Greetings all,
Why is it so hard for some people to believe the Jesus was just a man with a message and a great marketing strategy?
Why do these people HAVE to take the bible so literally? Isn’t being kind to one another enough? Why must he be this magical, water walking Son of God?
I know this probably is a topic that has been beat to death, but I want to know!
Anybody want to take bets on how long before it gets moved to GD?
I think it has to do with that whole return from death thing. I doubt I could pull of a stunt like that. One could say that it didn’t really happen that way, but then you’ve got to discount the apostles as being fools or liars. Once you get to that point, you can’t really have a whole lot of faith in Christian churches. I think that’s why so many Christians have difficulty believing that Jesus was no more than a cool guy who happened to be really great at parties.
From a General Questions perspective:
No one has to view Jesus as anything other than a wandering preacher with a decent message.
Christians view him as much more because Christianity, dating back to the first century, has regarded him as God-become-man. It is not merely a question of believing that the New Testament is “correct,” it is a matter of believing that the New Testament (and all the subsequent commentators, beginning with people who were writing their thoughts even before that New Testament was completed) expresses the truth of his divinity. The belief in the divinity of Jesus is, pretty much, what makes a person a Christian.
(Yes, there are people who identify themselves as Christian who do not accept his divine status. A discussion of whether or not they are “true” Christians, however, would clearly be a matter for the GD Forum. Historically, the overwhelming number of people who have identified themselves as Christian (and the vast majority of the churches/denominations they have established or joined) have accepted Jesus as both God and man.)
What Tom said.
In the three gospels that give us the clearest picture of Jesus the Man, he is nowhere identified with God or any ramification thereof. In Mark, he is the Son of God; in Matthew, Israel’s promised Messiah; in Luke, the compassionate healer of human bodies and souls. In each, he is portrayed as Tom says.
In his discourses in John, Jesus uses the “I am” statements which are effective claims to identity with the Hebrew God whose name for himself translates as “I am.” And Paul produces a mystic superstructure of Christhood that seems only tangentially related to the man portrayed in the Gospels.
One added thought: the whole deal with Easter – Jesus rising from the dead – is something that skeptics have a great deal of fun debunking. The accounts vary as much as typical eyewitness testimony recorded in variant sources might be expected to. However, this much is key: typically, humanist rabbis do not have followers going to their death for claiming that they came back to life after being martyred. This one did. You need not accept any part of the doctrine, but you do need to face the idea that people willingly risked death to proclaim that Jesus rose from the grave. Religious hysteria? Or a life-changing event?
I heard a sermon at a baptism once that equated the incarnation with the new baby: as the child was the love of its parents taking human form, so the incarnation of Jesus was the love of god for mankind taking human form.
As always, YMMV. But it’s not an irrational doctrine, just one that doesn’t fit a non-god worldview.
Ha! That’ll do it! Also impressive was the whole water to wine thing. I can turn beer into urine, but that’s about it, so you’ve gotta be impressed by that.
Seriously, though, the question proceeds from a false premise. It is not particularly difficult to believe that he was “just another apostate rabbi with a good message,” as shown by the many people who believe exactly that. But, as explained, one chooses to have faith in divinity based on the texts and what one takes out of them.
And for a discussion of that, I’d like to indroduce you to the Great Debates forum.
Eerrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…now, you’re not trying to argue that every movement, belief, doctrine, ideology, or claim to messiah-hood which has inspired people to die (or to kill) is necessarily true, or even should that its truth-claims should be given greater weight, are you? I suppose that one could say the Heaven’s Gate members, the late denizens of Jonestown, or those poor suckers in Uganda all had a “life-changing” event, all right.
No, that slope’s not slippery enough.
I’m arguing that, whatever your views on the historicity or other origin of the resurrection myth (allowing it its fair identity as a myth, true or not), the fact that almost immediately thereafter, according to the available accounts (biased as they may be), people who had known the historical person started making this extraordinary claim and that it had somehow changed their lives to such an extent that they were willing to die rather than deny it, indicate that there is something worth examining in depth here. I don’t see even certifiable lunatics doing the same sort of thing over Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate or the Branch Davidian phenomenon. And this semi-legendary historical figure that is claimed to have been raised from the dead has supposedly appeared to some otherwise hard-nosed good thinkers down through the ages (as well as to some True Believers whose evidence is shaky to a skeptic to say the best about it). That’s as far as I care to push the historicity of the Resurrection as a non-religious historical item, but I think that the very fact that something interpreted as it influenced these people to take the martyr stands (and to portray themselves as stupid and cowardly prior to it) does have some objective merit for discussion, without the question of faith entering into it.
Of course, if you believe the Bible is true, or at minimum that some phenomenon occurred that satisfies your standards for “God raised Jesus from the dead,” then there is no question at issue. But that’s religious belief.
