The question of whether a historical Jesus existed triggers a lot of angry debate even among atheists. This seems like a strange and counterproductive fixation. Once we've agreed that Jesus wasn't the supernatural son of God, who cares whether there was some guy at the core of the story?
But I'd suggest that the problem with historicity debates runs even deeper than that, to the extent that a yes/no question about whether Jesus existed doesn't even make that much sense. The depiction of Jesus in the Gospels is riddled with so many stories ranging from questionable to absurd that they probably didn't come from the life of a real life person - and this includes natural as well as supernatural stories. So when you start ruling out or at least questioning these stories, it starts to look like the actual question is not "Did a historical Jesus exist?" but rather "Would it be semantically defensible to call any historical person 'Jesus?'"
This video is an attempt to delve into the challenges I see with getting our hands on the very concept of a historical Jesus. It's from a layperson's perspective with the goal of helping other laypeople recognize how muddy this topic is even on a common sense level, so I recognize the limitations of what I'm doing and would encourage anybody interested in this to explore more scholarly work on this. If the ideas I brought up help to frame your journey, that's great. If not, then please make sure to leave a dislike and make negative comments.
My thoughts on this topic are heavily inspired by Aron Ra's video "Jesus Wasn't Jesus." I'd encourage you to check it out. [ Ссылка ]
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