Does Jesus mean something to you?

RayRo wrote: Theist, atheist or agnostic, does the life of Jesus of Nazareth mean something to you?

As an atheist, I'm not sure he even existed since there is no incontrovertible historical evidence that he did. That said, as an atheist I don't have to not believe he existed I just have to not believe he was the son of god, not believe he performed miracles, not believe he rose from the dead and not believe he was born of a virgin. [and let's not get into an argument about atheism being a belief system, that's been done to death - it isn't but perhaps only an atheist can accept that logic].

As far as the documented version of his life goes... it means very little to me because we actually know very little of it (we know of three very brief periods: his birth, going to the temple at age 12 and then the last 3 or 4 years of his life). The bible gave four accounts of his life but what they are is one telling (Matthew), two retellings (Mark and Luke) and one non-synoptic contradiction (John) - and as a chronology they are all a poor record and by no means a history, we cannot even say that Mark and Luke corroborate Matthew's account as it's highly likely they cribbed from him. As others have noted, messianic and mystic figures are not uncommon in mythology, so whether the Jesus story was based upon a real person or a hybrid of various messiahs/mystics is also an unanswerable question. However, it does seem logical that a religion that adopted the name christians (meaning of the anointed one) would have based their faith on a real person who they believed to be the anointed one ('anointed one' in Hebrew: mashiah=messiah, and in Greek: khristos=christ) rather than an imaginary one, and with such undoubtedly charismatic figures, their followers have a tendency to ‘big them up’, especially after they have died, to the extent that it is impossible to separate myth from reality.

The whole supernatural element of the account of his life is a bit of a stumbling block for me. However one thing we do know from the modern version of the religion that bears his title, is that even in the 21st century christians are prone to beatify and canonise dead mortals who allegedly performed apparently supernatural acts that they call miracles without having actual proof that such events happened. Therefore presuming 1st century christians would freely attribute fictional supernatural 'miracles' to a charismatic religious teacher who may or may not have existed doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination. So I can freely dismiss the miracles such as the feeding of the five thousand as easily as the early christian church (c. 400CE) dismissed the apocryphal gospel stories such as Thomas's 2nd Century anecdotal account of the clay birds miracle allegedly performed by a 5 year old Jesus.  So that just leaves his (alleged) teachings and whether they have relevance to an atheist.

Which raises the inevitable atheist view of an improbable son of an unprovable god side of it… because aside from his aspirational teaching of love and respect of our fellow man and all the other good humanist things he is reported to have said, which we can pretty much all agree are “a good thing”, the canonical gospels also report him saying a lot of things that (according to C.S. Lewis) would have him as either “a madman, a liar or the son of god”, [though in the modern PC age it would probably be more appropriate to re-state them as “deluded, deceitful or divine”]. Of course Lewis was arguing for the divinity of Jesus, not against it, but from an atheist perspective the "divine” is simply removed from the table without further discussion because if we do not believe that gods exist then his disciples’ claims that he said he was the son of a god can also not be believed… either he never made such claims and the disciples were deceitful or he did and therefore he was either deluded or deceitful. Of course none of that negates or sullies any of his humanist teachings; it just questions whether a non-believer should regard him as an aspirational teacher or simply someone who said some things that we agree with. Personally, I go for the latter.