make your choice – who was Jesus?
“You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God…” Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
A lot of Christians seem to think this is a key piece of thinking. I’m confused why anyone would think the options are so oddly limited. There are quite a lot of other conclusions that seem more plausible about the character Jesus. Here are just a few:
- He was a reasonably successful moral teacher of his time, with some useful but not original philosophies to share. (But not all of us are impressed with cursing trees and acts of violence against tradespeople.)
- Whatever message he might have wished to share was confused and/or embellished by the ‘eye-witnesses’ who wrote about his life, and taken to unrelated conclusions by others beyond his death. For example, I’m still not clear where the character Jesus personally claims to be a god.
- He’s a largely fictional character whose story was fabricated in the decades and centuries after he allegedly existed, perhaps roughly based on popular itinerant preachers of the time.
- He was a man with mental health problems who thought he heard the voice of a god speaking to him, much like many other people.
- He was a charlatan and a chancer on a power and attention trip, doing cheap tricks for crowds and flattering people into following him by ‘choosing’ them and promising them great things in an afterlife.
Whatever the case, I wouldn’t spit at him, kill him and call him a demon. Or believe he’s a god. Why do Christians praise this piece of writing and blandly accept there are only two options?
One thing Lewis did not tackle in Mere Christianity was the other ‘L’ option – Legend.
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Have you read it?
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Nope. But I have read a number of comprehensive reviews.
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I tried reading it once, it was sooooooo boring. Can’t believe it’s the guy that wrote some of my favourite childhood gems.
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I have never felt inclined to read MC and I have never read any Narnia books, so I cannot comment on any literary prowess he may or may not have had when in the fiction/fantasy genre..
But boring was a term that came up on occasion from some people. Not Christians, obviously.
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The worst was The Screwtape Letters. Demons were never preached at me when I was a kid, so the concept is largely foreign to me. I could decide that the possibility of a god made perfect sense long before I ever understood the concept of demons.
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The detail and colour saturation on the photo are excellent.
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*beaming* Love you Ark, you are truly my best blogging buddy. 😀
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Yeah. Right. I’ll bet you say that to all the guys and girls. I’ve even read it on a few occasions. 😉
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Many people do the ‘you either believe this or you must believe this’ word game. It’s annoying. Those might be the only two explanations you can imagine, but there’s clearly more.
Nice post.
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As a word game it’s annoying. But for so many to fawn over such obvious nonsense is kind of weird.
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The more I read from mythicists like David Fitzgerald and Robert Price, the more I think it’s possible the entire story was made up.
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I’d like to think he did exist and he’s just a man who was horrendously misreported.
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Or a well-studied illusionist determined to change the religious thinking of the time.
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I like that one!
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CS Lewis. My youngest has a “shortened sweetened” version of the whole Narnia series. She read me excerpts (after I tried, unsuccessfully, to sustain focus long enough to watch the series of films with my children and ended up doing something else). At the very last, the story gets seriously uncanny when the gorgeous lion we all adored turns out to be the Almighty God. Yikes. Deity parading as a powerful animal? Shades of Greek mythology, for sure!
I also read “Out of the Silent Planet” by CS Lewis, that was the point at which I decided this author was not my case.
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I thought the Narnia books were amazing when I was a kid. But I was a Christian …
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I will say that I used to hold Lewis in such high regards. Then, when I abandoned my faith, I actively facepalm at his quotes. He was a much better writer when he openly admitted his writing was fiction.
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That’s really interesting that you changed your opinion so much on him. I might have a go of Mere Christianity, if I can stay awake.
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Mere Christianity is on a bookshelf somewhere in the house where I live. It’s been a long while since I’ve read parts of it (like, more than a decade or so). Should be interesting to read as an atheist. Just try not to read too much. Don’t want to die laughing or anything…
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I have concluded that this sort of apologists work is most effective for Christians who are troubled by doubts and are looking for assurance that it really is true.
Once you conclude it is not true then you start to see the weakness in the arguments that previously you had not wanted to see. Such as what the post mentions about there being more than three options to explain Jesus.
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I’m pretty fond of the idea that Jesus never existed. I prefer to let the historians argue about that, but I’ve heard arguments from some historians who believe he didn’t exist that seem pretty convincing. From what they say, it appears the only “evidence” for his existence comes from long after he, and any witnesses of his life, died. You would think, considering the supposed supernatural things he did, that there would be more records from while he was alive if he really lived and did all those things. Then again, maybe, as you said, the stories were just wildly exaggerated or made up. It would be funny if one day we figured out Jesus was the Chuck Norris of his day, and all the miracles were a running joke some clueless listener thought was true.
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I think we’re too far removed to ever know for sure. Fairly sure if he did exist he wasn’t a god though …
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Ah yes, the old false trilemma.
Relevant: An Atheist Reads Mere Christianity: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL29857556DB7AB87D
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Thanks, will try and watch some of those.
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I noticed over on Eliza’s blog that she has branded C.S. Lewis as a false teacher, noting that he never quotes the Bible in Mere Christianity:
https://holdingforthhisword.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/lying-liars-telling-lies/
I don’t think many people meets Eliza’s standard for orthodoxy, she had previously argued that St Augustine and John Piper were heretics.
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Brilliant! I love that kind of in-house catfight. And someone new to follow …
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If you want to see an in-house cat fight have a look at the exchange between gracealone1 and Bob Wheeler on this post:
https://holdingforthhisword.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/the-rapture-part-six/
That gracealone1 seems a real nasty peace of work, keeps calling a Bob Wheeler a false teacher and implying he is of the Devil.
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Wow, that’s great! I wish I knew more about end time fantasies to jump in. The preoccupation with end times is one of the most embarrassing aspects of Christianity – and that generation after generation, century after century, they are speculating and holding their breath seems to completely escape their attention.
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It started with Jesus, who in Mark 13, said it (his return) would happen in the current generation. Then in 1 Thessalonians Paul again said it would happen soon. In fact in his early letters Paul advised people not to marry. He saw no point as Jesus was to return so soon. He softened this tone in his later letters as no doubt the reality of his failed predictions dawned upon him.
So the Bible New Testament was wrong at the start. One of the later letters, the second century forgery, 2 Peter (no serious scholar thinks it was written by the Apostle), tried to give ‘God’ an excuse by saying God is not slow, but is delaying the return so more people can be saved. The letter then says a a day is like a thousand years to God. So what we are seeing is that by the 2nd century the Christians knew that the prophecies had failed so were trying to come up with an excuse.
I studied Christian history and noted that in virtually every generation Christians have been convinced that the current generation is so evil that Jesus will return in that generation. Leading up to the first millennium of 1,000 AD it was so pronounced, society almost ground to a halt as the millennium approached.
What mildly amuses me is that many Christians are so ignorant of their history that they fail to see that this has been an ongoing delusion and that by them focusing on their generation being somehow different they are showing that they too are deluded.
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On “acts of violence against tradespeople”, the trade in the temple was a scam. Pigeons were more expensive there. If you brought in your own for sacrifice, the priests would find a blemish and reject them, and take a cut from the temple sellers. Or so I have read. In a Bible commentary, actually. How did they know, I am unsure.
On claims to be God, “Before Abraham was, I Am”. This is a clear communication in a code we may interpret.
57 So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” 58 Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”
“I am” is a name of God.
This is a claim to be at least around 2000 years old (whether Abraham existed or not, because his audience believed in Abraham).
Then they picked up stones to stone him, because his claim to be God was blasphemy.
It is recorded in the Gospel, whether he said it or not. It is a clear communication, clearly understood by the audience to be a claim to be God.
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8 million Jehovah’s Witnesses can’t be wrong. 😀
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As I’ve previously said elsewhere, one of my areas of expertese is myth and legend. I personally keep an open mind to the historicity of Jesus, but I have to admit that the evidence is strongly against it.
Not one first century theologian speaks of Jesus in his time. Forget Josephus – the passage mentioning Jesus is almost certainly a fake. The Romans make absolutely no mention of him in the first century, despite the fact that Roman record keeping bordered upon the obssessive. Not one of the apostiles was present at the supposed crucifixion, each wrote the gospels decades later, based on second hand and even third hand oral testimony, and in places copying from each other.
It was not Roman custom to let a prisoner go on the eve of Passover. That is complete mythology.
The Romans allowed a man who had been crucified – the punishment for the lowest criminals and political enemies – to be placed in a rich man’s tomb? How likely is that? The remains of crucifixion victims were usually thrown to the dogs, and were given no burial (unless you count grinding the bones for fertilizer) so that no trace of them could remain.
Why would Pilate even order soldiers placed outside the tomb? Jesus had been confirmed dead. What was he expecting to happen?
Then of course there is the connundrum of the two Jesus’s; Jesus who called himself the Son of Man, and Jesus who called himself Son of the Father – Jesus Barabbas, as he is called in Matthew 27. The Messianic prophecies of the OT speak of a warrior messiah, not a peaceful judge. Barabbas, guilty of murder and sedition, would better fit those prophecies than the man who was allgedly crucified. If that is the case, then Christianity has been following the wrong man for 2000 years.
