A supernaturally powerful person capable of doing miracles
A traveling philosopher who makes no claims of divinity
A mentally unstable man who is prone to seeing visions
A con man promising people miracles
A regular guy who thinks people should love each other
No one, Jesus never really existed. He is the product of later authors imaginations.
…or what?
What is your educated guess about what you will find in looking for Jesus?
A very charismatic, somewhat eccentric, and polarizing leader.
A hippie with his group of followers.
Several people, some real, some not combined into one non-blue eyed, blond haired package.
If I had to guess I’d say something in between these two. But really I don’t know. If I knew why would I bother with the time machine?
A little of each of the above. Most likely Jesus is an amalgamation of various messianical jewish preachers that existed about that time, one or several of which may have borne the actual name, and one or more of which may actually have been crucified.
The various stories were likely turned into one persons life around 70AD and then cleaned up and purged of contradictory material again at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD).
I think there really was an individual person named Jesus who Christianity was founded after. So I believe I could meet that person if I could travel back in time.
But I don’t believe that person was God or had miraculous powers. I’d even question whether that person made those claims. So I’d vote “traveling philosopher who makes no claims of divinity”.
A supernaturally powerful person capable of doing miracles
A popular drunk with wild ideas.
Probably more this than any of the other suggestions. You’d either love him or hate him, and even if you hated him, you could sort of see why other people would love him.
Just this guy you know?
Atheist here, but I expect I’d find there was a real, historical Jesus. Maybe I don’t frequent enough religious discussions, but there seems to be a dearth of threads concerning whether there was a real Buddha, a real Mohammed, a real Zoroaster, and so on. It’s always JC who seems to get singled out for not having really existed. There have been enough charismatic individual who founded religious movements in historical, even modern, times that I would expect to find a real Jesus. Supernatural powers? No, I don’t think he had any. Nor do I think that Christianity as we have it today necessarily carries much of whatever message he preached. But, yeah, I think there was a Jesus.
Most historians and scholars say a real Jesus almost certainly existed, but they seem to be able to agree on very little about him.
I think Christianity, more likely than not, originated with some sort of real crucifixion of a real Galilean holy man of some sort. He probably was a healer and exorcist and probably led some sort of assault on the Temple in Jerusalem. Other than that, we just don’t have the data to know much. A lot of hypotheses are plausible (excluding genuine supernatural events, of course), but none are provable.
I think you find nothing. The myth was invented long enough after his supposed death that no one alive could verify any of the stories. There will be evidence of a variety of people and situations that might have been used to construct the myth.
There were quite a few guys in Jesus time who claimed to be the Messiah or whose followers made such claims. I believe the Roman historian Josephus verifies that Jesus really existed and was crucified.
However, I don’t believe Jesus intended to start a new religion, and in fact, did not. Christianity was created by Paul.
A great book on this subject is The Laughing Jesus.
My favorite scene in Monty Python’s “life of Brian” is the messiahs in the marketplace.
Jesus would have been one of many wandering preachers of his day.He probably was a decent guy, reasonably well educated, who didnt like the religious/political establishment, and idealistically thought he could bring social justice. Like the hippies of the 60’s.
He was a good public speaker: a bit social protestor, a bit philosopher, and a bit of a showman.
He just happened to draw a little too much attention to himself.
A rebel who would be king.
Maybe much more religiously hardcore than most Christians expect. A little like al-Zarqawi or Jim Jones as a Hasidic rabbi?
Maybe not that scary. Maybe something like Baha’ullah or the early Sikh gurus, persons which are certainly historical.
Maybe 2000 years from now there’ll be a message board where people will debate whether or not there really was an L. Ron Hubbard or whether or not he was made up by 22nd century new age gurus as an amalgamation of 20th and 21st century teachers.
Josephus describes a number of would be Messiahs who got themselves killed by the Romans. The passage where he appears to be describing Jesus is believed by practically all historians to be heavily forged, but many argue that it still has an authentic core. A 2nd Century Roman historian named Tacitus also says that the Christian religion (which he calls an “evil”) was named after someone called “Christus” who was put to death by Pilate.
Tacitus is mostly accepted as genuine, but he could just as easily have gotten his information from Christians as from any independent source.
Which other religious figurehead is actually ascribed to be the son of god? And what mentally stable kind of person would make such a claim about himself? Because several parts of the story seem to be heavily embroidered, skeptics tend to feel that those things weaken the likeliness veracity of the accounts overall. Maybe they all got ahold of some of those red and white mushrooms from Scandinavia or something.