Alan the Atheist

I've had this theory for a while now, so I thought I'd see what you guys think.

Jesus was not the son of God (good so far), or did he in fact believe in the Jewish traditions. Instead, he was trying to bring love into an otherwise quite vicious religion (good old Judaism). Furthermore, when he spoke about hell, he was refering to earth without evil. What I mean by that is that he told people that they would go to heaven if they were kind and loving, and whilst that wasn't true in the classical view of heaven, it would theoretically be true because if everyone was loving and kind, earth would be like heaven. The gospels are elaborated and perhaps misguided versions of this.

Of cause I don't have much evidence to back this up, except that Jesus would have written a holy book himself if he wanted one (being Jewish he would have been literate). Also, Christianity seems somewhat unusual in its complete turn around of an evil religion into one based on "love thy neighbour", and being based on love itself is unusual.

So, what do you think?

RUmike

Being a 1st century Galilean construction worker, it would seem more likely that Jesus was illiterate, as was the 90%+ of the rest of the Roman Empire at the time.

countjulian

Actually, I read a book recently, Bryan-Ward Perkin's The Fall of Rome, and he suggests, from graffito found in Pompie and requests of leave left in Roman forts, that literacy was considerably higher than that, maybe over 50%

Boomeister

Who knows if he was literate or not?
Some liberal Christians (whom fundamentalists might not think of as Christian) would probably agree with you about Jesus was just bringing the message of love.
Calling Judaism viscious and evil is a little harsh, isn't it?

Boomeister

RUmike

Interesting, I will try to check that out, but "50%" does sound pretty ridiculous to me.

From this Wikipedia article:

Diogenes the Cynic

Crossan says that 95-98% of 1st century Palestine was illiterate.

Naphtali Jones

Christianity is a merging of Jewish theology and Greek philosophy. The process was started about a century before Christ by Philo of Alexandria. This hellenization process took place all over the Roman Empire. In some ways the rejection of christianity by the Jews was really more of a rejection of hellenization.

~Nap

Mountain Man

I don't believe that this jesus ever existed.