, in my opinion, just that, coincidences and the tendency of people to fall back into the same pattern of idealization.

I am sure you could find quite a few similarities between Jesus and MLK, for example, of even Jesus and Lady Di...

I don't think Lady Di was deified, nor called a saviour, nor a bunch of other rather key elements of the mythos.

 

[Cavemonster]

I don't think Lady Di was deified, nor called a saviour, nor a bunch of other rather key elements of the mythos.

No, but a lot of other figures have.

And give it a couple thousand years, history has a way of mutating.

 

[HansMustermann]

I don't see any reason to doubt there was a historical Jesus who did at least some of the things described in the Gospels, but I think it's possible that he could have been confused with several other cult figures from around that time. Most of the sayings and parables attributed to Jesus come from a different source than the biographical info, and the Divine Christ described in the epistles doesn't necessarilly correspond with any actual person.

But if enough elements are confused, embelished, or outright invented starting from another myth, is it still a "historical Jesus" or is it on par with "historical Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz", as Rasmus so aptly puts it?

And, really, that is in fact the more important question: are there _any_ elements in there which are actually true? Which of them? And how would you know, much less get so sure that you have no reason to doubt?

The article makes a decent case that someone may have started purely from a story of Julius Caesar, and didn't even do a too thorough job of changing the names and words to morph it into a Jesus Christ story. Some names have barely a couple of letters switched around. (E.g., Nicomedes becomes Nicodemus, or both get their uncle back from the dead and he then remains with a woman named Martha. Didn't even bother changing _that_ name at all. Or the Capitoline Hill, whose name does contain the root for head, becomes the hill of Gologotha, i.e., of the skull or the head.) It follows the Caesar narrative as closely as to even mangle the geography of the place into more of a geography of Italy, e.g., by placing Judea right across the river from Galilee, just like Italy was right across the river from Gaul. Some whole sentences apparently the author didn't even bother changing at all, and can be read one way or another just because you already know you're reading about a crucifixion, hence putting someone on some wood naturally sounds like crucifixion instead of placing them on a funeral pyre.

Is there _anything_ from a historical Jesus in there, or is it all just a bad plagiarism of something that had nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus?

If you have no doubt, I envy you, because I do.

 

[Manopolus]

Well, personally I think it was fiction to begin with, but perhaps it was inspired by the story of Julius Ceasar. I would also put forth the story of Socrates as a possible source of inspiration, as well as some stories from Greek and Egyptian mythology -- if similarity is a method of showing influence.

Here's the thing:

Stories influence culture, which again influences stories that may be independent of knowing the original story.

 

[bluskool]

If no, then it doesn't matter ***** if the real Jesus was more real than the real Dorothy, or more fabricated than Harry Potter. We know Ron Hubbard was real. We know Joseph Smith Jr was real. Does that incline anyone to become a Mormon or Scientologist? Should it?

It matters to me. I would rather hold to the view that is closest to historically accurate. It is either true or false that Jesus existed and considering the impact that Christianity has has on western civilization, I think the question is certainly meaningful. It certainly is a question that matters to historians. Now, it might not matter to you and I am not saying that it should, but I don't really see why your personal opinion on what is meaningful historically should be the guide to what questions get considered.

Also, I never said that the mere existence of Jesus should make someone a Xtian. You seem to think that I must have religious motivations for thinking Jesus existed which is pretty presumptuous.

 

[I Ratant]

And I'll have a bloody Mary as well

.
Do NOT go into your bathroom, close the door, look in the mirror, and say "Bloody Mary" three times!
You have been warned!