Jesus Christ was probably born… Never. No contemporary historical records support his existence.
Why didn’t just write 3BC
The “best” is dating events in Holy-Roman era books. Aside from the variable of several years, then there’s also that some sects date from “birth” others “baptism” or “death”.
Further, each time the book got hand copied, you’ve no idea whether that monk copied verbatim dates OR believed (possibly wrongly) that the prior copy was dating heretically, and took the liberty of “correcting” it.
So several iterations along, book could be stating a century off…
And its pretty much impossible to pin all the stories in the various gospels to any single individual reliably. And the younger he gets, the more nebulous and fuzzy the stories are.
Historians also have a rule for any historical figure that we are unsure if they really existed, if that person also has lots of stories about him involving magic or him personally doing anything supernatural, ya that guy is probably a myth.
TIL Jesus have been born before he was born.
Damn jesus looking chopped as fuck in that pic
He is already sick of the bullshit happening at work. Roll on Friday 5pm.
He was probably an amalgamation of many mystics and prophets.
What’s more likely? That his story is historically factually written, decades after his death, by a myriad collection of sources, people that also wrote “Holy books” during the same period that were rejected by Christianity as a whole? (like the apocrypha and Gnosticism).
Or that he’s a loose combination of many different holy men, which were pretty common at the time?
Or that He was the super-powered son of God, and there was a total eclipse for hours after His crucifixion that nobody else noticed, and He promised that He would come back in His apostle’s lifetime, but then He forgot for 2,000 years?
Iirc the current consensus among critical/secular Bible scholars is that he was probably a real guy, but the stories about him in the Bible are mostly fictional (eg, he was probably born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, did not have any supernatural abilities, and did not resurrect after being executed). Pretty sure Josephus, a historian who wrote a few decades after the historical Jesus would have died mentioned him, and iirc there’s at least one or two other mentions of him in non-Christian sources (or non Christian adjacent, Christian orthodoxy hadn’t really formed yet) from the first century CE.
Imo the most likely scenario is that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who publicly opposed the Roman state and was executed for it, and most of what we consider modern Christianity was invented by Paul and his clique.
hOW dARe yOu jEsUs wAs a WHiTe AmERiCaN mAn anD thE BIbLe IS tHE wORd Of GOD!!!
Could be both tbh. He is literally described as man and God at the same time.
He is literally described as man and God
So were thousands of other historical figures.
And who are we to say they’re all wrong, or any of them are?
We just have to square ourselves with the fact that every religious text written by our long dead ancestors is literal truth and that some malevolent super being has the power to write time and space the way we might write a grocery list.
And so am i
deleted by creator
That’s a long labour! Did Mary at least get an epidural?
Imagine giving birth to a 7 year old…
Does this 7 year old sleep through the night? Because I could be convinced
But, the Bible says he died at age 34.
Also, no one fucking knows. At all. It’s all stories written long after the facts, and the “facts” were as likely just fiction.
It’s all bullshit.
How did Jesus die? I mean after he died and came back to life? He resurrected and so did tons of people in a nearby graveyard and they all walked through the nearest town (yes this is very literally what’s written about the resurrection in the bible) then what? He just went to a hill and floated away? What happens after that to him? Seems like a huge plot hole
He allegedly basically went “vwoop” straight up to heaven, also so did his mom for some reason.
Some say he continues to walk around to this day… that would kinda suck
He may have died in reality, but can a man this swole really die?
He may have been an actual human, but a lot of the stories were taken from previous religions. It’s like a bad bunch of fanfic. Plus I read they voted on him being a god.
I don’t see the problem with voting to see which god you wanna worship
Can I vote for Cthulhu? Probably would kick Jesus’s ass.
Uh, we got a Cthulhu Johnson and a Cthuhlu Johnson running for God. which one you voting for?
edit: and a Cthulhu Jergensen. big year for Cthulhus.
Even if he wasn’t actually a god and was just a person?
So you’ve heard about my second cult, Dave-ology
Adapted along the time to please the people in power
Nah, he walked over water and everything and it was great. I guess you had to be there.
The fuck they put in that water, makes people think they can see other people walking on it
I heard he walked on the water and then the water turned to wine and then they made babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me!
