110
Have you heard about this dude named Brian?
I'm Brian, and my wife is too!
Downvote for stating "facts" without sources.
Joseph Smith was real too. Why should anyone care
Well, the followers of Joseph Smith spent a great deal of money back in the early ‘oughts against gay marriage. Perhaps looking into things like the Book of Abraham (a “translated” copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which wasn’t able translated until after the Rosetta Stone, and clearly does not say what Smith said it did), genetic testing of Native American tribes showing no Middle East inheritance, the various anachronisms (iirc, pre Columbian horses?) and the precedence of “KJV’ism’s” in the text might be important. We can debunk a lot of what Smith said, which might have significance for a religion that has a stranglehold over the politics of Utah.
Religious cults don't care about reality.
You might not care about any particular religion, but there is a pretty good chance that any particular religion cares about you, and wants to enforce its ideas on yourself, and the world.
Religion drives wars, it drives politics, it drives culture, it is a fundental component of human existence.
Just because its own mythology or doctrines may be whatever level of contradictory or false... does not mean these things do not affect you, and the rest of the world.
That has nothing to do with what I said. You're not convincing people to leave their cults by arguing historical minutia with them.
Sometimes people aren't always trying to convince people to leave cults, and are instead just trying to describe and discuss aspects of reality, like religions.
People should care about reality, reality involves religious people driving how that reality progresses.
If you disagree with that, you don't actually care about truth, you are an anti-intellectual.
Ideas must be considered, explored, examanined, discussed, in order to determine their truth or falsity.
Sometimes people aren’t always trying to convince people to leave cults, and are instead just trying to describe and discuss aspects of reality, like religions
And they're free to do that, but it doesn't have anything to do with with improving conditions for anyone or deprogramming cultists, so to assert that everyone should spend their time on it is ridiculous, as it amounts to a hobby.
People should care about reality, reality involves religious people driving how that reality progresses
People have a limited amount of time in their lives to spend. Learning about a religion, or how it ties into real history, should be done as a hobby by those interested or when it is pragmatic to do so. Arguing with zealots about how their cult ties into history is a pointless endeavor that is really playing their game, and therefore not pragmatic.
If you disagree with that, you don’t actually care about truth, you are an anti-intellectual.
Now you're just being unserious.
Ideas must be considered, explored, examanined, discussed, in order to determine their truth or falsity.
Not all ideas are equal. If someone says we should genocide an ethnic group, the correct response is to recoil in horror and condemn the idea. When someone makes supernatural claims from their religious cult, the correct response is to make arguments that have at least some chance for a spark of deconversion - not to engage them in a rousing conversation about minutia that will NEVER have any positive impact.
Hmm... let me get this straight.
Your unpopular opinion™ is that someone named Jesus may have existed around the same time that all the stories about Jesus Christ of Nazareth were written?
and that “most mainstream scholars of the era” agree with OP
Jesus doesn't have to be a single historical person.
Never knew Jesus is plural from Jesu
Saying Jesus existed but biblical events didn’t happen is meaningless. And since we know the bible is full of crap, it doesn’t really matter if a Jesus existed or not. That specific fairy tale Jesus is made up. Maybe it is a dramatization of real events, maybe it is a mix of stories and legends about several different people, maybe it was fabricated, it doesn’t really matter. Saying “Jesus existed” is just feeding the apologists, and there are so many Christian historians than I cannot take claims like that seriously.
Jesus-ish existed? Just a thought. A little of this a little if that. Some of these & those. Perhaps a few of the other things and ta da. An individuals legacy can change with every generation. The fish gets bigger every time my Dad recounts the tale of the monster Largemouth Bass he caught.
Who fucking cares?
Why do we care about history in general?
It provides us with some patterns in human behavior, things that cannot really be studied in a lab. You could approach early Christianity as a way to better understand mass movements, or the different coping strategies of an oppressed/conquered people. You could read the text of the New Testament and ask yourself why these ideas were appealing and what that might say about human nature.
As part of the study of ideas, Christianity is a really interesting expression of how Hellenistic thought mixed with Judaism. There’s a reason a lot of Neoplatonists were Christian.
The early conflicts with Judaism as Christianity developed its own identity have pretty far reaching impacts, with the death of Jesus being placed on all Jews and being used to justify atrocities to this current day.
