If Jesus Existed, What Can We Know About Him?

This topic is similar to one I started on the Christian Sanctuary, but I'm hoping to appeal to a broader audience here. Jesus has been the subject of a wide variety of interpretations. By various accounts, he was a Mediterranean peasant and cynic (Crossan) a political revolutionary(Brandon), a shaman (Craffert) , a charismatic (Vemes), a magician (smith),an echatological prophet (Ehrman, Sanders), a wandering sage (Funk), married with children (Haglund), a polygamist (Swanson), founder of the French royal Merovingian family( Baigent, Leigh, & Lincoln), gay (Goss,Hyena), a woman named Mildred (mentioned by Boulton), and a mushroom (Allegro). Of the four sects of Judaism mentioned by Josephus, Jesus has been put into three of them by one scholar or another: Essene (Falk), Pharisee (Szekely), and a proto-Zealot (Aslan). So will the real Jesus please stand up? Albert Schweitzer remarked in 1910 that the quest for the historical Jesus by secular scholars typically ended with a result curiously similar to the authors' own preconceptions. Does secular scholarship have anything meaningful to say on this subject?

 

I think he was an Essene....if he existed. I also think he would have been married and did not die on the cross.

 

What can we say about him? All the things you mentioned as a start. The same types of things we say about anyone. Secular scholarship would suggest just such.

 

I agree I think he was Essene and that he was most probably married. I have a couple of messianic Jewish friends, and through them, I learned a lot about Jewish teachings and such. Another reason it makes sense to me that he would have been married is because Jesus was supposed to have been confronted with all of the temptations that the rest of us deal with.

I do think he existed and I do think he died on the cross. I think he died on the cross because what would have been the point otherwise...it proved his God (and mine) could "pull off" resurrection.

 

Essenes were generally celibate, so I don't think he was married or had kids.

 

I was just brushing up on a bit of Essene knowledge. I found multiple sources that claimed they never married or were celibate but then claim that they were around for thousands of years. So how did they pull that off? No sex...thousands of years of existence?

In any case, I've read some pretty compelling points to make me think that Jesus was an Essene or something similar.

 

Jesus was a paramedic..

 

I should also say that I've read some pretty compelling points in support of him never existing too.

 

The essene community continued by an influx on new converts not by having kids.

 

That might be totally true but it seems pretty unlikely that a community that could last for a few thousand years could sustain itself with new people and then keep all those new people from having sex.

 

Lots of things are probably true about the many people who the character is probably based on, but I've never seen any even moderately compelling evidence that he existed at all.

 

There is no conclusive that jesus existed - and the bible is certainly not a historical document

 

Can you explain how these temptations being around makes it more likely to you that he was married?

That is not why he supposedly died on the cross at all. What would have been the point otherwise? Uhm, if you are a christian you should not have to ask that question

 

On topic: we can assume he did not get older than 34.

You mean like catholic priests? Yeah this sounds like a setup for a joke but a majority of them over the last thousand years probably did refrain from having sex, but the order/group/whatever did live on through new members. Why not different communities or groups of people? It is not that unlikely if you consider how dogmatic certain groups in the past (and even now sometimes) are.

It is a historical piece of work wether you like it or not. It is a religious collection of books from centuries ago.

 

Pulp fiction to control the gullible masses.

 

That is your opinion (or is it, you sound more like a parrot), and it is irrelevant to what I or Lynn was saying, as well as to the original topic (although half of my posts in here can also be accused of the latter ).

 

His name was

Yeshua ben Yosef

 

I am not a parot - do your own research on and how and why the bible was created - I submitted a dissertation on Emperor Contantine many years ago - I suggest you use this a first point of reference - it will back what I said

 

I did, and found pulp fiction is not the most accurate definition. Unless you want to derail a thread and turn it into another discussion that already has been done to death. In that case nice try.

 

Well, I still think that being married would have made Him more exposed to "temptations of the flesh", and I do believe that He was confronted with all that we are handed. To simply be celibate and isolated (such as the Essene group was, for the most part) would not have allowed any kind of opportunity for temptation, or the opportunity(s) would have been pretty much nonexistent.

I don't think Jesus remained an Essene. I just think he was once one. I remember finding a couple of sources for this years ago, but I do not remember what they were. (and I'm just too dang lazy to try and find what I found those years ago that so convinced me of this.)

You got me on the last thing, and I do apologize. For certain, Jesus being crucified on the cross and then resurrected was not to show anything, but to fulfill His promise...He was the blood sacrifice so that each of us could be saved and considered forgiven from sin if we only claim His promise.