When Jesus born?

[CaffeineJunkie]

The question "Was there a historical Jesus?" depends on how you define your terms. Did the Romans crucify somebody named "Jesus" during the first century AD? Definitely! Jesus was a popular name among Jews during the first centuries BC and AD, and crucifixion was very commonly used by the Romans to execute people. It's probable that the Romans crucified dozens of people named "Jesus" at around that time.

The questions, therefore, become "how many details must you add to this story in order to get a 'Biblical' Jesus?" and "how many details can you add before you get a person who never historically existed?" Did Pontius Pilate crucify anyone named Jesus? We have almost no contemporary extrabiblical evidence that Pontius Pilate even existed, much less who he did or didn't crucify. We have some documents written by people who hadn't even been born yet at the alleged time of the crucifixion (Tacitus, born in 56 AD, and Josephus, born in 37 AD), we have the Bible, and we have a few coins and the Pilate Stone. That's basically it. Was Jesus from Nazareth? As far as anyone can tell, Nazareth didn't even exist until ~200 AD. Was he born in December and resurrected in late March or early April? Almost definitely not. Christmas and Easter are actually Pagan holidays with a very thin layer of Christian paint.

With all of these details up in the air, how can we say anything about the year of his birth with any confidence?

 

[Patine]

The question "Was there a historical Jesus?" depends on how you define your terms. Did the Romans crucify somebody named "Jesus" during the first century AD? Definitely! Jesus was a popular name among Jews during the first centuries BC and AD, and crucifixion was very commonly used by the Romans to execute people. It's probable that the Romans crucified dozens of people named "Jesus" at around that time.

The name, "Jesus," in Hebrew was not AS ubiquitous as you claim, though probably not unique. It has a same linguistic root in Hebrew (transposed into Aramaic) as the similar sounding Joshua, from the eponymous Sixth Book of the Old Testamount/Hebrew Bible - basically, at it's core,roughly paraphrased, meaning, "someone who guides/leads people from a worse place to a better place," which both tthe Biblical figures Joshua and Jesus did, in their own way. The name is not as inconsequential as you portray.

 

[PhroX]

Christmas and Easter are actually Pagan holidays with a very thin layer of Christian paint.

While this is a common belief amongst internet atheists, there's very little if any historical evidence to support it. That's not to say that there was absolutely no influence from the cultural milieu in which Christianity developed, but the idea that they were just rebranded pagan events is a pretty baseless claim.

 

[Plotinus]

Easter is based on a Jewish festival, not a pagan one.

I don’t know what reason there is for thinking that Nazareth didn’t exist until 200 CE. The fact that Nazareth is referred to frequently in the Gospels, which were certainly written well before that date, would suggest otherwise.

 

[Moff Jerjerrod]

I don’t know what reason there is for thinking that Nazareth didn’t exist until 200 CE

I think I might know the reason why some may claim the city of Nazareth didn't exist until 200 CE (AD).

Claiming Nazareth didn't exist at the time the man who was called Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth would attempt to prove that there was no Jesus of Nazareth since there was no Nazareth.

 

[Plotinus]

I think it’s worth adding something here about the disconnect between scholarship and popular understanding of that scholarship. There’s always a significant time lag. In my very unscientific opinion it seems to me that this is typically roughly a century, at least in humanities (maybe it’s shorter in other fields - e.g. the popular understanding of dinosaurs at the moment seems to be roughly equivalent to the scientific view that was current in the 1980s, and most of that is down to Jurassic Park). So for example, I’ve encountered many people online and otherwise who seem to think that logical positivism is a live theory in modern philosophy.

The century rule holds pretty well for theology too, especially biblical studies. So this idea that early Christianity was little more than paganism with the names changed was typical of the “history of religions” school of thought that dominated scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Figures such as Adolf von Harnack and Albrecht Ritschl pushed this idea, which fitted with the widespread antisemitism of the time. (Harnack and Ritschl were not themselves antisemitic, I think, but they had little interest in and knowledge of ancient Judaism, and wittingly or otherwise they gave a scholarly rationale for antisemitic theology.) If you read any scholarly commentary on a New Testament book from this time you will find endless citations of Hellenistic, pagan parallels, and little from Jewish works of that time (and certainly nothing from rabbinic literature).

