Non-Christians - what do you know about Jesus ?

[Babybirdmum]

Atheists, agnostics, maybe raised as a Christian’s but not that into it…
I am just interested to see what ideas you have about Jesus. I was talking about it to my dad the other day and I said that I felt that a lot of people think Jesus is a made up fairytale, they don’t realise he is an actual historical figure.

With all respect to you and your friends, I would take them with a pinch of salt, especially if they had built their lives and identities around the incredible things they claimed you had done.

Many of these people have biographers proclaiming their divinity (particularly the Twin Flames guy). I would take each account on its merits : en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus

Blokes from the New Testament had met him.

I had the full Catholic experience, attended v Catholic schools, taught by nuns for some classes. Got an A in RE GCSE for which we studied the gospels in minute detail. None of it made much impression on me.

I know plenty about him but am not religious and am an agnostic.

If some incontrovertible evidence turned up then ok but imo there isn't any. The written evidence is not conclusive.

OP, it doesn’t work to treat the bible as a historical account because it is full of contradictions, impossible timelines and events that are scientifically impossible. The starting point for me is that it isn’t credible because of what it says. This is why I approach the bible as a collection of stories, some of which feature a charismatic philosopher called Jesus, who may or may not have lived (but if he had lived, he certainly didn’t have miraculous powers and was not a god). The only way to engage with the bible as entirely factual is to suspend disbelief and adopt a faith position, as Christians do. I respect their right to believe but Christians tend to trip up when they try to convince others that the bible is a factual record.

As a Muslim, I don’t believe he was the son of God, but I believe he was born from the Virgin Mary, that he is the Messiah and that he will return.

No I absolutely wouldn’t think this would be a fairly accurate account of my life! It would be perhaps decent in places, most likely missing out a lot, probably misconstruing many things, and almost certainly told with a particular slant. Same goes for many biographies. It certainly wouldn’t be good enough evidence on which to base a whole belief system.

No, I'd expect the accounts of your life to be wildly inaccurate in that scenario, honestly, and I would assume that the content would be influenced more by the agenda(s) of the people that had chosen to write about you rather than any facts about your life.

If I tried to write a life story for someone I knew 20 years ago, I would struggle to do it accurately. After 40 years, my memories would be pretty sketchy and I'd probably have to fill in a lot of gaps from my own imagination. Then, of course, there would also be the question of what I was trying to achieve in writing about your life so long after you had died... and that purpose would no doubt shape what I chose to include and exclude in the narrative.

I would be astonished if I wrote such an account and someone just really accepted it as historical fact.

I think I would respect Christians more if they simply said the Bible is full of incredible stories which they believe through faith, rather than trying to appeal to non-Christians through logic and evidence which they have to distort to sound plausible. It’s painful and unnecessary. Just own and embrace that you are taking a faith position on a religion that doesn’t fit with science and which has its own historic timeline, and be honest that you choose to believe it, in spite of it’s impossibility. That would be honest and refreshing.

Well there's what people believe about him and there's what they know, and you could say the latter is fairly subjective because are we talking about what people know about the Bible Jesus or what people know of possible historical figure on which he is based.

I'm Jewish, went to nominally Christian schools (though not CofE). I believe there was some historical figure or maybe figures stories of him came from. It seems possible there was a wandering, dissenting rabbi called Yehoshua around 2000 years ago and something like the money-lenders at the Temple incident sounds to me like it could be a real thing that happened with someone like that. I doubt he ever named himself the Son of God, but other people did that later. Maybe he got crucified or executed in some other way, maybe not.

I don't think Jesus came from nowhere and I suspect there is some historical basis for him and he was probably an admirable person.

it’s the same as this … if I die and 40 years after my death 2 of my best friends write about my life. Another of my two best friend gets their friends who is better at writing to write about my life. Then someone who doesn’t know me personally, my neighbours son, writes about me. Then someone who’s heard people all over my hometown talking about me writes what they’ve heard. Would you think it was a fairly accurate account of my life?

Not necessarily.

I've been to funerals of people I knew for the entirety of my life. I've listened to eulogies and humanist tributes that bore little to no resemblance to the individual I knew. This is because humans are prone to sentimentality, exaggeration, poor recall, and people generally pick the positive things to recount rather than the negative or the mundane.

