McCulloch wrote:I remain agnostic about whether or not Jesus actually existed. I've heard and read arguments on both sides and have remained unconvinced by either. However, it is clear to me that if Jesus did exist, it is highly improbable that he in any meaningful way resembled the portraits of him in the Christian gospels.
If one reads between the lines in the Synoptic Gospels, one can find the story of a preacher saying things that would have been familiar to and resonate with a lower class Jewish audience of the day. The message this preacher delivers is this:
* The restoration of true righteousness – moral living and charitable works – in place of the literalist interpretation of the Law as the means of justifying the people as worthy of a messiah who would save them from oppression
* The resurrection of the dead for the purpose of being judged by the Son of Man (as per Daniel), with the good being rewarded and the evil punished, as the means of redressing the imbalances of history
* The institution of the kingdom of God, the promised messianic age, when evil and suffering will no longer exist
These principles are fully in line with the Prophets, especially Amos the first prophet, and with the apocalyptic sentiments of the time. The criticisms leveled at the Pharisees by Jesus are much more applicable to the Shammai school that would have been predominant in the putative era of Jesus than to the resurgent Hillel school that was dominant in era of Gospel writing. If Jesus was born when Matthew said, he would have grown up when the much less literalist Hillel was the voice of the Pharisees.
Remove the supernatural elements and miracles (of which Paul is unaware anyway),
…change all those third person Son of Man references to refer to an
actual third person coming in the future (as they almost seem to do now),
… have the body of this executed troublesome preacher disappear (and thereby give credence to the idea of a universal resurrection)
…and you have an entirely believable scenario of someone who thought of himself as a prophet seeking to reform Israel like the prophets of old.
Now take a closer look at all this sacrifice business:
* Jesus as the Passover Lamb – sorry, that is not a sin atonement sacrifice
* A sin atonement sacrifice that is fully effective in its own right – sorry, did not exist in Judaism
* A painful,
human sacrifice – definitely against the rules
* A sacrifice performed by goyim instead of in the Temple by priests – forbidden!
There is no way anyone would make up such an improbable story. But if this holy man who was expected to usher in the messianic age and all that entailed instead got executed by the Romans, this sacrifice business and subsequent ‘resurrection’ is a good way of explaining away that uncomfortable fact.
Bottom line: IMO it sounds a whole lot like there may very well have been an historical Jesus who preached a lot of the things that appear in the Synoptic Gospels.