Did Jesus Exist?
I watched a special on the Discovery channel a while back about Jesus, and did he exist, was he married did he have a child etc.. After searching around on the net a bit I somehow ended up on www.jesusneverexisted.com, and started looking at some of the articles, claiming that no, Jesus did not exist. I read some of the forum posts where people talked about how Christians were stupid for believing in a mythical man and God.
Now, a younger version of me would have agreed and maybe even posted, but I don’t believe that proving someone wrong or right solves any problems. Beliefs, opinions, and ideas that can never be proven really end up just being words against words. I like to think of two Christians, or a Christian and a Jew, or a Muslim and a Jew, or any other couple arguing over what or who is God and what is his/her attributes.
I have come to believe that words are not actual experience. I have come to believe that God cannot be explained by words, although it has been tried for many many centuries. It is said that St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote Summa Theologica, which is over 3000 pages of theology ranging from God to the Trinity to Nature, realized before he died that all of his writing and words were in vain and really did not explain Reality or God. He became silent, not speaking a word for the last three years of his life, knowing his mistake.
The same is said of Buddha. Many people believe that Buddhism is an atheistic religion, when in fact it is not at all. Whenever the Buddha was asked if there was a God or Gods, he stayed silent. Many took this to mean, “No, there is not a God†hence people’s misunderstanding, but how I see it is that he did not want to say yes or no because the questioner would then grasp to the word and not the actual experience.
Buddha did not believe that it was important to wonder over something that cannot be transmitted through concepts, but only experiences through direct contact.
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Comments
The movements, actions and miraculous labors of Jesus could well have been the dramatist’s efforts to portray histrionically the occult experiences of the soul in its evolution. Such features as the birth, the awakening of intellectual power at age twelve, the temptation or stress of conflict between the body and the soul, the development of the soul’s divine potency to heal the ills and weaknesses of the flesh, the overcoming and casting out of the demonic forces of the natural man by the Christly influence, the symbolic raising of the “dead” inert spiritual power to a new birth of life, the anguish at the height of the clash between the two poles of life–the whole experience of the soul under the long domination of the animal instinct being itself the essence of crucifixion on the cross of matter–then the final victory in the soul’s radiant transfiguration of the moral man by the spirit’s light, and the ultimate resurrection of the soul out of its “death” under the suffocating heaviness of the life of sense–what are all these but a dramatic rendition of the phases of the soul’s life under the duress of its incarceration in mortal body?
PEACE BE WITH YOU
MICKY
I believe we are compelled to think of (a) God as a persona, an entity.
Why?
Maybe it’s in our nature to seek control over others, and if we were to have been created we expect to be controlled too.
There is a great book by a fellow who’s name I forget. The book is called “Rescuing Jesus”.
Reading this book gave me confidence in what I believe - Jesus was a man, he preached truth - Love; if all people are children of God, then Jesus was a son of God too.
Why complicate things with doctrines and so on?
The answer is simple and lies in so many places - love.
If you are interested in “Rescuing Jesus” all I can remember is it is written by an Australian minister, I believe it is published in Australia too.