I think Lemmy has a problem with history in general, since most people on here have degrees/training in STEM. I see a lot of inaccurate “pop history” shared on here, and a lack of understanding of historiography/how historians analyze primary sources.
The rejection of Jesus’s historicity seems to be accepting C S Lewis’s argument - that if he existed, he was a “lunatic, liar, or lord,” instead of realizing that there was nothing unusual about a messianic Jewish troublemaker in Judea during the early Roman Empire.
All the similarities to Krishna.
The Zoroastrian influence is generally speculated to have occured to the Jews, hundreds of years before the advent of Christianity.
The Jews of Judea and Israel actually historically were conquered by the Babylonians, many of them were taken captive back to Babylonia, around 586 BCE.
Then around 539 BCE, Persia defeated Babylon, and Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Judea and Israel, as basically a new vassal kingdom, a significant improvent from being basically a slave caste in Babylon.
It is around this time period where the nature of Yahweh in texts begins to become much more monotheistic… prior to that, the proto-Judaism was actually pretty much the Canaanite polytheism.
Yahweh worship had been something of a splinter group / dedicated cult within Canaanism prior to the Babylonian scouring of Judea and Israel, but it seems that the survivors set free by the Persians had strong Zoroastrian influences on the later development of Yahweh into a monotheistic single God.
So… while there may have been Hindu influence on Zoroastrianism, there does not appear to be much direct Hindu influence on Judaism, as… you would expect maybe the concept of an avatar to show up at that point, not ~ 575 years later, roughly around 50 CE, with the advent of Christinanity, or you would expect maybe more polytheism, not less, maybe a very famous story or character archetype to get translated over into Canaanism/Proto-Judaism.
To the best of my knowledge, there is 0 evidence of interfaith influence between Hinduism and Christianity for say, the first centuries of the existence of Christianity.
All of the “Jesus’ missing years are from when he went on a spritual/religious pilgrimage across Asia” type stories, those are all much, much more modern inventions, mostly made up within the last 200ish years, often by some kind of esoteric/syncretic occultist types in the mid to late 1800s.
Christians were basically a contentious, squabbling group of ‘Gnostic’ cults/sects for their own first roughly 150 to 200 years, in Judea, Greece, modern day Turkey, Egypt, eventually Rome…
And all these groups had widly, dramatically different interpretations of Jesus, Yahweh/God, and to what extent and how they tried to incorporate mainly the ideas of famous Greek philosophers into their new cults/religions… and they famously got into huge disagreements over this, over which texts were legit and not legit.
Some believed Jesus was basically an avatar of Yahweh.
Some believed he was fundamentally a human man, but maybe blessed or sort of adopted, favored and elevated by Yahweh.
Some believed he was an incarnation from an alternate realm of reality, meant to deliver to humans a way out of a fundamentally evil reality, which had created as basically a prison by a fundamentally evil version of Yahweh.
Some believed Jesus’ true form was something like a 700 foot tall floating ghost giant.
I am not aware of any Christian arriving anywhere near, or having a discourse with India untill … what, over a thousand years after its founding, after the advent of Islam?
You can stand here in 2025 and look backward, and project similarities you see onto different parts of the past, but this is the most egregious sin a historian can commit, to try to understand historical eras and places not from within them themselves, but from the standpoint of our modern cultural and material landscape.
If you have actual historical evidence that Hinduism did actually directly influence the development of Judaism or Christianity, I’d love to see it, but I don’t think any of that actually exists.
I do not have any evidence beyond that Jesus and Krishna did a bunch of the same stuff. I wonder why these actions were separately attributed to both of them, if they had no influence on one another. Both born of a virgin, both dying and resurrecting three days later, similar miracles. Now I’m curious why these similar tropes arise in different cultures and times.
Sometimes coincidences happen and sometimes human stories independently converge on specific tropes.
Like how evolution keeps making more and more things into crabs, or how flight developed indepently in multiple different branches of the tree of life, same with eyes, I think.
Also, Jesus virgin birth isn’t even fully agreed upon by early Christians.
The word that is translated as ‘virgin’ in most modern Bibles … actually just means ‘young woman.’
Sure, its doctrine now, but it wasn’t originally.
EDIT:
A number of Christian detractors in the early days actually spread a story that Mary had been impregnated by a specific Roman soldier, and that Joseph, a much older man, possibly a widow… basically pity married her, because … well, being an unmarried 15 yo pregnant with the son of a hated, occupying, heathen military force?
She’d be lucky to not be stoned to death.
Frankly, its a historically plausible story, but there’s no real way to evaluate whether or not it is actually true.
Haha carcination is one of my favorite weird things that earth does. As for eyes I always appreciate the old internet bit that calls out eyes and how generally bad they are at what they do as a refutation of intelligent design. I wasn’t aware of the translation bit from virgin to young woman but that makes a lot of obvious sense. Also clearly the virgin thing was added later since one of the first mentions of Jesus is in reference to his brother’s execution if I’m not mistaken. In another comment it was mentioned about speculation that Jesus went to the east during his missing years, there’s a hilarious fiction book called Lamb by Christopher Moore that basically runs with this idea. Anyway thank you very much for throwing all this knowledge at me, I know my comments haven’t been nearly as high quality but I genuinely appreciate the conversation.
No problem!
Also, I threw in a stealth edit that you may have missed, I may have finished adding it after you read it.
But uh yeah, the whole point, imo, should be to discuss and share knowledge, in a reasoned manner, not just gloat over knowing something someone else may not.
Also!
I am not an actual expert, I just read a few of em and watch their YT channels and what not, as a hobby.
I am just as fallible as anyone else, and may have gotten some details wrong… normally, I try to actually provide citations lol, but this has been more off the cuff so far.
What similarities to Krishna? Please give me some examples, and a plausible explanation of how those ideas would have crossed the continent?
Jesus coming to earth as a human was possibly borrowed from Krishna, who I believe came to earth as an “avatar”.
I think there are other similarities between Jesus and Krishna.
The earliest Christians did not view Jesus as God incarnate. That’s a later development through the second century.
Why Krishna specifically, instead of another avatar of Vishnu like Rama?
How do you explain the transmission of that idea? Are we supposed to imagine something of a “Journey to the East” where mostly illiterate conquered peasants brought back the ideas if not the text of the Bhagavad Gita?
Maybe look into who popularized your idea. The guy who made Zeitgeist also made Loose Change…