Unpopular Opinion
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This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
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A Jesus who had an apocalyptic ministry, some amount of followers, was executed by the Roman state and said at least some of the things recounted in the Gospels. Matthew and Luke are clearly pulling from some sort of earlier source, which likely had at least some accurate accounts of his teaching.
Could also be teachings of some of the other messianic cults just misattributed to Jesus, but either way he was clearly the only one that managed to maintain relevance much past their death.
TLDR: "The one in my head, that I cherry picked from a contradictory fictional source"
Have you ever read a document from before 1400? Just curious, because you seem to be under the illusion that reading primary sources means that you either take everything they say literally, or dismiss them as entirely made up. This is exactly what I mentioned with regard to ignorance of historiography and method earlier.
Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes all say contradictory things about Socrates. Will you argue that Socrates was fictional?
Plato (indirectly via fabricated self insert character) describes Atlantis as a story he read from his great great uncle Solon, who himself apparently heard about the story from 'Egyptians'...
... therefore, Atlantis is 100% confirmed real, lol.
The letter J wasn't even invented until the year 1524, so formally speaking, Jesus, Jews, Judges, January, June, July, and every other word including the letter J did not exist in the 1400s or before.
Therefore, Jesus never existed.
Lower case letters are medieval too, so only IESUS existed. Case closed.
That's just orthography; the letters and words didn't exist, which is unrelated to whether the things they represent did. There was in fact a judge, a January, and a Julius Caesar in Rome.
The joke ->
💨
-> you
His name in Aramaic, which was what he almost certainly would have actually spoken, was almost certainly Yehoshuah, which was a common name at the time.
It was often shortened to Yeshua, sometimes to Yeshu.
(This is still a common surname in Hebrew to this day.)
When translated into Greek, this became IESUS.
This is because Greek doesn't really have a representation of Y as consonant, and because Greek also doesn't really do the 'sh' sound, that got changed to just an 's'.
The earliest Gospels that we have are largely (entirely?) written in Greek, because:
Most people of the time were illiterate or functionally illiterate, and most people who learned how to write, well they were taught Greek, because it was the most common shared language of business and governance in the eastern Mediterranean.
There was very obviously a push to proselytize to Greek speakers, the Gentiles, to grow the movement outside of Judea, by many early Christians.
Anyway, yeah, you are correct that the harder J consonant did not develop until much, much later, in Europe.
So... if you were to do a more modern, direct translation of Yehoshuah, to a modern name in modern English, it would roughly be Joshua / Josh, not Jesus.
You realize that books like the First Epistle to the Corinthians were actual letters written and sent to those churches? That's one example, but there is plenty of history to be pulled from the Bible. Shitloads of New Testament books are Apostles sending Jesus' words to various churches and governments. Look up "epistle".
Look at the Old Testament for more history. Books like Leviticus, where we can pick out loads of weird proscriptions, were the records of law as the Tribe of Levi saw it.
A scholar can spend a lifetime unpacking the Bible without believing in ghosts, holy or otherwise. You're doing the "I'm too smart for this bullshit!" thing. Stop. You're having the opposite effect.
Also the fact that modern scholars recognize that not all of the Epistles were even written by Paul! You’d think if all of these Bible scholars were fervent Christians hellbent on ignoring historical evidence, they wouldn’t be arguing that Paul didn’t write Ephesians or Colossians, or that the Pentateuch was probably a compilation from four different authors!
I never knew they had all been ascribed to Paul, always thought there was various authors.
Ephesians and Colossians explicitly claim to have been written by Paul.
I find it funny that you end up with a or multiple pseudo-Pauls, when... Paul is already not his original name, lol.