this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
57 points (98.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43742 readers
1336 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sadly there are not a lot of extra-biblical sources on Jesus and his life actually.
There is one, a single one. And it’s pretty bad. Josephus. He basically mentions “James, the brother of Jesus they call Christ”, in the middle of a text not about Jesus at all.
And that’s it.
I'm not a historian, but Tacitus definitely mentioned Jesus' crucifixion. Saying there are a "a lot" of source is an exaggeration, you're right about that, but there's basically no doubt that Jesus was a real, historical figure. (I'm not saying that you're disputing that, I'm just still stuck on the guy actually thinking that Jesus wasn't real.)
Obviously Christian sources can't be taken at face value, but there's enough corroborating evidence - be it archaeological or written - that proves that at least some of the things in the gospels are based on facts, even if it's certainly embellished and a lot of it likely just made up and/or warped over time.
The Annals of Tacitus were lost throughout history and many of the passages (including the ones that mention Christ) were rewritten in the 11th century by Christian monks. We cannot trust it as an historical source any more than we can trust the Bible itself
Issue with Tacitus is he wrote about Jesus over 70 years after he allegedly died. After a Christian movement was already under way.
And yes I do think Jesus was a real historical figure.
But we have very little actual history on him, that’s all.