Who was Jesus? Wanta see BS view on him. Edit: I lost the orginal poll when trying to update number of options with 100+ words in an option, then i forgot some of the orginal options, seriously annoying!!
Where is the choice for "Until we find find an autographed copy of the first edition of The Rabbi from Galilee: My Story by Yshua ben Yosef, we'll never know and anything said about him is speculation"?
That's extreme. There's little reason to doubt a divisive religious figure named Jesus lived in the early part of the 1st century AD and some of the writings attributed to him today were likely spawned by some of his ideas. Its not all that much more than what we know of Socrates, but I don't have any reason to suspect Socrates was a figment of Plato's imagination.
History shows that there were 10 (of which we have some record) messianic movements within a 150 year span around the same time frame as Jesus lived. Though we know little of the actual teachings of the leaders of most of them, there were a couple who taught from the Scriptures in a manner similar to that of Jesus. Ever wonder why none of them have ever gained any recognition remotely close to that of Jesus?
I'm not saying he did not exist. I'm saying that with the information we have we are limited to speculation when trying to answer the question: Who was he? Right now, all we have are various and differing second- and third-hand views of him that sometimes don't agree with each other. So unless more and definitive information is discovered, we have to try to reconstruct what he really said and taught and therefore can never be 100% sure that we're right. Yeah, yeah, our guesses can be more or less informed and therefore more or less likely but most of our reconstruction still fits into the category of speculation.
This is why I choose "Other". I think it's highly unlikely that some of the options are correct (such as Son of God), but there isn't enough evidence to come to a decision on many of the others.
Maybe we should have an option saying that Jesus was an enlightened reincarnation of the Buddha. The Dalai Lama seems to think so. I guess that could go under number seven or eight.
Where's the "Jesus was the guy I hired last week to spread some pine straw mulch around my shrubs" option? But seriously, he was a normal sort of fellow who was considered by half of his contemporaries to be a diety. The other half thought he was a leader of an insurrection against oppressive authority. Unfortunately, the first half wrote all the books.
Half of his contemporaries certainly never considered him a deity. It was a very minor percentage if any; its most likely they saw him as divinely inspired, especially considering that the Jewish tradition did not feature messiah as the son of God.
If the degree of devotion to a silly cause proves the cause, Mekhlis must make Stalinism true. More on point, Shabbatai Zvi is proof that the conviction of one's disciples has absolutely nothing to do with the belief's veracity.
Must you always henpeck? My "half versus half" line was for illustrative purposes. I failed apparently.
Whoever he was i think what he taught has been changed and lost its real focus over the years. e.g. Paul came up with the saved by grace stuff, Jews didnt have to obey the law, etc, the Romans Catholics came up with the go to a building, sing songs, give us some money etc...
Its not "henpecking". Almost no one at the time of Jesus's life saw him as a deity. You failed because what you were trying to illustrate is wrong in the first place.
Well, obviously we can't be 100% right, but we can have a fairly decent guess as to what he said, partially by examining how parts of his "message" was at odds with what the Church would eventually become.