Who Was Jesus - Did He Exist

As we now head into the Christmas season holidays, an article in The Daily Beast looks at the question of who was Jesus.  Not in the sense of the Jesus of the Gospels, but in terms of did he exist and, if he did, who was he.  Past posts on this blog have looked at the fact that much of the Jesus storyline of death and resurrection was not new in the 1st Century.  The Egyptian cult of Isis - which had spread across the Roman Empire had a similar theme with the death and resurrection of Osiris.  And the cult of the Persian god Mithra likewise had parallels.  With so much energy put into Christianity for good and for bad (today's conservative Christians exemplify the bad), it is worth pondering who was Jesus.  Here are article excerpts:

Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don’t measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and—outside of this material—there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him. In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.

This presents biographers with a problem. What can you base his reality on, unless you take it on faith?

The work of recent Christian scholars comes in every size and shape, with few common assumptions. Jesus may variously be regarded as a wandering magician or a Mediterranean peasant, a radical revolutionary (a Zealot) or a mystic or a radical Jew or, indeed, the long-awaited Messiah. Arguments can be mustered from the evidence to support all kinds of theories about his identity and true nature.

Plenty of fairly literal-minded Christians believe simply in the gospel truth. But even among these groups, there are severe differences. Some fundamentalist groups see him as a kind of avenging angel, ready to hurl into the flames of hell those who refuse to “believe.” Countless milder versions of this Jesus exist, including the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Son of Man who, like that shining figure in the Hebrew Book of Daniel, stands before God in our place. As ever, it depends on which verses in the Bible you happen to quote, building a theology on those select references, ignoring any verses that contradict your vision.

One of the great theologians of the twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann, famously said in 1935: “I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.” He understood that the gospels were hardly straightforward biographical accounts but quasi-mythical tales that reflected views of Jesus put forward by various Christian communities in the decades after his death.

[A] lot has changed since Bultmann made that dire pronouncement. A lot of archaeological work has been done in the Middle East, and we have much clearer ideas about what ancient Palestine looked liked. . . . . And yet, we still can’t say that much about Jesus, as a man.

In writing about Jesus, as in my new biography I like to use the word mythos, the Greek word for a story with symbolic contours. This story has both literal heft and poetic levels of association.

So who is Jesus? For me, he’s the central character in the greatest story ever told. It’s a story about a gradually realizing kingdom that lies inside of us. He encouraged us to enter the wider mind of God through attachment to his teaching and example, but he left only one commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” It’s quite simple, this message, but it’s enough.

In the end, there is no proof that Jesus really existed.  As for this single commandment, the commandment is seemingly unknown to today's far right Christians and "family values" organizations that claim to be "Christian." Fear, the embrace of ignorance and hatred of others are the pillars of their belief system.  If Jesus did exist, I suspected he'd be sicked by the behavior of his most vocal followers.