All we have are scriptures and texts that could have been a series of meme that built/improved from eachother but lost the common knowledge between the generations that it was fictional.
This is actually what i sorta believe. Thats jesus was just a smart guy amongst stupid people.
Like people be all dirty and getting the plague and hes like “bruh go wash youself in the river, you dirty as fuck, thats why you keep getting sick”.
Then next minute they get better and theyre all like “omggggg the messiahhhh”
But a narcissistic one. He did believe he was the son of the fucking god lol.
But Jesus didn’t write the bible, it was mostly written over a hundred years after the fact. I believe Mathew is the closest at 80 years and John was 300 years later. We have no way of knowing whether Jesus actually did say anything of the sort. The Nicean Council was mostly a political one so Constantine could solidify his power by utilizing the top heavy hierarchy of a fledgling branch of Christianity.
We only have the Nag Hammadi library because of “heretics” preserving it in secret.
Finally a shower thought that isn’t just trying to redefine words or concepts! Thank you!
We know that this is from a series of texts that built on each other - many “facts” and feats attributed to Jesus were earlier attributed to Mithras and others.
The same “miracles” and other stuff get reused and applied to new prophets or supposed gods as they roll in.
I mean, yeah…
The Bible wasn’t some dude writing stuff down. It’s a bunch of dudes over centuries writing stuff down, and doesn’t include everything.
It was commone with the pre-christian religions for myths to work like that, and as Christianity co-opted different parts of those earlier religions to make conversion easier, people.kept making up stories about Jesus or saints like people used to make up stories about Zeus or Hercules.
If Jesus’s 20s weren’t conspicuously absent, it prob would have been pretty close to Chuck Norris. Just because those stories didn’t stick around, doesn’t mean they never existed.
The Chuck Norris meme isn’t an antique, it’s something we’re all ashamed of being part of after finding out he’s a crazy person.
Pfft you might be, that just makes it funnier to me. Chuck Norris is an actor and a white guy who knows karate. That’s already like the height of unseriousness, add poo-brained conservatism and it’s comedy gold. Like have you ever watched an interview with him. He is 100% that guy who talks about his hands being registered weapons but has never been in a fight as an adult. The point of those memes was that he was a washed up joke.
What did he say/do? I’m out of the loop on this one
Big shock, the 84 year old white dude famous for playing a Texas Ranger is very much a conservative republican
While that’s not surprising, since he’s been a Republican supporter for decades, that doesn’t equal crazy by itself.
As an outsider looking in, it seems that to be a Republican you have to be crazy, ignorant, or evil. Any combination of the three will do, but if even one of them was applied to a person it you’d think it would be enough to make them re-examine their beliefs.
People forget that the party and its shenanigans don’t always equal the people that vote Republican.
Identity politics exist. And it is no more a sign of insanity when the person is republican than when they’re democrat or libertarian, or tory or labour, or whatever. We could all sit around and argue about how stupid it does or doesn’t make someone, but there are a shit ton of people that will vote for their party solely because they’ve always voted that way, and likely their parents and possibly grandparents did too.
Again, if that’s insanity, then it applies equally to anyone voting a given party for that reason.
Then you’ve got single issue voters. While I kinda err on that being purely stupid personally, it’s really more emotionally driven voting than insanity (which is an exaggeration of the term, or for crazy, for this whole thing to begin with).
With Republicans, there’s two huge issues that drive those voters, abortion and firearms. The democrats, firearms tends to be more important as an issue across the party than it does republicans, whose single issue voters aren’t necessarily all voting for that single issue. But with democrats, when they’re single issue, that’s what it tends to be. Not so with abortion since that gets included in other rights support rather than being a driver of voting dem despite having other beliefs that align with other parties/ideologies
Again while I think it’s dumber than dammit, it isn’t ignorance, evil, or craziness to vote on a single issue. To the contrary, if one is going to vote based on emotional drive, might as well vote single issue because at least that’s going to mean the person is paying attention and voting their conscience.
This is separate from any discussion about whether or not a given view of those issues is better or worse, and my opinion on those issues isn’t involved either. This is all about whether or not voting for a party is a sign of something wrong with a person inherently.
I’ll say this much, as someone that’s not registered for either party, and has beliefs farther left than either, I’m an outsider looking in too. But I’m an outsider that’s a bicycle neighbor, friend, or family member of people that are registered to one of the two viable parties, as well as alternate parties.
From that perspective, I see as much identity driven ranting online and off from every US party, excepting the green party. Republicans, democrats, libertarians, and even the socialist party will parrot party talking points without even understanding them, or being willing to gain understanding of them. None of them are excluded from debating a point without devolving into “I’m right, you’re wrong, stfu” at some point, though there’s also segments of each party that are nicer and go to “agree to disagree” instead.
Currently, the Republican party has been taken over by the craziest, worst elements. Outright fascists, white supremacists, and christian extremists. But there’s still people, our fellow human beings, that haven’t caught on to that fact yet. Not just republican voters either, there are democrats and libertarians that don’t get exactly how bad things will get without major efforts against the far right that have taken over, and the oligarchs that use them to maintain their power and wealth.
But this doesn’t make any given individual voter even ignorant. There are a lot of republicans that think the party can be salvaged, others that see it as a bump in the road that will go away on its own. They see the problems, but disagree on how best to handle it from the rest of us.