By the time that becomes a second, or third hand account written by people who didn't know you and never met you, I'd suggest it's highly likely to be embellished somewhat, and inevitably warped a bit by effect the passage of time has on human memory.

I believe he likely existed at some point. I agree with pp’s who say like a cult leader but other than that I’m atheist and don’t believe he performed any miracles or was the son of God.

Even more Atheist as my son has just completed cancer treatment and the only people I feel thankful for are the doctors and nurses who saved his life. In my eyes, God had nothing to do with it.

Raised a churchgoer and later became a Christian at confirmation, faith fluctuated, from my late 49s have been an atheist

I certainly believe the accounts of Jesus as a historical figure. We actually have quite good evidence that he existed for the era. I don't see why that's really a question tbh, everyone knows there were humans around at the time!

I no longer believe in God so therefore I don't believe Jesus was divine. The miracle stories are obvious folk tales and stories that had meaning for people at the time. We have our own stories of meaning in this era. And in the 21st century we don't have to take that very 40s eugenicist view that CS Lewis promotes that Jesus was either who he said he was or mad, and that mad people should be locked up in an asylum, the way people were in the mid 20th century. Life and humans and stories are more complicated than that.

I do think he was an exceptionally charismatic preacher of a millennial Jewish sect, who came to believe that he was the Jewish Messiah, as others have occasionally done. I believe he was sincere in his teaching and so were his disciples. I believe they had a vision of the end of time and that it would come in their lifetimes. They clearly weren't set up for managing death or marriage or having children or plans for the long term wuthin their sects. That all came later.

Essentially, OP, I think you're barking up the wrong tree with trying to "prove" anything of note about Jesus. If it was possible to "prove" your beliefs to be true, then there would be no need for faith.

Surely the whole point of faith is that you carry on believing in the absence of any real evidence?

I think there is a fourth option to the 'Mad, Bad or Son of God' trope.
His followers could simply have misrepresented and/or misquoted him to fit their agendas when writing about him some years after the events.

As an aside, Josephus was born after Jesus died - so not exactly a current or an eyewitness account.

Former CofE, now atheist. As far as I can tell, Jesus was a real man who was an itinerant preacher with a small number of followers. I often think he'd be blown away if he could come back and see that a whole religion with millions of followers is based on him and his life!

I think I know quite a bit. I was raised in a Christian household, committed my life to him in my teens and went to church every week until my early 20s. I did an A level in Christian Theology and nearly did a theology degree too. I believed I had a relationship with God and listened to him and prayed all the time.

Then I realised that all the times I saw God "at work" in my life and "heard" him speak were all just wishful thinking and/or my imagination. It's not real and I'm happier and my life so much better as an atheist.

I think there probably was a real person who provided the original inspiration for all the stories and Jesus-based cults that followed.

However, it's possible that the Islamic version of Jesus is closer to how he himself would have conceived of his significance, even although Islam is a much younger religion. His original Jewish followers had to flee because their ideas about Jesus (ie not divine) did not fit with the new orthodoxy that grew up in the wake of St Paul and narrative developments brought in by subsequent non-Jewish followers.

The descendants of the original Jewish followers of Jesus eventually became followers of Islam, preserving what I believe would have been a version of Jesus that would be a closer match to how he was viewed by his first supporters.

@Babybirdmum "it’s the same as this … if I die and 40 years after my death 2 of my best friends write about my life. Another of my two best friend gets their friends who is better at writing to write about my life. Then someone who doesn’t know me personally, my neighbours son, writes about me. Then someone who’s heard people all over my hometown talking about me writes what they’ve heard. Would you think it was a fairly accurate account of my life?"

No! Humans are incredibly unreliable narrators.

I think John Lennon once claimed he wasn't quite as significant as The Beatles

Not really.
In March ‘66 he said in interview the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. That rock and roll music was on the rise and church attendance was down. He didn’t say more significant or important.

It was barely noticed in the U.K. It was only when it was reported to the Bible Belt in the USA that anyone got their knickers in a knot.

OP, if Jesus existed (opinions vary) he was an engaging speaker and a disrupter of the Jewish status quo. Interesting political views, happy to cut through social norms and befriend those on the fringes of society.

Frivolously - Very useful at a party, with the catering and wine production miracles.

