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.

And any celebrity can be spun as an all round Good Sort by his mates and others who are emotionally invested in this person being something special and the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (but disappointingly died in a humiliating process ending with being nailed to a tree) - see The Sunk Costs Fallacy - when in reality, they were nothing like the way they come to be portrayed.

Look at Trump - for some, he's a quasi-messiah, the answer to all their woes and their voice amplified a hundredfold. Others hear themselves in the music of Kurt Cobain or in what is attributed to Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Or the ramblings speeches of David Icke.

Even Christians can't agree amongst themselves about the nature of G-d (Trinitarian or not, child baptism or dedication, whether transubstantiation occurs or if it's merely representative, whether the Bishop of Rome genuinely has a batphone to the Almighty or whether he is literally Satan.

To say that nothing is 100% but then try to argue that one version - your version - of a religious belief is 100% certain to be true contradicts your own argument.

Well indeed. And it does sound a little like the attitude of many on the left as well when you put it like that…. Maybe there was a charismatic carpenter all those years ago, and maybe the whole edifice of religion hasn’t been a construct to control people and raise money over millennia. But one thing is certain, and that is that the carpenter was not the son of god. There’s no evidence in science or the storytelling of the bible to support the existence of a god.

As a belief systems to make some people feel better about life, fine. And let’s not forget originally it was just a method of control, playing on the fact that the majority were uneducated and therefore easily manipulated. As society has become more educated it’s no wonder that belief in religion has fallen. Now the majority are quite comfortable to live life in a better, more caring way than many who claim the moral high ground by dint being religious.

We look back at the society’s that went before us, such as the Egyptians and their belief in the after-life, along with their huge constructions to convey them and their possessions with them, with a wry smile and disbelief. I have no doubt future archaeologists will look back on our civilisation, the infrastructure built and wealth amassed by a few dominant religions, albeit crumbling now, with similar disbelief as to how we could have thought it was true.

@neverstartingstory I don’t get it. Being bored (it’s nearly 3am here and I’m waiting for a document to come through from another country to shoot something back by their end of day) means I surf Mumsnet and often comment to pass the time and keep myself awake. Not because I give a shit about content. Posting doesn’t necessarily mean you give a shit. Sometimes it does if it’s about something you care about, but if there are no posts going that you care about doesn’t mean you can’t read and post. I don’t care about this, just engaging with anything to try and keep the brain going at this time of night. Also, no idea where I’ve disagreed with you? I probably should have clarified, my kids who call themselves Christians in my first post as that would have been technically correct. As for whether they technically are or are not, meh, I neither agree nor disagree with you because I really really don’t give a shit. Just trying to keep the eyes open, and brain ticking as I wait for people who give even less of a shit about the time difference and keeping me up than I do about this.

The Jesus name thing was because both I and many others keep referencing Jesus on here, it was in no way directed at you (as not everything is), just pointing out we are all banging out the wrong name (as it seems strange to use a name that a person never knew themselves as).

I don't care whether he existed or not - either way it has absolutely no influence or bearing on my existence.

What I'm generally curious about is why the insistence on people having to fit into the yes or no boxes. And why the default is yes unless you've some wildly traumatic reason that excuses you.

The problem is that many religions and systems of belief have evidence. Many have an abundance of evidence.

Apparently humans have a tendency to believe things that fit in well with their internal sense of self and the world and then cherry pick evidence to support their belief. Humans are not really built for logic. I include myself in this btw!

There are thousands upon thousands of religions and beliefs in the world today. What are the chances you picked the correct one? What are the chances that that one true religion was available in your language and your part of the world during your lifespan?

Man is flawed. Man is power hungry and selfish and corruptible. Even if Jesus was Son of God I would not trust generations of Man to accurately and fairly record and teach his Word.

Jesus is alive

Indeed.

OP, my experience that the people best informed about Christianity are not Christians, who are frequently astonishingly under-informed, and lack the most basic grasp of things like the historicity of Jesus, the preponderance of lots of messiah figures within Second Temple Judaism, the history of the composition and transmission of the Bible, early Christianity (before Paul)'s status as a Jewish sect, the retrofitting of elements of Jesus' life and teaching by the gospel writers to fit with Old Testament prophecies etc.

Most Christians' beliefs are a combination of wishful thinking, sentimentality and fear of death. Exactly the same kind of woolly thinking that comes up again and again on 'woo' threads here ('There must be something!' 'Science can't explain everything!')

I can absolutely get behind the Golden Rule, but there's absolutely no need for a religious framework to act with justice and compassion.

I grew up in a devout Catholic family, in a devoutly Catholic society, was educated at convent schools with religion at the heart of everything. I am thoroughly well informed about Christianity, its rituals, beliefs and practices, and love some of the art and music it has left us, but it's something I grew out of early as an actual belief.

We have no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus. The ones that are closest in time are from unknown authors who were likely relying on accounts from other people.

By contrast, we have a number of actual contemporaneous accounts, from named authors, of people who saw the Golden Plates that were given to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni. They also saw him translate them from Reformed Egyptian to English by looking at two stones in a hat.

