<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Jesus Christ Superstar, Do you think you are what they say you are? </em></p>
Jesus Christ Superstar (lyrics), Broadway musical
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[We must set up the just man] — a simple and noble man who … does not wish to seem but be good. Then we must deprive him of seeming. For if he is going to be thought just he will have honors and gifts because of that esteem. We cannot be sure in that case whether he is just for justice’ sake or for the sake of the gifts and honors. So we must strip him bare of everything but justice and make his state the opposite of his imagined counterpart. Though doing no wrong he must have the repute of the greatest injustice, so that he may be put to the test as regards justice through not softening because of ill repute and the consequences thereof … that such being his disposition, the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding iron in his eyes, and finally after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified, and so will learn the lesson that not to seem just but to be just is what we ought to desire.</em></p>
Republic (2:361B-362A), pp. 123-125 – Glaucon speaking to Socrates, written four centuries before the biblical Gospels
– Glaucon speaking to Socrates, written four centuries before the biblical Gospels
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Justice returns, returns old Saturn’s reign,</em></p><p><em>With a new breed of men sent down from heaven.</em></p><p><em>Only do thou, at the boy’s birth in whom</em></p><p><em>The iron shall cease, the golden race arise …</em></p><p><em>Under thy guidance, whatso tracks remain</em></p><p><em>Of our old wickedness, once done away,</em></p><p><em>Shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear.</em></p><p><em>He shall receive the life of gods, and see</em></p><p><em>Heroes with gods commingling, and himself</em></p><p><em>Be seen of them, and with his father’s worth</em></p><p><em>Reign o’er a world at peace.</em></p>
4th Eclogue, pp. 31-32 – a Roman version of “the rapture”
– a Roman version of “the rapture”
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Jewish belief in the Messiah still to come had exercised widespread attraction. Yet it paled completely before the allure of a Messiah who had actually appeared on this earth already, within living memory — indeed the immediate past. This, as events would show before long, was a sensation: a claim with which none of the pagan ‘mystery’ religions, with their far remoter saviors, could possibly compete.</em></p>
Saint Paul, p. 57
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But you [Christians] are so misguided that you have not even remained faithful to the teachings that were handed down to you by the apostles. And these also have been altered, so as to be worse and more impious, by those who came after. At any rate neither Paul nor Matthew nor Luke nor Mark ventured to call Jesus God. But the worthy John … I say, was the first to venture to call Jesus God. </em></p>
Against the Galileans (327A,B), p. 413
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Not only did the Lamb of God endure sufferings and punishments for us … but he suffered torments and tortures he did not deserve. It is we who deserved them because of our sins. He became the cause of our sins’ being forgiven, for he accepted in our place the death, the blows and the disgrace we deserved. He transferred them to himself and took upon himself the curse that was rightly ours, thus becoming a curse for us. What was he, except the substitute for our life.</em></p>
as quoted in Gerard Soylan’s The Crucifixion of Christ (4), p. 115
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Imagine if the king of a small country announced that he was going to have his son beaten, whipped, nailed to a tree, and then stabbed with a spear. During an interview on CNN, the king admits that he is sad that his son will suffer and die but it must be done because it is the only way he can forgive the citizens of his country for their moral lapses and allow them access to healthcare and social services the following year. The king loves the people of his nation and wants their crimes pardoned, so his son must die. What would you think of this king? Weird? Cruel? Evil? Insane? But why would you expect a higher moral standard from the human king of a tiny country than you would from the god of the universe?</em></p>
50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God (19), p. 151
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see …</em></p>
letter to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">… a system of morals is presented to us [by Jesus] which, if filled up in the true style and spirit of the rich fragments he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man.</em></p>
“Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others,” in a letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I put the New Testament among your books … when you were a child; because it is the best book that ever was or will be known in the world.</em></p>
letter to Edward Dickens, September 26, 1868
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other. </em></p>
“Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others” in a letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Previously God, who has neither a body nor a face, absolutely could not be represented by an image. But now that he has made himself visible in the flesh and has lived with men, I can make an image of what I have seen of God … and contemplate the glory of the Lord, his face unveiled. </em></p>
(2:1:1159) – quoting John Damascene, so goes the 2nd Commandment against idolatry
– quoting John Damascene, so goes the 2nd Commandment against idolatry
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ. I know some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.</em></p>
Writings of Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">This sublime person [Jesus] … we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus absorbed all of the divine, or has been adequate to it … but in the sense that Jesus is the one who has caused his fellow-men to make the greatest step toward the divine. </em></p>
The Life of Jesus (28), p. 226
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If the doctrine of Jesus had simply been belief in the approaching end of the end of the world, it would certainly now be sleeping in oblivion. What is it, then, which has saved it? The great breadth of the Gospel conceptions, which has permitted doctrines suited to very different intellectual conditions to be found under the same creed. The world has not ended, as Jesus announced, and as his disciples believed. But it has been renewed, and in one sense renewed as Jesus desired.</em></p>
The Life of Jesus (17), p. 149
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">To regard Christ as God, and pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.</em></p>
letter to the Holy Synod (of the Russian Orthodox Church), responding to his excommunication, April 4, 1901
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">His [Jesus’] life is near its end, but watch and observe the portrait the gospel writers painted of how he died: He was betrayed but loved the betrayer. He was forsaken but loved those who forsook him. His arrest was challenged but he demanded that his betrayers put up their swords. He was falsely accused but he was silent in the face of his accusers ... This is a portrait of a fully human one who has no need to hate or to hurt ... [he was] one who possessed his life so fully that he could give it away.</em></p>
Jesus for the Non-Religious, p. 288
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Of course, Jesus never literally said any of these things [in John]. For someone to wander around the Jewish state in the first century, announcing himself to be the bread of life, the resurrection or the light of the world would have brought out people in white coats with butterfly nets to take him away. None of the earlier gospel writers give us any indication that any of them had ever heard it suggested before that Jesus taught in this way.</em></p>
The Sins of Scripture (27), p. 234
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Greek author of this gospel [John], as we have it, has effectively buried the Jesus of history and substituted his own theological notion of the Son of God, a posturing polemical figure with a streak of anti-Semitism, wholly incompatible with the Messiah of the apostolic [Synoptic] tradition. It is not to its credit of the Church that it has taken this presentation of a pathological egoist to its bosom as the veritable Jesus. </em></p>
The Passover Plot, p. 99
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Jesus was slightly more than normal stature [about 5’6”]. Jesus wore His hair to His shoulders, with curling side locks below His ears, and had a generous moustache and was thickly bearded. His hair, the color of chestnuts, was parted in the middle of His head. His eyes gray and sunken, His nose overly large and bent or hooked, His lips full. … His look was commanding, yet often he was withdrawn and introspective. … His voice was deep and musical … His posture was slightly stooped. His gait was uneven due to a bodily deformity, a lameness in one crippled leg which had become evident the year before his Crucifixion … </em></p>
The Word, p. 194 – possible but pure speculation
– possible but pure speculation
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[Jesus was] a revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost.</em></p>
Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 215-216
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The vision of Christ that thou dost see</em></p><p><em>Is my vision’s deepest enemy …</em></p><p><em>Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,</em></p><p><em>Mine speaks in parables to the blind.</em></p><p><em>Thine loves the same world that mine hates,</em></p><p><em>Thy heaven doors are my Hell gates …</em></p><p><em>Both read the Bible day and night</em></p><p><em>But thou read’st black where I read white </em></p>
“The Everlasting Gospel”
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