Yeshua: Historical Figure or Myth?

First, let's distinguish an important point:  "Myth" does not mean "untrue", but is merely a story containing fantastic plot points that often defy what we know of reality.  A "myth" could very likely be an embellished version of a very real series of events, and could also be completely true, or it could be completely fabricated.

That said, this post is written specifically to distinguish between the Myth of Jesus to focus on The Historical man named Jesus (Yeshua).

Personally, I've always had a difficult time accepting the commonly held narrative that most Christians believe; that Jesus was a magical, virgin-born, God-incarnated man, whose spiritual lessons led to his brutal execution.  Then he was entombed, came back to life, and then ascended into the sky.  While obviously that's a rather simplistic summary, this is the myth of Jesus.  From an objective perspective, it seems that the Christian religion as a whole focuses more on the myths of Jesus's birth and death, and much less emphasis on what Jesus spoke and taught.

Which has led to a growing belief in our modern society that the whole story of Jesus is a fabricated story, which is a grave injustice to common sense.

The people that dispute the existence of Jesus usually make that claim because our modern scholars and anthropologists haven't discovered any physical proof of his existence.  However, absence of proof isn't proof of absence.

There is still rather a lot of evidence ("evidence" and "proof" are two different things that people often confuse) to go by in order to logically conclude that Jesus existed.  It is my contention that a factual, historical Jesus that existed is the most logical possibility.

The reason for this conclusion is simple.  If we first assume he didn't exist, that his story was made up completely, then we must logically conclude that those who created the story had  to have not only a motive to promote this fictional story, but also enough devotion to their creation that they were more willing to die by execution than admit it was merely a story that was conjured up.

From a strictly logical standpoint, I find that idea a lot less likely than the opposing idea; that the mythology of Jesus and his following was based off of a real man, with real teachings, and that same man was executed due to either 1) politically powerful Jews within the community looking at his teachings as "heretical",  and/or 2) inciting what the Romans could consider a "rebellious" movement.  It's logical to conclude that the actual, historical account was exaggerated by this man's remaining followers in order to lend more credence to his teachings, which eventually created the mythology of Jesus as the Christ/Messiah.

The "burden of proof" that non-believers keep insisting on either doesn't exist, or it hasn't been discovered.  Maybe one day it will, maybe it never will.  However, based strictly off the evidence we have both within scripture and historical documentation outside of scripture, it's simply more logical to conclude that Jesus the Man did indeed exist.

The conclusions that can be drawn by assuming the opposite are, at best, rooted in tin-foil hat conspiracy theories that date back almost 2,000 years, and would require a lot more explanation to the motives of conspiring to create and die for a story that was conjured up by imagination.

#seemslegit

That's not to say that, historically speaking, 2,000 years is just "too long to know anything about", because we have much, much older historical evidence and proof of different people and different areas.  However, the time frame is very important, because we know that there were many, many different sects and texts of Christian flavor.  

The original theory was that Christianity began as a universal (or "Catholic") belief system, that later split into different sects after the Protestant movement.  But we now know, through much research, the discoveries of the Nag Hammadi scrolls, and the comparative studies of early Christian writers (like Irenaeus and the like) that the early Christian movement was almost as splintered THEN as it is NOW (some of those folks even called themselves "Gnostics" ;) ).  

That said, we've got about 300 some odd years before the Council of Nicea, in which texts and beliefs related to Christianity we're expanded, expounded, and explained.

But AFTER the Council of Nicea, once the canonized version of the bibliography we know of today as The Bible was decided and ratified, these many other texts, scriptures, and accounts of Jesus and Christianity were destroyed.  And it was an incredibly thorough job, because the Roman Empire was extremely good at suppressing information as well (which is why the find of Nag Hammadi was such a HUGE discovery; finding texts that were either considered lost to history, some we'd never heard of, some that helped complete already existing fragments of previous discoveries, and just a library of texts that had almost been completely erased from history).  

Even reading further about the Nag Hammadi texts, we know that the original discoverer didn't understand the significance of the find, as he and his wife used some of the scrolls as FIRE WOOD.  Which makes my head hurt.

The point is, that while 2,000 years ago, in historic terms, isn't so long ago that we can't do some research, the inherent problems with tracing Christian history back to its roots (whether that means finding a Jesus man or not) is, to date, virtually impossible.  So much information, scriptural as well as historical documentation, written accounts, artwork, and just any and all evidence that would point one way or another...it's evident that the Romans did a remarkably thorough job in destroying what was deemed either heretical or unworthy of keeping.

That's why the time frame is important.  Personally, I'm extremely hopeful that the monks that buried the Nag Hammadi scriptures weren't the only ones of their kind, and that there's still more to be discovered.  Just as the Library of Alexandria was destroyed (along with countless historical documents), so too were many of the records of the Jews, the Nazarenes, etc. (especially after the Romans re-invaded and virtually burned to the ground the entire city of Judea in 70 C.E.).  Also, the Roman Catholic Church, under Emperor Constantine, purposely and willfully destroyed so much after Nicea, that we're left today with not just a lack of evidence and proof, but extremely large gaps in our own understanding of the history of that specific time and geographical area.