This downplaying of Christianity’s Jewishness and obsession with its paganism reached its extremes in Franz Cumont’s book on Mithraism in 1903, in which he argued that everything Christians believed about Jesus was based on earlier beliefs about Mithras. This involved basically inventing a lot of stuff about Mithraism, and also pretending it was a lot earlier than it really was, and the whole theory is entirely discredited today. But you still find people repeating it at the popular level as if it’s established fact.

The same thing goes for the idea that Jesus never existed at all, which is really just a logical extension of the notion that all Christian belief about him was taken from paganism. This claim was made by a number of Dutch and German intellectuals - though mostly not biblical scholars - in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Arthur Drews. In this case the view didn’t really gain much traction among serious historians, and of course pretty much all New Testament scholars today regard it as a fringe theory without any serious reason to entertain it, but we still find it pushed constantly at the popular level - usually in connection with the equally outdated nineteenth-century “history of religions” view about Christianity and paganism.

In roughly the second half of the twentieth century, and certainly from the 1970s onwards, scholars came largely to reject the “history of religions” view in favour of an understanding of early Christianity as fundamentally Jewish, without much reference to paganism. This was perhaps partly motivated by a desire to articulate a more positive view of Judaism, both in itself and as an influence on Christianity, in reaction to events earlier in the twentieth century and repudiate the antisemitic tendency of earlier scholarship. But it also reflected greater interest in and serious engagement with ancient Jewish sources themselves. So for example E.P. Sanders argued for an interpretation of Paul not as a sort of Hellenistic philosopher but as a sort of Jewish teacher, specifically a Pharisee, and he did so by placing Paul in the context of the ancient rabbinical literature rather than Christian polemic about Pharisees. In other words this was an approach to Paul through an understanding of ancient Judaism on its own terms. And we find scholars such as Geza Vermes similarly drawing attention to the Jewishness of Jesus. This was the dominant approach when I was a student in the 90s so it’s the one that I’m most familiar with and which seems intuitively right to me.

I think though that, as always happens, the pendulum has swung a little further back in the past decade or two. Scholars today are perhaps a little more willing than they were in the 1980s or 90s to recognise that Paul and other early Christian authors were not confined to a Jewish context but were also engaging with the wider Hellenistic world. This isn’t a return to the nineteenth-century sidelining of Judaism, of course, but it’s a finessing of the contemporary position to be a bit more balanced.

The point I’m making though is that all of the scholarly developments since roughly a century ago are largely unknown at the popular level, which as I say lags massively behind scholarship. Presumably a century from now positions like Sanders’ and Vermes’ will be widely known and endlessly repeated on whatever people have in place of online forums, and whatever new developments there will have been on scholarship after today will be only known to specialists. Which is a bit depressing, but that’s people for you, I suppose.

 

[Harv]

This is still a truly fascinating topic. If I understand the Bible correctly, we have three options:
A. Matthew is correct.
B. Luke is correct.
C. Neither.

In the case of A or B, we can make an estimate based on the historical figures named. In the case of C, then it is anybody's guess.

Here is another question - How did the scholars establish a basis for BC / AD?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

This is still a truly fascinating topic. If I understand the Bible correctly, we have three options:
A. Matthew is correct.
B. Luke is correct.
C. Neither.

In the case of A or B, we can make an estimate based on the historical figures named. In the case of C, then it is anybody's guess.

Here is another question - How did the scholars establish a basis for BC / AD?

And why? There are so many other events (ones that are actually verified to have happened) that don't seem to rate a calendar reset. I wonder what the next reset will be based on.

A long time ago, I invited a couple of friends over to watch I, Claudius, because Star Trek: The Next Generation had recently started and I asked if they'd like to see Patrick Stewart in something else (he played the villainous Sejanus in that show).

They said yes, and then I found out that neither of them knew anything about 1st-century Rome. So I wrote a quick summary of the highlights of it, emphasis on the major events that pertained to the characters in the show, and one friend said, "This doesn't make any sense."

I asked her what didn't make sense. I'd been careful to explain the reasons why things happened...

Turns out that she did not understand what BC and AD really referred to. She's a believer who liked a local pastor-turned-politician who insists to this day that the world is only 6000 years old (scary that at one time he could have ended up as Prime Minister). My friend told me very earnestly that "AD" means "After Death" and therefore it made no sense that Augustus was the Emperor until 14 years after Jesus died, because he'd have been too old.

I asked her some more questions and finally realized that she thought the entirety of Jesus' life, from birth to death, had happened in between 1 BC and 1 AD, that those 33 years were crammed into the moment between one year ending and the next one beginning, and then I had another fun time explaining why there was no "year 0".