Pigeon holing that many people with dismissive, derogatory thinking by slapping labels onto them is dangerous. It’s also kinda hypocritical, but that’s tangential at best.
Remember the human, always. Remember that everyone has motivations, and that understanding them is a more powerful tool for change than dismissal, even if we don’t want to apply empathy and approach it from a desire to help someone be better. Even if the goal is to win, understanding the motivations and thinking of opponents at every level of power is necessary. The harder it is to do, the more important it is to work at it.
Me? Idgaf about parties. I don’t care about being better than a given bloc. I care about successfully shifting people as a whole towards the goal of equality, compassion, and mutual support. If that takes breaking apart and digesting the thinking of the extremists to find ways to counter their influence, so be it. If that takes applying compassion and empathy towards the people I disagree with, so be it; one does not have to abandon those things to fight against dangerous elements.
Even the nazi segments, if you don’t understand how and why they came to be, you can’t be as effective in countering and negating their influence (unless you wanna just go ham and take them out entirely).
I’m fine with revolution. I would be happy with it, but even then you have to know your enemy and plan accordingly. And be ready to stop thinking of them as the enemy when the fighting is over.
The FUCK it doesn’t…
Saying it emphatically doesn’t make it right
Based on my understanding of non-religiously biased history, the character of Jesus Christ is an amalgamation of many Jewish prophets who preached a generally similar message.
One of the interesting things that sticks out to me personally that lends credence to the idea that the Bible is just kind of a bunch of half-remembered stories all mashed together is Barabbas- the guy that Pontius Pilate supposedly pardoned instead of Jesus.
In some versions, Barabbas is given the first name “Jesus”
And “Barabbas” could potentially come from “bar abba” in
HebrewAramaic (although Hebrew “ben av” or “ben aba” is not far off) meaning “son of the father”He was imprisoned and sentenced to execution due to taking part in an insurrection against the Roman empire.
The two characters- “Jesus, son of the father, and sentenced to death for sedition” and “Jesus, son of God, sentenced to die for claiming to be king of the Jews” sound a hell of a lot like they’re referring to the same dude to me.
That’s either one of the biggest coincidences in all of history, or someone heard two different versions of the same story and mashed them together.
Or maybe it’s just sort of a 1st century version of the saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.”
This is what happens over time with people remembering history that they start to attribute a lot to a single person. More recent example of this is George Washington which is given more credit that he deserves for creating the US.
This is pretty cool, but I’m struggling to find anything else that makes this claim using my Google fu. Can you help point me at something I can read about this?
Where did you get it?
I’m not too sure where I first picked up the idea, for some reason I think it may have been one of the videos on the Useful Charts YouTube channel, but in general it all kind of fits together to me, and I of course kind of put my own little bit of spin into it myself. Unfortunately I don’t have exact sources to cite directly to where I first heard this theory put together.
For starters you can go to the Bible itself with Mathew 27:16-17
16 At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Jesus Barabbas. 17 So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”
I misspoke in my earlier comment, and I edited it accordingly, the language would have been Aramaic, which is what most scholars agree is the language Jesus mostly spoke, although it is a pretty closely related language to Hebrew. I speak neither Hebrew nor Aramaic so I kind of just have to take it on faith that some of the people I’ve seen discussing this online have some idea what they’re talking about. You can kind of piece it together from some common bits of Hebrew “bar mitzvah” literally translates to something like “son of the commandments” and I believe in modern Hebrew, the word for father in “av” with “aba” being commonly used in some places/cultures.
There’s also some that would say it comes from “bar rabban” (may be misspelling that) meaning “son of the teacher” instead of father, which you can compare to “Rabbi”
This comes from an era when people didn’t really have official last names, depending on who you asked, Jesus could have been known by quite a few different names, Jesus the carpenter, Jesus son of Joseph/mary, the son of God, the teacher, the guy from Nazareth, the religious weirdo, the insurrectionist, of the house of David, etc.
I believe in modern Hebrew “ben” is more often used as the “son of” prefix. And those sort of patronymic names are pretty common in semitic languages, in Arabic you’ve probably heard a few people with “bin” in their name. It’s basically the same idea as Irish/Scottish names that begin with mc/Mac/O’, or names that end in “son”
As for Barabbas having been involved in an insurrection, going back to the bible we have Mark 15:7
A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising.
Israel experienced more than a few different Jewish uprisings/revolts/riots/insurrections/whatever name you wanted to call it. They weren’t exactly happy to be under Roman rule, and there were always a bunch of different political or religious movements trying to do something about it and usually not having much success. It’s not unlikely that Jesus is sort of a composite of several different folks making trouble for the Romans.
I’m no scholar, my knowledge on this doesn’t really go a whole lot deeper than what I’ve said here, and I can’t say how widespread this particular little conspiracy theory is in academic circles, I won’t say that I’m totally sold on it myself, I’m very open to someone else saying differently, but it’s something to consider, and it looks like a hell of a coincidence to just be a coincidence to me
Very interesting! As a Hebrew speaker, I can confirm “bar” is being used to indicate “son of” but not in spoken language, just in some exoressions which originate from Aramic, and some surnames (son of…) Btw, there is an Israeli actor with the surname “Barabba”, who mentioned in an interview it’s a name going back many generations.
I was hoping a hebrew-speaker would chime in to confirm that I at least wasn’t too far off-base with that part. Talking about languages I don’t know is always a little uneasy for me because every language has its own weird quirks and something is always lost in translation.
