Do you think Mary, Joseph and Jesus existed?

[Papergirl1968]

Do you think Mary, Joseph and Jesus existed? I thought about putting this under religion, but thought there’d be a wider range of views on chat.
I’m not religious any more (was raised Methodist) but the Christmas story is something I think about occasionally, usually when I’m singing carols to the cat .
My own view is that they probably did exist, but I don’t buy the son of god thing. I’d hazard a guess that Mary got pregnant by Joseph when they were being intimate, even if they didn’t technically have sex. So she panicked and either invented or dreamed a convenient story about the angel telling her she was carrying the son of god.
I believe there’s evidence that they would have had to travel to Bethlehem - although not at Christmas - and that there was a bright star in the sky etc.
And I think Jesus may well have had children. Or maybe I just took the Da Vinci Code too seriously...
Would be interested to hear what others think.

Where does the notion that Christ will come to earth again come from ?
Do christians really believe it ?

I think Jesus existed as a man who did good things, helped the sick and c spoke about God. I think probably Mary and Joseph were a convenient back story. Jesus obviously had parents. The Virgin Mary bit was invented to provide a way for the Church to make sex sinful and therefore control human relationships and establish control over their followers. She did what women should be doing (procreation new followers) but without the sinful sex business. I do believe Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had children. The bible was written many years after Jesus' death

Some christian sects and muslims believe it @roisinagusniamh

Although muslims believe he was never crucified but ascended to heaven

This is quite a good article written by an atheist

strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the-evidence-for-jesus-part-1-of-2/

I think that as there are so few historians who think Jesus never existed, I would be pretty conceited to state that he did not.

I'm sorry, you think that because da Vinci painted Mary that is historical evidence? Hysterical maybe...

vdb That's not a very compelling article. He just points out that there is indeed no contemporary evidence, but decides that he doesn't consider that important. And he ignores the fact that there are actually quite a few writers reporting on people from that time.

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I'm sorry, you think that because da Vinci painted Mary that is historical evidence

You've misunderstood what I said. I said that there was historical evidence that Jesus lived. There is.

I mentioned the Immaculate Conception and said that it was uncertain territory at the very least.

You've conflated the two unfortunately.

I'm an atheist but I'd love to visit that part of the world. It's so fascinating to me. I do wonder given the size of our planet...why it all took place there if indeed it did? It would have meant that this supposed saviour was never known about to most of the people on earth during that time.

I may be misunderstanding what you're saying, but the middle east is very significant historically and geographically. Look at an atlas. 5 major continents, 3 of them joined at the... middle east. So either god is a brilliant politician, because this really is as close as you get to the centre of the world, or you can investigate actual sociological mechanisms. It's the natural main crossroads of human activity. It's also an area of large natural resources. Where you get human crossroads you get ideas, trade and conflict. Huge empires with complex power structures first grew up there, and many different mythological ideas spread and were combined / recombined. Some are common motifs among humans anyway, such as great leaders being returned to life, the common man made famous. In the near / middle east the same or similar myths apply to Cyrus who unified Persia and Mithras for instance. The particular forms these myths took were then spread or were spread through those complex empires and enforced either through genuine belief or through a need for some cultural unification and common ground before modern media existed. For us, they specifically spread through the medium of the Roman empire, which took over the middle east. Any use?

But you haven't shown us this "historical evidence" that you claim exists!

But you haven't shown us this "historical evidence" that you claim exists!

Page 1 of this thread.
Other posters have also included links.

I believe they existed.

Jesus isn't the first historical figure that's had huge followings for good they've done.

No one questioned Nelson Mandela, Florence nightingale or Mother Theresa.

What I don't believe is that the story is 110% accurate.

I think what we read is the olden day version of a celebrities biography!

Plenty of the goings on can be explained reasonably. For example the jarring of the tides could have been a tsunami.

Stories got changed on time as language evolved etc.

And it's possible Mary was a unmarried mother and her and Jospeh fled and that how the went to Bethlehem and ended up in a stable - they probably couldn't afford a air
B and B.

I tend not to look at whether something is impossible but rather whether it's possible something could have happened and the reporting has reported bias.

Re-posting for anyone else who's interested and can't be bothered to RTFT.

www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/14/what-is-the-historical-evidence-that-jesus-christ-lived-and-died

Here's the opposite argument:
www.atheists.org/activism/resources/did-jesus-exist/

Molly
Well his uncle came to Glastonbury and was thought Jesus accompanied to him

Believe he existed, he was just quite progressive for his time.

Moredoll - nothing conclusive then, just speculation. As I thought.

Yeah, millennia of academic research just speculation

I'm open to genuine proof if you can present any, but appeal to authority doesn't count.

l saw a programme on tv about this, and the consensus on there was that if Jesus did exist, it would be unheard of at that time for a Jewish man in his late twenties/early thirties to be unmarried and not to have children.
l'm still torn between thinking that he did exist, and that he was a healer/prophet, that he was an anarchist, or that he's a fabrication or amalgamation of various versions .
Personally l can't really reach a decision without any conclusive evidence either way. Two thousand years is a lot of time for information to filter down, and there are so many versions it's very difficult to know which to dismiss.

Isn't there a lot of pussyfooting around the obvious on this thread? Even if Jesus, Mary and Joseph existed, the stories about them are nonsense. The Bible has been debunked over and over again. The Earth is not a flat circle underneath a dome. The sun does not revolve around the Earth. Humans and dinosaurs did not co-exist. The Earth is not 6000 years old. Snakes cannot talk. I could go on. There's nothing to suggest that the authors of the Bible were being "poetic" when they wrote Genesis, but literal when they wrote about Jesus' life.

You know they were completely different authors Pearl.

Basic point stands. It's a collection of myths. It's no more deserving of great attention than any other collection of myths.

Not to mention the bible advocacy of slavery, rape, human sacrifice and genocide.

Yes, Dione. What difference does that make?