• Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
    903·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    401·
    9 months ago

    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…

    • Neato@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      22·
      9 months ago

      Longinus (/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.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        10·
        9 months ago

        It’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~

      • cerement@slrpnk.net
        32·
        9 months ago

        nickname 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)

    • Oiconomia@feddit.de
      5·
      9 months ago

      It also inspired Schwanzus Longus as the accurate translation of Biggus Dickus in the life of Brian

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
    20·
    9 months ago

    All the biblical fiction heaven vs hell fantasy fiction is basically this. Gotta harvest those potential biblical artifacts for their apocalyptic powers.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
    41·
    9 months ago

    Note that Jesus was crucified partially because the Romans did not believe he was God or had any powers

    (i get the joke)

    • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
      30·
      9 months ago

      Idk, 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.

      • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
        22·
        9 months ago

        Maybe he was killed because an acorn dropped on some chariot. You never know.

      • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Or 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.

        • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          I remember reading about how investigations into the translations of the Bible support the gay Jesus. (Disclaimer I’m not gay, so I have no affiliated interest in promoting gayness, I just find it historically interesting).

          “Washing feet” was a actually a mistranslation of some kind of general “servicing” that had several meanings, including cock sucking or accepting being bottom. Jesus “washed a lot of feet”, but one thing is certain: It didn’t mean literally washing feet. That part was definitely made up according to the people who looked into it.

          Anyway, it’s been thousands of years and learning of how cultures and acceptance of certain things can change rapidly, I wouldn’t be surprised.

          Keep in mind that Romans were also at war with the Greek shortly before the alleged time of Jesus. We know that the ancient Greeks practiced gay sex not just casually, but even expectedly. The Romans did not. The empire had an expansion strategy that looked a lot like the Nazis Third Reich: Expansion by breeding.

          Personally I find it likely that historical Jesus was killed for a whole lot of other reasons than for claiming to be the king of Jews or for betrayal of the state, and he sure as fuck did not die “for our sins”.

          • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            We know that the ancient Greeks practiced gay sex not just casually, but even expectedly. The Romans did not.

            Huh? The Romans were even more extreme with it. The Greeks would court young boys coming of age with a lengthy courting ritual that involved a lot of focus on consent - the Romans were straight up castrating prepubescent children to preserve their femininity.

            In fact, it’s probable that the “marriage is between a man and a woman” in the NT was an anachronistic reactionary response to gay marriage having become a legitimate Roman institution in the 60s CE following Nero marrying two men, first playing the role of the bride and then the role of the husband (the latter time with someone who had been castrated when prepubescent).

            Even before the empire there were rules related to homosexual senators losing their voting rights if they were the bottom, and they weren’t likely to create a rule for something that didn’t happen.

            So I’m not sure where you get the idea Rome didn’t have homosexuality.

            “Washing feet” was a actually a mistranslation of some kind of general “servicing” that had several meanings, including cock sucking or accepting being bottom.

            I’d really need to see a source for this claim, as it sounds extremely spurious. There’s a lot of literature around Christianity that claims secret coded language use, but generally they are all quite ridiculous claims.

            While ‘feet’ or ‘thigh’ as words sometimes have euphemistic meaning for genitals, I’m unaware of any idiomatic use of “washing feet” as reference to sex. You can see some related discussion about the OT usage of a similar phrasing/theory here.

        • Psychodelic@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 months ago

          Idk about gay Jesus. lol. But I love the idea of that as a possiblity!

          Him being killed for heresy makes sense to me. That said, my understanding is all the gospels about Jesus were written long after his death. It’s totally possible he was killed like all the rest and the majority of the narrative was written after and heavily romanticized. It was then updated, as needed, to advance different political goals.

          I’d never heard anything about disagreements with Epicureans, or much about them in general. Any books/links you could recommend on the subject? I’m currently reading the Dark Side of Christian History by Ellerbe and it’s great! The lengths the Church went to solidify its political power is kind of hard to comprehend. It’s crazy how little most people know about something that’s still so influential.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
        31·
        9 months ago

        Perhaps 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.