Jesus, continued:
"All those Jesus Christs, lined up like an army. Which was the real one and can anyone ever know?
The only thing we can say with any certainty is this: the guy we call Jesus was an itinerant Palestinian teacher from Galilee, whose most active period was some time around AD30, ending with his execution in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. That's it. Full stop. The sum total of what we can all agree on.
After that, the row breaks out. And when you're talking about Jesus it breaks out pretty rapidly. Was he God? A prophet? The word made flesh? An enlightened healer? A political subversive? A magician, a fraudster, a chancer, a bowsie? How did a set of abtruse, fragmentary and frequently contradictory stories about him become the basis for a religion that has flourished in almost every corner of the planet? How did the reported observations of this elusive and sometimes frankly odd man, who spoke in riddles, epigrams and puzzles, parables peppered with an agricultural imagery drawn from his immediate surroundings, become the foundation of a spirituality as resilient as it is adaptable?
Are we talking about the most extraordinary life in human history? Or the greatest piece of confidence trickery the world has ever witnessed?" |