The baby looked at you? Mary, call the Sanhedron.
Can confirm, I was the water
Pics or it didn’t happen
Jesus was way cool
And he built my hotrod.
and then everyone clapped
The guy in the bible who talked to a bush probably just did a bunch of mushrooms lmao
I once knew a guy who did that and he wasn’t even able to save himself, nor was he very big on “peace”, “love thy neighbour” or “turn the othet cheek” stuff. He would stab you in dark alley if you crossed him.
Okay. Look, it was documented, he was real, he existed. All the other stuff though, I’m not sure he did all that 😆. It’s basically all church propaganda. I mean the church obviously had an agenda and they divined up a natural speaker/teacher of morals.
“Christ” as in the son of God as we read about in the Bible, “Christ” clearly did not exist. If there was an individual who served as the historic basis, that is something else entirely. It’s like saying Christopher Robin or Carrol’s Alice was a real person. Or the characters from Dante’s Inferno. They are fictional reflections of people that exist not to tell us about the history of that potentially real person but for literary reasons.
My take, and far as I know it’s unique to me, is that Jesus existed, probably did some preaching, and was crucified. There were a lot of streetcorner ranters back then and the Romans did crucify a lot of people. And they were halfway decent about keeping records.
The Jesus we know is a fiction created by the Romans to pacify the Jews. The Jews made shitty slaves but were awaiting a messiah so the Romans gave them one, but made him a wimp. A slave god. Be a good slave and you’ll get a nice reward for it after you die. It would have worked, too, except the Romans didn’t understand Jungian psychology. They didn’t realize what a shadow self they were creating by insisting people emulate an archetype of pure empathy.
Basically, I see Christianity as the result of social engineering from a couple millennia ago, and its worldwide dominance is due to its accidentally militaristic nature.
I always figured the apostles must have cast a new Jesus after the crucifixion. How many people really knew what he looked like, and hihard could it have been to find a doppelganger?
It’s one of the black-and-white irreconcilable contradictions in the Bible. The gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew puts Jesus birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE. The gospel traditionally attributed to Luke puts Jesus birth during the census of Quirinius. Quirinius wasn’t Herod’s successor, he was Herod’s successor’s successor, and his reign didn’t begin until around 6 CE. The other canonical gospels don’t have nativity accounts.
Well, not so much. Because the bible doesn’t mention the dates of life and rule of the two figures, so you have to go outside the bible to find the problem - so it’s not a contradiction in the bible but a contradiction between the bible and other sources.
(And for biblical literalists, there is no contest of course!)
I also like how Jesus has two different lineages depending on which gospel you read. Apologists try to say one of them is about Mary’s parents and not Joseph’s, but the text is explicit.
Matthew 1: “Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus…”
Luke 3: “Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli.”
So was Joseph’s father Jacob, or Heli?
There are many more. The bible is literally unbelievable. Chapter 2 lists a different creation order from chapter 1. Anyone claiming it contains no contradictions is drinking the kool-aid. It would be funny if people weren’t dying for it.
This feels like one of those riddles where the answer is that the doctor is a woman. Today, Heli is considered a feminine name.
However, the biblical figure was male.
A slightly longer quote from the verse makes that clearer
Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi […]
My understanding is that any sort of a census of the sort described in Luke (requiring males to return to the towns of their birth for registration) probably did not actually occur, as it would have created impractical logistical issues.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius
Most critical biblical scholars agree that the Gospel of Luke is erroneous.[10] Its author seems to have invoked the census as Joseph and Mary’s motivation for departing “their own city”[11] of Nazareth, Galilee, for Bethlehem.[12][13][14] Additionally, the author may have wished to contrast Joseph and Mary’s obedience to the Roman edict with the rebelliousness of the Zealots, and also to find a prophetic fulfilment of Psalm 87:6: “In the census of the peoples, [princes] will be born there.”[12][b][c] (Luke and Matthew also give different accounts of the family’s departure from Bethlehem.)[17][d] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer states:[20]
It is clear that the census is a purely literary device used by him to associate Mary and Joseph, residents of Nazareth, with Bethlehem, the town of David, because he knows of a tradition, also attested in Matthew 2, that Jesus was also born in Bethlehem. He is also aware of a tradition about the birth of Jesus in the days of Herod, as is Matthew; Luke’s form of the tradition, unlike Matthew’s, tied the birth in a vague way to a time of political disturbance associated with a census.
