If they just wouldn't have killed him he wouldn't have been able to come back and prove that he's holy. Then Christianity may not have come to existence, and we'd instead have the much cooler Roman gods.
87Nah, they should have killed him in his avatar state. That way he couldn't have come back again.
34But that means less piss potions!
2
You might be interested in Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg. It's a pretty quick read and it more or less explores that topic precisely.
14he wouldn't have been able to come back and prove that he's holy.
Well, he probably didn't and another religion emerged regardless.
4In Raised by Wolves it's a timeline without Christianity where it was Mithrism (a competing mystery religion around the time Christianity was starting) that succeeded to one day be at odds with atheism.
The first season is pretty good if you like the Idea of seeing what a SciFi scenario sans Christianity but a different pagan tradition instead might have looked like.
3and we’d instead have the much cooler Roman gods.
Yeah, I've seen what ancient Greeaks and Romans prayed to - they are all shit (with the possible exception of Aphrodite/Venus).
1
They don't want to harvest the Holy Shit?
81You jest, but just imagine what it would do for the fields.
28It's probably even better for your gut microbiome than Tom Brady's!
9Jesus on the cross does look a lot like a scarecrow…
4
Behold, the Holy Shit!
26I resent that remark
6
Let's also make him an onlyfans and sell his bathwater
8the spice melange
4Wonder how many courics that would be.
1
Harvest his semen!
Jesus: 😏
41End product:
18- 8
Been going down a lot of early Christianity rabbit holes, and my latest over the past few days has been oddities to the depiction of the crucifixion in John (allegedly based on earlier eyewitness testimony).
Crucifixion as an execution method didn't even necessarily involve nails. It was excruciating because it dragged on over a very long period of time. Your body's survival instinct to keep breathing effectively tortures you to keep struggling to breathe as it gets more and more unbearable.
Except - that's not at all how Jesus's execution turns out in John.
He just sort of chills up there, takes a sip of sour/bitter wine brought up to him on the cross (19:29), and then not long after is just like "ok, peace out" and croaks midday.
This is so unusual that in the evening the guards who are then breaking the legs of the other prisoners being executed to speed up the process for the Sabbath have to double check whether Jesus is actually dead by poking his side with a spear, when suddenly water and blood pour out (19:34).
So, some fun facts about the Mediterranean in antiquity:
- Euthanasia was a thing, mentioned a number of times BCE as performed by high doses of opium
- Opium has a bitter taste
- Acute opium poisoning causes pulmonary edema where your lungs fill up with fluid
(Notably both Matthew 27 and Mark 15 deny that he drank the wine offered when he was on the cross, though there's a doubled denial of wine where the soldiers offer it that's found in all the Synoptics. In theory Luke depends on Mark, but doesn't have the non-consumption of the wine on the stick as drunk in John, so it looks a bit like the extant version of Mark may have had post-John parts of Matthew edited into it later on.)
So suddenly dying only a few hours into crucifixion shortly after drinking bitter/sour wine and then having fluid pour out of a lung puncture sounds a bit like even if you put him in a cage it wouldn't necessarily have lasted very long anyways assuming he still had access to beverages provided by his mom. Also, a rather dark but humanizing perspective to the story if what I'm suggesting was historically correct and his mother effectively euthanized him to shorten his suffering...
38Rimworld!!! Stop leaking into lemmy communities!!
37We are like mildew, we get in everywhere!
7*everywhere within 32 tiles of a table
7
Longinus, you might want to buy some lances. A lot of them.
22Longinus (/lɒnˈdʒaɪnəs/) is the name given to the unnamed Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus with a lance;
The name is probably Latinized from the Greek lonche (λόγχη), the word used for the lance mentioned in John 19:34.[9]
They didn't know this soldier's name so they essentially named him "Lancer". Amazing.
22It's actually worse. The name couldn't be from the 1st century CE because otherwise it would be Lonchinus [lɔn'ki:nʊs]; back then Greek still kept ⟨χ⟩ as [kʰ] (as in "kit"), this would only change around the 4th century or so.
Plus whoever coined that name wasn't fully proficient in Greek, otherwise they wouldn't plop a Latin -īnus into it, they'd go with ⟨λογχίτης⟩ lonkhítēs "spear-bearer, the spear guy" → Lonchites instead.
...the English pronunciation stands out as being weirder than everything above. Also, obligatory:
A spear of Longinus a day keeps the Tang sea away~
10That sucks, he almost got his place in history.
1nickname for Roman soldiers was “Miles” from Latin mille for “thousand” – legionaries walked everywhere giving us the unit of measure, a Roman mile = mille passus (thousand paces)
1
It also inspired Schwanzus Longus as the accurate translation of Biggus Dickus in the life of Brian
5But what about Incontinentia Buttocks?
4
All the biblical fiction heaven vs hell fantasy fiction is basically this. Gotta harvest those potential biblical artifacts for their apocalyptic powers.
20"Just imagine the value of a slave that can turn water into wine..."
16Think of the potential profits!
13Jesus: I want to rise again just to kick this guy's ass.
8Close to the plot of Redfall
4Ah! A man of science, I see!
3Note that Jesus was crucified partially because the Romans did not believe he was God or had any powers
(i get the joke)
3Idk, I think he was crucified because he was a political activist that threatened the power of the state and forced people to question the authority of said power, just like the Romans crucified all political activists that were critical of the Roman Empire.
30Maybe he was killed because an acorn dropped on some chariot. You never know.
22Or he was crucified because he was gay (kisses the guy he put in charge of the group's money around that time, had a beloved disciple reclining on him when feeding same disciple he kisses dipped bread at his last meal before being turned in). That was a capital charge under Jewish law.
In fact, it's extremely sus that Peter is alleged in his own tradition to deny Jesus three times right around the time Jesus is going through ~3 trials, at least one of which Peter is acknowledged as going back to the guarded area where the trial was taking place to deny him in.
He could have also been killed for promoting atheist ideas at the time, given the earliest Christian 'heresy' was Simon Magus who after leaving the early church is talking about an "indivisible point" and later heretics and apocrypha have Jesus seeming to be quoting Lucretius's naturalism and atomism. This is the same century Rabbi Elazar allegedly said "why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean." So Jesus promoting Epicurean ideas might not have gone over very well (and might explain why Paul was so adamant Corinth ignore "other versions of Jesus" that they accepted saying things like "everything is permissible" or denying physical resurrection - very Epicurean statements).
Or it could have been the official story, though personally I don't really buy it. If he was a threat to Rome it's bizarre he gets such different treatment from the several other messianic upstarts in Josephus who are killed immediately without trial by Roman forces with their followers included. And why would the Sanhedrin be peeved about messianic claims when the other examples of messianic claimants were solely depicted as opposed by Rome?
But possibly gay Jesus teaching evolution and atomism while criticizing dynastic monarchy? Yeah, I can see that dude ending up dead pretty fast in that time and place by Sanhedrin demand and Roman hands.
3Perhaps that was the historical perspective, but that doesn't include Jesus definitely performing miracles either. In the perspective where he does do miracles, a.k.a. the Bible, at least according to Christianity.com (which sources itself inline to the bible) a ton of priests and people were angered by Jesus's claim of being the messiah and son of God. They then invented a bunch of insurrection charges and took to the local governor, who initially refused but went through when they basically threatened to get him fired by questioning his loyalty.
So, I guess I stand corrected that it was not the Romans but the existing religion.
2
Im sure he was framed by the Judean Fishermen's Association.
2
