Do you really want to know why the roman guards gave Jesus a vinegar-soaked sponge to drink?

[DetlefK]

SPOILER ALERT: You don't. Trust me.












































http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2009/08/what-the-romans-used-for-toilet-paper.html

You know what the Romans used instead of toilet-paper? A sponge on a stick.

And afterwards?

Well, the sponge wasn't thrown away.
If it was a public toilet, it was hung into a canal/pipe with running water.
If it was a porta-potty, the sponge was stored in a vinegar-filled jar between uses, because vinegar disinfects.

[BlueCaliDem]

1. EEEEEUW!

It's probably the reason Jesus made a face and pulled back when he caught a whiff of it, and it had nothing to do with the strong vinegar scent!

EEEEEEUW!

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Assumes facts not in evidence.

[DetlefK]

3. The existence of a cult-leader "Jesus Christ" is historically pretty much verified.

[trotsky]

4. Evidence that tall lumberjacks named Paul existed...

doesn't mean one of them created the Grand Canyon while dragging his axe on the ground.

[AtheistCrusader]

5. "pretty much"

Tell me more.

[DetlefK]

7. Well, you can't rule out witness-testimony entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

Sure, so far the only evidence we have of his existence is that contemporary followers claim that he existed.

(To be fair: There is a famous literaric fuck-up, where scholars in ~400AD thought, the character "Hermes Trismegistos" (mentioned in theological writings from ~300AD) were a real-life person who had lived in Ancient Egypt.)

An evidence FOR his existence as a human is in my mind the way he's depicted by the earliest Christians: He's not depicted with divine regalia. He's depicted as a humble shepherd.

[AtheistCrusader]

8. Trying to align the four as-documented gospels reveals flaws in the idea of an eyewitness account.

I take more of a legal standard approach to evaluating testimony. A defense attorney would have a heyday with the gospels.

That said, I don't think it's impossible that a person by that, or a similar name, may have existed and had some particulars around preaching some ideals, and maybe a brutal death at the hands of the romans, but that's a far cry from accepting the biblical character of Jesus as a real historical thing.

[DetlefK]

9. The biblical Jesus is a different topic.

We were talking about a historical Jesus.

At some point we have to weigh the statistical significances:
What is the probability that the theory "a-historical-Jesus-existed" is correct?
What is the probability that the theory "a-historical-Jesus-didn't-exist" is correct?

Then we pick the theory with the higher probability and declare it scientific truth. Because science doesn't deal in absolute truths. It simply cannot. It's mathematically (to be precise: statistically) impossible to derive absolute truth by empirical means.

"A historical Jesus existed... with a statistical significance of X%."

"The existence of the Higgs-boson has been verified with a statistical significance of 5 sigma." (which translates to a probability of roughly 99.99997% that the theory is correct)




The biblical Jesus is a totally different topic, because this theory includes supernatural phenomena and we have no empirical data that would back up this theory in the faintest. So far, the statistical significance of "the-biblical-Jesus-existed" is 0%.

[trotsky]

11. But the biblical Jesus is the one it is claimed was given a vinegar-soaked sponge.

Unless that was written down somewhere else by a firsthand witness?

[AtheistCrusader]

12. Archaeology and other disciplines have failed to prove that a historical jesus certainly existed.

Until then, the claim is suspect. There is actually very little direct evidence.

[thucythucy]

13. Archeology and other disciplines would be unable to prove the existence

of 99.9% of all the humans who ever lived prior to the 18th century.

Most people down through the ages were illiterate, and thus left no records themselves, and were for the most part unrecorded as individuals by any government or religious entity of the time. This certainly would have been true of a peasant or semi-skilled craftsman such as Jesus, living in obscurity for most of his life. Even his execution probably wouldn't have been noted--the Romans executed thousands of slaves involved in the rebellion led by Spartacus, how many of their names were recorded? Did those executed slaves then not exist?

And even if such evidence of their existence did at one time exist, it may well have been lost in the intervening centuries. Most of Homer's works didn't survive. He supposedly wrote many longer epics, and hundreds of "Homeric hymns"--but only the Odyssey and the Iliad have come down to us.

