[flagged]
EDIT after reading comments: Well, sir, that's the quality of the people making the impolite discourse here, not myself!
If you set off a flamewar in which other people behave badly, the primary responsibility lies with you. (I don't mean you personally, of course - I mean any of us posting here.) It's not as if these outcomes are hard to predict.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I'm not a fan of Trump but if I merely mention his name and it sets off a flamewar, then the primary responsibility lies with me? Really?
Honest question as it was literally 100% not my intent so I'm just a little surprised.
It's like I said Santa Claus doesn't exist and that triggered a bunch of children, so it's my fault... I fail to understand.
I can think of just 1 example where everyone agrees that simply speaking a truth is wrong and that is "spoilers," but in that case it's because it is objectively ruining the enjoyment of people. I don't know what exactly I'm "ruining" here
Intent doesn't communicate itself and isn't what determines outcomes. We have to moderate by effects, not intent.
It isn't enough for a statement to be true—besides which, you may feel something to be true and yet others may intensely dispute it. In case it helps at all, here are past explanations on that point:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31996470
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697044
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I think that what you're getting at is exactly the sort of thing that is communicated nonverbally in person, but which gets lost over text.
Anyway, thanks. I'm now going to post portions of this discussion to ChatGPT4 just to see what it thinks...
(Also, lead as nutrient? What the heck did that guy post??)
> What the heck did that guy post?
You should be able to see everything by turning 'showdead' on in your profile.
(Standard disclaimer: if you do that, please realize that you're signing up to see the worst that the internet brings to HN; and don't forget that you did it! We regularly get emails from users complaining about awful comments on HN, and then it turns out those accounts were banned a long time ago and the user just forgot that they had 'showdead' on.)
Few things are more irritating when telling a story than having to deal with inconvenient reality.
I think I can say with at least some minimum authority that the evidence that he existed is scant at best.
Anyway, your comment is also missing the whole point of my comment: The idea of Jesus is powerful; it almost doesn't matter what his exact existence entailed.
I'm not a historian. There is a consensus among the vast majority of historians that Jesus existed, right? I suppose there could be consensus without evidence, is that the case?
> Anyway, your comment is also missing the whole point of my comment
Yes, that's why I asked you to explain: I was missing the point of your comment.
> The idea of Jesus is powerful; it almost doesn't matter what his exact existence entailed.
Sure.
We’re doing that thing where we make sharp turns into the weeds. “Yeah but…”
The person simply claimed that he was a historical influential person.
We’ve got another person complaining about America’s historical figures being “whitewashed “
How about we all be specific instead of making sweeping statements?
(There's really little point discussing stuff like this in vague generalities. If you aren't knowledgable enough to talk about the specific evidence and arguments ancient historians use, you can't expect to reach a conclusion anyone should take seriously).
There's no particular reason to believe that a historical Jesus-figure didn't exist, but the attestations to his existence are the New Testament, written some decades after he is believed to have existed (generally believed to be based on a single document which has been lost despite its obvious significance to early Christians), a couple of secular Roman references to him as the figure the Christian cult was centred on also written some decades later, and a couple of lines in Antiquities of the Jews whose wording varies greatly depending on which of the much later copies you read...
On the one hand, that's more attestations to his existence than most of the people who lived in classical antiquity. On the other hand, we have plenty of references to the angel Moroni that Joseph Smith met from a wider variety of sources written within a few decades of the meeting supposedly taking place, and I'm still completely comfortable doubting that the angel Moroni was a real historical figure.
and your final comments seem like a disingenuous comparison when you yourself point out the difference in standards we have when talking about the existence of figures in ancient history vs. the 19th century
There are more obvious routes to discrediting religious belief systems than searching for definitive proof that a particular individual 2000 years ago definitely didn't exist, something experts on the period would struggle to prove conclusively for Brian the Very Naughty Boy!
