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achughes  ·  3823 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ancient Confession Found: 'We Invented Jesus Christ'

I'll open with my bias, I am religious, but even with the lack of evidence presented in this press release there are a few things I'm not to sure about (as much as I can surmise without actually hearing his argument).

Firstly, his overarching theory of population control reads like a conspiracy theory. Roman aristocrats spent thousands of hours, constructing the story of jesus, wrote it in a book, and then just hoped that it would catch on? As many unexpected routes that propaganda seems to take today, that seems like a lot of work for something that "might" work. Even then, they constructed a story so bulletproof that it tricked scholars for centuries? Sure religions come and go, but religions that end up being used as population control (egyptian pharaoh as a god strikes me as most obvious), these rose though centuries of cultural development. None of them were just "thought up" by a group of aristocrats. They developed to a point where they could be exploited.

Secondly, him playing the "every scholar before me missed it" card doesn't inspire confidence.

If he has a legitimate theory, I'll hear him out, but (and I realize this is just a press release) it seems flimsy at best. Plenty of people have tried to disprove god or jesus plenty of times, whether through physics or philosophy, but so far nobody has been able to inspire the religion ending effect they hope for.