Come to think of it, what archaeological or other evidence do we have that Homer existed? I don't think his name even appears in writing until at least a century or more after his alleged life and death.

As I've said before, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

[Warren Stupidity]

16. There are few if any academic claims for the historicity

of Homer. There is no evidence such a person existed. There is plenty of evidence for other people from the same general era as Jesus. Usually your argument is framed around Socrates, not Homer. But I might as well also let you know that the Socrates canard is full of fail too.

[thucythucy]

17. Have I ever used Socrates

to frame this argument? I don't think so. Aristophanes poked fun at him in a play of the time (which Socrates--Plato actually--mentions in the Apology), so I don't think I would ever have used Socrates in this context, but I could be wrong.

And yes, there are allusions and evidence of the existence of plenty of people during the time frame in question. But how many were peasant carpenters from a rural backwater of a relatively unimportant province of the Empire? Jesus, if he existed, had a following drawn primarily from peasants, slaves, outcasts. These people, and even their leaders, are generally not the sort who figure prominently in accounts of the time.

Again, how many of the thousands of slaves who took part in the Spartacus rebellion are mentioned by name?

How many of the ordinary people massacred by the Athenians at Melos can you name? In fact, had it not been for Thucydides deciding to document Athenian atrocities--and had it not been that his book was preserved--we wouldn't have a single reference to those events. Would that then mean it never happened? That those people never existed?

Again: absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

[Warren Stupidity]

18. well regarding spartacus, the leader, spartacus was mentioned by name.

and there are multiple references to both him as the leader of the slave revolt and the slave revolt itself, all of which mostly corroborate each other on the details of the revolt and the biography of Spartacus. While there is no direct evidence (no body for example, no coins with his picture embossed, no surviving first person accounts) the historicity of Spartacus is highly certain.

I didn't claim you made the Socrates Argument, I said that was the more typical framing of the counter argument to the simple fact that the historicity of Jesus is not established as 'highly certain'. Both Spartacus and Socrates are interesting examples of how we can be reasonably certain of what really happened in the ancient Mediterranean world and contrast starkly with the evidence for an historical Jesus.

[thucythucy]

20. We know Spartacus by name

because he was a major player in the revolt. Similarly, we know the names of the major players in the Jesus story--Pontius Pilate, King Herod--because they were significant persons as seen at the time. Jesus was by contrast less than a bit player in the context of the Roman and Jewish elites, and didn't become significant until his myth became widespread in the following decades.

We know of the massacre on Melos only because Thucydides thought to record it. Had his work not survived I don't think there would be any record at all of those events--and even so I don't think a single personal name is mentioned in his account. We have only a small fraction of what was actually written at the beginning of the so-called Christian era. There may well have been a Jewish or Roman or Greek contemporary who made reference to the events as described in the Greek scriptures, but whose work was lost in subsequent millennia. There's no way of knowing--until such an account is unearthed. We had little or no knowledge of the existence of the communities documented in the Dead Sea scrolls--until those scrolls were unearthed in the middle of the 20th century.

One reason I think there was an actual person at the core of the Jesus myth is the lengths the original chroniclers go to fit him into the framework of the foretold Jewish Messiah. Had folks been simply making up the story out of whole cloth, I think they would have said, "Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as foretold by the Prophets." End of story. No, instead there's this whole fairly absurd account of his family having to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of a census we know never took place. Why that story? It makes no sense--unless there was an actual Jesus that people living at the time knew grew up in Nazareth. People then--the overwhelming majority--lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. There must have been people who knew that the person Jesus was raised in Nazareth, and thus his birth elsewhere would have to be explained. So to make him conform to the Hebrew idea of the Messiah, they had to fudge this detail of his biography. In a mostly illiterate society--where the modern concept of historical documentation was shared by an infinitesimal elite--such a story would be easier to sell than the notion of a Jewish Messiah who didn't conform to the Hebrew traditions of which most Jews--even those not literate--would have been aware.