 

[Patine]

I wonder what the next reset will be based on.

Probably something of an Orwellian- or Hexleyist-type cast, the way things are going...

A long time ago, I invited a couple of friends over to watch I, Claudius, because Star Trek: The Next Generation had recently started and I asked if they'd like to see Patrick Stewart in something else (he played the villainous Sejanus in that show).

Although only in supporting roles, Excalibur (1982 - the only R-Rated rendition of Arthurian Legend in a proper sense I am aware of) and the original movie version of Dune by David Lynch, are good ones, too.

They said yes, and then I found out that neither of them knew anything about 1st-century Rome. So I wrote a quick summary of the highlights of it, emphasis on the major events that pertained to the characters in the show, and one friend said, "This doesn't make any sense."

I asked her what didn't make sense. I'd been careful to explain the reasons why things happened...

Turns out that she did not understand what BC and AD really referred to. She's a believer who liked a local pastor-turned-politician who insists to this day that the world is only 6000 years old (scary that at one time he could have ended up as Prime Minister). My friend told me very earnestly that "AD" means "After Death" and therefore it made no sense that Augustus was the Emperor until 14 years after Jesus died, because he'd have been too old.

I asked her some more questions and finally realized that she thought the entirety of Jesus' life, from birth to death, had happened in between 1 BC and 1 AD, that those 33 years were crammed into the moment between one year ending and the next one beginning, and then I had another fun time explaining why there was no "year 0".

I think you've regailed us with tales of this, "friend," before.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Probably something of an Orwellian- or Hexleyist-type cast, the way things are going...


Although only in supporting roles, Excalibur (1982 - the only R-Rated rendition of Arthurian Legend in a proper sense I am aware of) and the original movie version of Dune by David Lynch, are good ones, too.

I think you've regailed us with tales of this, "friend," before.

I haven't seen Excalibur. As for Dune... Stewart is good. But he never likes to mention that movie in his list of past performances, likely because of having to carry a pug around for part of it.

(not that the pug wasn't cute, and it gave me a couple of fanfic ideas, but honestly, this falls into the category of "what were they THINKING?")

Stewart was also in the movie Lady Jane, about Jane Grey who was Queen for 9 days in 1553. Henry VIII's son wanted a Protestant successor and knew he wouldn't live long enough to father one himself. He threw out Henry's line of succession and decided to make his cousin Jane his successor - a staunch Protestant who was the right age to marry and have sons.

Princess Mary wasn't impressed with this and overthrew Jane and tossed her and her husband into the Tower. Later on she asked them to convert to Catholicism and they refused. When Jane's father (played by Stewart) gathered some supporters to try to overthrow Mary and restore Jane to the throne, Mary had them executed.

There have been a few newcomers to the Colosseum who haven't heard the story of my time-challenged friend. This happened 35 years ago and I'm still mindcroggled over it.

 

[Joij21]

His birthday was October 21st, 4 B.C.

It's obvious because my birthday is the same but in 1996 A.D., which means I'll always be trailing Yeshua's age by exactly 2000 years!

insists to this day that the world is only 6000 years old

Imagine just for a second that the Mandela effect is literal and not simply a result of mass psychosis but rather a sign that the past is literally changing because our world operates like some sort of simulation or video game whereby that which is not being observed is not really there so as to save memory allocation, where the game or simulation can also be edited or hacked midway through the session while it is still in play to add a faux past to the ongoing simulation.

In other words I feel like biblical literalists or fundamentalists if they really wanted to could actually use the Mandela effect and the simulation hypothesis as an explanation for interpreting reality. There's also some earlier versions of the simulation hypothesis which date back to secular enlightenment philosophy which describe as though reality could "simply be a show controlled and puppeteered by a demon or something similar to that". I forget which philosopher said that but it was more a euphemism to describe how through our senses we can never truly discern true reality even our deepest notions like causality and whatnot for it could all be one giant syke out/fake out/fud. But they usually don't unfortunately (and I say unfortunately because if they used this above defense I think it would be hilarious, make their debates more wild and entertaining, and absolutely make everyone else blow up with all the memes + secular believers in the simulation hypothesis trying to put their distance and whatnot, plus general mayhem all around).

 

[Patine]

Imagine just for a second that the Mandela effect is literal and not simply a result of mass psychosis but rather a sign that the past is literally changing because our world operates like some sort of simulation or video game whereby that which is not being observed is not really there so as to save memory allocation, where the game or simulation can also be edited or hacked midway through the session while it is still in play to add a faux past to the ongoing simulation.

