JESUS <3

[Anomalocaris]

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 think there was likely a specific Jesus who was most closely associated with the origin of the myth and cult of Jesus.   Although if we were to be able to trace every twist and turn that the mythification process his image had taken in the hands of his cultists through the ages we would eventually come to the man, very little of what attribute his cultists assign him today would be the remnant of some actual quality of the real man.    Almost all are the result of subsequent mythification, some calculated to advance the interest of Jesus cult against rival cults in the 2nd - 4th centuries, others the result of wish thinking, mass hysteria, delusion, or insanity.   If we were to meet the real man Jesus, I strongly suspect we would find a pitiful, delusional, manipulative, faintly contemptible, most likely deranged individual.  Not image of the divine, but reflection of the underbelly of society.

I don't think he brought forth most of the ideas that Christianity or Christians attribute to him, or chose to think to be what distinguishes their religion from others.   Rather most of the ideas that became subsequently embodied in various orthrodoxies of different Jesus cults were borrowed from various other sources and religions, re-packaged and then attributed to Jesus through subsequent process of mythification in order for the Jesus cultists to better varnish their cult.

I think in this Christianity followed but an orthrodox path for cults to elevate themselves to the status of "faith" or "religion".   Many other cults, vaguely traceable to some particular individual at its origin, gained success through essentially the same path.  Some gained success to rival Christianity itself, such as Islam.   The few actual traits of the real Muhammad we might still vaguely perceive paints him as a scoundrel, thug, opportunist, and psychopathic manipulator. But truth be told, that Muhammad would still be a much more impressive and less pathetic man if met in the flesh than what I think is sketched by what can credibly be perceived as real traits of the actual Jesus.