A man ahead of his time. source

But, the Bible says he died at age 34.

Also, no one fucking knows. At all. It's all stories written long after the facts, and the "facts" were as likely just fiction.

It's all bullshit.

Adapted along the time to please the people in power

Hence the creation of the term Before Common Era, or BCE

It's one of the black-and-white irreconcilable contradictions in the Bible. The gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew puts Jesus birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE. The gospel traditionally attributed to Luke puts Jesus birth during the census of Quirinius. Quirinius wasn't Herod's successor, he was Herod's successor's successor, and his reign didn't begin until around 6 CE. The other canonical gospels don't have nativity accounts.

Okay. Look, it was documented, he was real, he existed. All the other stuff though, I'm not sure he did all that 😆. It's basically all church propaganda. I mean the church obviously had an agenda and they divined up a natural speaker/teacher of morals.

I do miss the way both terms hugged each other, though.

AD is both big spoons and BC is both little spoons. ABCD

It's an early form of a 419 scammer's typo-riddled email or letter. Filter out anyone who pays attention to inconsistencies and you can squeeze some easy money from the gullible leftovers.

Okay, but prove he existed

My understanding is that any sort of a census of the sort described in Luke (requiring males to return to the towns of their birth for registration) probably did not actually occur, as it would have created impractical logistical issues.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius

Most critical biblical scholars agree that the Gospel of Luke is erroneous.[10] Its author seems to have invoked the census as Joseph and Mary's motivation for departing "their own city"[11] of Nazareth, Galilee, for Bethlehem.[12][13][14] Additionally, the author may have wished to contrast Joseph and Mary's obedience to the Roman edict with the rebelliousness of the Zealots, and also to find a prophetic fulfilment of Psalm 87:6: "In the census of the peoples, [princes] will be born there."[12][b][c] (Luke and Matthew also give different accounts of the family's departure from Bethlehem.)[17][d] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer states:[20]

It is clear that the census is a purely literary device used by him to associate Mary and Joseph, residents of Nazareth, with Bethlehem, the town of David, because he knows of a tradition, also attested in Matthew 2, that Jesus was also born in Bethlehem. He is also aware of a tradition about the birth of Jesus in the days of Herod, as is Matthew; Luke's form of the tradition, unlike Matthew's, tied the birth in a vague way to a time of political disturbance associated with a census.

Scholars point out that there was no single census of the entire Roman Empire under Augustus and the Romans did not directly tax client kingdoms; further, no Roman census required that people travel from their own homes to those of their ancestors. A census of Judaea would not have affected Joseph and his family, who lived in Galilee under a different ruler; the revolt of Judas of Galilee suggests that Rome's direct taxation of Judaea was new at the time.[21] Catholic priest and biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown postulates that Judas's place of origin may have led the author of Luke to think that Galilee was subject to the census.[22][e] Brown also points out that in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke the Evangelist (the traditional author of both books) dates Judas's census-incited revolt as following the rebellion of Theudas, which took place four decades later.[22][f][g] Protestant theologian and biblical scholar E. P. Sanders concedes that, because revolts followed both Herod's death and the census, Luke's author may have "decided to elaborate the event [as] a reason for Joseph to travel ... to Bethlehem", calling this "a relatively slight historical error for an ancient author".[8]

ABCDE

Big spoon little spoon and the cat

I also like how Jesus has two different lineages depending on which gospel you read. Apologists try to say one of them is about Mary's parents and not Joseph's, but the text is explicit.

Matthew 1: "Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus..."

Luke 3: "Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli."

So was Joseph's father Jacob, or Heli?

There are many more. The bible is literally unbelievable. Chapter 2 lists a different creation order from chapter 1. Anyone claiming it contains no contradictions is drinking the kool-aid. It would be funny if people weren't dying for it.

7-4 BC? So 3 BC?

Nah, he walked over water and everything and it was great. I guess you had to be there.

this is like saying we know what year Poseidon was born.

Not a huge margin of error given how long after the events the Bible was written.

"Christ" as in the son of God as we read about in the Bible, "Christ" clearly did not exist. If there was an individual who served as the historic basis, that is something else entirely. It's like saying Christopher Robin or Carrol's Alice was a real person. Or the characters from Dante's Inferno. They are fictional reflections of people that exist not to tell us about the history of that potentially real person but for literary reasons.

Also Luke was written ~20 years after Matthew. The oldest copy of Matthew 1-16 predates our oldest copies of the other gospels by a long time IIRC. Kind of circumstantial but it is indirect evidence that the Matthew account might be older and less embellished.

@MurrayL @ManfredMumpitz Wouldn't it be 10BC? I think it goes backward when you're in negative numbers...

The scholarly consensus is that a real Jesus existed, and it's actually a really fascinating topic to read about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus?wprov=sfla1

Luke I'm Your Fatha.. sorry wrong fake story.

Don't forget about the Star of Bethlehem - if you date the birth by it - you will get other numbers in the mix.

Yea, but are the majority of scholars really free from bias with 3 major religions notorious for killing people over disagreements (and funding those that agree with them) all having a vested interest in perpetuation of the myth?

Every wikipedia source to the contrary is essentially an agrument to authority and didn't even discuss the underlying "evidence" or points to sources long after the fact and calls on:

Multiple attestation across independent Gospel traditions (Yea, right, that can all be made up)

Criterion of embarrassment: (Once again, not evidence. Religions are not aways rational, or correct)

Tacitus (Annals 15.44, c. 116 CE): "Christus... suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus." This is the key non-Christian corroboration. (And a hundred years later, press X to doubt)

So, I'm not impressed.