The "Q" text--the supposed source material for three of the four Gospels--was composed when there were still people around who would have had a living memory of the person Jesus. They would have been the first audience for the accounts. Thus the need to retrofit his early biography (which no one outside of Nazareth would have known) to conform with Hebrew scripture.

Whether this actual person did or said the things attributed to him is another story. But I think there is at least circumstantial evidence that there was such a person, around whom these stories began to congeal.

If you're going to create a mythical character out of whole cloth, why even bother to place him as a contemporary at all? Much easier to say, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far away..." Instead you have a resurrection story centered on someone who appears in living memory. This only makes sense to me if the original author(s) of the accounts that have survived were trying to carry on the story of someone they actually knew to be real, someone important to their lives, whose death had to be processed in some way as to give it meaning.

That's my take, anyway.

[edhopper]

19. We know Homer existed

because we have a picture of Aristotle considering a bust of him.

[IMG][/IMG]

[Major Nikon]

22. There's evidence that a historical Jesus existed and that he was crucified

Beyond those two things, not much.

What's interesting to note that you supposedly had someone wandering all over a region what was fully under Roman control drawing crowds and performing all sorts of miracles, but the Romans who wrote down even the most mundane details had absolutely nothing to say about it. No written record of Jesus exists until several decades after his crucifixion.

[thucythucy]

26. See my post 25,

all the stuff I wrote about the paucity of what survives of the Roman archives.

I think there is at this point circumstantial evidence that the Jesus myth is based on an actual person, as I explain in one of my responses on this OP to Warren.

Best wishes, and happy holidays, whichever you celebrate or don't celebrate. May these days be happy and peaceful for you and yours.

[Major Nikon]

30. The problem is we aren't talking about some random troublemaker

By the 2nd century the Christian ministry was off and running, and the problem is at best we have a 4th or 5th hand witness to anything Jesus said or did even if you include the gospels. Regardless of what physical records survived or didn't survive, you still have numerous historians who were contemporaries of Jesus or came shortly afterward whose records did survive, and the absence of any mention of any fellow named Jesus, allegedly from Nazareth, touring the area performing miracles is in itself very telling.

[thucythucy]

32. "Is very telling"

I don't think so. You said it yourself, "by the 2nd century the Christian ministry was off and running."

Prior to that it was just another sub-cult among probably hundreds that came and went in the various provinces. So it makes sense, given the paucity of documentation from that era in general, that this one cult among hundreds or thousands wouldn't have garnered much interest until it began to take root. Caesar's notes about the Celts in his books are the great exception, not the rule when it comes to Roman documentation of the various religions and cults they encountered all around the Mediterranean Basin.

In fact, the Roman lack of curiosity about other cultures has been noted by historians. For a sea-faring people it is remarkable they made so few attempts to explore the African or Asian coastlines. There were few if any Roman expeditions even into the Baltic, which is remarkable given that sea's strategic importance to the empire.

Here's a quote from H.G. Wells (yes, THAT H.G. Wells) I've always enjoyed:

The Roman Empire "had no strategic foresight, because it was blankly ignorant of geography and ethnology. It knew nothing of the conditions of Russia, Central Asia, and the East.... The clue to its failure lies in the absence of any free mental activity, and any organization for the increase, development, and application of knowledge. It respected wealth and despised science. It gave government to the rich, and imagined wise men could be bought and bargained for in the slave markets when they were needed. It was therefore a colossally ignorant and unimaginative empire."

The vast majority of the empires inhabitants were serfs and slaves, conditions among whom wealthy Romans cared not a jot, so long as their interests weren't threatened. When they were threatened the go to response was violence of the most brutal kind. Like Stalin, the average Roman emperor believed "the shortest distance between two points politically was organized violence."

This, I think, explains two phenomena which otherwise seem almost inexplicable--certainly remarkable. The first was the military defeat of the Empire at the hands of less sophisticated and even less numerous "barbarians." By the time the various tribes--the Huns, for instance--came knocking, the vast majority of the inhabitants could have cared less for the "Roman peace." Had the empire been seen as worth defending, the "barbarians" would have been driven off.

