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Mar. 30, 2005 There are numerous approaches to the question of the historicity of Jesus. Some people maintain that Jesus was God incarnate and that the Bible is inerrant. Others maintain that Jesus was God but allow that the Bible, being the work of mortal men, is susceptible of some small errors. Another view is that Christ was an historical figure, to be sure, but that his utterances are only his personal views, reflecting the beliefs of the day. This view is embellished somewhat by those who aver that Christ was not merely a random individual in history, but also a great teacher. Those who take the view that Jesus was just an historical figure may have in the mind the purpose of removing the halo from Jesus’ head, by making him out to be just a man, but they are falling afoul of the fallacy of presupposing that Jesus ever existed in any guise whatsoever—divine or human. They are saying, “Jesus was not God. He was just a man,” conceding that he was a man, just for the sake of arguing against his divinity. But they are conceding too much. There’s no real reason to believe that Jesus ever existed at all. And there are good reasons for believing he did not. As for the school of thought that regards Jesus as a great teacher, this too may have started as a concession. “We don’t accept Jesus as God, but we acknowledge that he was a great teacher.” This may have been meant as an appeasement to or compromise with the religious faction. But this argument is untenable, because Jesus was not a great teacher. Any mature, intelligent person who reads the Sermon on the Mount, supposedly the very quintessence of Christianity, honestly and objectively, will understand that it is not the sermon of a great teacher at all, but rather a hodgepodge of banalities and platitudes, nonsense and foolishness. Unless we agree that God was capable of such useless ramblings, we would have to conclude that Jesus was not God and Jesus was not a great teacher. For example, Jesus counsels us to take no thought for tomorrow, what we will eat and what we will wear, but instead to seek the kingdom of heaven, knowing that God knows what we will need, and will provide it. This is the parable of the Lilies of the Field. This is manifestly false. If we do not think of tomorrow, tomorrow we will be destitute. Everyone knows this. Why do people go to school, seek paid employment, open bank accounts, and subscribe to insurance policies and pension plans? They are clearly ignoring the teachings of Jesus to take no thought for tomorrow. How can they have the gall to characterize as divine wisdom the teachings that they ignore at every turn? Ignore them they must, indeed, for the teachings are fraudulent. But why do they insist upon insisting that they believe them? It doesn’t really matter why they make this kind of pretense, as long as we understand that it is mere sanctimony, but I venture a guess that they are succumbing to peer pressure. They want to go on record before their friends and relatives as “good, decent people”, so they make a lot of pious noise, without regard to the indefensibleness of their position. The Sermon on the Mount, including the Beatitudes, the Golden Rule, the injunction not to resist evil and the rest, is loaded with flaws, faults and foibles. But I won’t catalog them all at this point. Once we understand that Jesus cannot have been divine, and that by no stretch of the imagination was he a great teacher, the only question that remains is whether he existed at all. There is absolutely no contemporary evidence—evidence from the actual days when Jesus was supposed to have lived—corroborating his existence. The first evidence was the Epistles and the Gospels. St. Paul, who wrote most of the Epistles, never met Jesus personally but saw him in a vision, he admits. So we have only the Gospels, written between 70 and 100 AD by unknown persons, and full of irreconcilable contradictions and preposterous miracle tales that any teen-ager should be able to see are false. Extrabiblical accounts begin in 93 AD. All of these scraps and bits are too late and too dubious to merit any attention whatsoever. The upshot of all these considerations is this; Jesus was not divine and he was not a great teacher. Apparently, somebody was trying to sell us a bill of goods. It hardly matters, in that case, whether or not there was some megalomaniac in the first three decades of the first century claiming to be God, as long as we know that the claim is false. But my guess is that there was probably no one at all. The authors of the New Testament probably invented Jesus out of thin air to make it look as if he had been the fulfillment of prophecies made in the Jewish Bible and that he had empowered them to be his vicars. Then they could establish a church and start diverting the cash flow their way. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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