I don’t care if he was purple, his message was be kind to each other and we’ve failed to grasp even that simple philosophy.
If he actually lived it might even matter.
There are historical records of somebody named Jesus that lived at the time. The Bible story is just horse shit. He was an apocalyptic preacher just like today, and probably had undiagnosed schizophrenia, thought he could talk to God, and was the son of God. Plenty of people think that today, and we put them in Institutions instead of create a whole ass religion out of their life.
I will say this, I can’t think of a thing Jesus says in the Bible that isn’t pretty based. He prioritized pragmatism over rules and protocol, compassion and understanding over judgment, generosity over greed, forgiveness over scorn, acts over words. Everyone following his death like Paul seem to be the ones that start to miss the point.
The desire to control people who follow compassionate teachings is what turned sound advice into the dogma we see today. It’s an unfortunate history, not unique to Christianity.
It’s the institutionalisation of religion that’s a problem.
If everyone would just focus on finding their own connection with god/the universe/whatever, nobody would have a problem.Fuck churches and using religion for politics.
That’s why we have the separation of church and state at least - although not enough and currently it’s backpedaling…
I agree he said a lot of cool stuff for sure but ultimately he was an apocalyptic preacher. I think it’s immoral to tell people they need to accept your God or you’ll go to hell, personally, so that’s one not cool thing.
“Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Pretty messed up given that belief is not something you can even really choose.
Yup. Born and die in a place where it wasn’t possible to believe because knowledge hadn’t spread yet? Believe it or not straight to hell.
There’s no such thing as hell in the Bible. Jesus said sinners would cease to exist.
I’m not a biblical scholar but my understanding was there was biblical basis for it. Especially mentioned by Jesus as he was an apocalyptic preacher. Something like this sounds like it fits the bill pretty well:
The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Like I said though I’m not a biblical scholar. Although I’m not sure simply being denied an infinite reward is that much better really. It’s still effectively an infinite punishment for something you have no control over.
Reminds me of the classic Bill Hicks bit about Jesus and crosses.
Fucking paulists ruined Christianity
I agree. His motivations were purely political in order to keep people in line when he realized this new movement wasn’t going away any time soon.
Which is why on one hand we have Jesus calling for freedom of oppression, while Paul was telling slaves to obey their masters, even the cruel ones
Religion has always been politically motivated to control people.
Umm there’s a few
When he spoke of division instead of peace (Matthew 10:34-36, Luke 12:51-53)
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Acting like a gate keeper of Salvation (John 14:6)
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Slavery and servanthood (Luke 12:47-48)
“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows.”
Gentiles as ‘Dogs’ (Matthew 15:21-28)
When a Canaanite woman asks for help, Jesus initially replies: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
There’s a few more, but I’m too lazy to keep going. The problem with the bible is it tried to be too many things at once. Especially trying to sell the concept of fear and love in one, which isn’t possible.
Knew a theology professor (ended up in his class for credits somehow) who went with the “multiple Jesus’s” theory. Apparently it’s quite possible that stories of a variety of healers/figures got combined into the Jesus mythos. Explains a lot of the time and geographical inconsistencies with the historical record iirc
Could be, it always interesting to get theology professors take on it. A lot of times they were preachers who went into it to understand “god” more, or historical Jesus, and rhen come out of it an atheist or agnostic at least.
I feel like this professor pissed off a lot of students who joined his class expecting sermons or something. Did more to reinforce my atheism than anything else. He was a good dude
The best argument for Jesus’ existence comes from Christopher Hitchens.
It goes like this: We know the nativity story is made up because of the census. There was a census near the time, but it was after Harrod’s death and cannot fit the story. But why fabricate the nativity? Probably because Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to be born in the “city of David”: Bethlehem. So then, if Jesus was invented whole cloth, why not make him Jesus of Bethlehem and save the aggravation?
Yeshua of Nazareth is a historically confirmed individual. He was real, really the son of a god? Probably not.
Since it was a fairly common name, you might as well say John from Richmond is a confirmed individual.
Yes, because historians were like “yeah there was a guy named that, so this religious book must be right about him existing.”
Don’t be daft.
Right, that’s kind of what I’m saying, the book mentions a person with a name and location (ish). Then finding a guy there when the name is fairly common does not equate all things said about him to be true. Far from it it seems. Especially if the book has fantastical claims outside the realm of reality about said person and is inconsistent on his story.