In other words I feel like biblical literalists or fundamentalists if they really wanted to could actually use the Mandela effect and the simulation hypothesis as an explanation for interpreting reality. There's also some earlier versions of the simulation hypothesis which date back to secular enlightenment philosophy which describe as though reality could "simply be a show controlled and puppeteered by a demon or something similar to that". I forget which philosopher said that but it was more a euphemism to describe how through our senses we can never truly discern true reality even our deepest notions like causality and whatnot for it could all be one giant syke out/fake out/fud. But they usually don't unfortunately (and I say unfortunately because if they used this above defense I think it would be hilarious, make their debates more wild and entertaining, and absolutely make everyone else blow up with all the memes + secular believers in the simulation hypothesis trying to put their distance and whatnot, plus general mayhem all around).

This is nothing new. Orwell's fictional dystopia Oceania, in, "1984," is based on the premise of this sort of thing being a fait accompli in most meaningful areas. And, it almost certainly already is for the isolated population of North Korea.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

There's also some earlier versions of the simulation hypothesis which date back to secular enlightenment philosophy which describe as though reality could "simply be a show controlled and puppeteered by a demon or something similar to that". I forget which philosopher said that but it was more a euphemism to describe how through our senses we can never truly discern true reality even our deepest notions like causality and whatnot for it could all be one giant syke out/fake out/fud.

René Descartes?

 

[Plotinus]

Imagine just for a second that the Mandela effect is literal and not simply a result of mass psychosis but rather a sign that the past is literally changing because our world operates like some sort of simulation or video game whereby that which is not being observed is not really there so as to save memory allocation, where the game or simulation can also be edited or hacked midway through the session while it is still in play to add a faux past to the ongoing simulation.

In other words I feel like biblical literalists or fundamentalists if they really wanted to could actually use the Mandela effect and the simulation hypothesis as an explanation for interpreting reality.

The philosopher Hud Hudson has recently proposed something like this to argue that a literalist belief in the Fall as described in the Bible is compatible with the scientific understanding of evolution and deep time. He makes much use of the notion of hypertime: the idea is that although some proposition about the past cannot be true at one moment and false at the next moment, it could be true at one hyper-moment and false at the next hyper-moment. So evolution could produce the world we see around is in the scientifically approved way, and hyper-then God could change the past so that this was no longer the case and the biblical account of the Fall were true. Which I think is coherent but is extremely tricky to wrap your mind around (not to mention very hard to motivate, really). But I admire it for its ingenuity!

There's also some earlier versions of the simulation hypothesis which date back to secular enlightenment philosophy which describe as though reality could "simply be a show controlled and puppeteered by a demon or something similar to that". I forget which philosopher said that but it was more a euphemism to describe how through our senses we can never truly discern true reality even our deepest notions like causality and whatnot for it could all be one giant syke out/fake out/fud. But they usually don't unfortunately (and I say unfortunately because if they used this above defense I think it would be hilarious, make their debates more wild and entertaining, and absolutely make everyone else blow up with all the memes + secular believers in the simulation hypothesis trying to put their distance and whatnot, plus general mayhem all around).

That’s Descartes, but of course he didn’t propose this as a serious possibility. And he wasn’t exactly “secular”. Perhaps Fichte might be a bit closer to the sort of view you’re proposing, as he thought that reality is wholly created by the mind and there is no objectivity at all. Or Berkeley, with his view that God directly causes all our perceptions, and unperceived objects exist only as possibilities of perception, so nothing exists other than God and created minds. Much later, John McTaggart defended what was basically an atheistic version of this idealism, in which only minds exist and there is no God directing everything.

 

[Plotinus]

Here is another question - How did the scholars establish a basis for BC / AD?

I forgot to answer this. The AD system was invented by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century (he dated his own writing to AD 525). However, he used the system only to calculate the date of Easter - always a problematic issue in early medieval Christianity - rather than assign any dates to any other events other than Christ’s birth. It’s not known what methods he used to determine the date of Christ’s birth relative to other dating systems.

The BC system was devised in the seventeenth century by Dionysius Petavius. Unlike his earlier namesake he produced a fully comprehensive history of the world with everything dated, and in so doing he had the great resources of the then-burgeoning science of chronology to draw on. I couldn’t tell you precisely which sources he used to compile his chronologies, except that given that he was a seventeenth-century Jesuit, they would have been pretty much every source available to early modern Europeans. The Catholic Encyclopaedia comments that “The complete list of his works fills twenty-five columns in Sommervogel” which probably tells you all you need to know about the sheer volume of material that scholars of that time had at their disposal.

