It's Good to Review the Basics


We have not covered here for a while how Christianity became such a large and successful religion. As time goes on and more critical review of the Bible is done, the more clearly we can see where this branch of the world's religions came from

The character in the Bible know as Jesus is portrayed as something like a local evangelist. Those who wrote the Bible tell of him preaching about the soon to come "end" in towns in a small part of the world.

Professor Bart Ehrman has the explanation of Jesus that happens to make sense to me. Ehrman believes there was an actual person like the Jesus portrayed in the Bible. It doesn't really matter whether there was or was not such a person. That many believe such a tall tale is what makes the faith popular. 

Ehrman puts Jesus in the category of the many local gods that existed all over the world during that period. I'm reading a book that discusses actual clay tablet records preserved from a two to three thousand years before the alleged time of Jesus. Every local area had its own gods. Today, Hinduism has many local gods. Catholics have many saints with various specialties. The Bible talks of "other gods." It's reasonable to assume there were local gods during the Jesus period.

If Jesus had a following and he later died, it would be reasonable to believe some would have referred to him as their local god. Ehrman believes Jesus took on the status of a lower-level local god.

But then a story began circulating the local god, Jesus, had come back to life. This was an appealing story because other gods, more important than Jesus, had been human then died and came back to life. When this began circulating Jesus' stock as a god went up. He entered the big time. This, even though no one ever recorded that he or she actually were present when it happened. It was a story that was created quite a while after it was supposed to have happened. One would think there would be one first-hand observation, but there is none.

This story lived on without world significance for 300 years until a Roman dictator claimed to have converted the Christianity. This set in motion other events that allowed the faith to spread. The printing press later gave it another boost. 

Millions of Christians still have not looked critically at the original claim, that a flesh and blood human died for some time and came back to life.   

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