Well, from my atheist perspective Jesus was an odd duck, if you go by all the stuff attributed to him in the Gospels. Some of it is extraordinary, tremendously moving material, with some almost left-wing radical overtones--the Beatitudes, the admonition to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the radical insistence that rich people need to give away all their stuff, those great fights with the Pharisees over the stupidity of religious hyperlegalism--and some of it is this strange near-term apocalyptic prophecy and some sort of viral "no salvation except through me" statements. Sometimes he seems to be preaching love and kindness to all the world, and sometimes he seems to be trying to construct a strange little insular cult of wandering ascetics. And then there are the stories that are just baffling, like the bit where he curses the fig tree. I suppose it's pretty much what you'd expect from a collected mishmash of 2000-year-old stories about a purported messiah.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 04:53 am (UTC)