Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.
I'm saying that there's absolutely no conclusive evidence that Jesus ever really existed, even as a mortal. I don't believe he was a historical figure at all.
When I wrote 'The Da Vinci Code,' I told myself that this story of Jesus makes more sense to me than the story I read in the Bible.
Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.
About six years ago, Life magazine ran an article on the historicity of Jesus and I was floored to find that they conceded the only evidence we have for his existence is in the Gospels. But don't take Life's word for it. In his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the most definitive study that's ever been done on the subject, Albert Schweitzer admitted that there isn't a shred of conclusive proof that Christ ever lived, let alone was the son of God. He concludes that one must therefore accept both on faith.
Certainly I have no faith in Jehovah, although I think it quite likely that Jesus Christ, as a preacher and a wise man, did indeed exist.
The more I started studying the historical Jesus, the man who lived 2,000 years ago... the more I started to realize that there was this chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that I had been taught about in church.
Paul's lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.
For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament.
My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.
In his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the most definitive study that's ever been done on the subject, Albert Schweitzer admitted that there isn't a shred of conclusive proof that Christ ever lived, let alone was the son of God. He concludes that one must therefore accept both on faith. I reject both for the same reason.
I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.
When on a Sunday morning we hear the old bells ring out, we ask ourselves, "Is it possible! This is done on account of a Jew crucified two thousand years ago who said he was the Son of God. The proof of such an assertion is wanting".
I think the exploration and the search for who Jesus is, and that 2,000 years later we're still trying to figure out who He was, and did He really rise from the dead... And I think for me, the answer is 'yes,' and that's why we're talking about Him today.
All Jesus' pictures are falsifications; they cannot be about the real Jesus. This real man must have been totally different, because we know he enjoyed drinking - it is impossible to think of a person who enjoys drinking and not laughing. He enjoyed women - it is difficult to think of a man who enjoys women and not laughing. He was friendly, almost in love, with a prostitute, Mary Magdalene. It is difficult to move with a prostitute - he was not moving with a Catholic monk, not with a priest, not with the Pope... with a prostitute! These were the condemnations against him.
Remove all images of a white Jesus. This is not correct even if one is Christian. The historical Jesus had be black in color despite the missionaries' attempt to paint him English and Swedish.
Asante is known as “the Father of Afrocentrism.”
Scholars have found that references to Christ in Josephus were deliberately planted in the translation long after it was written, and the Latin references to Christ are not to a person of that name. In the Dead Sea Scrolls there was mention of a particular "teacher of righteousness" who had characteristics somewhat like those attributed to Christ, but it might easily have been someone else.
The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.
I believe in the Biblical documents supporting Jesus. But I have no illusions about them. I think they contain many flaws, scribal errors, and so forth and they are only partial or fragmentary.
What I did was take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Son of God, the Son of the Virgin Mary, and sought to make Him utterly believable, a vital breathing character.
My proposal is not that we understand what the word ‘god’ means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross-and that we take our courage in both hands and allow our meaning for the word ‘god’ to be recentered around that point.
You accept the historical Jesus?
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.
Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it's possible.
The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.