Scholars point out that there was no single census of the entire Roman Empire under Augustus and the Romans did not directly tax client kingdoms; further, no Roman census required that people travel from their own homes to those of their ancestors. A census of Judaea would not have affected Joseph and his family, who lived in Galilee under a different ruler; the revolt of Judas of Galilee suggests that Rome’s direct taxation of Judaea was new at the time.[21] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown postulates that Judas’s place of origin may have led the author of Luke to think that Galilee was subject to the census.[22][e] Brown also points out that in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke the Evangelist (the traditional author of both books) dates Judas’s census-incited revolt as following the rebellion of Theudas, which took place four decades later.[22][f][g] Protestant theologian and biblical scholar E. P. Sanders concedes that, because revolts followed both Herod’s death and the census, Luke’s author may have “decided to elaborate the event [as] a reason for Joseph to travel … to Bethlehem”, calling this “a relatively slight historical error for an ancient author”.[8]
Also Luke was written ~20 years after Matthew. The oldest copy of Matthew 1-16 predates our oldest copies of the other gospels by a long time IIRC. Kind of circumstantial but it is indirect evidence that the Matthew account might be older and less embellished.
Just picking a small nit: Matthew is not considered the oldest gospel, Mark is. There may be fragments of Matthew that are the oldest, but it is generally agreed that the writer of Matthew was influenced by the already-written gospel of Mark. Luke was written around the same time as Matthew, or a few (5-10) years later.
So on average our calendar is mostly close enough
I wouldn’t say it is a contradiction in the bible because the bible doesn’t say e.g [Romans 67:420, ‘And henceforth ye shall keep a calendar of AD and the Datum between AD and BC shall be Jesus’ Birth/Jesus’ death. So speaks God’] - what I’m saying is it was a stylistic decision by the Roman Catholic state a good while after Jesus’ death.
(Unless someone can correct me on that.)
It’s an early form of a 419 scammer’s typo-riddled email or letter. Filter out anyone who pays attention to inconsistencies and you can squeeze some easy money from the gullible leftovers.
There’s also a lot of stuff that’s not meant to be taken literally. The text is full of similes and metaphors that are a lot less clear today than they were at time of writing. For example, many numbers in there are just used to convey a vague
servesense of size. Sometimes concrete numbers just mean “many”, which was well-understood back then.On top of that we have later edits for various reasons and assorted other sources of imprecision. The Bible makes a lot more sense as a book that’s not meant to be taken literally in it’s entirety. Of course figuring out what’s really meant isn’t very easy all this time later.
Plus what you pointed out. That’s also in there, probably especially by means of edits.
Numbers were often imbued with a mystical significance. For example, 40 with spans of time indicated that the time was chosen by God. 40 days and nights of the flood, the Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 years, Jesus going into the desert for 40 days.
People in groups of 12 were chosen by God. 12 tribes of Israel, 144,000 (12x12x1000) saved in the Rapture, 12 apostles, etc.
3 and 7 were similarly associated with God. Tions of examples.
Luke I’m Your Fatha… sorry wrong fake story.
A cult leader that supposedly started off as a carpenter, that was born from a virgin birth and “performed miracles.” You know what the real thing is, it’s the, “Well what if he is?,” feeling. I’m guessing that’s what scared the shit out of everyone back then too and throughout Christianity’s existence. That one fuckin’ feeling.
'Cause being scared, hopeless, in shambles or something of the sort is when people turn to religion or drugs… Or both…
It’s just comfort shit though and I don’t hate on it, it’s just something that I have no ability to truly put belief into.
No one in antiquity would have thought he was born of a virgin, the word used in the original greek is parthenos, which also just means young woman. The virgin reading is just a translation error afaik.
Who asked?
Wouldn’t it be funny if somebody went backin time and found our that he was just some toothless guy from Northern India.
