[Serious] The Story

[Pat Mustard]

What a brilliant question!

For some, I would advise listening to the Kings Cambridge “9 lessons and carols” service on Xmas Eve. Milner-White did a fantastic job summarising the Xian story in readings.

A TL;DR version might perhaps be:

Humanity discovers disobedience to God. This is incompatible with eternal life so God goes all Timberlake.
God has a plan to solve this problem, which involves the descendants of Abraham. However they prove not up to the task, and a cycle of sin->exile->forgiveness->restoration gets repeated over and over.
God promised in a series of prophecies that He would sort out all these problems personally, and subsequently set up the Kingdom of God (KoG).
Israel gets exiled to Babylon and the return is not seen as proper forgiveness.
Around AD 33 Jesus says stuff about the KoG arriving, he dies and gets resurrected. As Israel's representative, he's sorted out the sin/death problem. The KoG is started, and we live in the latest act, in which this message is taken to the world.

The two stories are from separate cultures thousands of years removed from each other.  There is no singular narrative from beginning to end largely because of that fact and the differences between.

Why do gospels and epistles make such a massive effort to show how the death and resurrection fit into prophecy and the whole OT narrative? Surely Jesus' death only means what it means because it is in a pretty rigid OT/prophecy framework?

I've always found it odd that the line on this is that the jews got it wrong..rather than the christians getting it right.  

Would a better historical model be that Judaism forked between those who decided Jesus did bring in forgiveness etc and those who disagree?

Why and how does a perfect being create imperfect people to carry out its tasks? Does that not defeat the meaning of perfection?

Face facts, your religion's bullshit is painfully stupid.