Jesus was likely an apocalyptic preacher who was crucified by the Romans but developed a following in the course of his ministry. Shortly after his death (and maybe just before), his followers saw him as a man who had the “divine” about him, like a messenger from God. Eventually, his followers started treating him like he was still a man but who was adopted by God as his son. Then eventually (maybe early 2nd century?) you eventually had this notion of Jesus as actually God. They started with a man and kept heaping glory on him until they made him God.
So over the decades, you have all these contradictory texts about Jesus’ divine versus human nature. When you get to the 3rd and 4th centuries, eventually church leaders wanted to create one harmonized view of who Jesus was. But the the problem is your sacred texts all describe him in contradictory and mutually exclusive terms.
So that did they do? They came up with the doctrine of the trinity to try and address all these contradictory views into one doctrine. But the trinity fundamentally does not make sense because it tries to take these contradictory views and mash them into a whole.
A good book if you want to know more is Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God.
The alternate theory is Jesus never existed and Paul was the prophet who spread the religion. Paul is the one who thought Jesus existed in the spirit realm. The last supper appeared to him in a vision as did all the other acts, including his death. So in this version, which is gaining more traction, Jesus was always a part of God because he only dwelt in God’s realm. The death, resurrection, all that was given to Paul in his visions and happened outside of heaven but in an spiritual arena.
Now the reason we think this may have been the case is because all of the most original writings in Acts and some of the other books and so on never mention any meeting of Jesus in the flesh or existing in the flesh but he does talk about visions of Jesus. All the writings we have from Paul of Jesus in the flesh are much later additions. Paul is the only author in the bible who could have written about Jesus in the first hand. All other books came much later.
There are a few flaws with this theory and mostly come down to how we think translations of some things should read. It is also important to know that this view is still a minority but the majority of biblical scholars are believers and therefore are quick to dismiss it.
Add comment