Jesus could have been an antique meme à la Chuck Norris that got waaaay out of hand

MajorSauce@sh.itjust.works to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 12 points –

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.

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I rather think it's plausible Jesus was a figurehead with the (already by then well established) messianic archetype applied to him who was hyped up by some Judeans as propaganda to incite their people to try to cast off their Roman rule. But then the notion really got out of hand some time after the original context was lost.

Given the prior number of Jewish prophets and messiah claimants (not to mention Apollonius of Tyana who also readily leaps to mind) there were probably several attempts at this, but only one made it to this level of popularity.

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.

Finally a shower thought that isn’t just trying to redefine words or concepts! Thank you!

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 Hebrew Aramaic (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.

It is obviously intentionally done to mimic the ritual sacrifice of the two goats on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. Two goats were presented to the high priest, one was chosen by casting lots to be sacrificed on the altar and the other was cast into the wilderness, purifying the people of Israel of their sins. In the story, Jesus plays the role of both goats.

All of that is speculation since we have no way of knowing what actually happened. The only thing we know for certain is that a lot of people back then wrote a lot of bat shit lunacy.

Then if Barabbas really was pardoned, to some of his acquaintances who didn't know the pardon, he was sent off to die, but then showed up later in the weekend.

I mean, Hitler had an underling named Himmler. Sometimes coincidences happen.

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?

You weren't kidding...

I looked everywhere and scoured the Dark Web and managed to only find this after great struggle:

There exist several versions of this figure's name in gospel manuscripts, most commonly simply Biblical Greek: Bαραββᾶς, romanized: Barabbās without a first name. However the variations (Biblical Greek: Ἰησοῦς Bαῤῥαββᾶν, romanized: Iēsoûs Bar-rhabbân, Biblical Greek: Ἰησοῦς Bαραββᾶς, romanized: Iēsoûs Barabbâs, Biblical Greek: Ἰησοῦς Bαῤῥαββᾶς, romanized: Iēsoûs Bar-rhabbâs) found in different manuscripts of the Matthew 27:16–17 give this figure the first name "Jesus", making his full name "Jesus Barabbas" or "Jesus Bar-rhabban", and giving him the same first, given name as Jesus.[b] The Codex Koridethi seems to emphasise Bar-rhabban as composed of two elements in line with a patronymic Aramaic name.[17][18] These versions, featuring the first name "Jesus" are considered original by a number of modern scholars.[19][20] Origen seems to refer to this passage of Matthew in claiming that it must be a corruption, as no sinful man ever bore the name "Jesus" and argues for its exclusion from the text.[21] He however does not account for the high priest Biblical Greek: Ἰάσων, romanized: Iásōn from 2 Maccabees 4:13, whose name seems to transliterate the same Aramaic name into Greek, as well as other bearers of the name Jesus mentioned by Josephus.[17] It is possible that scribes when copying the passage, driven by a reasoning similar to that of Origen, removed this first name "Jesus" from the text to avoid dishonor to the name of the Jesus whom they considered the Messiah.[22]

Etymology

Of the two larger categories in which transmitted versions of this name fall Biblical Greek: Bαῤῥαββᾶν, romanized: Bar-rhabbân, seems to represent Jewish Palestinian Aramaic: בּר רַבָּן, romanized: Bar Rabbān, lit. 'Son of our Rabbi/Master', while Biblical Greek: Bαραββᾶς, romanized: Barabbâs appears to derive ultimately from Jewish Palestinian Aramaic: בּר אַבָּא , romanized: Bar ʾAbbā lit. 'Son of ʾAbbā/[the] father', a patronymic Aramaic name.[17] However, ʾAbbā has been found as a personal name in a 1st-century burial at Giv'at ha-Mivtar. Additionally it appears fairly often as a personal name in the Gemara section of the Talmud, a Jewish text dating from AD 200–400.[23]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas#Name

I'm not sure why, but a lot of people seem to have a really hard time looking up information about stuff from the Bible. I remember probably about a year ago not too long after I first joined Lemmy commenting on a thread from some guy whose sister fell into some fundamentalist Christian flat earther bullshit and he was trying to figure out where she got her info from and said that he couldn't find anything about "the firmament"

It's on like the first page of the Bible. And just googling "firmament" will get you plenty of good sources about the firmament and what it's supposed to be.

