Lately I’ve heard people attacking the veracity of the fairy tale book with statements like “Jesus wasn’t real” or it was a psy op operation by the Romans that got out of control. And I hate talking about reddit but it’s basically the atheism mods policy over there that Jesus wasn’t real.
I usually rely on the Wikipedia as my litmus test through life, which shouldn’t work in theory but is great in practice:
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Virtually all scholars agree that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
Edit: My suggestion to any who would like to see my opinion changed (see above quote) is to get on the Wikipedia and work towards changing the page. My upvote goes to Flying Squid for reminding us “does not matter at all because that’s not who Christians worship”
Edit 2: practicality changed to practice
Gotcha, guess I jumped that a bit. I’m going to blame my eyes going crossed from reading too many “that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying ‘can’t prove it’ back-and-forths.”
P.S. Speaking of Herodotus, he also said the Thesomophoria, a multi-day women only ritual celebrated all around the Mediterranean, had originated with the daughters of Danaus fleeing Egypt.
You might notice that in Judges 11 there’s a multi-day women’s only ritual (this is its only real mention in Judaism, it seems to have disappeared from the historical record and was no longer practiced among the Israelites later on). You might also notice that the explanation given for why it was taking place is remarkably similar to the story of Idomenus’s return home to Crete where he sacrificed his own child as the first thing he saw upon his return.
So, was listening to this pod cast, random recommended thing. The overall podcast was about climate change. In any case they were looking at the end of the Bronze Age and the podcast host was interviewing an archeologist that wrote about it (and the sea people’s,) he posited that they might have just been climate refugees- people moving around for work or whatever to find a better life.
If we assume that was true; it would make sense that these refugees spread their culture to the new places.
It would explain a lot of the parallels.
Edit: the guest was Eric Klein and it was a [throughline](https://The Aftermath of Collapse: Bronze Age Edition (2021)) episode.
There were a number of things going on at the time, from climate and natural disaster, famine, to pandemics.
But there were also definitely groups of different people banded together conquering areas, and in a number of cases it seems they were conquering their own homelands.
So the first mention of any kind of ‘sea’ peoples is actually the Merneptah Lybian war inscriptions we were just talking about.
Later on, there’s letters between a Hittite town and Cyprus where the town is asking for help defending against the naval attacks of the sea peoples, and Cyprus responds that it’s their own ships attacking.
Looking at the comments Ramses III makes about the end of the 19th dynasty, the ruling by city governors and “making the gods like men” seems to be Phonecian in character. The former was their style of government, and the latter corresponds with the alleged religious mystery of Sanchoniathon that the Ugartic pantheon simply represented humans who had invented stuff deified after death.
So if you have a collection of tens of thousands of people brought into Egypt who have a greater allegiance to each other than to their home governments, who reject rule by appeal to divine will because they think the gods were just men, and have been expelled from the only place they’ve known as home, facing natural disaster, famine, and plagues all around - what do you have on your hands?
The seeds of revolution.
It only lasts for about two generations, but during that time areas from Greece to Turkey to the Gaza strip to even potentially Egypt itself all end up conquered.
But nothing about those people end up in a lasting written record.
But you do have two different cultural myths with some remarkable overlaps between both actual history and with each other. One among the Geeks, and the other among the Isrealites.
After Alexander the Great conquered both as well as Egypt, after comparing notes of the written records of the time (few of which survived to today), the unanimous opinion of the Greek historians writing about the events through the rest of antiquity was that this was a shared cultural history between themselves and the Jews.
Some of the things said back then are wild in how they line up with what seem to be unexplainable modern discoveries. For example, look at Tacitus:
After the 2017 sampling of 3,500 year old graves in Crete, those samples were added to a DNA database. A year later on a genetics forum, an Ashkenazi user posted confused by the fact that out of every single sample in the database their closest match was 3,500 year old graves in Crete, [leading to over 10,000 pages of discussion.](https://web.archive.org/web/20210105141636/https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?14484-Could-Western-Jews-(Ash-and-Seph-\)-descend-from-Aegeans-and-Levantine-admixture) Notably their result seems to be absent the steppe DNA that entered the Greek lineage with the Doric invasion.
The similarity between Cretean DNA and the Ashkenazi turned up again in published research in a 2019 study.
And yet the Ashkenazi have a particular gene mutation that originated in the Lybian Berbers ~5,000 years ago and isn’t found in any other populations at nearly the frequency of those two, and puzzlingly the Ashkenazi genetic lineage seems to have picked this up between 3250–6425 years ago, the nearest end of which is right around the 1250 BCE events of the 19th dynasty where Aegean sea peoples and Libya were fighting against Egypt.
Herodotus had been talking about the daughters of Danaus.
Danaus was allegedly the Lybian brother of a Pharoh with 50 sons.
How curious that Ramses II, the Pharoh with ~50 recorded sons was described as appearing as a Lybian Berber in his 1987 forensic report.
Danaus was said to have gone off from North Africa and become king of the Achaeans, who at this time would have been the Ahhiyawa in southwest Anatolia.
A similar Greek story is that of Eumolpus (“good singer”) who was put in the water as a babe and raised by a different family before leaving North Africa to become king of the Thracians (who at this time would have been in the Troad region of western Anatolia).
Moses too in Josephus and the medieval Book of Jashar was said to have become a trusted advisor to a king of a foreign nation who eventually made him the king when he died.
TL;DR: Yes, I agree that there were likely broad migrations during this period of time which led to cultural influence in a number of places. Though I think there was a bit more than just climate going on.