(January 3, 2012 at 3:48 pm)Paradoxum Wrote: Hi, this is my first post on this forum.
I come from a conservative Christian background, but I now doubt the existence of God. I probably doubt more now than believe. By question (which is probably very common) is thus: How did Christianity begin if Jesus Christ died and stayed dead?
Did the disciples start Christianity, and if so why did they say Christ had risen and that they had seen Him if it is false?
Hey Paradoxum:
Unfortunately we are dealing with an issue where a lot of the facts are not known and probably will never be known. The point a lot of people are making here, I think, is that Jesus may very well have existed but outside of the Bible and a controversial passage in Josephus we don't have evidence of his existence.
There are two sides of the camp one called Mythical Jesus I.E. that he was made up and one called Historical Jesus that believes he was at the least based off a real character. There are atheists on the historical and mythical sides and if you want to do a delightful romp through this debate I would check out freeratio's biblical criticism forum. To be honest though I don't think it is necessary to subject yourself to that unless you REALLY love digging into the details.
Regardless of whether or not Jesus existed the gospels which recorded him were not written until at least, according even to conservative estimates I believe, 30 years after the supposed time of his death. That is a lot of time for rumors, legends, etc to form. Not to mention gossip about this Jesus if he was real would have spread, changed forms, etc as it jumped from person to person.
The issue really is a mess because of the lack of historical sources outside of the biblical text. From my perspective if there was some divine hand behind Christianity and Jesus it wouldn't be so hard to find some reliable evidence of it. Clearly the divine being would know that not having good evidence could cause issues later.
There is also modern day figure you should google called
Sathya Sai Baba who died in April 2011. He was basically a modern day Jesus figure who had some things attributed to him which quite frankly are bullshit. The reason I mention this is to bring up the idea of people honestly being mistaken.
