I think Lemmy has a problem with history in general, since most people on here have degrees/training in STEM. I see a lot of inaccurate “pop history” shared on here, and a lack of understanding of historiography/how historians analyze primary sources.
The rejection of Jesus’s historicity seems to be accepting C S Lewis’s argument - that if he existed, he was a “lunatic, liar, or lord,” instead of realizing that there was nothing unusual about a messianic Jewish troublemaker in Judea during the early Roman Empire.
Because of the destruction of the Temple and the Judean rebellion there were probably a lot of messianic figures.
Jesus is just the one who achieved the necessary memetic virulence to be remembered.
Saul/Paul definitely helped this.
ETA: Also, stories attributed to Jesus may have happened to other messianic preachers.
The entire myth was also borrowed from Zoroastrianism, but let’s just pretend that never happened I guess
Christianity is like English in that it will appropriate and assimilate words/ideas that help it survive
I mean, I guess… But they stole like, the entire fucking thing from an existing religion. Christianity would not exist without the parts they took from Zoroastrianism.
Didn’t they rip off a lot of Hinduism too?
Uh… how?
The Zoroastrian “borrowing” is more along the lines of there’s a perfect good force versus a perfect evil force.
But I don’t know how there would be any Hinduism influence. There’s lot of Greek influence, but India was really far away.
All the similarities to Krishna.
The Zoroastrian influence is generally speculated to have occured to the Jews, hundreds of years before the advent of Christianity.
The Jews of Judea and Israel actually historically were conquered by the Babylonians, many of them were taken captive back to Babylonia, around 586 BCE.
Then around 539 BCE, Persia defeated Babylon, and Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Judea and Israel, as basically a new vassal kingdom, a significant improvent from being basically a slave caste in Babylon.
It is around this time period where the nature of Yahweh in texts begins to become much more monotheistic… prior to that, the proto-Judaism was actually pretty much the Canaanite polytheism.
Yahweh worship had been something of a splinter group / dedicated cult within Canaanism prior to the Babylonian scouring of Judea and Israel, but it seems that the survivors set free by the Persians had strong Zoroastrian influences on the later development of Yahweh into a monotheistic single God.
So… while there may have been Hindu influence on Zoroastrianism, there does not appear to be much direct Hindu influence on Judaism, as… you would expect maybe the concept of an avatar to show up at that point, not ~ 575 years later, roughly around 50 CE, with the advent of Christinanity, or you would expect maybe more polytheism, not less, maybe a very famous story or character archetype to get translated over into Canaanism/Proto-Judaism.
To the best of my knowledge, there is 0 evidence of interfaith influence between Hinduism and Christianity for say, the first centuries of the existence of Christianity.
All of the “Jesus’ missing years are from when he went on a spritual/religious pilgrimage across Asia” type stories, those are all much, much more modern inventions, mostly made up within the last 200ish years, often by some kind of esoteric/syncretic occultist types in the mid to late 1800s.
Christians were basically a contentious, squabbling group of ‘Gnostic’ cults/sects for their own first roughly 150 to 200 years, in Judea, Greece, modern day Turkey, Egypt, eventually Rome…
And all these groups had widly, dramatically different interpretations of Jesus, Yahweh/God, and to what extent and how they tried to incorporate mainly the ideas of famous Greek philosophers into their new cults/religions… and they famously got into huge disagreements over this, over which texts were legit and not legit.
Some believed Jesus was basically an avatar of Yahweh.
Some believed he was fundamentally a human man, but maybe blessed or sort of adopted, favored and elevated by Yahweh.
Some believed he was an incarnation from an alternate realm of reality, meant to deliver to humans a way out of a fundamentally evil reality, which had created as basically a prison by a fundamentally evil version of Yahweh.
Some believed Jesus’ true form was something like a 700 foot tall floating ghost giant.
I am not aware of any Christian arriving anywhere near, or having a discourse with India untill … what, over a thousand years after its founding, after the advent of Islam?
You can stand here in 2025 and look backward, and project similarities you see onto different parts of the past, but this is the most egregious sin a historian can commit, to try to understand historical eras and places not from within them themselves, but from the standpoint of our modern cultural and material landscape.
If you have actual historical evidence that Hinduism did actually directly influence the development of Judaism or Christianity, I’d love to see it, but I don’t think any of that actually exists.
I do not have any evidence beyond that Jesus and Krishna did a bunch of the same stuff. I wonder why these actions were separately attributed to both of them, if they had no influence on one another. Both born of a virgin, both dying and resurrecting three days later, similar miracles. Now I’m curious why these similar tropes arise in different cultures and times.
What similarities to Krishna? Please give me some examples, and a plausible explanation of how those ideas would have crossed the continent?
Jesus coming to earth as a human was possibly borrowed from Krishna, who I believe came to earth as an “avatar”.
I think there are other similarities between Jesus and Krishna.
This is far from the only thing. They also had the concept that everyone has free will to choose between good and evil. I believe they also had a concept of final judgement and heaven/hell (or an analogue).
Were those solely present in Zoroastrianism? From what I understand of Egyptian religion, there’s the whole Thoth “weighing your heart to see if it’s lighter than a feather” thing. I think free will has always been a “popular” idea, but even then, there are passages in the Bible that contradict free will - to the point that Calvinists much later discarded it.
They did not steal anything. It’s such a weird take to be out here applying 20th century notions of Intellectual Property to mythology from 2000 years ago. If you approach old world cultures and memetic ecology with reddit catchphrases, you’re just gonna rot your brain. Not worth it.
I read this as “Sean Paul” and now my mind won’t stop with “so me go so”
See “the Egyptian” and Simon bar Kokhba..
It makes sense - I mean, Pompey literally went into the Holy of Holies and didn’t die. It must have felt as if there was something cosmically wrong.
Yup