If they just wouldn’t have killed him he wouldn’t have been able to come back and prove that he’s holy. Then Christianity may not have come to existence, and we’d instead have the much cooler Roman gods.
Or if instead of hiding him in a cave, they put Roman cement blocks on his feet and dumped him in the Mediterranean.
Enjoy coming back to life now arsehole.
You might be interested in Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg. It’s a pretty quick read and it more or less explores that topic precisely.
Nah, they should have killed him in his avatar state. That way he couldn’t have come back again.
In Raised by Wolves it’s a timeline without Christianity where it was Mithrism (a competing mystery religion around the time Christianity was starting) that succeeded to one day be at odds with atheism.
The first season is pretty good if you like the Idea of seeing what a SciFi scenario sans Christianity but a different pagan tradition instead might have looked like.
Rimworld!!! Stop leaking into lemmy communities!!
Note that Jesus was crucified partially because the Romans did not believe he was God or had any powers
(i get the joke)
Idk, I think he was crucified because he was a political activist that threatened the power of the state and forced people to question the authority of said power, just like the Romans crucified all political activists that were critical of the Roman Empire.
Perhaps that was the historical perspective, but that doesn’t include Jesus definitely performing miracles either. In the perspective where he does do miracles, a.k.a. the Bible, at least according to Christianity.com (which sources itself inline to the bible) a ton of priests and people were angered by Jesus’s claim of being the messiah and son of God. They then invented a bunch of insurrection charges and took to the local governor, who initially refused but went through when they basically threatened to get him fired by questioning his loyalty.
So, I guess I stand corrected that it was not the Romans but the existing religion.
Of fucking course the website of the religion dedicated to worshipping a dead Jewish carpenter is going to say he definitely performed miracles. Dude… we don’t have any actual proof of him doing so though, just attestations from people who either worshipped him or claims from people who stand to benefit from the story being true
Or he was crucified because he was gay (kisses the guy he put in charge of the group’s money around that time, had a beloved disciple reclining on him when feeding same disciple he kisses dipped bread at his last meal before being turned in). That was a capital charge under Jewish law.
In fact, it’s extremely sus that Peter is alleged in his own tradition to deny Jesus three times right around the time Jesus is going through ~3 trials, at least one of which Peter is acknowledged as going back to the guarded area where the trial was taking place to deny him in.
He could have also been killed for promoting atheist ideas at the time, given the earliest Christian ‘heresy’ was Simon Magus who after leaving the early church is talking about an “indivisible point” and later heretics and apocrypha have Jesus seeming to be quoting Lucretius’s naturalism and atomism. This is the same century Rabbi Elazar allegedly said “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.” So Jesus promoting Epicurean ideas might not have gone over very well (and might explain why Paul was so adamant Corinth ignore “other versions of Jesus” that they accepted saying things like “everything is permissible” or denying physical resurrection - very Epicurean statements).
Or it could have been the official story, though personally I don’t really buy it. If he was a threat to Rome it’s bizarre he gets such different treatment from the several other messianic upstarts in Josephus who are killed immediately without trial by Roman forces with their followers included. And why would the Sanhedrin be peeved about messianic claims when the other examples of messianic claimants were solely depicted as opposed by Rome?
But possibly gay Jesus teaching evolution and atomism while criticizing dynastic monarchy? Yeah, I can see that dude ending up dead pretty fast in that time and place by Sanhedrin demand and Roman hands.
Idk about gay Jesus. lol. But I love the idea of that as a possiblity!
Him being killed for heresy makes sense to me. That said, my understanding is all the gospels about Jesus were written long after his death. It’s totally possible he was killed like all the rest and the majority of the narrative was written after and heavily romanticized. It was then updated, as needed, to advance different political goals.
I’d never heard anything about disagreements with Epicureans, or much about them in general. Any books/links you could recommend on the subject? I’m currently reading the Dark Side of Christian History by Ellerbe and it’s great! The lengths the Church went to solidify its political power is kind of hard to comprehend. It’s crazy how little most people know about something that’s still so influential.
I remember reading about how investigations into the translations of the Bible support the gay Jesus. (Disclaimer I’m not gay, so I have no affiliated interest in promoting gayness, I just find it historically interesting).
“Washing feet” was a actually a mistranslation of some kind of general “servicing” that had several meanings, including cock sucking or accepting being bottom. Jesus “washed a lot of feet”, but one thing is certain: It didn’t mean literally washing feet. That part was definitely made up according to the people who looked into it.
Anyway, it’s been thousands of years and learning of how cultures and acceptance of certain things can change rapidly, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Keep in mind that Romans were also at war with the Greek shortly before the alleged time of Jesus. We know that the ancient Greeks practiced gay sex not just casually, but even expectedly. The Romans did not. The empire had an expansion strategy that looked a lot like the Nazis Third Reich: Expansion by breeding.
Personally I find it likely that historical Jesus was killed for a whole lot of other reasons than for claiming to be the king of Jews or for betrayal of the state, and he sure as fuck did not die “for our sins”.
Roman leadership didn’t really care enough about crucifying Jesus and that they were just doing what the Jews told him to
And it’s complete bull. If the Jewish authorities wanted Jesus dead he would have been stoned to death - not crucified. The Romans only crucified people they wanted to crucify. This is not anti-Roman propaganda - it’s anti-Jewish propaganda by the Catholic Church to camoflage the fact that it was their imperial progenitors who was responsible for Jesus’ death.
Pilate did seem to be pressured by the Jews into crucifying Jesus. Even with the Barrabas incident where they freed a literal murderer to still have Jesus killed.
Been going down a lot of early Christianity rabbit holes, and my latest over the past few days has been oddities to the depiction of the crucifixion in John (allegedly based on earlier eyewitness testimony).
Crucifixion as an execution method didn’t even necessarily involve nails. It was excruciating because it dragged on over a very long period of time. Your body’s survival instinct to keep breathing effectively tortures you to keep struggling to breathe as it gets more and more unbearable.
Except - that’s not at all how Jesus’s execution turns out in John.
He just sort of chills up there, takes a sip of sour/bitter wine brought up to him on the cross (19:29), and then not long after is just like “ok, peace out” and croaks midday.
This is so unusual that in the evening the guards who are then breaking the legs of the other prisoners being executed to speed up the process for the Sabbath have to double check whether Jesus is actually dead by poking his side with a spear, when suddenly water and blood pour out (19:34).
So, some fun facts about the Mediterranean in antiquity:
- Euthanasia was a thing, mentioned a number of times BCE as performed by high doses of opium
- Opium has a bitter taste
- Acute opium poisoning causes pulmonary edema where your lungs fill up with fluid
(Notably both Matthew 27 and Mark 15 deny that he drank the wine offered when he was on the cross, though there’s a doubled denial of wine where the soldiers offer it that’s found in all the Synoptics. In theory Luke depends on Mark, but doesn’t have the non-consumption of the wine on the stick as drunk in John, so it looks a bit like the extant version of Mark may have had post-John parts of Matthew edited into it later on.)
So suddenly dying only a few hours into crucifixion shortly after drinking bitter/sour wine and then having fluid pour out of a lung puncture sounds a bit like even if you put him in a cage it wouldn’t necessarily have lasted very long anyways assuming he still had access to beverages provided by his mom. Also, a rather dark but humanizing perspective to the story if what I’m suggesting was historically correct and his mother effectively euthanized him to shorten his suffering…
![[ElderCactus] There were worse outcomes(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5715508f-01e1-4e13-90ad-a098f1bb8f63.jpeg){kind=link}
Ah! A man of science, I see!