Or, as a guy that thinks about the Roman Empire at least a couple times a day, it’s a great window into the experience of a backwater Roman province that eventually revolted and was absolutely crushed.
Jesus is not history in general, and I still don’t fucking care.
I've always understood historical Jesus as a concession, and not a reflection of confirmed existence.
...there was nothing unusual about a messianic Jewish troublemaker in Judea during the early Roman Empire.
I bet he was a member of the Judean People's Front.
Fuck off! He'd definitely have been a member of the Peoples front of Judea
Splitters
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Can someone share a link or two that confirms the existence of historical Jesus?
UsefulCharts just released a youtube video on the topic. The argument is basically "the earliest documents referencing Jesus aren't explicit that he was real but on the other hand it wasn't long before he was treated as real". Basically there wasn't a lot of time for myth to be reinterpreted as history.
Personally I'm ambivalent, Sherlock Holmes wasn't real but he may have had a real effect on criminology. People may confuse his historicity. Compared to Houdini.
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Just want to add a couple of things
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There were no extra-Biblical references to Pontius Pilate until 1961. Now imagine how much documentation must have surrounded the Roman prefect of Judea. All of it gone, except for a bit of limestone.
Also an argument (I think I heard it from Hitchens, but not sure): We know that the Nativity story is bogus because the Census that was supposed to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem is anachronistic. And we know that it's important that Jesus be from Bethlehem (City of David) because the Messiah was prophesized to be from there.
So the question is: if were making up Jesus from whole cloth, why not just make him Jesus of Bethlehem? Why go to the trouble unless Jesus of Nazareth was something people were already familiar with?
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I don't think most serious scholars would swear that a Jesus existed at that time and place, but would say that it is much more likely than not based on the confirming evidence from outside of the Christian faith. At some point you need to decide how much evidence is enough for any ancient topic. There's no particular reason that I've found credible enough to convince me that there WASN'T a historical figure there, even though I absolutely refuse to accept any magic or miracles.
That's the thing though —you shouldn't need convincing that he wasn't real. You should need convincing the he was real. I don't have any particular reason to doubt he existed, but equally I don't have a good reason to believe it either, so I just don't. That's the default position.
I don't need to doubt he existed to also not hold a belief that he did.
Okay, now do Atlantis.
The “evidence” for Atlantis is Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, which is pretty clear in context to be a myth Plato is using to make a philosophical point. He’s not claiming it is historical, and it connects to Plato’s ideal of a “Noble Lie.”
Because of the destruction of the Temple and the Judean rebellion there were probably a lot of messianic figures.
Jesus is just the one who achieved the necessary memetic virulence to be remembered.
Saul/Paul definitely helped this.
ETA: Also, stories attributed to Jesus may have happened to other messianic preachers.
The entire myth was also borrowed from Zoroastrianism, but let's just pretend that never happened I guess
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As you indicated, this isn't an unpopular opinion in the wider world. There are records outside of Christian scripture that mention Jesus. No legitimate historians doubt that he existed.
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It's quite possible, but the waters are muddied since every legendary facet was treated as fact, so the historical record is relatively less reliable given how much of it was manipulated in the name of faith.
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People think that if it's not recorded, it didn't happen. That line of thinking ignores that entropy of historical documents. Records are lost in fires, floods, looting, improper care, and more. There is also the issue of conflicting information from different sources. Is the document written by Ancient Person A about Ancient Event correct or is it Ancient Person B's version correct.
STEM people are trained with principles that are consider absolute until a paradigm shift happens.
It's why historians have the 5 C's: context, change over time, causality, complexity, and contingency.
The profession what would under historical evidence and historical thinking would be lawyers. Lawyers get cases all the time were you don't have direct evidence. For example, it's a murder case. There is no murder weapon and no eye witness. The victim was found with multiple stab wounds. There's a suspect in custody.
How do lawyers prove the suspect did the murder? Lawyers bring in collaborative evidence, such as: the suspect was seen with the victim before the murder, the suspect was seen in the area after the estimated time of death, the suspect had blood on their shirt, the suspect had a motive, etc.
To circle back to Jesus. There is no fundamental law of physics nor experiment to prove Jesus. Historians have to apply the five C's to prove the existence of Jesus. Collaborating documents, events, archeological evidence, carbon dating of physical evidence, etc.
Of course as soon as religion is mentioned, people's biases go into overdrive.
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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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