A brief follow-up to my Jesus Never Existed post.
For the record, I believe Jesus of Nazareth existed. I believe he was a great and gifted teacher and healer. I also believe Jesus as Christ only happened when his followers placed that on him.
As for "no first-hand accounts," I wrote my Jesus Never Existed essay to acknowledge this truth. The accounts we have of Jesus of Nazareth are, so far, not first-hand accounts. And, to that, I say, "so what?" Going back that far in history it's not very common to have first-hand accounts of anything. And, as a wise theologian wrote to me, "Proof cannot be an operative word here, since we're dealing with the past. The only question that counts is historical probability."
Moving on to discussions of the resurrection I'll happily explain that on every third or fourth day I'm perfectly content with that as reality. The other days I'm more comfortable with it as metaphor. What makes me a sort of wacky Christian is that I don't care. Both work for me. If I'm celebrating poetry or a miracle can change from moment to moment.
Let's love our neighbors, care for the least of those among us, look beyond ourselves for strength (some of us will go to god for that strength, others go elsewhere), and work for social justice every day. If some of us call that christianity, why argue?
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Thursday, March 12, 2009
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4 comments:
In fact it is very common to have contemporary accounts of people even farther back in history than the alleged Jesus, and particularly people who made such an impact as he is alleged to have made. The fact that this man, who was stirring up such unrest as to require him to be executed by the religious and occupation authorities working in concert, is not mentioned by contemporary chroniclers, is a death-blow to the "historical probability" he existed at all. Imagine if I told you about a major social and political figure of the 1970s, who challenged the government and was eventually put to death, but you couldn't find a single newspaper report, magazine feature or TV documentary which even mentioned him in passing. What would you think of my story then?
Whether Christ existed or not, in my non-Christian opinion, is secondary to what the stories about him illustrate.
It's like I say to people, "Do I believe he was the Messiah? Possibly. The only Messiah? No. Do I think the teachings are valuable? Yes."
I don't care either. :) In my life there's a lot more argument over whether you're allowed to eat corn on Passover. Funny what gets people going.
How refreshing. I moved to Maine from Kansas. There I felt suffocated by pious Christians.
Your last paragraph is good, except that Christians aren't all about doing good and fighting for what is right. Sometimes they fight to deny gays the right to marriage and to dumb down education science standards or to deny women the freedom to have an abortion or to limit condom distribution in Africa.
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