Why do you believe in the New Testament accounts of the miracles of Jesus and not the accounts of those who saw Joseph Smith translate the plates?

I really dislike this narrative that "he is open to everyone who seeks him". I think, for me, this is the biggest proof that God does not exist.

I spent a good few years in my twenties desperately trying to believe in God/Christianity etc. Went to church weekly, read the bible, prayed a lot and so on. I even went through the whole rigmarole of getting myself baptised in the hope of somehow making it all seem real. I wanted to believe and I tried to believe so I did plenty of "seeking", only to find that I was on a wild goose chase because there simply wasn't anything there.

Much as I wanted to buy into the fairy story, I couldn't keep on lying to myself and pretending that I believed in the hope that I would eventually start to think it was true. My rational mind simply couldn't accept a narrative that made no sense and I wasn't capable of maintaining that level of cognitive dissonance over a sustained period.

I realised in time that my failed attempts to believe merely confirmed the truth that deep down I always knew. There was nothing there. If there had been a loving God that was genuinely open to all, he'd have welcomed me when I kept knocking on that door. The fact that he didn't was solid evidence that he either didn't exist or didn't give a shit. Logic suggests the latter.

I also can’t reconcile that there are different versions of The Bible and different versions of Christianity. If it was all based on one truth then there would be no divergence. The Bibles and the religions have evolved (so to speak!) depending on time, location, other cultural forces etc. If that evolution is evident in the differences we see today it seems only logical to me that nobody can say what (or who) it is all based on originally.

On this very thread we have differences in Christian opinions about Original Sin. Someone else arguing about whether the definition of a Christian can be someone who believes Jesus is the son of God (or not). Why is one version more correct than another? And if Christians can’t agree on that, why do they expect others to believe their truth.

The Pope and The Archbishop of Canterbury are Christians but they seem to have significant differences in their beliefs.

It seems to me Christians can’t agree, but then they get annoyed when others don’t believe in Christian principles. It just seems so inconsistent to me.

Yes, dropping the attempts to maintain the sustained cognitive dissonance required to belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, benign deity is a real relief. It felt like a great, refreshing gust of fresh air.

What you see at a church service when you look in from outside after you've dropped the rope is like watching people desperately trying to spin plates while balanced on a unicycle, for the sake of a rather belief in a larger version of themselves with mysterious priorities and a rather bad temper.

This 'argument' for the existence of god(s) is hilarious. I love it when Jehova's Witnesses offer it as a deep thought challenge.

Therefore, there must be something that exists outside of time matter and space that began them ...

Your answer, presumably, is that the 'something' is god? OK, then, how did god begin?

God, you say has no beginning or end? So god is infinite?

Now we agree that infinity is a valid concept, right? Not everything has to have a beginning or end that we can understand (even if we're physicists). It's not unreasonable, then, to suppose space-time is infinite.

Maybe we're both talking about the same thing? God is space-time, just something that occurred for no known reason. A natural accident.

But god isn't an accident, it has intention, purpose, consciousness. Really, how did it acquire its purpose and intention? And why's it so interested in the details of human lives, when it's got the whole universe/itself to play with?

... We all have 'faith' in that we believe we are products of an ineffably vast process that's been going on forever, or for what we can only conceptualise as 'ever'. The difference is that some believe this process is a gigantic, conscious being that thinks like a human.

Me, I look at the findings from space telescopes and think wow, what a spectacularly explosive jumble of consequences. Fascinating!

I don't really see how any of you believe a human-thinking giant created all those massively exploding stars, black holes, gas clouds, etc. Why would such a being be so interested in whether Fred shagged his best mate's wife or some other bloke ate pork? If it can do all that stuff, would it choose to live in a big house made of gold and gemstones? Seems a bit pedestrian, given its options!

But, yeah, we all have faith of a sort.

Indeed! The sheer ridiculousness of it all becomes astonishingly clear when you finally allow yourself to drop the pretence.

There will always be a sadness in me about the fact that it wasn't real, as it was kind of comforting to imagine that there could be someone benign and powerful pulling all of the strings. But I think I always knew that it was wishful thinking really.

If you need faith, then have faith. Believe in the literal bible, not this wishy-washy God of the Gaps stuff.

If you go as far as "God is what came before the Big Bang", you're 90% of the way to atheism anyway. I only believe in one god fewer than OP these days—I realised I don't need anything to be in the gaps.

God of the Gaps is for people who really want to believe there's something, but can't wave away dinosaurs and science the way they can stuff like war, child abuse and disease (all part of God's Mysterious Plan!)

Honestly, being an atheist absurdist is much less work.

The Church which was formed following Christ's ascension and which spread throughout the middle east and Europe still exists, but the church of Rome moved away from it and then Protestant doctrine has moved further away still resulting in literally dozens of different flavours of church across the globe. To seek Christianity in its original form, as founded by the Church Fathers (some of whom knew the apostles), you have to seek this Church. This Church is very different from all others and provides an insight into Christianity that no other Church can, hence the constant restless searching and changing beliefs by the Protestant world.

I can at least see the logic and consistency in this.

So OP, if you were asked if you believe in T4phage’s version of The Bible and Jesus, and if not why not, what would your answer be? Why don’t you believe it?