I’d like to attack the Resurrection question from the point of view of what might have motivated these people, on the assumption that the accounts of their martyrdoms is true. And what criteria we might use for judging the various accounts in the N.T. as factual narrative slanted to a Christian outloook vs. myth vs. urban legend vs. misinterpretation of something vs. midrash. And I’d be the first to admit that my viewpoint is tainted by my faith.
About that word “apostate”, other that the fact/claim of JC being the Messiah/Son of G-d/G-d, his preachings are not all that more radical than was Hillels, the “first rabbi”.
Necessarily true, no. Greater weight, yes.
I think Richie Ashburn was the greatest defensive center fielder of all time. Moreover, I have stats to back my claim. Nonetheless, I would not die for this belief.
I have no objective, empirical proof of the divinity of Christ, but I would die for that.
That is an indication of how much weight I give to my religious experience. Insofar as you think me an intelligent person, you have to give my opinion/conviction some weight. And if many others agree with me…
Like the Chinese restaurants used to say: “A Billion people can’t be wrong!” 
I don’t think so really. I am not a believer in magic, but I have seen men do some really amazing things. Of course they don’t actually claim to have mystical powers, but the principle could be the same. So rather than say they were fools, one might think merely that they were fooled. And that happens to the best of us at times.
And outstanding athleticism.
Worship of Richie Ashburn may be tolerated, but you’ll run into doctrinal disputes if you start referring to him, Jim Bunning and Dick Allen as the Holy Trinity.
I agree wholeheartedly with Furt. And, if things go as I have a feeling they will, he and I will have the opportunity to put ourselves to the test in about a dozen years.
Turning to more significant things, it should be obvious to you all that Tris Speaker is and has always been the greatest defensive center fielder, though Willie Mays might be a reasonable close second. Ashburn was wonderfully talented, to be sure, but hardly moves into the true pantheon of the greats! 
I think this sort of evades the point I was making, which is that a large number of people were willing to die for Jim Jones or David Koresh in the first place. Now, it’s true that following of David Koresh has dropped off quite a bit. But, there are still people out there who follow the teachings of David Koresh. In other words, Jesus was not the only person to be reviled, to die in disgrace, and still have people who continued to revere him. (I could also bring up Joseph Smith and the Mormons.) At this point, who knows what will happen to the Branch Davidians. A hundred years from now they may have vanished without a trace, or they may have turned into a religion as widespread as Mormonism. Two thousand years from now, people may be dating things “A.K.”, in the Year of Koresh. I don’t really think so, but who knows?
Okay, clearly if people are willing to die for a truth-claim, then I must take seriously just how seriously they take the truth-claim. But I don’t necessarily give any greater weight to the truth of the truth-claim.
Just curious, but what did you mean by that last part? Are you getting pre-millennial on us, or is this just an intimation of personal mortality?
No, the Holy Trinity is Schmidt, Rose, and Bowa, the core of the 1980 Phillies infield. 
LC,
I believe that some people today DO view the bible as fact. I’m sure the early scholars of Christianity had an entirely different purpose in mind when they wrote about the life and teachings of Jesus. They most likely intended these writings not to be taken literally but more in a spiritual nature.
As far as people seeing Jesus as this cosmic superhero, I myself have only looked upon his re-re-re-retranslated teachings as a good way to lead my life.
If faith is all takes to believe in a magical divine being such as Jesus, then why throw his pet flying elephant into the mix. What?!, you never heard of Jookie? Oh come on,all it takes is “faith”.
Peace
I’m not so sure about that. Both the Apostle’s Creed (which is probably not literally Apostolic, but does seem to date back at least to the 300’s to 400’s, and presumably began to take shape somewhat earlier than that) and the
Nicene Creed seem to emphasize a certain concrete factuality: Jesus really died and was really buried and was really resurrected. 1 Corinthians 15:14 is also pretty emphatic:
The Gospel of John–clearly the last composed of the Gospels–also makes a point of the physical reality of Jesus’ resurrection:
Actually, I believe various Gnostic sects did have a “spiritualized” view of Jesus, and that much of what is now accepted as the canonical New Testament was written to counter such views. So, the “literalist” view of Jesus goes back a long way in Christianity.
To MEBuckner:
Re Paul:
I’m not 100% sure, but I believe that Paul nowhere mentions a physical resurrection of Christ. In fact, at one point, he lists all of the people to whom Jesus has appeared. He lists himself last, even though it is clear from his other epistles and the book of Acts that Paul’s vision of Jesus was entirely spiritual, not corpereal. This implies that he views the other appearances of Jesus similarly.
If someone has a verse to prove me wrong, I’ll be happy to retract my statement. Remember, that “Paul” refers only to the seven or eight epistles actually written by him, not the rest of the pastoral ones that are falsely attributed to him.
I don’t even believe he existed as a man. I’m pretty sure he’s a fictional character, like Uncle Sam.
Which supports my theory that the most influential person of all time was not Jesus, but whoever had the great idea of hiding his body. Political and social revolutionaries seem to have little difficulty extrapolating wildly from the merest of occurrances.