A poster in the southern Spanish city of Seville that depicts a young, handsome Jesus wearing only a loincloth has unleashed a storm on social media, with some calling it an affront to the figure of Christ and others posting lewd remarks and memes poking fun at the image.
The poster by internationally recognized Seville artist Salustiano García Cruz shows a fresh-faced Jesus without a crown of thorns, no suffering face and minuscule wounds on the hands and ribcage. It was commissioned and approved by the General Council of Brotherhoods, which organizes the renowned and immensely popular Holy Week processions ahead of Easter in Seville.
As soon as it was unveiled last week criticism of it went viral on social media and a debate erupted over how a resurrected Christ should be depicted. Many called it a disgrace, inappropriate, too pretty, modernist and out of line with Seville’s Easter tradition.
Spain is predominantly Catholic and church traditions such as marriage, baptisms and religious parades are immensely popular both among believers and nonbelievers. A campaign on Change.org to have the poster of Jesus withdrawn was signed by some 14,000 people from around the country.
Didn’t you just make my point for me? You are debating why Josephus mentioned Jesus’s execution, not whether he did or not. True, we don’t really know whether his account had been altered before we got to it, but we’re never going to have that certainty.
No. I conceded a point to show how your idea still doesn’t work “even if everything we have from him was unaltered,”.
We have two passages from this man.
One that refers to James the Brother and contains the exact turn of phrase that Matthew uses in 1:16 “legomenos Christos” “so-called Annoited one”. Given the complete context of the passage and the exact quote of the Bible it is most likely a fraud. We know that there was a tradition that James was killed and we have a page that talks about a James and another guy named Jesus. To make it refer to James the Just would take a two words addition. It doesn’t even make sense since it requires James to be very old, for a known hertic to be appointed head of the temple, and for the general population (who were hostile to James) to be upset that he died, and James to be descended from the temple priest clan which means he can’t be from David line, a claim he would have had to defend for his brothers claim of son of god status. None of it works.
The second passage is so obviously fraud even religious scholars don’t defend it. It expressed 2nd century Trinity ideas, it isn’t in Josphius writing style, it doesn’t fit in the context of the chapter, it goes against Messianic ideas that Josphius had, it isn’t written the same way he describes other Messiahs, and describes Jesus in glowing terms that no religious Jewish person would use.
My point was even if we somehow someway accept that Josphius really did write this stuff in 71AD it still doesn’t get us anywhere since he could have just been repeating what Christians told him without doing any work of verification.