Judaism in the first century was all about wizards and animal sacrifice.

In fact, if you compare earlier extra-canonical apocrypha to the canonical stuff, it’s less supernatural in a number of ways.

Paul was adamant in his letters that signs and wonders was what Jewish audiences cared about.

Jesus was hardly the only person in the first century making supernatural claims.

In fact, one of the big questions in the academic discussion of a historical Jesus was why so many of the details are out of character of the various other reported figures in first century Judea (such as in Josephus).

You have stories about rabbis around that time doing wizard crap too.

In fact, I’ve increasingly been persuaded that what may have actually gotten a historical Jesus killed was ironically endorsement of naturalism over intelligent design.

The only other explanation for the sower parable in antiquity which isn’t the “secret explanation” that interpolates Mark 4 claiming it was about proselytizing was preserved among a group called the Naassenes in the 4th century:

For the ends, he says, are the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist. And this, he says, is what has been declared: "The sower went forth to sow…

Elsewhere, in discussing the mustard seed parable, they talk about these seeds as having been “indivisible points as if from nothing.”

That language is almost verbatim Lucretius from De Rerum Natura where writing in Latin 50 years before Jesus was born, he didn’t have the Greek atomos to use and so used the term seed to describe the Greek concept (in a nod to earlier ideas from Anaximander).

In fact, in that book - the only extant work from antiquity explicitly describing survival of the fittest and progression from senseless life emerging from mud to what we see today through “intermediate freaks of nature” based on survival to reproduce - Lucretius straight up described failed biological reproduction as being like “seed falling to the wayside of a path.”

So then 80 years later in backwoods militantly Orthodox Judea a guy is talking about randomly scattered seeds, and how the ones that fall by the wayside of the path don’t reproduce, but the ones that eventually do reproduce produce more and more.

This guy is then allegedly persecuted by the Jewish religious leadership and ambivalently or reluctantly persecuted by Rome, breaking from surrounding parallels in the historical record where it was the opposite.

The same century a Rabbi allegedly said “Why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer an Epicurean.”

And after he’s dead the guy persecuting his followers co-opts the movement, and is initially discussing sown seeds in the context of the futility of a physical resurrection (1 Cor 15) - a topic also discussed in Leucretius - before switching to sown seeds in the context of proselytizing (2 Cor 9), then decades following that there’s a secret explanation for a publicly shared parable inserted into the canonical accounts.

Literally the only other extant explanation is still (seemingly unknowingly) tied to language from Lucretius centuries later among a group of ‘heretics’ whose writings were eventually banned from possession on penalty of death by the canonical group. A group whose beliefs included an initial form of intelligent life referred to on the basis of its spontaneously coming to exist like a cancer tumor, and where the person recording their beliefs acknowledged the influence of naturalist philosophers (though missed Leucretius specifics as Pseudo-Hippolytus probably only knew of Greek Epicurean texts).

TL;DR: It may be that the ‘magician’ Jesus we all know far too well was a fabrication established by a conservative religious movement at the time to oppose efforts to harmonize concepts in Judaism with contemporary naturalist (i.e. evolutionary) philosophy from the Epicureans, specifically Leucretius, much like Philio was harmonizing Judaism with Plato around the same time. So “signs and wonders” Jesus saying “not one word of the Old Testament is to be changed” was the popular alternative to someone entertaining ideas far more popular to this sub today in a place and time when it was much more dangerous to entertain them.

Dude got a bad rap and seems to have had far more interesting ideas than the bastardized canonical version would ever have indicated.

I still find it wild that Judaism, Christianity and Islam basically believe in the same god and have many of the same stories and teachings; but they disagree on which demigod was the real son of god.

Let’s just say for the sake of argument, their God exists. Are they gonna be mad if their favorite flavor of wizard (Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, or “Other”) isn’t what they thought? 🤔

One of my hunches is that Jesus, if he ever existed, and if the bible is based on somewhat real events and isn’t just straight up allegory (two giant ifs), was deeply wounded by the crucifixion but not quite dead when he was removed from the cross. Then he sat around for a few days, somewhat recovered from his wounds and addressed his supporters (a.k.a. “was resurrected”), and then died a few days after that from infection or other delayed causes stemming from the crucifixion.

EDIT: People were notoriously bad at determining whether or not people were dead until the advent of modern medicine.