Manetho wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 5:11 pm
dastardly stem wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 4:54 pm
Your qualifier of "recent" may or may not apply all that much. Why would that matter? It could be that Jesus existed...It could be that he did not. That is the question. You seem to be suggesting it's evidence that he existed because Alexander existed. But it's two separate cases.
You seem to be missing my point, even though it's a point that Kishkumen and I have made before. In this era, we see multiple real people being elevated to divine status by having mythic elements applied to the stories of their actual lives. We do not see previously mythical figures being placed in a specific, recent historical setting. Or, in Kishkumen's words:
Kishkumen wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:24 pm
Never do we see someone who has made up a history out of seemingly authentic details to turn a god into a human being. We don't see Ti. Julius Dionysus, you may have seen him in such stories as the god who beheaded Pentheus, but now he's back, and he's a drunk consul of Rome defying Augustus' orders and getting into zany capers.
If you want to present the mythicist hypothesis as more probable than the historicist one — or even equally probable as the historicist one — you have to present a reason why the beliefs about Jesus developed differently from the way we would expect in this era.
youv've jogged my memory, a bit, Manetho. I wanted to make another response to these points you've raised.
You are suggesting since Jesus came from a period that was closer to Alexander and Apollonius we should treat them as more closely allied with Jesus than say Osirus, or Romulus, or Moses for that matter. You don't like or appreciate Carrier's use of the Rank-Raglan mythotype to help establish some basis as his starting off point. I admit, i don't care that much about this. I like Carrier's approach over yours only in that he takes a list of criteria then applies the stories of these characters checking off anytime they meet the criteria. It's less biased it seems to me, than to take a bunch of characters and suggesting Jesus is like these all because timing.
But an interesting point (to me) in this thread has been others including Justin a defender of the faith, sees in jesus parallels to these other characters who match more closely to Jesus than do Alexander or Apollonius. Justin seems to be more closely related to Carrier's take. Also, MacDonald in his work, has detailed stories from long before Jesus as the basis from which Mark also attempts to hit the mark on these hero myths. So I suppose you can take this thread as another response, added to the previous ones I provided you from years past, as reason to take Jesus as more Roman/Greek myth added to history rather than a historic figure who later was mythologized (which I think has been established, there is no evidence for).
Ultimately I'd maintain it doesn't matter if there were a Jesus or not. I find myself confused by the dogmatism of historicists. That's what makes me feel use in addressing this. As I see it, and I hope others agree, the discipline of history matters. We shouldn't wash it away because we can't simply know all the details of things that happened in the past. All too often, it appears, we have to conclude we don't know.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos