Vanni Fucci said:
If he did exist, and I don't believe he did, then the lack of evidence of his existence would suggest that he was far more mundane than the scriptures portray him. More likely, he was part of a Jewish insurgency against the Romans, and that he was executed for treason and subsequently martyred by his fellow insurgents.
A little background info: Jesus was a nazorene. That usually get's mistranslated and people say
Jesus of Nazareth, but Nazareth wasn't established as a town until a close to 200 AD.
The nazorene's were a devout sect of Jews who lived in caves in Mesopotamia. They had an internal prophecy that two messiahs would come and restore them to glory: a kingly messiah and an earthly messiah. The kingly messiah of the nazorene's was the man we call Jesus, as he descended from the line of David, and the earthly messiah was James, his brother.
When the two messiahs are in place, I think it was called Shallom, which means something akin to unity or harmony. Each messiah represented a pillar, and Shallom represented an archway that connected the two of them.
So again, Jesus = King Messiah, James = Earth Messiah.
That's the commonly held belief anyway.
Where it gets muddled is when one of those two messiahs tried to usurp the title from the other. Obviously an archway will not stand if one pillar is trying to support two sides, and that's pretty much what happened. The man named Jesus claimed himself both the King messiah descended from David, as well as the Earth messiah (which was also known as the Priestly messiah). Dissention rose within the other nazorene's, and the rest is misrecorded history.
What's interesting to note though is who Jesus was crucified in favour of. The Bible states that the crowd was asked whether they wanted to kill Jesus, the King of the Jews, or Barabas. Oddly enough, Barabas translates as "Son of God", which also means Earthly Messiah.
When these events finally got written down, they were likely skewed. That's why the best source of this information is the Apocrypha of the New Testament. It's also more fun to read then the gospels that they left in the Bible. The apocrypha paints Jesus as a kid who would kill children just so he could bring them back to life. Fucked up stuff for sure, but interesting nonetheless.