Which is essentially what you are asking us.

Ok, OP, I'll bite. I was raised in the Christian tradition at very strongly Christian schools; I have studied a fair bit of the history of the early church since then.

My opinion is that the weight of historical evidences favours the conclusions that:

• Jesus was probably a real person who lived around that time, and was probably a prophet of some kind.
• No contemporaneous eyewitness accounts exist.
• The Gospels were all written after the death of Paul the Evangelist, and cannot be considered as uninfluenced by them.
• The Gospels were all written anonymously and most likely by multiple authors, including those traditionally written by apostles.
• Matthew and Luke draw heavily on Mark as source material.
• What is thought of as any of the modern Bibles are the result of a combination of oral tradition, multiple translations, intense negotiation and considerable retconning.

I also think, based on your posts, that you confuse or conflate faith (in a definitionally unknowable and unprovable entity) with trust (such as in human systems that are observable and testable and where risk is approximately known, or in scientific theories that are based on observation and testing.)

Amen! 🙌🏻

The gospels of Jesus were written soon after his life and dear (death- AD 33) - Mark was written approx AD 60 by Mark who was a student of Peter (Apostle) and scholars believe he got his account from Peter because of the things that were written about Peter (eg leaving our embarrassing stories about Peter). Peter was an eyewitness to Jesus’ life.
Matthew and John were both written by 2 of the apostles called Matthew and John.
Luke was written by a gentile doctor called Luke who knew the apostles Peter and Paul very well.
The whole New Testament was written from 60AD and completed by 100AD. The Pauline epistles are dated to between AD 50 and 60 (i.e., approximately twenty to thirty years after the generally accepted time period for the death of Jesus), and are the earliest surviving Christian texts that include information about Jesus.
A copy of the book of Isaiah was found in the Dead Sea scrolls 1947 and it was found to be dated from 100 years before Jesus. They found it was the same as the copy in the old testament therefore showing that even though ancient copies had been lost the copies that were made were accurate. The Jews were very stringent with the accuracy at which they copied scripture.
There are over 5,800 completed or fragmented Greek manuscripts copies of the New Testament. Any discrepancy would stand out eg if a word was spelt wrong or missed out during the copying process then it would be obvious as there are all the other versions to compare it to. Scholars think it is 99.5% accurate.

Are we talking Byzantine Church here? Eastern Orthodox? Oriental Orthodox? Coptic? Mar Thoma? Syro Malabar? Syriac Orthodox? Chaldean? Assyrian Church of the East? East Syriac Rite? West Syriac Rite? Jacobite Syrian? Malakara Orthodox? Malabar Independent? Pentecostal St Thomas? Kerala Brethren? Alexandrian Rite? Armenian Rite? Maronite?

Any number of churches will say that they're the OG church, that others have got it all wrong and it should only be their way - it's the entire argument for Protestantism, that Catholicism had got it all wrong and this <gestures wildly at several thousand different paths> is taking things back to their roots and is the only way to salvation instead of formenting devilry. It's why Gnostics, Cathars and millions of other people in religious groups were stamped on by assorted other Churches and how the US was colonised by a bunch of rather pissed off people mostly from Norfolk at the expense of the people who already lived there.

There were apparently, several men wandering around Judea at this time. The name Yeshua( Joshua) was very common and it's thought that the biblical stories are based on more than one. In addition knowing that there were prophecies, it must have been easy to make some of those prophecies appear to be fulfilled.
And, I do know all of the stories, I've actually read the whole of the Bible. I was sent to a church school!

You are stating things here as fact that are, at best, the subject of historical debate, and where the weight of historical opinion is weighted against your statements.

The idea that Matthew and particularly John wrote the gospels attributed to them is really not supported by much evidence or by many historians. Similarly, the timings of the authorship of the composite books of what much later became the New Testament is much less clear than you describe.

This sort of dishonest argument - presenting opinion as fact - really undermines your arguments.

I don't think the OP is actively trying to be dishonest. I suspect that she is just a bit naive and maybe lacking in the critical thinking skills to challenge what she has been told.

It's classic confirmation bias, I suppose. She wants to believe so latches on to the "evidence" that seems to support that while ignoring everything that doesn't fit with her narrative. The people who set out to "prove" Christianity all seem to have a similar approach.

I have a lot more respect for those Christians who acknowledge that their beliefs are based on faith rather than fact, and who aren't afraid of admitting that there are all sorts of inconsistencies and unanswered questions. Their approach seems so much more intelligent and nuanced than that taken by people who are just desperate to prove that it all checks out factually... do they not realise that they're setting themselves up to fail?

Humans invented the concept much further back than that.

It comes across like you think you'd be harmful to others if you didn't have a religious justification for not doing harm.

Yet religion is frequently used as a justification for harming others.

That's a fair interpretatIon, though I do always wonder at people who when presented with alternative viewpoints don't at least look into them - though as you suggest that is probably one way people deal with cognitive dissonance?

I always felt quite bad for my school - it was quite a decent school and they did set up the general principles of investigation, burdens and methods of proof, etc - which actively undermined the religious instruction they were simultaneously trying to impart.