• [-]
• blorg
• 11 Points
• 14:43:38, 6 August

It means he was a historical figure, rather than a mythological one like Thor or Zeus or Ganesh. That we can say certain very basic things about, that he lived in a specific time period and was associated in some way with founding what became Christianity.

That's all that is being argued. And /u/PresidentEisenhower isn't even arguing THAT, he's being downvoted just for saying that the majority of historians believe that Jesus existed. Which they do. Honestly, the belief that Jesus never existed at all, that he is a mythological figure, is about as fringe as Holocaust denial.

• [-]
• nonnyduck
• 10 Points
• 14:25:55, 6 August

There was an actual, physical dude with his name. I believe that most scholars concur that he was baptized by John the Baptist and that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate. Other than that, nobody knows...

• [-]
• thumbat
• 5 Points
• 14:23:33, 6 August

I don't know what you're asking exactly, but it obviously means lived or was alive in this context.

• [-]
• blorg
• 7 Points
• 14:49:28, 6 August

You'd be better off replying to him, but bear in mind he's a professional historian that specialises in Ancient Greece and the Near East. He might have a better handle on how classical historians deal with sources and decide what's historical and what's mythological.

• [-]
• blorg
• 2 Points
• 15:25:30, 6 August

>What are you really doing, squeezing drama from the down arrow or you are here to spread your ideological hatred of the atheism subreddits?

You're projecting. I give credit in my first line that the top comment (most upvoted) is saying that Jesus does exist. Most casual readers of that sub seem to accept that.

What is interesting to me is the fervor with which a percentage of the supposedly rational and empirical subscribers are willing to deny reality to push their agenda. The top comment (most upvotes, from casual readers) is saying that, well, yes, Jesus did exist, but if you delve into the depths of the thread you find the deniers.

Which really isn't necessary in the first place, as whether Jesus actually existed or not has absolutely no bearing on whether you should believe in God or accept Christianity. Hitler existed, but I'm not a Nazi.

• [-]
• nonnyduck
• 4 Points
• 14:31:08, 6 August

Whoa... relax, meanidea. You're flipping out a bit. We're here to laugh and relax, not to pursue ideological hatred.

• [-]
• Quouar
• 5 Points
• 14:51:58, 6 August

The type of writings made about the Roman or Greek gods were, in many ways, qualitatively different from the writings that we consider historical about Jesus. A good comparison might be between the Iliad and the Gosperls as examples of accounts that aren't historically accurate, but which have nuggets of truth sprinkled throughout (the Iliad having the razing of Troy and the Gospels having a Jewish guy being crucified and leading a bunch of religious zealots). We don't take the Iliad as a historical account of the war on its own, but when coupled with other evidence, it becomes easier to pick out what may or may not be true.

The same is the case with the Gospels. On their own, there may be truth to them, but we don't know what that truth is until it's corroborated by other accounts. This is where people like Josephus and Tacitus come in. They are people who aren't invested in what happens to Christians (and indeed, in Josephus' case, would have thought the lot of them were insufferable nutbags), but they are still writing about things that are happening in that particular section of the world from a "by the way, this happened" standpoint. In Tacitus' case, he's writing a history of the Roman Empire from Tiberius to Nero, and Josephus is writing a history of the Jewish uprising around 70 CE. From a genre standpoint, both are clearly historical writings (whereas the Gospels are a variety of things), and both have no reason to mention Jesus except as a historical note.

• [-]
• Daeres
• 3 Points
• 15:26:28, 6 August

That's a fair question, because this is an interpretation that's come up before.

Some Greek thinkers themselves wondered if it might be the case. Euhemeros, born in the late 4th century BC, is at the very least the original codifier of this interpretation- a type of interpretation of mythology known as Euhemerism. The idea of this philosophy is that most mythological tales can be attributed to real persons in the deep past.

So, this is not an idea without precedent, and it's made sense to people before including the Greeks themselves. And even many Greeks who did not believe this did treat their own legends and myths as part of real history; some Greeks had proposed precise dates for the lifetime of Herakles, the Trojan War, etc.

