I may have to recheck, but my memory is that the general populace didn’t have any idea who Jesus is until he starts to speak, and then they only know of him from what he says. There’s no indication that he is widely known, either directly, or by word of mouth.
The Bible does indicate that, after Jesus’ death, some number of his disciples went out to found churches. But the closest thing to an indication that any of them spoke publicly during his life, is St. Paul’s declaration that he personally prosecuted Christians before converting to Christianity himself. But then again, Paul also says that he had no knowledge of Christian doctrine before his divine revelation, so how he managed to prosecute Christian beliefs and not know anything about Christianity is quite the question. Overall, he doesn’t seem like a very reliable witness. It is also not clear exactly how long after Jesus’ death, Paul became active. Various sources list Jesus’ resurrection and appearance to the disciples as occurring three days, 40 days, or all the way to 550 days after Jesus’ death. Paul may have prosecuted Christians for years before he converted, so there’s still not a ton of indication that they ever said anything publicly during Jesus’ lifetime.
The OP reminds me a bit of all the “How did the dinosaurs fit on Noah’s Ark?” threads we’ve been having lately. That is, it assumes that the story in the Bible is 100% accurate, and then tries to find holes in the story. Except of course, we have no reason to believe the stories in the Bible are any sort of accurate, and even if you did believe them, the answer is “It was a miracle.”
So, if you read the Bible to find out about Jesus, and then ask yourself what Jesus really said and really thought, but you don’t believe what the Bible says, then there’s nothing left. All we know is what some random people wrote down 2000 years ago. Nothing else exists. So you’re like the guy who is trying to figure out what Sauron was really like, but who doesn’t trust what JRR Tolkein wrote about him.
Not really. The question doesn’t suppose that the bible is entirely untrue, merely that:
all of the supernatural miracle, son-of-god stuff isn’t true because frankly it’s preposterous.
all of the other stuff is fairly unreliable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true.
It’s entirely possible (and in my mind likely) that some figure actually existed to form the seed from which Christianity grew. These things happen - just ask the Mormons.
And given that this character can’t actually be the son of god then it’s a perfectly valid question to ask ‘well, who was he then?’.
King of the Jews, which would fit with Messianic claims, might get him stoned due to the population wishing to disassociate themselves from sedition. Son of God might have produced worse results, or at best, cries of "get out of here with this goyisher nonsense. The Greeks and Romans had children of deities roaming around, not Jews.
Two godlike beings come to this planet and start speaking with mankind. Which would you percieve as god? The first one who says that you’re doing a great job with you’re mining metals and clearing of land and don’t worry about destroying other species in you’re quest for advancement of mankind. The second one says that you have destroyed the beautiful world I gave you and killed some of the most meek species on earth for things you did not really need so I will destroy all mankind. Which Godlike being would most Americans try to destroy?
Of course it’s likely that the stories in the New Testament were based on a really existing person. Likewise, scientists have discovered that there really was a country called “Egypt”, although they didn’t call it Egypt. There really was a city called Jerusalem, in fact you can go and see it today.
So I think it’s almost certain that there really was a Jesus who really was some sort of preacher in Judea 2000 years ago. What was this man really like, though? Well, the only things we know about him were what was written down in what is now called the New Testament. So other than that, we’ve got nothing. And throwing out all the miracles but believing the rest is kind of ridiculous. There’s no more reason to believe he chased the moneychangers from the Temple than that he walked on water.
I mean, we could do the same thing with George Washington and the cherry tree. It doesn’t contain any obvious supernatural elements that would allow us to dismiss it, but that doesn’t make it true either. Luckily, George Washington lived only 200 years ago, and we can trace the cherry tree story to one guy who just made it up. If all we knew about George Washington was was Parson Weem’sLife of Washington how the heck could we sort out the “real” George Washington from the pious mythologizing? Other than, the stories were probably based on a real person who probably really was some sort of political leader in 18th century America, which we can prove via archeological records actually existed as a country at the time.