So potentially he was born 6-7BCE?

I'm not a historian but the math checks out

After Dinner and Before Cake

But clearly a historical Poseidon existed or there wouldn't have been so much literature written about him.

There are eye witness testimonies in the Illiad.

The guy in the bible who talked to a bush probably just did a bunch of mushrooms lmao

I heard he walked on the water and then the water turned to wine and then they made babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me!

I thought it was like 33 BCE, which counted down to 0, which is when Jesus died......and then waited 2000 years to come back as Y2K, but we stopped that from happening by updating all the computers before they caused the apocalypse. So instead we got hats that counted down to another year.

Then a year and 9 months later 9/11 happened. And nobody cared anymore about bearded arabic guys from the middle east. I can't speak for other countries, but here in America people went full racist mode. Sept 10th 2001, if you asked an average white guy what they thought of arabs, he'd probably just shrug. Sept 12th? He's calling for death.

So I guess the real question isn't whether he was born in 33 BCE, or 7 BCE or 0 AD. The real question is "What the fuck are we even doing on this planet, if it's nothing more then a revolving door or racism? Who's going to be the next target? Black people? The Irish? Mexicans? Jews? Arabs? The Dutch? Oh who can keep up anymore....It's all one big pile of "FUCK ALL OF THIS SHIT!!!"

Always another day. Always another group to hate. Never an answer to the question "Why can't we all just get along on a planet together?"

Can confirm, I was the water

Now, to be clear, I'm not really religious anymore and have my own belief system now. But I was raised Christian, and it annoys me how much of a voice "uneducated" Christians have for the narrative. One of the important things taught was: "regardless of the influence god had on bible writers, they were still human, so the bible is not a perfect record." And for the four gospel writers, they still had different personalities and thought different details were more important than others. And really, it makes sense that it wouldn't be 100% accurate at all times. I don't expect any biography or memoir to be such. There would absolutely be embellishments and inferences, if not straight lies.

He was so ahead of his time he was born before Christ.

Ok. Is that Steve Buschemi?

This feels like one of those riddles where the answer is that the doctor is a woman. Today, Heli is considered a feminine name.

However, the biblical figure was male.

A slightly longer quote from the verse makes that clearer

Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph son of Heli, son of Matthat, son of Levi [...]

There's also a lot of stuff that's not meant to be taken literally. The text is full of similes and metaphors that are a lot less clear today than they were at time of writing. For example, many numbers in there are just used to convey a vague serve sense of size. Sometimes concrete numbers just mean "many", which was well-understood back then.

On top of that we have later edits for various reasons and assorted other sources of imprecision. The Bible makes a lot more sense as a book that's not meant to be taken literally in it's entirety. Of course figuring out what's really meant isn't very easy all this time later.

Plus what you pointed out. That's also in there, probably especially by means of edits.

I had never thought of the Bible as Jesus' memoir but that is a great way to put it

Scholars aren’t called historians for a reason.

Anyone claiming Jesus existed is chilling for Christianity. They try to use it as a fine pointed needle to try and wiggle their bullshit into the real world.

Simply put, you can’t separate the myth from any kind of grain of truth at this point, so any and all points of so called proofs are invalid. Once you mention Jesus, there is so much package it’s just over.

Put a trucker hat with a random saying and it's Judah Friedlander.

Edit: no, the eyes aren't right.

the logic is sound.

So on average our calendar is mostly close enough

I think you’ll find pretty much all secular historians of the time and place will agree that there was probably an itinerant preacher by the name of Joshua going around in the area who was baptized by John, got in trouble with the local authorities, and got himself executed, but his followers eventually regrouped and built myths around him.

The gospels themselves, including the ones that didn’t make the cut in the Council of Rome, are a form of documentation, and Jesus is independently attested several other times within a century of his death and not always kindly. It’s pretty decent documentation for a non-elite of that era, though.

Anyone who claims much more than that likely is shilling for Christianity, but it’s wishful or even conspiratorial thinking to insist that Jesus was completely made up. Better to attack the notion of his being divine, because that actually is sky-daddy nonsense.

To your first point, no one is free of bias, but it's not the Middle Ages dude. People are free to not be Christian or to criticize or contradict Christianity, and they do all the time. Even non-Christian historians agree that Jesus likely existed.

Between the canonical and apocryphal gospels there are a good amount of people who wrote about Jesus for decades after his death. In my personal opinion as an armchair historian it just seems more likely that early Christian writers, intentionally or not, mythologized a real person that people already knew existed rather than invented one whole cloth.

Looks like Adam Driver after a rough night.

AfaIk, it's undisputed that he was a real person.

I always thought it was weird that the year (aka Jesus' age) changes a week after his birthday. Like 2,026 weeks must add up to quite a bit.

Edit: just under 39 years apparently, so it should really be the year 1987 or 2065 depending on which way you want to correct it.

It's because he was Jewish. Jan 1st was his bris

and then everyone clapped

You can be perfectly skeptical of the miraculous claims about Jesus, but he's about as well attested in history as Alexander the Great almost certainly a Real Guy.

It's more or less impossible to come up with a standard of historical evidence that doesn't allow Jesus "the guy from Nazareth who went around saying the end of the world was at hand" without throwing out... most everyone in history before maybe 200 CE?

(edited to be less exaggerated. I know I heard the comparison somewhere once but it's not accurate.)