General History Questions thread

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Didn't button spacing indicate their regiment? I vaguely remember the Guards Regiments have differently spaced buttons in the UK.
Could be practical too as you said, with the written documents... but it's safer to have a special container for those.
 
It looks in the photos they use those as pockets or hand warmers. I vaguely recall someone (Sherman?) hiding a pipe there too, another storage/pocket example.
In my professional opinion though, they used those spacings to mess with the OCD of southerners and Czechs from the future.
 
Yes, because the historical evidence supports it: two contemporary writers hostile to Christians acknowledging his existence. This is as good as it gets as evidence that someone at that time existed (apart from Roman worthy men and functionaries).
Curiously, someone very religious, but rightly unsure of Biblical realities, asked me the same question (me, a Guardian-reading bookish atheist).
Of course there's also lots of speculations and (conspiracy) theories about Jesus being invented, but no real evidence to back them up.
 
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MadVader said:
Yes, because the historical evidence supports it: two contemporary writers hostile to Christians acknowledging his existence. This is as good as it gets as evidence that someone at that time existed (apart from Roman worthy men and functionaries).
Curiously, someone very religious, but rightly unsure of Biblical realities, asked me the same question (me, a Guardian-reading bookish atheist).
Of course there's also lots of speculations and (conspiracy) theories about Jesus being invented, but no real evidence to back them up.
Click to expand...
List all of your speculations and conspiracy theories you know about Jesus, I may have a new one for you if you haven't listed it.
 
MadVader said:
Yes, because the historical evidence supports it: two contemporary writers hostile to Christians acknowledging his existence. This is as good as it gets as evidence that someone at that time existed (apart from Roman worthy men and functionaries).
Curiously, someone very religious, but rightly unsure of Biblical realities, asked me the same question (me, a Guardian-reading bookish atheist).
Of course there's also lots of speculations and (conspiracy) theories about Jesus being invented, but no real evidence to back them up.
Click to expand...

Regardless of America's intentions in asking that question, this is interesting to me- what did those writers say about him?
 
DanAngleland said:
Regardless of America's intentions in asking that question, this is interesting to me- what did those writers say about him?
Click to expand...

One of the main sources is a Jewish writer from about 30 years after Jesus died called Josephus:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.
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According to wikipedia this is largely considered inauthentic to some degree, and having not read this segment in years I can definitely see it now, since a Jew of this time who never converted would be unlikely to outright say "HE WAS THE MESSIAH". But it is extremely unlikely that it was completely fabricated. Once you remove the dogmatic parts, that's probably exactly what he wrote.

There is also a passage written by Tacitus which is a lot more "Roman".

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.
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This is pretty much how the whole upper class of Roman society would have seen Christianity, as a kind of abominable, anti-traditional offshoot of Judaism, which they respected a lot more.

The historical consensus since modern historiography began has been basically unanimous that Jesus existed, and that he was crucified. The rest is up for debate, but you really have to go out of your way and jump through a million historiographical hoops to claim he never existed, or that he wasn't crucified. Simply put, having sources from just a few decades after someone's death 2000 years ago is pretty conclusive by historical standards, especially for a non-monarch.
 
Thank you. So it seems certain that he was known in his time for having a committed following, and that it was believed among those contemporary followers that he had been resurrected. I had previously wondered whether a lot of the tales about him were invented or greatly embellished decades later, but those quotes suggest he was as big a deal in reality as the Bible suggests.
 
It is remarkably rare for explicitly non-fiction manuscript sources to completely make up events out of thin air. In order to fabricate history in the age of manuscripts you need someone who is willing to painstakingly copy your writing in 300 or so years time when the vellum or papyrus or whatever becomes hard to read. What's more, popular texts would get copied hundreds of times, meaning that any major changes would have to be done to all known copies, something basically impossible unless you conduct some kind of extremely conspicuous manhunt, something one of the early Caliphs tried to do.

For example, in the entire Bible, the majority of the changes between old and newer manuscripts are typos, margin errors, or presumed errors being removed erroneously. And with the exception of the chapter reshuffling the aforementioned Caliph attempted, it's the same in the Koran.

Conversely, the "wikipedia" of the manuscript age would have been short stories drawing from a pre-existing format like Hadith, Medieval Saintly myths, Gospels or just general poetry. Literally anyone could churn those out, and in the case of Hadith there are literally millions. But even back when they were written, scholars had methods for trashing the trash, not too dissimilar from modern historiography, where you examine the author's motives or background and try to find older manuscripts that corroborate it. Most of the weird scifi gospels where Jesus fights a dragon or goes to the moon were scrapped pretty quickly, and all the propaganda hadith written by the Abbasids or stoned Egyptian proto-hipsters are gone.

Basically if a religious or historical text can be found today, the general assumption is that it is mostly the same as when written.
 
MadVader said:
So you were not really asking a question, just setting up for some conspiracy tale.
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No. I just wanted to see out of curiosity, and to anyone who is on this discussion.. if you were aware of this particular conspiracy theory about Jesus that I was thinking of. I just wanted to.. see something, that's all.

Would anyone in this discussion mind listing all the conspiracy theories they know about Jesus?

DanAngleland said:
Thank you. So it seems certain that he was known in his time for having a committed following, and that it was believed among those contemporary followers that he had been resurrected. I had previously wondered whether a lot of the tales about him were invented or greatly embellished decades later, but those quotes suggest he was as big a deal in reality as the Bible suggests.
Click to expand...
The thing is, there are people who were made up in history, for example it was recently found out that Pythagoras, the Pythagorean theorem guy, most likely didn't exist. I don't want to make it seem like I am a mythicist in the case of Jesus, I'm not, but I just wanted to see if one of the conspiracy theories held any weight.

In fact, the very absence of one conspiracy theory (if not mentioned), might make me doubt his divinity, but not necessarily his existence since that is for sure known.
 
U.S.A. said:
The thing is, there are people who were made up in history, for example it was recently found out that Pythagoras, the Pythagorean theorem guy, most likely didn't exist. I don't want to make it seem like I am a mythicist in the case of Jesus, I'm not, but I just wanted to see if one of the conspiracy theories held any weight.
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I doubt you have credible sources or a consensus among historians for the non-existence of Pythagoras.
 
MadVader said:
You could just answer without demanding arbitrary stuff, that's weird.
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I did not ask for your opinion on the meta, sir, but seeing as though you seem hesitant to go through this then I will also be hesitant in turn to continue this conversation. So there you have it.

Good day.
 
U.S.A. said:
I did not ask for your opinion on the meta, sir, but seeing as though you seem hesitant to go through this then I will also be hesitant in turn to continue this conversation. So there you have it.

Good day.
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You make a doubtful claim then, when challenged, insist on unrelated demands. This means you can't support your claims. Good job.
 
MadVader said:
You make a doubtful claim then, when challenged, insist on unrelated demands. This means you can't support your claims. Good job.
Click to expand...
The thing is, I can support my claims but I was only using Pythagoras as a cul-de-sac to get back to the Jesus subject so it does relate. But you did not want to continue with this the moment I asked for a list of conspiracy theories about Jesus which was actually even before I mentioned Pythagoras. Pythagoras means very little to me, he is, after all, non-existent.
 
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