That question has been in several publications are asking, including Time magazine and The Wichita Eagle. Outside of the Christian community, there are those who believe Jesus was fabricated from stories and an ancient zodiac, while others believe he was a preacher that simply got the idea he was God and therefore divine.
Since that time, various religions have sought to make Jesus their excuse or tool for political and economic power. Forget that the Bible said it is as hard for a rich man to get into Heaven as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, The Wichita Eagle has some examples of preachers who use Jesus to justify wealth:
Christians gather around the world each Christmas to sing about "poor baby Jesus" asleep in the manger with no crib for his bed. But the Rev. Creflo Dollar looks inside that manger, and he doesn't see a poor baby at all.
He sees a baby born into wealth because the kings visiting him gave him gold, frankincense and myrrh.
He sees a messiah with so much money that he needed an accountant to track it.
He sees a savior who wore clothes so expensive that the Roman soldiers who crucified him gambled for them.
Dollar sees a rich Jesus.
"He was rich, he was whole, and I use those words interchangeably," says Dollar, senior pastor of World Changers Church International, a 23,000-member church in College Park, Ga. It broadcasts its services on six continents.
Dollar is part of a growing number of preachers who say that the traditional image of Jesus as a poor, itinerant preacher who "had no place to lay his head" is wrong.
"Did Jesus have money? Well, the Bible was clear: Kings brought him gold," Dollar says.
Of Course in he famous song by Black 47, a fictional anarchist named Sam Hall said:
And the priest he said to meRepent or face eternityKeep your rich man's god from me, so said I, so said IHe never gave a damn for me, so said I
To that I add agreement. If Jesus is a rich man's god, I have even less in common with him than I figured before.
A lot of famous people have seriously questioned the divinity of Jesus. Thomas Jefferson said:
It is in the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions: 1, of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws of nature at will and ascended bodily into heaven; and 2, of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally fore sedition, by being gibbeted, according to the Roma Law."[1]
He went on to say that it didn't matter if a person found belief in God in order to attain a sense of virtue. I would go one step further and say he was a nice guy with vision of godliness, but that didn't make him god. I can't share my intelligence with a cock roach or an ameba. Why would a supreme being even try something as foolish and taking human form and trying to share the secrets of not only this universe, but if the M theory of science holds out, an infinite number.
More recently, Hunter S. Thompson, while writing on the death of Richard Nixon, went as far as to compare the ex-president to Jesus:
"He (former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the emperor Hirohito.[2]
Of course, I have disowned Jesus as a god-head in an earlier blog. As I said, he may have been a nice guy, but anyone can claim to be god and I don't believe any of them.
And this is just one more reason to reject Christian values, as outdated and of little use to the struggle of the poor and working class people.
1]
[2] Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex (Gonzo Papers, Vol. 4), (Ballantine Books, New York, August 22, 1995) pp. 242 – 243.
This is an excerpt from
Years of Fear and Paranoia:
How I survived the 1980s and early 1990s
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