Assuming that there was a historical figure that we refer to as Jesus Christ, what were his own thoughts about himself?
Did he really think he was the savior?
Did he really think he was the son of God?
Did he really think he performed all those “miracles”.
Did he really think that one day he was going to judge the entire planet and everyone who ever lived?
Or was he, as I suspect, a con man who woke up every day and thought* “I can’t believe these suckers are falling for this crap!”.*
Real experts will be along shortly but my understanding is that he didn’t say much to elevate himself at all. There is precious little to suggest he even said he was “son of God”. It’s his disciples who talked him up.
To my knowledge we have little if any objective*, direct information about what he said. Mainly, what we have is a collection of claims about what he said by people who never met him and who had an open agenda of pushing Christianity.
Personally I suspect hat he was more of a lunatic than a con man, since a con man would be less likely to get himself crucified; there’s no profit in it after all. Although he could of course have been a con man that screwed up big time.
This is my view. I think, at best, he might have thought himself as a prophet or something like that.
He’s not the messiah…
With what motive?
Wouldn’t # 3 be “Prophet”? 
Money, power, women, acclaim; the sort of things fake preachers always go for.
As opposed to the preachers who really *are *talking to god? :dubious:
No; the ones who actually think they are.
Are you really looking for debte/answers here, or just interested in an anti-Christian circle jerk?
Pkbites, it is impossible to answer any of your questions, since they are all asking what “he” (JC) thought.
Not only do we have no record of what he said first-hand or even in his time, so much of what religious belief exists, both recorded in the bible and preached by a church, is only derived from the supposed sayings of JC. Paul extended and interpreted the concept, but he is only one of many.
Right, but does it make very much sense to accept the biblical account of the activities and claims of Jesus, but reject the account of what happened as a result of those activities? (which didn’t often include the outcomes you listed)
That’s (probably) not true. If you read through the Bible, every time that Jesus talks to the general public, he ends up having to run away as the people pelt him with stones and whatever else, teasing him about his grandiose claims about being the King of the Jews or the Son of God, or whatever else. I’ll grant that the quotes which are attributed to him don’t include such assertions, but it seems awfully odd for random people on the street to have decided this about him all on their own, sometime during the course of whatever real speech it was that he was making.
A debate that simply presupposes that Christianity is not true is not an “anti-Christian circle jerk”.
But that’s not inconsistent with the thesis that Jesus never (or rarely) made grandiose claims, and it was instead his disciples talking him up. (Indeed, I’m rather fond of the relevant portrayal in Jesus Christ Superstar: he preached but was noncommittal as to true identity; it was Simon rousing the crowds.) Not that I think there’s any way to discern how it all went down one way or the other.
It was probably ianzin once, who wrote about Cold Readers. Most of them probably started as regular children, who just happened to be good at reading body language. Their parents and people they knew remarked upon the child’s ability to “sense” things about people, and so the child begins to believe that he has a power. Being such a person is pretty special, and people like to be special. So even if they start to get a niggling feeling like maybe they’re not practicing magic at all, they have a strong impetus to fool themselves, develop methods of giving arcane, meaningless answers, and to ask questions of such breadth that they’ll always hit.
Of course, some might realize that this is all bullshit and continue anyways, because it’s a living, it makes people happy, the other person should know better, etc.
Others may never have even started as children, they simply learned cold reading and entered into it as a business. AKA true con men.
Overall, there’s going to be a wide spectrum, of varying levels of complicity.
The case for Jesus isn’t great, however. He was born in a small shanty town for day workers, who were helping to rebuild a local city. He eventually ended up leaving, because the people there threw him out and threatened him if he ever came back. I would usually expect a child prodigy in philosophy, cold reading, etc. as being popular in such a place, not thrown out as a scoundrel – unless he was. There just isn’t much room for new marks in a tiny village like that.
Once out in the greater world, the best he was able to manage as a spiritualist was to join up as a follower of John the Baptist, and then to pull maybe a half-dozen of his least reputable followers – out of hundreds or thousands (enough to make the local government fearful of him) – after John’s death.
