Gooch's dad

Who was Jesus?

There, I put the verb in the correct tense for you.

I think he was an itinerant Galilean preacher, who got stoned to death by the Jews, or possibly crucified by the Romans, for blasphemy/insurrection. I tend to go with Crossan's analysis of how the story grew after that.

I definitely think that the whole thing would have died out if it weren't for the marketing genius of Paul.

Selsaral

The mythical god at the heart of Christianity.

I don't give a special pass to Christianity. I believe that Zeus, Thor, Hercules, Achilles and thousands more were all mythical gods/half-gods too. There's absolutely no difference between Jesus and Hercules. Both are literary, mythological characters with no external evidence for their existence or the magical powers they were supposed to have.

I am not positive that there wasn't some historical figure at the heart of the myth. After all, even some ridiculous myths like Santa Claus DO have historical cores.

But it's obvious that humans invent mythical gods to believe in, and I am sure you and I would both agree on thousands of gods that are obviously mythical. I just don't give a pass to one particular religion.

Also, there's this issue of magic. Jesus is supposed to have performed magical feats, but since magic doesn't exist, either the feats (and the character) were exaggerated or fabricated. Show me that magic actually does exist and I am willing to re-evaluate my entire reasoning process.

douglas

I don't think anyone can tell you definitively who Jesus was, but there are countless theories on who he COULD have been, like...

He was a teacher who directly opposed the prevailing Jewish practices of his time (ie. no need to "change" your money at the temple, cripples and prostitutes are worthy of forgiveness, ritualistic cleansing practices are not needed, Samaritan Jews are ok in God's book) which pissed off the Sanhedrin. Also, because of his pacifistic stance and general unwillingness to take on the Roman occupiers ("Give unto caeser that which is caesers.") he pissed off the militant Jews, hence Judas turning him in and the mob choosing "barrabas" over Jesus for release by pontius pilate. Both groups conspired, along with the Romans, to pin the label "King" on him, which would have been treasonous and made him worthy of crucifixion.

Post crucifixion, his follower drummed up stories and rumours about him, combined the stories with common mythology of the time, and created a tale of resurrection fit for the son of God. Along comes Paul who hears these stories, spends some time getting snockered by Peter and the other "Apostles" and sets out to build the foundation of a new religion.

Now, I'm not saying I believe this. I honestly don't know who Jesus is, or if he actually existed. It does show how you can piece bits of circumstantial information into a plausible story.

Biff the unclean

Well the cults, of course. That's why I mentioned Apollonius of Tyana and his worship of Christna. What I don't see are any cult leaders in Galilee at the time that the Jesus character could have been pinned on. If there was Christians would be parading him around as the historic Jesus instead of just demanding that a historic Jesus existed without anyone to point to.

Malachi151

You might want to try the forum dedicated basically to this topic:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/forumdisplay.php?f=60

And, BTW, Jesus is a fiction - a vague spiritual concept in the minds of early "Christians", which became "historicized" by the author of Mark after the destruction of Judea when he wrote his gospel, which is really nothing more than a cutting and pasting of a whole bunch of "Old Testament" stories together into a new story.

The Jesus character of "Mark" was an allegorical figure meant to show how the Jews had become foolish and brought destruction upon themself.

AthenaAwakened

That's who the Jesus Seminar is looking for. And I wish them LUCK. They are gonna need it.

I don't think there any ONE historical person that was Jesus of Nazareth. And even if there was, he'd be so far removed from the Christ as to be of no real importance to the faith of Christianity.

motorhead

Jesus was a preacher in ancient Israel who preached the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God but it never came. He was wrong. How did I reach my conclusion? Read the canonical Gospels, especially Mark, Matthew and Luke.

No Robots

You should follow your own advice:

Neither shall they say: Behold here, or behold there. For lo, the kingdom of God is within you. (Lk. 17:21)

sharon45

In the bible, jesus was a stumbling block for the Jews.

Deuteronomy 13, 18, and the NT.

Dean Anderson

The Christ is Paul's wholly divine saviour-figure, melded from a combination of his Hellenistic (as a Greek-Turk in Tarsus) culture and his Jewish beliefs.

Jesus is the wholly human leader of an itinerant Cynic school of philosophy (to whom the teachings of that school are attributed although they probably came from many teachers in reality, rather than one single leader) which flourished in Jerusalem and which melded Cynic philosophy with Judaism.

Jesus Christ is a wholly mythical character, created by the syncretic combination of the two characters and given an invented biography composed of about 50% Midrash and about 50% Greek philosophy. This invented biography gives the character the traits of both the human travelling philosopher and also the divine saviour, and forms the basis of Christianity as we now know it (as well as many forms of Christianity that are no longer extant).

By spending years reading the Bible and studying what a wide variety of historians, linguists, theologians and so on have to say about it; as well as examining the extra-Biblical historical and textual evidence that we have.