The argument works better flipped on its head: proving the existence of the historical Jesus is of the utmost importance to the predominant belief systems of the Western World that preserved, transcribed or found the historical records throughout most of history and founded the academic institutions that studied them, and they believe his impact upon humanity was seismic. So far, they haven't found a single contemporary textual reference to his existence but have managed to allow the earliest and most detailed known source describing him to slip out of existence, and adulterate what might have been the most impressive secular reference to his existence. And all the purported physical evidence of his existence in the form of "holy relics" that have been scrutinised have failed the test
Absence of primary source material or detailed secular accounts is not evidence of absence of the historical Jesus, but it is evidence that the "historical consensus" really doesn't have much to go on, and consists mostly of people with a keen interest in Biblical texts (apart from the New Testament there's not much evidence to study) not finding anything that particularly conflicts with their faith.
> your final comments seem like a disingenuous comparison when you yourself point out the difference in standards we have when talking about the existence of figures in ancient history vs. the 19th century
The difference in standards we have means we can't conclusively prove that minor historical figures referred to in legends did or didn't exist, not that we must abandon scepticism about religious texts and others' references to them if the belief is much older.
Seems a bit disingenuous to accuse someone of making a "disingenuous comparison" whilst you yourself point out that I explicitly acknowledged the differences...
> Seems a bit disingenuous...
I'm more confused as to why you made this comparison right after poking holes in this argumentation
I'm not sure why you expect a non-trivial proportion of secular historians to take a hardline position on the nonexistence of a Jew called Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth (I don't think you'll find much "consensus" about the historical accuracy of reports of miracles or virgin births or even donkey parades). The "consensus" comes from religious scholars being committed to their position, and secular scholars for the most part avoiding taking any particularly strong stance: even high school history lessons caution against arguing that figures must not have existed because they were referenced in mythology as well as against accepting that a legendary figure must have existed because he was referenced by a secular chronicler.
Ultimately study of the sources has proved all the supposed archaeological evidence of Jesus' existence were late medieval frauds, reached consensus that the early Church belief that the Gospel of Matthew was written by Jesus's disciple was false and it was actually written decades later by an anonymous Jew who'd read the Gospel of Mark and a couple of missing documents, and mostly reached consensus that Flavius Josephus' references to Jesus were edited (to be fair to Christian scholars, they've been enthusiastic participants in discrediting much of what was once considered evidence). When cross referencing the few things written in the Gospels that can be validated against contemporary records, they've found the Gospel authors appear to have got basic stuff like Herod dying before the census Joseph supposedly travelled to Bethlehem to participate in wrong (the term "historical Jesus" is really loaded when the mundane details attributed to him are as problematic as the miraculous stuff). But there's no such thing as records to prove the nonexistence of a Jew called Jesus son of Joseph of Nazareth and I'm not sure such a record ever could be a thing, so those whose faith relies of a priori belief that the late first century writings by cult leaders are particularly reliable evidence obtain "consensus" that he existed more or less by default.
> I'm more confused as to why you made this comparison right after poking holes in this argumentation
I would have thought my followup post would have made it reasonably clear. Any moderately successful cult will accumulate at least a handful of passing secular references to figures central to that cult after it has become popular. There is no reason to believe this confirms the existence of that figure. The figure doesn't become more likely to have existed if 2000 years pass; that's not how time works!
Certainly an influential figure whether such a person actually existed or not.
Going back to the original point of this thread (and of the posted article): the efficacy of the biography is orthogonal to whether the subject existed or not.
though there is no debate among scholars about whether Jesus existed, so you chose a poor example
outside of inherently untrustworthy Christian sources, Jesus is mentioned by Tacitus, Josephus and possibly Suetonius. but who maintained and copied those books over the years?
would you trust the records kept by a cult about their hero-figure over 50 years? how about 1500? how about if that cult monopolised literacy over most of that period? what if there were known examples of interpolation and forgery in the cult’s records of that figure?
Tacitus’s potential reference—which is regarded as the most trustworthy—survived in a single manuscript copied a thousand years later by a Christian scholar. Josephus’s reference is regarded to have been fraudulently embellished at least, and Suetonius’s reference to a Jew “Chrestus” is fairly tenuous
I think there’s a tendency to assume that earlier people were not as smart or capable as we are and couldn’t possibly have pulled off such a massive forgery. I would question that, especially when the means, motive and opportunity are so clear
this isn’t to say that Jesus wasn’t a historical figure; he probably was in some form, but I’m extremely loath to trust records kept on Jesus by his followers, and that’s almost all we have
Who for the subject, whom for the object.