My answer to the OP is that we don’t know enough about what Jesus actually said or thought about himself to give an answer. It’s possible he thought he was the Jewish Messiah. It’s not likely at all that he thought he was God. There are a number of hypotheticals which could work. Bart Ehrman thinks he believed in an imminent coming of the “son of man,” an allusion to the Messianic figure in the Book of Daniel who mentions “one like a son of Adam” (i.e. a human being) descending from the clouds. Ehrman also thinks that Jesus believed he would bring about this event, and the subsequent Messianic age with his symbolic assault on the Temple, and that his followers decided only after the crucifixion that Jesus himself was Messiah who would return in glory from the sky as prophecied in Daniel.
If Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah (in the Jewish sense of the word, meaning the hereditary heir to the throne of David), then he believed himself, ipso facto to be the “King of the Jews,” and the “Son of God” (which was an honorific title for Davidic kings, not a literal attribution of divine parenthood). Obviously, if he had any Messianic or imminent apocalyptic beliefs at all he was wrong, and delusional to some degree or another. I don’t think pure, cynical fraud is likely, though it can’t be ruled out and is still not as unlikely as anything supernatural.
Since we only had oral tradition that bridged the gap between the small number of people who actually met whoever inspired the Jesus myth (and I do believe it was probably inspired by something instead of just invented after the fact entirely) there is probably a massive difference between the things this historical thinker/preacher said and what stories have been told about him.
He could have been a relatively benign philosopher espousing a certain ethic or something, and maybe he never made any supernatural claims or claimed to work any miracles.
If Beowulf was based on a real man, that real man was probably a genuinely great warrior but he definitely didn’t fight a monster like Grendel or Grendel’s mother or die fighting a dragon.
It’s impossible to say what the men who may have inspired the Jesus or Beowulf legends thought, because our knowledge of their stories may be totally different than their real stories. So it isn’t fair to necessarily claim Jesus was a fraud, we have no idea what “historical Jesus” claimed, if anything.
The stoning and running Him out of town was do to Him exposing the shortcomings of the current religious authorities and not the above claims you state (which your claim doesn’t even make sense).
State you are the son of God and mainly authorities will usually leave you alone, but challenge the authority and you are usually in for a world of hurt. Try it next time you are pulled over for a traffic stop, claim you are the son of God, you may even get off, claim that the officers authority is invalid and expect to be in handcuffs.
My reference to “neither you, Simon, nor the fifty thousand” notwithstanding, I still don’t see any reason to conclude with any degree of certainty that (the assumed historical) Jesus made grandiose theistic claims of himself. He needn’t have been widely known for followers to disseminate their own claims in close proximity, possibly even simultaneous, to his preaching. All we can say is that the biblical record is in some respect fishy on this issue.
The OP is sort of a take of the ‘Jesus is liar, lunatic, or lord’ argument C.S. Lewis made in the mid-20th century, and apparently (I didn’t know this part until just now) very similar arguments were made by a variety of other people going back to around 1800. It’s really just as a guessing game.
That occurred to me a moment ago, and I just returned to this thread to mention it. The persuasiveness of the “trilemma”, as it’s often known, hinges upon a biblical record of reasonable historicity, purporting to demonstrate a mutual inconsistency between the statements
Jesus claimed to be God
Jesus was a wise teacher (or some variation)
Jesus was not God
Irrespective of whether the argument works — it doesn’t, really, because he could (say) be wise and nevertheless insane — it is demonstrably silly on the face of it if we can’t even figure out whether (1) is true.
This claim is also in the Gospels:
Mark 3:21
When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
John 10:20
Many of them said, “He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?”
Based on the possibility in scriptures brought up by Jesus’: 1 Family, 2 Authorities I would say it’s safe to say the question has gone back a lot longer.
If you want to look at this academically, you might want to start with the Jesus Seminar, which had a bunch of scholars going back to the source texts of the Gospels to try to learn what was authentic – or at least what were the oldest sourced materials.
Based on the original texts and allowing for the imprecision of oral tradition, the Seminar concluded that Jesus was an itinerant preacher from Nazareth with a fondness for social outcasts, who told a few memorable parables, said a handful of things (but by no means all) attributed to him in passages such as the Sermon on the Mount, did one or two faith healings and who was eventually put to death because he was a troublemaker, but not because he claimed to be the Son of God.
All the Son of God/Messiah stuff was hung on later by followers.