At best you get a King Arthur story, was there a king or ruler in said period for (part of) England? Probably. Did he become king because he pulled out a magical sword from the rock? I would assume not.
There are even stories that Arthur never died and will return one day…
There are historical accounts that align with some of the events that as recorded in the Bible. The person existed and went around claiming to be the son of a god. This we know. The rest of it is myth and legend.
He existed alright but we have zero idea if he claimed to be the son of God. That was added much later after his death.
Jesus could in fact be an algamation of various men at the time who led the religious/social movement that would eventually become Christianity, and not all early versions claimed him to be the son of God. Some even claimed him to be a new God here to rescue us from the original God who was harsh, vindictive and punishing. Lots of wild shit.
So even the “he said he was the son of God” is a myth and legend.
But there definitely was a dude who was alive back then who had a LOT of complaints concerning the church and the government.
We have an American commercial illustrator named Warner Sallman to blame for the canonical Jesus’ melanin deficit.
That’s a ridiculous claim.
Here’s a picture of Jesus’ baptism from Normandy, painted in 1185.
Plenty of others here: https://smarthistory.org/standard-scenes-from-the-life-of-christ-in-art/
Europeans tended to paint Jesus as white because they didn’t understand there were no photos or movies or TV around, so someone in Norman France didn’t know there was an alternative possibility.
After reading that I just had an idea for what I think would be a good premise for a film. In the 70s Jesus “returns” in the US somewhere, but as someone who gets labelled as a black man, noone believes him. Because he keeps getting knocked down at every turn due to systemic racism, and because he is so fed-up with the “White Jesus” trope he joins the Black Panther Party. He ends up being shot by a cop. Final shot slow-zooms in to show cop’s name on a tag. First name Judas.
i think it goes back a little further than some dude from the US…
I was going to paste the same link. :) Have my upvote instead.
I have family, DEVOUT Christians, that live in the actual holy land. I asked them “who is that?” in response to their posting a picture of white-as-fuck Jesus on the Facebook page for the family village. They have yet to respond
Levantine people don’t have very dark skin, they definitely aren’t as white as Western Europeans though
All the applying of modern ethnic categories here is making my head spin.
I mean, rendering Jesus as a blonde guy is weird, but the way the pushback is parsed is just about as weird in the exact same way.
Modern Levant and Levant people three thousand years ago are both different in appearance. You can thank the Romans and Crusaders from Europe for changing this.
To expand on this with some small context albeit way older than the Romans. Egyptians gave the Peleset land in the Levant. Theorised that they were warrior peoples of the sea and the Philistines of biblical text somewhere in the late second millennium BC before the bronze age colapse. There is an incredible documentary by Pete Kelly (History Time) on youtube. Well worth the watch. Another great video he did about the Akkadians called The first Empire. He also did a great video about the Hittites. His whole channel is a goldmine of knowledge of the ancient world.
Any way the ancient world is filled with peoples from all over, moving around. Trade was a major factor. War was another. People from all over the Mediterranean and beyond mixed knowledge, their trades, their crafts, blood on battlefields and likely genes. Probably long before there was a written word pressed in clay.
Were all muts.
Ancient but Romans weren’t even really white. More olive toned.
There aren’t any white people in the Bible.
All Europeans are white… You mean to tell me Italy is not in Europe or that the amount of melanin in their skin is inconsequential?
no white people in the Bible
What about the Greeks?
I could give two shits about the Bible, but what you are saying is dumb as fuck.
Like I said, more Olive toned. Sorry it offends you but ancient Europeans, especially people in the Italian peninsula and Greece didn’t exactly look like the Europeans of today, being as most of them came from a different part of the world
They weren’t white people who left the middle east, they were middle eastern people who eventually turned white due to the different climate conditions of the area.
Not dumb as fuck, nuanced. History is neat like that
Good info. Looks like I’m the one here who is dumb as fuck.
Even relatively recently, Italians weren’t really considered “white”, especially by Americans. The KKK considered them “coloured” people with their olive skin and dangerous Catholicism. There was a big wave of “italiapobia” in the late 19th/early 20th century.
The governer of Louisiana in 1911 described Italians as “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous”.
People can be pretty terrible when it comes to race and ethnicity.
Got any further readings for this? Thank you for sharing that knowledge. Yeah racists are going to racist
You’re not dumb as fuck.
