I know, right?huckelberry wrote: ↑Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:38 pmYes there were various people named Jesus. I thought we were talking about the one who went about preaching and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was believed by some to have risen from the dead. Of course other people did not believe he rose from the dead. No reason to think Jesus Rodriguez living down the street was involved.
It is interesting for a while until the conversation starts going in circles. The facts are pretty stubborn. Yes, it is true that Paul was the first person to write about anything we would recognize today as Christianity. It is unfortunate that we don't have the sources that Tacitus and Suetonius were relying on. Is the Testimonium Flavianum an interpolation? To what degree if yes? So we have the few genuine Pauline epistles that give us minimal information about Jesus because they are mostly pastoral and theological in nature. We have the Gospel of Mark. Later come the other epistles, gospels, etc. We either think that what we have points to a real person whose religious activities provoked Roman punishment, or that some myth about a cosmic being come down to earth somehow got spun out into a story about an apocalyptic preacher who was crucified by the Romans . . . for some reason.
Honestly, I just don't get the latter at all. Why would one turn the cosmic god into the flesh and blood Jesus who is given the most humiliating punishment by the Romans? It would be much less problematic a story if the cosmic god stayed a cosmic god and his demonic enemies stayed demonic. Transforming the tale into one about a nobody from Galilee who was tacked up on a cross strikes me as counterintuitive to the point that it seems almost impossible. No matter how I slice it, which angle I examine, I am just not seeing the fictional cosmic Jesus who became a regular guy.
Don't get me wrong: to me the incarnation of Jesus is one of the most unbelievable aspects of Christian doctrine period. It makes absolutely no sense to me at all. You want to believe it is a myth on the other side of things because it really makes no sense. And, yes, it is a myth, but I think it is the same kind of myth as the one about the divine parentage of Alexander the Great. It is the one where you take your person that you think is really cool and imagine that he must be divine because of how cool you think he is. Because he would have to be divine to be that cool. It is not the sui generis kind where you take a cosmic deity and then for some incomprehensible reason make him less cool by having third-rate Roman authorities tack him up like they would a common slave.