That’s assuming even Jesus Barabbas existed. If he had been found guilty of murder and sedition against Rome, again there is no Roman record of that.
Yet, I’ll still keep an open mind to it, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, that there was once a guy who said wouldn’t it be really nice to be nice to each other, and for having such a dangerous and obviously unworkable idea, they killed him for voicing it.
But even if he did exist, was he Christ? I think the fairest we can say is –
“He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”
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I think the Jesus story is most likely an embellishment upon a real historical character, or several of them. A bit like in the movies or books today we find a text claiming that the story is based on actual events. Such stories often are “based” on actual events, but telling a somewhat different story, even though the story tellers, writers and film makers could have with far more better accuracy, than the first and second century anonymous Gospel writers and the church “fathers” even later at the council of Nikea, have known and followed in their depiction what really happened, but for several reasons, like making the story more interresting and appealing, they did not.
There are several points in the four chosen Gospels, that reveal their writers had ample knowledge of the Torah, but knew and understood very little about the culture in Iudea in the time when this Jesus character was said to have lived there. This alone reveals to us, that they were interrested in the interpretation and educational side of the story, not so much on the actual events. This is a common problem in historical research even today, when (sometimes even educated) people tend to percieve history as a series of educational stories, rather than what did really pass. There is then the possibility for them to smuggle in all sorts of assumed notions, rather than to really learn from the actual historical events.
In my view, it is most likely, that the story really began at the end, when a “rabbi” who had approached people with some rather humane ideas, and who was percieved as their hero (because humane ideas resonate in us humans – especially so when we are not the mighty or the most safe and sound) was killed by the conjoined religious and imperial establishment. The Jews were being the underdogs to an outsider empire – once again, wich is why they had ample prophesies concerning such – and it fitted poorly with their religious idea as the chosen people of their only god, who let’s face it seemed a little feeble to most of them, even though a religious person could excuse this god by appealing him punishing them – once again. But according to the Gospel descriptions, there was a bit of a scam up with the actual execution, the dude was not there long enough on the cross to really kill a healthy carpenter and an aschetic exept if he had a sudden heart attack. Then, when almost nobody (a bunch of women was not percieved as wittnesses in them days) was looking, the Roman soldiers sold him to a rich Jew right after they had established he was still bleeding (=was alive), contrary to their standing orders – and why not – according to the story their commanding officer had already “washed his hands” from the execution of this man, whom the religious fundamentalists obviously wanted dead, because of religious reasons. And because the body was not found later on, several conflicting rumours spread out, because his followers had expected him to release them from the empire, that disappearance of the body sort of healed their wounds of disappointment on his fate, by making up this superstitious claim, that though he was unable to defeat the empire, he had “won” even a greater enemy – death itself.
Let’s be honest, if Jesus really did resurrect from actual death, it was not that impressive at all, because for some unexplained reason he chose to do this most important stunt in his career, when nobody was looking. It is a bit like an escape artist making an escape from chains under water, when nobody sees what really happens. Is it not? Wether one chooses to believe such is possible only through magic, or some inexplicable supernatural means, or more likely was achieved through something more mundane, may be a matter of taste, but most adults today understand in the case of the escape artist at least, why the actual deed is concealed and why the unnatural explanation, be it supernatural or magical, is bogus.
Maybe the same man had been a healer before, maybe not, but the miracle stories are obvious embellishments to the actual story about the nazarene (= a Jewish monk) even to the extend, that the writers have mixed up his social position to be the name of his home village. Comparing the Gospels it should be easy to see, that they do not differ the way a few people would remember what really happened, but rather the way people remember stories they have heard differently and have all sorts of add-ons to make moral points important to the writer and editor of the text and to embellish the magical and supernatural nature of their hero.
But because the Gospels are such myth ridden stories and agree just about nothing concrete, and mostly only in the superstitious jumps to absurd conclusions, we will never know for sure who this Jesus character was, or even if wether he was a real person, several of them, or just a fiction of imagination. Therefore, firmly believing he was a real historical person and add to injury the one and only human son of a particular god, that in the earlier parts of this alledgedly divinely inspired book, all sorts of loyal dudes are called the “sons” of this god is an emotional trick people pull on themselves to confirm a security blanket, they have learned as kids. Part of a cultural tradition, that is not necessarily evil as such, if people who hold it dear choose the humane parts from the story and ignore the rest, nor is it equally very healthy, if it affects their moral character to take excuses for bad behaviour, bad politics in a democracy and ultimately even violence, from a book that obviously offers a tribally moralistic view from the Middle-Eastern antiquity.
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