It’s a common misconception. Wasn’t even really until around the time of Queen Isabella (Might have the wrong queen as it’s pretty late here) that fair skin was considered preferable and a sign of religious purity.
Humans are a weird species.
diabitus american in Alabama needs him to be white as a cope
Far too many people only think they’re following Jesus.
He rode into battle on his noble T-Rex named Herbert. He can be any color he wants.
He was surely not white like in the images and sculpture but we don’t know how much darker his skin was. Skin color is a big spectrum
Yeah, for all we know he was full on albino
The original whitewashing
People also think that Jesus was all love and light and goodness because they ignore or don’t know about the other parts about Jesus.
Like when he says, just two verses after the famous John 3:16 verse, that you worship him or go to hell:
18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son
Then there’s him being super racist:
21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
Mark 15:21-28
Or when he says in Matthew 19 that you can only divorce a woman (and, of course, a woman can’t divorce a man) if she’s cheating on you, essentially condoning domestic violence:
8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
There’s more where that came from.
I’m sure some Christian would be happy to come in here and hand wave it all away with being out of context or misinterpreted or whatever. And yet quoting the Bible out of context happens every time they go to their church and they have no issues.
People most often praise Jesus for the Golden Rule. He didn’t invent it.
Isn’t there a physical description of Jesus in the Bible that says his skin is the color of bronze and his hair was wooly like a sheep? 🤔
That was Revelations, which was written far after anyone who ever saw Jesus would have died, and describes Jesus’ divine form. The only gospel that describes anything about him was about a transformation. “His face shown like the sun,” but that is in Luke, so between 50 and 80 years after his purported death, and continued to be edited throughout the second century. So essentially it’s all made up and none of it matters.
I remember when I learned all the gospels were written decades after the “fact.”
I can’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, and we are supposed to believe people played a game of telephone for a few decades and got everything correct when writing it down?
Sure, Jan.
The fact that the Egyptians never kept the Israelites as slaves negates the entire story IMO.
Surely it must be. Nothing really important except for the biblical events was going on back then! /s
The gospels were, while written decades after the fact, written by people who were alive at the time. It’s not really a game of telephone.
It turns out that when a guy dies in his early 30s, most of his buddies are still alive 30-50yrs later.
I think the majority consensus is that none of the Gospels were written by contemporaries of Jesus, and they were edited and changed up to 200 years after his death.
They were changed much, much longer than 200 years.
Hell, the book of Mark, the oldest version we have (that both Mathew and Luke are copied from) has a completey different ending and vibe than what he have now
A grumpy, almost cynical Jesus who gets annoyed pretty often that people don’t listen to him or his instructions. It’s hilarious.
What’s also wild to me is if these were buddies of Jesus, they had this story of his birth, then nothing for thirty years, then a couple things, then death.
Where are all the stories about teenage Jesus doing sick jumps off a camel or whatever? We are missing a few decades of knowledge about this supposed most important person ever.
There are about 30 gospels that didn’t make it into the final version of the Bible, some talk about a little about it.
Most were ordered destroyed and not rediscovered until pretty recently in Egypt.
I’m not a Christian, just someone with an interest in it. There’s pretty much no doubt Jesus was someone who actually was alive, but what we have concerning his “story” could possibly be an algamation of different people who led both a religious and social revolution at the time
One theory suggests that Jesus actually has a brother who looked strikingly similar (James) enough to actually pull off pretending to be him.
Which would explain after his death why people purported to have seen him. Possibly a tactic to keep the revolution alive
None of the Gospels were written by the apostles. They didn’t even have names until much, much later. I’m talking centuries.
Life expectancy was also much shorter
Mathew and Luke are both just re-writes of Mark. Mark is the oldest out of them all, and the oldest surviving versions we have are not designated a name.
It was a marketing ploy much later to give each gospel a name of one of his apostles to give them more credibility.
Some parts of Mathew and Luke are even word for word copies from Mark, which suggests that they are revisions from a different party who decided to edit in their own ideas.
Hell, the original version of Mark actually has a different ending than the one we got in the modern Bible.
John comes much, much later which is why it’s so different than the other three. It’s Spaceballs.
None of the Gospels were written by anyone who personally knew him.
If I learned anything from all of the Sunday school my parents forced me to go to it’s that Jesus was a white dude with amazing abs.
In todays standard Jesus would be a communist.
ICE would say “Papers, please” to him
These days it is way more widely accepted
Before it was problematic since religion was used to justify hate crimes against people of color