How would a white guy have ended up in Northern India at the time?
A white guy?
I mean just look at his image:
By technical definition. You can look into why Arabs are considered white by US definitions.
You want me to google “are Arabs considered white in the US in 2026?”?
As far as the census department is concerned, yes they still are. There is a reason the select race option says white/caucasion instead of separating them. That reason is Jesus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States
Okay, but prove he existed
It seems it was so common, at that time and this place to publicly claim religious things, that it is quite unlikely there is not at least one guy that matches less or more the one of the texts… texts which are written far after…
Anyway, the author isn’t the main character. The writers wrote texts, but the author who foundate the religion by making the bible as it is, is the one who collected texts, selected some, decided the order, and supervised the translation. Who is it?
The scholarly consensus is that a real Jesus existed, and it’s actually a really fascinating topic to read about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus?wprov=sfla1
Yea, but are the majority of scholars really free from bias with 3 major religions notorious for killing people over disagreements (and funding those that agree with them) all having a vested interest in perpetuation of the myth?
Every wikipedia source to the contrary is essentially an agrument to authority and didn’t even discuss the underlying “evidence” or points to sources long after the fact and calls on:
Multiple attestation across independent Gospel traditions (Yea, right, that can all be made up)
Criterion of embarrassment: (Once again, not evidence. Religions are not aways rational, or correct)
Tacitus (Annals 15.44, c. 116 CE): “Christus… suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” This is the key non-Christian corroboration. (And a hundred years later, press X to doubt)
So, I’m not impressed.
To your first point, no one is free of bias, but it’s not the Middle Ages dude. People are free to not be Christian or to criticize or contradict Christianity, and they do all the time. Even non-Christian historians agree that Jesus likely existed.
Between the canonical and apocryphal gospels there are a good amount of people who wrote about Jesus for decades after his death. In my personal opinion as an armchair historian it just seems more likely that early Christian writers, intentionally or not, mythologized a real person that people already knew existed rather than invented one whole cloth.
That consensus is knowingly based on the complete lack of any contemporary sources though. So the consensus is that he most likely existed, based on a wide variety of conjectural evidence, but there is no way to confirm with any certainty that he did.
No we don’t have any historical sources or archeological evidence. But why would we expect to have them? He was just an average, albeit radical, Jewish preacher who got himself in trouble with the authorities and only much later did he become significant.
I look at it using Occam’s Razor: is it more likely that early Christian writers mythologized a real person after the fact, or that they made one up whole cloth? I go with the former.
And why not? We know for a fact that singular people have started all kinds of movements and religions throughout history. And when you strip away the fantastical elements of the story, it’s really not unbelievable. A preacher is teaching radical things, enough that he gets in trouble with Jewish and/or Roman authorities and is eventually executed for it. His followers take his message, filter it, and spread it, and it catches on.
For what it’s worth I’m an atheist as well.
Scholars aren’t called historians for a reason.
Anyone claiming Jesus existed is chilling for Christianity. They try to use it as a fine pointed needle to try and wiggle their bullshit into the real world.
Simply put, you can’t separate the myth from any kind of grain of truth at this point, so any and all points of so called proofs are invalid. Once you mention Jesus, there is so much package it’s just over.
I think you’ll find pretty much all secular historians of the time and place will agree that there was probably an itinerant preacher by the name of Joshua going around in the area who was baptized by John, got in trouble with the local authorities, and got himself executed, but his followers eventually regrouped and built myths around him.
The gospels themselves, including the ones that didn’t make the cut in the Council of Rome, are a form of documentation, and Jesus is independently attested several other times within a century of his death and not always kindly. It’s pretty decent documentation for a non-elite of that era, though.
Anyone who claims much more than that likely is shilling for Christianity, but it’s wishful or even conspiratorial thinking to insist that Jesus was completely made up. Better to attack the notion of his being divine, because that actually is sky-daddy nonsense.
That’s exactly what the shillers keep saying, but the evidence just doesn’t seem to be there.
Concrete archaeological evidence is tremendously unlikely to ever surface. The afforementioned statement is a plausible conjecture based on what circumstantial evidence is apparent weighed against what we consider reasonable human behavior at the time. The purpose of the statement isn’t proof, but to be an academically sound conclusion to a mystery a lot of people take very seriously.