I know from first-hand experience that I have often heard some information from somewhere, but for the heck of me I can't remember where. So I can often not find sources for something I was sure was true. This happens a lot to me.

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.

What if we live in a simulation and all of humanity's historical religions were real, with the key term being "were"?

At some point the simulation owner got rid of them (maybe out of necessity or maybe they just got bored and wanted something new) but kept all the written and verbal history associated with them. Literally just deleted everything we would now consider "mythical" and called it a day.

That's why we don't have skeletons but we do have stories. They just ripped all the assets and scripts out and now reality throws a fuckton of errors whenever a particle interacts with the infinitely small, now-undefined space that used to be a minotaur.

I plan to think about this way too hard next time I get baked.

yep, that's actually what I beliefe. People in earlier times weren't stupid, they have the same genes and brains as us. If we could figure out religion is fake, so could they. But they didn't because back then, magic wasn't fake. It was real.

Religion now throws a null pointer exception?

Yep. It's part of the reason why reality seems so unhinged right now. There are so many of them stacking up at this point that the simulation can't run at full speed anymore, and it's causing dialog and personality bugs due to an unforseen interaction between framerate and player mechanics.

The first person to coin the word meme was Richard Dawkins in his book 'the selfish gene'. He also postulates in the same chapter that religion is a particular form of a meme. So you're one hundred percent correct!

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.

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.

Wish it were easier to find dispassionate, objective historical analysis of how the Bible was assembled and written. If one searches for any such information the results are an inundation of pro-bible sites trying to retcon the writings to as close to the alleged existence of Jesus and his followers as they can.

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.

I think you have your logic backwards.

When Chuck Norris stepped on the water it knew better than to let him sink.

Chuck Norris yelled at the river and 700 fish came out to feed his friends. Nobody dared ask where the loaves came from.

Chuck Norris was killed by crucifixion. It took him 3 days to kick Satan's ass and break out of hell. Now, he's out for payback!

Chuck Norris said "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one cometh to the Father except through me. And if you come back in, I'll hit you with so many rights you'll be begging for a left."

Gospel of Chuck 4:20; “Nikko was easy. Now it's your turn. One night you'll close your eyes, and when they open I'll be there. It'll be time to die.”

Thank you for giving me exactly what I needed.

I figure it was an argument of "my legendary tribal chief was SOOO great, he..."

Which led into a conversation of "Which super hero would win?".

My tribes legendary chief was so great, he made bread, wine, and fish, just when everyone needed it... He is so wonderful they tried to kill him, but he came back three days later, not even sick.

It's because he's part super hero, you should hear about his dad. People were so loyal to his dad they'd almost sacrifice their own children to him. He was so great he'll save us, you'll see.

I always thought of prophets as particularly charismatic mentally ill people. Jesus may not have set out to start a cult, but like, delusions of grandeur and distorted self-image in someone charismatic and intelligent usually ends in a cult. In his lifetime they were basically anarchist hippies (at least as recorded by the bible), but like all cults, today the center has rotted and it's just toxic brainwashing.

This sort of thing happens all the time, good intentions getting twisted over time.

Iirc the reason you’re not allowed to depict Muhammad, for example, was because Muhammad didn’t want pictures of to be used to worship him. He didn’t want to be deified basically.

Cut to today and his followers will literally kill anyone that even tries, even those outside of the religion, due to their worship of Muhammad, something that he clearly never would have wanted. It literally goes against the reason he had the rule in the first place.

That’s a cool thought.

Same with Julius Caesar, Nebuchadnezzar, Christopher Columbus, Henry VIII, Copernicus, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Ptolemy.

Really anybody famous could have their image embellished back before the widespread ability to read and write. (Some folks listed above may not have lived in a time of illiteracy, but it was hard to think of a list of historical characters lol.)

I mean, it's pretty well documented how awful Christopher Columbus was. Even in the context of the time period: he was arrested in the new world and shipped back to Spain for a trial because he was so ruthless in his treatment of the native peoples. The myths about him being a 'great man' are all only like 100 years old.

I was about to say, a lot of those guys we have letters, manuscripts, diaries and such to tell what happened lol. (Julius Caesar and Napoleon specifically. Alexander the Great I haven't studied as much.)