Same here, if the bible was seen as a lot of nice stories designed to teach rather than supposed accounts of things that actually happened I would think fair enough but as it is I see people who take the bible as "gospel" are deluded and I am unlikely to believe anything they claim

There was a personal trigger to becoming am atheist, yes, just as there is usually some kind of personal trigger to becoming a Christian or a Muslim. As for most people I'd imagine, it was finding that theology and religion and even the religious people I knew, had nothing to offer during a decade-long crisis that culminated in a death (if you can have a crisis that lasts a decade). And that the only explanation that gave me any peace and fitted with what i experienced was that God didn't exist.

Having been brought up in a much more religious background, there is part of me that is still waiting for a religious explanation that makes sense. So far, it hasn't and I am mildly insulted by the really superficial and binary attempts to persuade other people of something as literally unbelievable as the divinity of a human.

My academic background involves having spent far too much with the source materials around this and between that and my upbringing, I have a bit of knowledge.

I don't think his historicity really matters. The texts of the Bible are culturally very significant text and their use over time by different powers still shapes the world -- and the edits, selections, canon choices, choice in formatting, choice in translation, the destruction and mishandling of texts which has left us only fragments and the uses of the texts are all very human and much more interesting to me. The way people use them are why the texts have that influence, both that have a historical thread and those that absolutely don't.

It's similar to the archaeological evidence - it does give credence to some of the historical threads in the Tanakh, but it also shows a much broader picture and significant evidence of things beyond the scope of the texts. We have strong evidence that early Judaism and even some in Christianity was monolatry - worship of one deity without the denial of others - that remains in small pieces in the texts. We also currently have the debates on evidence like the ones about whether inscriptions like "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah." refers to the Asherah goddess discussed in the Bible (from King Josiah's reforms on, there is a very negative bend in the texts against her, he was very much everything needs to be monotheistic) or an object or grove of trees or something else. The evidence outside of the Bible is there, doesn't change anything about the texts to me. They're interesting, human stories, shaped and reshaped over centuries to fit the narratives.

I’d say that at the time Jesus broke the status quo because he had female followers.

There were many Jewish messianic cults at the time - people wanted out of Roman occupation and many Jewish groups have had the view for a while that there are potential messiahs in every generations, just none have succeeded yet to fulfil the requirements. It was not that unique for women to be among the followers of them. That none of the Gospels or other writings attributed to women were accepted into any canons or had much popularity says more about whether the early church was breaking the status quo than figures showing up in the tales who we can see from edits (literally we can see names crossed off and rewritten over) were managed around as part of developing the texts.

Your kids are not Christians if they don't believe Jesus was the the son of God. That is the core defining belief of Christianity

To some, and I can see why Christians who hold that would push back on it as many Christian branches have had it as established doctrine, but it's also within many doctrines that only God can know who really is and isn't.

All faiths are internally diverse and vary over time and place. Jesus being the son of God was not part of all early churches, particularly not literally, and has not been a required part of several church denominations for a while, the Quakers probably being one of the earliest and well-known sects that didn't start off Universalist to shift to that.

I know a bit about the character in the Bible. What we ont know is why the stories which give his view of Yahweh are so very dodgy from the Old Testament stories. There is some thinking around a new covenant but I think that’s stretching stuff to fit a narrative.

aWhat I do know is there is a darkness at the heart of the Abrahamic religions which both sickens and terrifies me, but is more in keeping with Old Testament stuff.

I have no time for any of them. I’m reminded of the saying, ‘If you need fear of God to make you a good person, you are not a good person.’

Words have meanings though. You can't just change established meanings of words, especially when that word is created and 'owned' by another group of people, and then claim that word as your own. The defining belief of Christians is that Jesus Christ is the son of God, not that he was a deluded man with a mental illness. Your children have created their own belief system, for their own reasons, which they follow But that belief system is not Christianity.

When you take medicine from the pharmacy, that particular medicine has been probably subject to thousands of hours of researching and testing, multiple times over. It’s not poisonous because it has been rigorously tested. This needs to happen in order for it to be approved, based on concise empirical evidence. Yes, not all medicine will necessary work for everyone, yet for the majority it will, and you don’t require faith in the moment your get prescription, because you know exactly what you are getting, and it’s been tested to be an effective remedy for said ailment. Where as belief in a god, that has been never been proven to exist, is just blind faith.