JESUS <3

[paulpablo]

Worrrrrrd to the heathens!!  

So, do you think Jesus was a real person? I'm not asking if you think Jesus was divine, or if He performed miracles, or if He was crucified, died, and came back.

I'm simply asking if you think there was a man 2000ish years ago named Jesus who brought forth these new "ideas" that we now call Christianity.

 

I tend to think the character of Jesus was based on someone real.

I imagine you take around 1000 people who are a bit of a Charles manson, david Koresh, Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, David blaine type characters. 
 Mix them in a civilization with no internet, not a very good education system, a relatively gullible population.
Then you fast forward 2000 years and just like how evolution works, these groups and religions these people started will have either evolved or been made extinct and you will be left with something that pretty much looks like the biblical writings of Jesus.  A collaboration of exaggerated accounts of what some people were fooled into believing.

Many of Jesus's teachings definitely sound like cult leader rhetoric, give away your possessions, leave your loved ones, leave your homes, follow me.

Many of Jesus's miracles sound within the realms of things so called prophets can do these days.  I mean Jesus isn't flying through the air and punching a dragon to death in the bible, he's doing things that magicians and religious prophets are still faking these days.

He's healing the sick, easily faked, going for long periods without food or water (didn't david blaine do that?) feeding 5000 people with some loafs and turning water into wine.  I mean if you look at the list of what Jesus did it looks less like Hercules and more like a pen and teller show, or David blaine or Derren brown.

And as for some of the more extreme things he did, like coming back from the dead, you can easily put that down to exaggeration and Chinese whispers.

But just to add, I think you did word the question a bit wrong, the guys name wasn't Jesus that's just some translation, Hebrew and Greek combined (something like that) and I doubt that cult leaders were a new idea at the time of Jesus, maybe he could have been a pioneer of peaceful protest and been quite uniquely pacifistic, but I'd say nearly certainly that his ideas weren't entirely new.

But I'd say yes to the bottom line of the question of was there a man who the idea of Jesus in the bible is based on.