It would be just as foolish to declare the Jesus of the bible absolutely couldn’t exist as it would be to declare that he absolutely did.
Historical, non-Christian, evidence about John the Baptist is pretty much nonexistent also, so there we go. Let alone them ever even meeting another person named Joshua.
So claiming anything about Joshua/Jesus is just nonsense at best, at worst it’s about appeasing Christians and to be able to argue about more miraculous things than the guy just existing. Letting one falsehood slide to get around countering others.
7-4 BC? So 3 BC?
Wouldn’t it be 10BC? I think it goes backward when you’re in negative numbers…
11bc*
Apparently we all suck at math :)
The maths work in mysterious ways
I’m not a historian but the math checks out
It’s a fictional character, he can be as old as you want
AfaIk, it’s undisputed that he was a real person.
It is not undisputed. We have no contemporary evidence of his existence, but scholars agree on a consensus that he most likely existed, based on a range of secondary conjectural evidence.
It cannot be undisputed though, since we have no certainty, and the scholars involved in the consensus are freely admitting to that.
It is extremely disputed that he was a real person.
Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure, and the idea that Jesus was a mythical figure has been consistently rejected by the scholarly consensus as a fringe theory.[7][8][9][10][11] Scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the biblical accounts, with only two events supported by nearly universal scholarly consensus: his baptism and his crucifixion.[12][13][14][15]
Look at the sources, they have dissent amongst themselves…
“Robert M. Price, an atheist who denies the existence of Jesus, agrees that his perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars.”
A fun excerpt…
Psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurologists, from the late 19th century (Oskar Panizza[279][280][281]), through the 20th century (including Emil Rasmussen, George de Loosten, Charles Binet-Sanglé, William Hirsch,[282][283] Władysław Witwicki[284]) to the early 21st century (Evan D. Murray, Miles G. Cunningham, Bruce H. Price[285][286][287]), have suggested that Jesus had a mental disorder or psychiatric condition.[288]
Christians are the majority religion, so I would say “of course the majority agree”. It’s the very easiest position to take in the Bible scholar field, regardless of their personal beliefs.
…By imbeciles inconsistent in their own veneration of “le based peer reviewed research.” He is one of the best documented historical figures ever, so by denying his existence as a person you create a mountainous list of other historical figures who are “obviously not real because i wasn’t there at the time.”
If Jesus wasn’t real, it wouldn’t just be a question of Christians lying, but of the roman empire making up a character so that they could persecute this new sect of Judaism, and of the wider Jewish faith likewise making up a character for the same propaganda purposes.
It’s just bad religious critique.
He is one of the best documented historical figures ever
If that were true then this thread would be full of people providing citations to that excellent documentation, but you will notice a complete absence of that here.
The closest we’ve come in this thread is the Wikipedia page with citations to several historians saying “yeah we mostly think he was probably real based on it would be weird if he wasn’t”
That is a waaaay lower level of certainty than you’re presenting here.
Sure, there were lots of guys named Jesus. It was a very common name at the time.
Like trying to prove that all of the “Mike” stories in the 80s refer to the one true Michael (Mike Tyson, of course).
Were there? How many? I mean i thought that name only took off after Christianity did, because one hears that “Jesus” is spelled and pronounced differently in the contemporary aramaic/hebrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_of_Jesus#Historicity
Jesus - as in the guy executed, not just for being called “jesus” but for being INRI (Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudeum = Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews) - is recorded by contemporary historians like Josephus (a Jew).
How many? I don’t know, ask the historians who say it was a common name at the time, with dozens of graves of dead guys named Jesus at the time of Jesus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus
The Hebrew/Aramaic name was common among Judean Jews at the time of Jesus’s birth,[32]
There probably was a carpenter in Bethlehem with a name like Jeshua or a variant around that time.
The rest is embellishments.
this is like saying we know what year Poseidon was born.
But clearly a historical Poseidon existed or there wouldn’t have been so much literature written about him.
There are eye witness testimonies in the Illiad.
the logic is sound.