The second is the rapid spread of the various apocalyptic cults, Christianity among them. What made Christianity so attractive to the "99%" (actually, probably more like the 99.999%) was that it was a theology that spoke to the experience of slaves, outcasts, the poor, the oppressed. Herein lies, in my opinion, the great innovation of Christianity. The central figure of its myth isn't a triumphant Hero or God, but rather a political prisoner arrested, tried, and tortured to death by the powers that be (i.e. the Romans). This is what made the cult so attractive and so subversive.

Of course, by the time of Constantine's "conversion" Christianity would be co-opted into becoming just another tool of Roman (and then Roman Catholic) hegemony. Constantine largely succeeded in rendering Christianity as an organized religion compliant and comfortable. Which legacy remains with us today.

So no, I don't think the lack of a Roman account of any Jesus of Nazareth is particularly telling. What IS telling to me, as I tried to explain in other posts here, is the lengths to which 2nd generation Christians tried to retrofit the Jesus story so that it complied with Jewish scriptures--the very awkwardness of the attempts tells me there must have been some original germ of a story that couldn't be ignored because too many people in the original cult were aware of at least some of the true facts. For instance, that the person Jesus came out of Nazareth, not Bethlehem. That Jesus was arrested during Passover, and that for all his "miracles" he was unable to escape the death so common for those seen as a threat to the established order. And that he was a person of considerable charisma who made enough of an impression that some of his followers were willing to risk imprisonment and death to keep his memory alive.

That's my take, anyway. All this is speculation, of course. But I don't see lack of contemporary documentation of the life of this one person as proof positive that he didn't exist.

Best wishes, and happy whatever you do or don't celebrate!

[Major Nikon]

33. That's kind of the whole point

Prior to that it was just another sub-cult among probably hundreds that came and went in the various provinces.

Jesus was either highly overrated decades after his demise, or he was simply manufactured as part of the rest of the mythology.

[thucythucy]

34. Or news just took time back then to travel,

especially among slaves and peasants, who were mostly illiterate.

It took centuries for Buddhism to travel to places where it is now quite widely practiced. Yet there seems little doubt, little expressed here anyway, that there was an actual person at the root of it.

[Major Nikon]

35. I don't doubt there was an actual person behind Christianity

But, I'm not sure if it really matters. The case for a biblical Jesus being at all similar is pretty remote.

[thucythucy]

36. If by "Biblical Jesus" you mean the whole turn water into wine

virgin birth star over Bethlehem healing the blind and lepers thing, yeah, that has about zero percent likelihood of being the actual truth. Not to mention rising from the dead. THAT's something I'd truly like to see for myself sometime.

I wonder if even the people who wrote those original stories actually believed any of it literally, or if they were simply using the accepted conventions and definitions of "divinity" to put a gloss on the message they were trying to send. Or maybe they did believe it, or somehow convinced themselves that they believed it--who can say?

Whatever the original events, and whoever it was at the center of them, is probably impossible now to reconstruct or maybe even to imagine. I can hardly conceive of what it must have been like for someone living in those times, especially someone at the bottom of the heap. The need for some palliative for all that suffering must have been tremendous. Still is, actually, for so many people around the world today.

Best wishes, and happy holidays.

[Major Nikon]

37. Even beyond that

Even if you assume there was a person named Jesus Christ who had a ministry around the first century, the likelihood that the actual events had much resemblance to how it was reported is quite remote. At best you're talking about accounts written decades if not over a century from when they actually happened passing through multiple people all with their own agendas during a time when people were highly susceptible to mythology and folklore. In other words the tales just kept getting taller further down the line until they bore little resemblance to what they were actually telling.

[Warren Stupidity]

15. Well except when he isn't and is instead described

as a supernatural being or in other texts as a revelation rather than a "being".

There are no texts written by actual eye witnesses. The gospels are written by others as the stories told by some of those alleged witnesses.

Generally the "historical Jesus" argument relies on the history of Josephus as its one valid claim, and that is a weak argument.

[stopbush]

29. There is no eyewitness testimony for the existence of Jesus.

You're about 60 years behind the scholarship curve on this.