 

[Joij21]

This is nothing new. Orwell's fictional dystopia Oceania, in, "1984," is based on the premise of this sort of thing being a fait accompli in most meaningful areas. And, it almost certainly already is for the isolated population of North Korea.

Yes except in those cases, both the fictional dystopia and real life one, the change of the past is the direct result of statist employed bureaucrats who are assigned to tweak or erase the historical records, archived news reports, and propaganda from yesteryear depending on whether or not the old narrative suits the current political realism which the omni-state whishes to create.

I'm thinking less of something anthropologically driven and something more metamaterial or metaphysical. Like a phenomenon almost eldritch, stemming perhaps from something more along the lines of H.P. Lovecraft. Where reality itself, the past is quite literally physically changing because it's not currently being observed (or rather the entity or entities changing it don't want the changes to be so obviously witnessed whereby their manipulations would become too obvious to the masses whom they are trying to test wether or not they are psychologically pure or something) say for the things we have already discovered. The gaps in our knowledge are quite literally in some undetermined state where it could be anything that may end up being discovered to fill in those gaps. However there may be "incidents" where the eldritch god (or rather in this case quite literally God) cheekily shows the truth from time to time whereby he actually changes the written/found/already recorded history before our very eyes like in the case of the Bernstein bears, in which people still retain the old memory of when all the children's books used to say Bearnstein bears.

 

[Joij21]

Which I think is coherent but is extremely tricky to wrap your mind around (not to mention very hard to motivate, really).

Well I mean didn't the gnostics also have a similar view of reality in not trusting the physical world seeing it as some deception? And they did have quite a bit of followers.

Perhaps it's because current christians don't want to go down a path too similar to gnosticism which they had/have already condemned as heresy? Seeing it as total hypocrisy and having to admit they where wrong in killing an early christian sect?

 

[Joij21]

So evolution could produce the world we see around is in the scientifically approved way, and hyper-then God could change the past so that this was no longer the case and the biblical account of the Fall were true.

And I feel like the vice versa could also be true, if he creates everything as described in the bible, then when enough time has past he extrapolates reality backwards so as to create even more time billions of years before he created everything and rearranges the very past where he created everything to now come into existence over a longer period of time in the way of evolution as scientifically approved.

 

[Plotinus]

Well I mean didn't the gnostics also have a similar view of reality in not trusting the physical world seeing it as some deception? And they did have quite a bit of followers.

That was a typical view of gnostics, but remember that the people we call “gnostics” had a very wide range of views.

Hudson doesn’t think that the physical world is a deception. On his view, the world really does (hyper-now) have the past it appears to have. And it really does (hyper-then) have the past described in the Bible too.

Perhaps it's because current christians don't want to go down a path too similar to gnosticism which they had/have already condemned as heresy? Seeing it as total hypocrisy and having to admit they where wrong in killing an early christian sect?

It would only be hypocrisy if the same people condemned Gnosticism and embraced its doctrines. There’s nothing hypocritical about thinking that earlier Christians got it wrong. But certainly the majority of Christians today would endorse the rejection of Gnosticism, I’m sure.

And I feel like the vice versa could also be true, if he creates everything as described in the bible, then when enough time has past he extrapolates reality backwards so as to create even more time billions of years before he created everything and rearranges the very past where he created everything to now come into existence over a longer period of time in the way of evolution as scientifically approved.

Yes, that would be equally plausible, I’m sure. (Indeed that may be Hudson’s view - I don’t remember off-hand which way round he thinks the two histories go!)

 

[Joij21]

It would only be hypocrisy if the same people condemned Gnosticism and embraced its doctrines. There’s nothing hypocritical about thinking that earlier Christians got it wrong. But certainly the majority of Christians today would endorse the rejection of Gnosticism, I’m sure.

Yeah I'm not sure why I used hypocritical, more like they would reject the idea because it would sound too similar to Gnosticism which they view as heresy, even though philosophically it would probably be more sound in the face of criticism (though if course things like other dimensions or time extrapolating via hypertime is not something that we can observe via our current technology or perhaps ever, so it most likely could never truly be scientifically validated, yet nevertheless could also never most likely invalidated)