Imajin said:
And is it not possible that in sources we do take as legitimate, it is quite possible have ulterior motives? The Gallic Invasion as told in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita is most certainly mostly false to try to make the Romans seem like they did better than they did, but we accept that a Gallic Invasion of some sort most likely occured.
Just because the Bible may not be an exact truth, there are certainly some histories beneath some of the "tales".
The question is, do you allow for the existance of Sargon, or do you deny him as well?
I think people are missing my point here. Of course I think there is an historical basis for King Sargon. And Glen, I think it is plausible that Jesus is based on an historical figure or figures. What is not plausible, and what for this reason I think is indeed appropriate for this thread, is an historical Jesus with all of the far-fetched assumptions built in. In other words, what I am saying is that, because of the Christians any historical kernal for Jesus is often boxed into a very tight time period to the point wherein people who are usual very critical are assuming a religious doctrine to be historical fact - namely in this case that Jesus of the Gospels is based on a
DISTINCT, 1ST CENTURY C.E. JEW OF THE TIME OF KING HEROD WHO PREACHED WHAT WERE ESSENTIALLY REFORMED JEWISH TEACHINGS.
This is is a huge assumption, based on various smaller assumptions, which in turn are based entirely on the doctrines of one specific religion. Consequently, its plausibility is certainly in question here.
If you compare Jesus to Moses, the difference is clear. Ask someone when did Moses live and you get many different answers, because his story, like the story of Jesus is timeless. The fact is that Moses would be Moses if based on a figure from 1500 BCE, or 1100 BCE or even 800 BCE, still accepted by people
AS Moses of the tanakh. But try doing that with Jesus. Want to search for an historical Jesus, I'd look first to the reign of Alexander Yanav (~103 BCE-76 BCE), a Hellenistic Hasmonean Jewish king who apparently
CRUCIFIED some 800 people
for their religious teachings, most of them pharisees, many whose name probably were Yeshua, given that it was as common a name in that period in Judea as John Smith is in the US today. On the other hand in writings of the first century CE, IOW during the early Roman period, there IS mention of what seem to be the basis of certain people from the Jesus story. In the undoctored version of Josephus'
Jewish Antiquities, he
does mention John the Baptist. He
does mention a guy called
"YEHUDAH OF THE GALILEE" ("Judas"), who he says was thought by many people to be the Messiah. People from the Jesus story mentioned in extrabiblical writings, but not Jesus himself?
Then there are the Gospel writings themselves. Jesus of Nazareth in an earlier story apparently was the same guy as the prisoner, "Barabbas", who in the Greek version of the New Testament is called "
Iyesus barabas", IOW Jesus Barabas which for Aramaic-speaking people would have been YESHUA BAR ABBA, which means
"Yeshua SON OF THE FATHER." So it would seem that
before Jesus was the guy who is kept in jail while a criminal is released, he was the guy who was released. Would that guy qualify as an historical Jesus? So profoundly would this change the story that it is hardly what most people would consider to be an "historical Jesus".
It is almost like Moses and the Pharaoh being based on the same person. There is always a way to find some historical basis for almost any character of any tradition as long as you don't mind changing him/her into something entirely different as compared to the story.
If you are open-minded about who or what the historical basis of Jesus can be then yes, I would say it is plausible that there was an historical Jesus.
Maybe Judas is the real Jesus, for instance, or contributed to an amalgamation of characters that became Jesus (which like the above example is like Moses and the Phraraoh being based on the same person).
There can be an historical Jesus, just like there could be an historical Athena, or an historical Yahweh. Search hard enough, look far enough back in time, and you'll find something plausible.
The problem is the assumption of this thread seems to be that, minus the supernaturalism, the storyline of the Christian writings is essentially what happened and that we are dealing with an actual person who lived out the general events of that story. But it's not just that no evidence for such an historically boxed-in character is lacking. It's also that there is NO LACK of actual historical figures between roughy 200 BCE and 100 CE who can easily be the basis for Jesus of Nazareth. And with that much uncertainty, I say it is not plausible at all to take at face value the Christian claim that Jesus of Nazareth is based on a Jew of Roman-occupied Judea, which is to say
it is not plausible to assume that Christianity is a spin-off of Judaism started by a distinct 1st century CE Jew.