[Goblinmonger]

6. Do tell

[Warren Stupidity]

14. No really that isn't "verified" as there is zero

direct evidence. A better assertion is that for political reasons it is assumed an individual existed as described in the holy texts of the Christian religion while also assuming that all the other obvious bullshit in the same books is nonsense.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

24. There were other "gods" in history just like him.

Born of a virgin on December 25th. Worked miracles. Signs in the heavens of his impending birth (like the star of Bethlehem).

Bethlehem didn't exist and the story of going back there for a census by the Romans is completely made up.

Those other gods: Osiris, Mithra, Apollo, and lots of others.

Now why would Jesus have those characteristics exactly like those other gods? There's nothing new and unique in the story of Jesus that wasn't already told in ancient history about these other gods. And there are no contemporaneous accounts of his life. We know about lots of the ancient Romans of the time who wrote and were written about like Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius. And quite a few ancient figures from before the time of the alleged Jesus.


We know Buddha existed. There are several shrines in Asia with bone fragments, teeth and hair of his that were preserved after he was cremated (hair would obviously be before his death). When he died at age 80 from eating bad mushrooms, all his followers who had memorized his teachings wrote them all down on palm leaves in Pali (which just means "language&quot . And that was around 600 BCE.

[thucythucy]

25. All of these supernatural aspects of divinity

were obviously added to the Jesus story after the fact.

We know something of the Romans by the written record, but not "a lot" if you compare what historians have to work with post mass-printing. The vast majority of their written records were most likely lost in the two millennia since the collapse of the empire. There may well have been correspondence about "some trouble-maker from Nazareth" but it also may well have been lost, particularly in the first centuries after the fall. Even works by the most respected writers of the era, and those of the earlier Greeks, have mostly been lost. If many of the works attributed to Homer are gone, and the political speeches of Antiphon, and the histories of Suetonius (we have some but not all), and the poetry of Sappho which survive only in fragments, what are the chances then for the survival of the complete correspondence of some bureaucrat working in a relative backwater of the empire?

Consider Roman architecture. The Romans no doubt constructed millions of buildings. How many of these survive? And how many survive in absolutely pristine condition? The only one I can think of off hand is the Pantheon--which survives mainly because it was turned into a church soon after Constantine's "conversion." How much more durable are marble, granite, and (the Roman specialty) water-resistant concrete, as opposed to papyrus?

The only reason we know, for instance, that the Romans painted their sculptures (as opposed to the practice today) is because miniscule flecks of paint have been retrieved here and there from some of the (mostly) fragmented pieces. The only reason we know at least something about Roman wall paintings is because of the fluke of Pompeii being preserved under volcanic ash for close to two thousand years. (Similarly, we know the Romans were quite into erotic art--but we have very few examples, perhaps several thousand out of the millions of items no doubt produced. Many of these--again--come from Pompeii).

So, as I've repeated several times in these threads--absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. I think there is circumstantial evidence that the Christ myth was centered around an actual person--see my response to Warren further up in this discussion.

The Romans tortured and executed probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. We have personal names and references to an infinitesimal percentage of those victims. It doesn't mean however that they didn't exist.

[stopbush]

28. Nope.

[cleanhippie]

10. Because they thought he could turn it into water?

I mean, he performed a plethora of other miracles, including turning water into wine, a fish and loaf of bread into a feast for many, killed a fig tree with a glance, etc, etc...

Making some vinegar drinkable should have been easy, no?

[thucythucy]

21. No, it was probably because the people entrusted with executing criminals

and alleged criminals back then were most likely sadists. It takes a really scummy person to see someone suffering like that, and to say, "You know what would be fun? Let's try to shove some shit into his mouth and see how he likes it!"

I pity the victims of imperialism, no matter which era we're discussing.

[cleanhippie]

23. Considering that it's most likely a fabricated story, I don't get too worked up abut it.

YMMV

[stopbush]

27. Fortunately, the whole Buy-bull is make believe.

No reason to be upset over this fantasy.

[Person 2713]

31. No not really

[Iggo]

38. Let's see. Is it because some people really love torture porn?