If you were ever a theist...

[GUBU]

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a Christian at work one day, we were in the kitchen and the topic of belief came up, and he said something that I thought was poignant. He said that back when Jesus walked the earth, and performed miracles right in front of people's faces, many still didn't believe that He was of a supernatural realm. They still scoffed, and many didn't follow Him. Some did follow Him, but many didn't. And He was right there, in their midst. Now, this time last year and for a few years, I didn't really believe that Jesus existed as what the NT states as such. For me, I felt Jesus may have existed, but as a human...historically. Perhaps. And then I even let all that go, and didn't give much thought to it all. 

I can almost guarantee you people didn't scoff at Jesus as you say, for one simple reason. The Jesus of the bible never existed.

I'll give you my pet supposition as to what happened: The original Yeshua was a leader in one of the Pharisee, or maybe even Sicarii (who were essentially an even more radical offshoot of the Pharisees) groups in opposition to Roman and Antipater rulers of Iudea. My supposition that his death actually came about because he was planning a rebellion (may never have happened given the small size of his group and lack of his notability) against the Antipater regime who were ruling Iudea as clients of Rome, found out and tried under Jewish law*. His followers who weren't killed were moping around for a few years as a dejected and defeated group until Saul of Tarsus, spotting a gap in the market for his own personal gain, decided to fuse the Jewish god and messianic tradition with the Hellenistic miracle worker tradition and came up with Jesus Christ son of god and redeemer of man as a way to exploit others for profit^.

My reasoning for this is a) the nature of the messianic figure in Jewish mythology, an earthly human ruler come to restore the Jews to power in their promised land (if you look at the most prominent of all the messiahs Simon bar Kochba, this is abundantly clear), b) the descriptions of him in the earliest writings available to us, which pretty clearly paint him as cleaving most closely to the ultra-orthodox Phariseeic (can anybody tell me how to turn the noun Pharisee into an adjective?) views about judaism (it is only with John, the last gospel, written by a clear antisemite that the association with judaism is killed), c) the opposition that Saul himself had from the Jerusalem branch of the cult which contained the people who actually knew Yeshua and what he was, d) the existence within christianity from the start of groups like the Ebionites who retained their judaism while accepting Yeshua as a messiah, and e) the way the bible itself is written. Leaving aside the massive historical and geographical errors within the four books, the bits which describe him as fulfilling prophecy are clearly written by those who didn't understand judaism and were simply cherry picking old prophecies regardless of how they fit or whether they were previously fulfilled (for example the virgin birth mythos in Matthew was referring to a propechy in Isiah which clearly referred to an invasion that was happening back then, and essentially said "if this young pregnant woman gives birth and calls her son Immanuel (god is with us) then god will banish the invaders from the kingdom of Judea before the child leaves infancy, an event which came to pass according to Isiah).

For those reasons I cannot accept that the story of a divine Jesus to be anything but either a legend or a deliberate lie (even if, in all likelihood my pet conjecture is wrong, the bible itself is too confused and self-contradictory to be anything but a tissue of untruth).

*Which is acknowledged by even the four gospels themselves, it was the Sanhedrin who tried Jesus before turning him over to Pilate. If this happened in reality what Pilate would have done was "you tried him, you found him guilty under your law, you kill him". Hence, I find the crucifixion story to be utterly implausible, if Jesus died at the hand of authority it was under jewish law, and he would have either been stoned or hanged from a dead tree, not crucified, a punishment under Roman law for those deemed to have rebelled against Rome.

^Which is why I get annoyed at descriptions of Saul as stupid. To my mind he was an intensely clever, yet immoral man. He was able to create a world religion out of a tissue of cloth, yet it was all for personal gain (well, of course, the whole point of organised religious structure is to enrich and assure the power of those at the top and ensure that the plebeians are kept in their place).