Ok, Pompeii. Less than a century later, before Constantine reskinned the Roman religion with the Christian label, we’ve found hidden shrines and symbols used by followers of Jesus. And uncovered very recently - not much room for it to be falsified. There’s also contemporary accounts that spread extremely fast throughout the Roman empire and beyond, but those weren’t buried under ash until the modern era.
That’s a long way to go in very little time - that’s only maybe 3-4 degrees away from the original source. Not nearly long enough for a mythical figure to develop organically
You can dispute the details, but someone must’ve been the figurehead at the very least. The gospels themselves hint at the events being staged to some extent by a small group spreading an ideology according to a literal plan - the public events literally start with Jesus’s cousin gathering support for the movement, and then Jesus goes around recruiting specific people as apostles
The Romans also kept records - there’s a lot of corroborating evidence for certain events spread too far and wide for a pre-information age society to fabricate. Even things like his birthdate - I think they’ve been able to narrow it down to a few days in July, during the census, where we had accounts of a temporary new star in the sky
Even the papers that are given clickbait-y headlines like “historians dispute the existence of Jesus” generally dispute certain aspects, there was almost certainly a historical figure named Jesus who was killed by the Romans for inciting a resistance movement
Ok, Pompeii. Less than a century later, before Constantine reskinned the Roman religion with the Christian label, we’ve found hidden shrines and symbols used by followers of Jesus. And uncovered very recently - not much room for it to be falsified. There’s also contemporary accounts that spread extremely fast throughout the Roman empire and beyond, but those weren’t buried under ash until the modern era.
That’s a long way to go in very little time - that’s only maybe 3-4 degrees away from the original source. Not nearly long enough for a mythical figure to develop organically
You can dispute the details, but someone must’ve been the figurehead at the very least. The gospels themselves hint at the events being staged to some extent by a small group spreading an ideology according to a literal plan - the public events literally start with Jesus’s cousin gathering support for the movement, and then Jesus goes around recruiting specific people as apostles
The Romans also kept records - there’s a lot of corroborating evidence for certain events spread too far and wide for a pre-information age society to fabricate. Even things like his birthdate - I think they’ve been able to narrow it down to a few days in July, during the census, where we had accounts of a temporary new star in the sky
Even the papers that are given clickbait-y headlines like “historians dispute the existence of Jesus” generally dispute certain aspects, there was almost certainly a historical figure named Jesus who was killed by the Romans for inciting a resistance movement