(February 27, 2018 at 11:38 pm)drfuzzy Wrote: ...Jesus, IF he existed, was a suicidal loony egomaniac Jewish preacher. He pissed off the religious leaders AND the Romans and he had to die. IF he existed.
This is what I believe as well. The contemporaneous evidence for Jesus as a mortal man is weak. There may have been such a preacher, but if he existed he had no particular significance or impact to the people in the area where he was supposed to have been roaming for three years. There are neither Roman nor Jewish nor "interesting chap I encountered while in Jerusalem" foreign accounts circa 30-35 CE. None at all.
The first mention of the Jesus character is a minimum of two generations later (circa 70 CE at the earliest), written in Greek by people who almost certainly were not eyewitnesses and who contradicted one another on various details.
Even if Jesus was a real person, I believe that he died and stayed dead.