He lived in the slums with lepers and prostitutes, and after his first venture to preach at the temple, ended up cussing out the local priests and then either had to flee from Jerusalem for a year (John) or go into hiding in the slums (Matthew, Mark, Luke). If the first instance, then that only resulted in him coming back a second time to Jerusalem, making another try at preaching to the masses, resulting in him having to flee the local people, and then to hide back in the slums. At this point, a general warrant for his arrest went out. One of Jesus’ few followers immediately ratted on him, and when the police went to pick him up, the follower hand pointed out who Jesus was, since none of the police had any real idea who he was. All of Jesus’ other followers then, immediately, abandoned him and fled the city, disavowing all knowledge of who he was.
When Jesus went up on trial, no one came to witness in his favor. When the court asked the local populace whether they should pardon him, most of them had no idea who he was, and those who did laughed and threw stones at him for claiming himself to be the King of the Jews.
From what we know about the “church” that Jesus left behind him, all that we know is that during a famine in Jerusalem, Paul came from outside of the city with bags of gold, and talked to the remaining disciples. At this point, he told them that he had all of the knowledge of Jesus, directly revealed to him, and that Jesus wanted him to preach to the gentiles, a message saying that none of this Jewish nonsense – kosher food, nipped willies, etc. – is necessary. They all agreed to everything he said and signed off on his divine revelation. Later, Paul came back with more money.
Once you strip away the magic, the story that is told in the Bible is not one that paints a portrait of a bunch of wholesome, wise people. They have some nice quotes that list off some wise and philosophical things, but no one that they talk to among the general populace ever reacts like they just heard something wise and philosophical. It’s just as likely that these are quotations that survived from John the Baptist, or were written by later authors, based on Paul’s teachings. Nothing that we know about Jesus portrays him as being particularly adept at recruitment, as being a particularly good orator, nor as being particularly wholesome. He liked to hang around with prostitutes, he got thrown out of his own home town, when the police came, it seems to read like he had a personal bodyguard with a sword (like he was ever-vigilant for attacks on his person),* and everyone he ever talked to in public pelted him with stones and wished death upon him.
The only evidence from any of this that he was actively malicious is the fact that he was thrown out of his hometown. A majority of the earliest Gnostic sects that later claimed Jesus as a founder also had a principal focus on Sophia, the “Bride of Christ”, and sensuality:
The Gnostic Jesus - Thomasine Sacraments (see note about the Bridal Chamber)
http://www.reuniting.info/wisdom/nag_hammadi_sacrament_bridal_chamber
If there’s one thing that cultists share in common, diddling the cult babes is a biggy, and I would say points to underhanded intentions, conscious or not.
I’d go with “confused,” or simply “mistaken.” Don’t forget, Jesus lived in a time and place where/when it was a lot easier for a non-delusional person to believe certain things than it is now.
Since he didn’t exist (or, at least, the Gospels is no picture of any actual man), I’ll have to go with “what?”
The questions the OP poses don’t presuppose anything about Christianity. It is possible that he thinks these things because they are, in fact, true. The OP still poisons the well by suspecting he’s a conman.
That said, even as a Christian myself, I have my doubts about how much of what was claimed he said and did actually happened. I don’t think it’s unlikely that there was some embellishments in the time between when they happened and they were talked about and when they were actually written down. Hell, I’ve even had events in my own life that, over time, I remember as more and more grandiose than they actually were when I’ve gone back and read about them or seen a video or whatever. Now add that a few people to the chain and several more decades and I can see a lot of things that very well may have been miracles becoming something a lot more than they really were even without deliberate distortion.
But as was said, it was important to a lot of people back then to establish that he was who they claimed he was whereas today, someone saying that someone did something without any sort of proof doesn’t count for a whole lot. So, even if they are embellishments, it really doesn’t matter to me because the important parts aren’t the claims about who he is but what he has to say.
Regardless, even if we suppose that Christianity is false, I still have a hard time believing that Jesus was a conman. He would have likely just been wrong or maybe even a little nuts. But his behavior doesn’t seem consistent with a conman as he was fighting against the establishment rather than trying to take advantage of it and he ultimately got crucified. Surely a conman would know that ruffling too many feathers of powerful people wouldn’t have been a good idea. So, if he was one, he was a bad one.