Was Jesus a Greek God Replacement


It's entertaining, for me at least, to try tp see inside the minds of ancient Greeks during the pre Christian period and then try to follow what happened in those minds when Christianity came along. A small army of people have made a living trying to figure this out and I'm but a novice. Still, no license is required so I can dabble in it as well. 

I've read many tomes that discuss Paul of the Bible. According to the Bible he was a Greek Jew of which there were many. Many writers, mostly skeptics, go over what he was supposed to have written in the Bible and find it peculiar. While Jesus was supposed to have lived and died only a few decades before Paul, Paul seemed not a all interested in this real person, Jesus. He was supposed to have traveled where Jesus lived but did not learn about the ground level life of Jesus. That is because, some pundits write, Paul's mind was still in the period of invisible and sky Greek gods. The real-life Jesus was less important than the sky Jesus. 

Then we can move to Luke, supposedly a Greek doctor who traveled with Paul, and find more hints of Greek religious thinking. The link, written by a Christian, plots the similarity of the Jesus story to stories in Greek mythology. It is a more dramatic story with virgin pregnancy and birth in a humble manger. The Greeks were not as preoccupied with the Roman Empire as others in the Bible. 

My way of interpreting Luke was to think of the passage of time and how people become disappointed or bored with old religions and look for something newer and better. The Christian writer in the link suggests, in my reading, the old Greek gods had become a disappointment. There they were floating around doing mischievous things and not doing favors for the more important "me". Any god that comes along and pays more attention to "me" will persuade me to dump the other gods who were self-centered.

So, the new god of the Greeks, Jesus, was one who briefly stopped in on earth instead of remaining aloof in the sky. This was a new and improved god. He was improved because he was of humble origins and would forgive my sins. Sold!

So Jesus was just a natural progression of religious notions not unlike the one we are experiencing right now where people are leaving churches they find tiresome and becoming "nones."

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