However, I don't personally believe in this interpretation of the mythology. Why don't I believe that this is equivalent to the situation with Jesus? Firstly, there's this; the period in which the stories of the Gods take place are all prehistoric periods within Greek history. By which I mean, these are periods where neither modern historians nor ancient Greeks could draw on any written resources whatsoever. For example, if the Greek dating is accurate then much of their mythology takes place in what's called the Late Helladic period in archaeology, c.1550-1200 BC. This is Mycenaean Greece. Our problem is that we have an incredibly poor idea of many elements of this period. Whereas for Jesus, we can place him within a well understood historical context- we know a lot about the history of Judaea following the conquest by the Neo-Babylonians in the very early 6th century BC, we know a lot about the Roman Empire in this period, we know a lot about the Mediterranean's history by this point. This makes it possible to attempt to fit the evidence we do have of his existence in with some kind of picture of the situation there. We cannot do the same for the Greek/Roman Gods. Not only does Greek mythology talk about a prehistoric past, it's also not very accurate with what we do know; the Trojan War is mostly narrated via the Iliad, which mostly contains stuff relevant to 9th century BC Greece and not 13th century BC. The dates for particular events are not agreed upon, and I don't mean the equivalent of 'Jesus' birth might have been 5-6 years earlier/later than is guessed', I mean matters of centuries and even the order of when people lived.

However, we can read the Linear B texts written in Greece between 1550-1200 BC. What that tells us is that most of the Greek gods were already being worshipped by this point, as many of them feature in the text. We don't know that these are exactly the same deities, but that they are deities is fairly obvious from context. That means that if there's a historical origin for these figures, it does not lie in the Late Helladic. And then there's this; of the Greek deities, many have etymologically linked names to many other pantheons from Indo-European speaking cultures. And given how widespread some of these cultures are, and how early the individual languages split from the 'original', it means that instead of c.1550 BC we're now going back to c.3000 BC, the proposed era for the emergence of Proto-Indo-European (some people propose c.5000 BC instead but that's a separate argument). And, indeed, most of these shared deities have names which actually mean something, they're not 'just' names. Of the other Greek deities, many are simply just proper nouns in the Greek language- Helios is the word for sun, Nyx is the word for night.

This links to my third point; the Greek gods are not as personified as they at first seem. Why do I say that? Firstly, many of the myths that we use for our versions of the Greek myths are actually from Ovid's compendium of Greek myths, written in 8 AD. This doesn't make them wrong, but it implies a relative unity of mythology that didn't really exist as our versions are collected by a consistent authorial voice. Secondly, many of the ancient Greek texts that we have regarding deities are just one interpretation among many; there was more than one creation story regarding how the world was made than just Hesiod's Theogony, and yet the version most people are familiar with are Hesiod's Theogony. Thirdly, people have tended to be more familiar with the versions of the stories that early Classicists first had access to and found the most appealing. This also disguises how many different versions of particular stories there was. It also disguises how radically different the versions of deities in different cities were from one another. Greeks themselves were confused over whether or not there was just X number of Olympians who were the same everywhere, or whether different Greeks were worshipping different deities with the same name. The fact that the Greeks themselves debated the issue shows it's much more complicated than many people realise. Fourthly, the fact that these deities have proper names in English belies their relatively functional titles in the original language- if you read a story about 'the Sun' rather than 'Helios', it has different connotations in English does it not? I feel that is something a lot of people miss, and links to my fifth main argument; that the earliest depictions of the Greek deities are incredibly inconsistent and also barely personified. In early Greek sacred texts and stories, the Gods are much more like raw, chaotic natural forces personified than any kind of actual person. Likewise, humans were not understood to have an actual personal connection to the deities; as in most ancient polytheistic societies, the focus was on ritual, sacrifice, and not angering the Gods rather than on the notion of belief. The Gods become more like distinct, consistent personalities in later periods of Greek literature, not in earlier periods. That seems to be rather inconsistent with the idea that they're based on real people.

To summarise, I don't think that Greek gods were as personified as you think they were, the real people would have to be prehistoric and exist some point prior to 3000 BC in all likelihood, and we have no positive evidence that in any way indicates when these potentially real people existed or that exists anywhere near the period that they existed if they did. It also, though I didn't focus on this, just makes less sense. Human mythology doesn't work on the basis of always taking inspiration from real events and people, and not all ancient periods are created equal. It makes sense to postulate the existence of a real 'Jesus' figure that the biblical Jesus is inspired by, it doesn't make sense to postulate a real *Dyēus ph2ter (the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European origina) that Zeus Pater is based on.

• [-]
• Daeres
• 3 Points
• 14:49:17, 6 August

Okay, that's fair enough. There were a number of elements that at least resembled many of the more tired and trotted out lines regarding the subject, particularly in the absence of tone, in your comment. This subject tends to come up a lot both on the site as a whole (as seen in this SRD) thread and is a CONSTANT question on AskHistorians. I think it is our most popular repeated question of all time, i.e some variation on 'was Jesus real', 'what's the historicity of the Bible'.

It's kind of a mild version of Poe's law; at this point I can't always tell the difference between your response and that of someone who is more like the kind of person in the atheismrebooted thread. It, purely coincidentally, shares so many elements. That's not your fault, but might be something to bear in mind; putting some of the details you put into your reply to me into your initial comment to begin with would have made it clear you were relatively informed and advising caution.