this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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There are an unfortunate contingent of atheists that think “Jesus existed” = “support for Christianity.” I’ve had this argument on this very website. (Very common on the internet for someone to assume that a non-mythicist must be a Christian - uh, no, that’s following for that CS Lewis “lunatic or lord” false dichotomy.)
It’s clear that there was a real, vagrant preacher that had a following. Q and the Sayings source were likely compiled quickly after his death - it’s likely that many of the words attributed to him were the words of the real man.
At first, I don’t think he was understood as literally divine, just a messenger of god or prophet. There’s a clear escalation across the gospels if you read them in the order they were written - it’s really John that presents Jesus as the logos, and John was written last.
The most likely explanation was that he was an apocalyptic Messiah figure, who was supposed to lead to the overthrowing of the Romans. When he was killed, the cope became that he was resurrected. They negotiated with the text of the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, and constructed the fully human/fully divine figure that eventually became the theological party line.