Jesus was just another apocalyptic preacher of his time.

I hear this argument from skeptics pretty often, and I recently decided to actually look into it. You know how many apocalyptic preachers we know of in Judea before Jesus? One, John the Baptist, someone intimately connected to Jesus ministry.

There were quite a few “around the time of Jesus” that we know about, but the thing is that they all came after Jesus. And there’s a pretty obvious reason for that if you think about it for five minutes. Jesus popularity and message clearly resonated. Once a movement like that exists, of course other people are going to imitate it, reiterate parts of the message, or make similar claims and try to capture the movement he created.

Then there is the destruction of the Temple. Jesus predicted this, which itself would lead to a lot of apocalyptic discussion. And we know this was a major part of Jesus’ ministry and remained very present after his death as Christian’s acted on this prophecy \~30 years later and fled Jerusalem at the time of the first siege. So this apocalyptic expectation was clearly being preached and remembered. Then AD 70 actually happened, and it would have been like gasoline on that fire.

You can point to the Qumran community as evidence that apocalyptic ideas existed before Jesus, and they absolutely did. But the Qumran community was specifically set apart from wider Jewish society. Using them to characterize what ordinary Judean religious life looked like would be like saying modern American society rejects electricity because the Amish exist. (And Jesus didn’t come from that community, so much of his peaching was opposed to what they believed.)

So the claim that Jesus was simply “one of countless apocalyptic preachers wandering around Judea” gets repeated as fact to discredit how unique Jesus actually was. When in reality, it was the power of Jesus’ message and who he was that helped create the very atmosphere that makes him look less unique in hindsight. His influence became so widespread that what came after him gets projected backward, making the extraordinary look ordinary and then used to discredit him.