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A lot of atheists end up with that impression, maybe from unfamiliarity. That Jesus was just a dope socialist who loved everyone.
But the religion has been absolutely shitty for pretty much as soon as he was dead (at least).
For example, the other day I saw someone cite Acts 4 as an example of how Christianity was a commune, where people pooled their assets.
It conveniently left out the part where Peter had an older couple who didn't pay him everything they owned who were both struck dead after meeting privately and being confronted (allegedly killed by God). Which was a reference back to the book of Joshua where a guy kept some loot for himself and was outed and killed.
Women were told to be silent and subservient (in spite of 'heretical' sects and texts of Christianity where Jesus was instructing female disciples and they were acting as teachers - ironically the only extant sect that claimed Jesus was talking about Greek atomism and naturalism was one of these).
The religion was canonized right after the emperor of Rome converted, so guess what was canonized? A bunch of shit about how patriarchal monarchy is the divine plan. The saying attributed to Jesus about how someone who succeeded in life should rule and should only hold power temporarily obviously gets excluded and eventually the collection of sayings is punishable by death for even possessing it.
Even a lot of that stuff about "blessed is the poor" was probably from Paul who was separating fools from their money. Originally there's sayings about how those ministering shouldn't collect money, but this gets straight up reversed in a later edition of Luke and you can see Paul in 1 Cor 9 arguing that he is entitled to make a living off ministering and encouraging donations "for the poor in Jerusalem." But then elsewhere we see Paul was accepting expensive fragrant offerings from people. But that's ok, as then in the gospels you see Jesus keeps an expensive fragrant offering and yells at the people who criticize him for not selling it and giving the proceeds to the poor.
It's a bunch of feel good BS to con people out of their money. I don't think it was always that from the very start, and probably even had some interesting things going on initially, but almost immediately after Jesus is out of the picture the errant early tradition gets morphed into a traditional cult where power and wealth consolidates at the top and it preaches subservience and obedience and self-hatred so you beg for the idea of salvation and trade all that you have for a promise the people you turn everything over to can't fulfill.
So why would a group that wants power and wealth concentrated and to destroy democracy in favor of patriarchal authoritarianism be attractive to Christians? Because they've been being fattened up for that slaughter going on near two thousand years at this point.
Would it be an assholish move to point to the religion of Jesus himself in this context? I believe it would, and thus I won't.
Not at all. There's a very good case that the historical Jesus was extremely outspoken about the grift of Temple Judaism.
Not only do you have tidbits like him prohibiting carrying anything (including sacrifices) through the temple after throwing out the merchants in Mark (theologically problematic given he isn't dead yet and supposedly that's what invalidated the need for animal sacrifices, so you see this line left out when Matthew copies from the passage).
But you have one of my favorite apocryphal lines:
(The work also uniquely has a parable about a son inheriting a treasure in his parent's field, selling it not knowing a treasure was buried within, and then the person he sells it to finding the treasure and lending it out at interest - and I can't think of better description for the grift of selling salvation for tithes than "lending a buried treasure out at interest".)
Which is again in the vein of another part of Mark left out of the other Synoptics, when he responded to a complaint about eating from a crop on the Sabbath with "was the Sabbath made for man or man for the Sabbath?"
So out of the many things I'm not sure about a historical Jesus, at very least "dude wasn't a fan of the religious grift" was one I'm pretty sure of, particularly when both early canonical and heretical sources agree about the subversive position.
The story as I understand it (explained by Neil Stephenson in Snow Crash ) was that living Jesus preached universal mutuality: Love your neighbor as yourself. Everyone is your neighbor. The myth of the empty tomb was to show that it was the people's religion, independent of temples and priests.
But then...
A disorganized movement was too much for the people (or more likely the apostles wanted sociopolitical power) so they created a myth of the resurrection and the founding of the church. Zombie Jesus has way different opinions than living Jesus.
If there really was a post-crucifixion Jesus, it was likely an impostor, a show. But Church tradition teems with miracles and hagiographs with only the word ofnthe Church itself as evidence.
Not the most accurate information in there. He messes up the Sumerian stuff a bit too. Better than the average person, but roughly what you'd expect being found in a fictional work.
The myth of the empty tomb likely had more to do with a divide over physical resurrection. You can see this in 1 Cor 15, a debate over whether physical resurrection was believed or not. The group denying it was associated with both female disciples and later Thomas, so you see in Mark the women "totally saw the empty tomb, they just didn't tell anyone." Just like Thomas in John "totally saw the physically resurrected Jesus and believed."
The other group was instead of having a Jesus where you needed to eat his flesh and drink his blood to embody him, portraying a Jesus saying "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him." They were also talking about there being non-physical twins ('Thomas') for physical originals, such that resurrection was mechanically the recreation of the physical in non-physical form, with a first Adam that was physical but a second Adam that was spiritual (this idea appears as early as 1 Cor 15, only about two decades after Jesus was dead, in what Paul is arguing with to position a physical resurrection as plausible).
Yeah, what a coincidence that Jesus had to come back from the dead to appoint the people claiming to have seen him do so as the proper torch bearers to carry on his message. Not at all suspicious.
Also: Jesus was made up by these early Xtian founders. He wasn’t a real person.
https://youtu.be/LTllC7TbM8M?si=oDMJJxBdAFsY3RFo
Yeah, and even if he was to some degee based on a real person every single detail recorded about him is clearly false as can be demonstrated to be literary devices, copied from somewhere else, or just clearly impossible. It makes a lot more sense he was invented whole cloth, if early Christians believed he was a real person they sure made up a lot of stories about him - and the most devout Christian will have to agree with that because of the endless apocrypha and insertions.
There are no mentions of Jesus outside of the bible until a lot years after his supposed death. Complete invention.
He was like Santa Claus for the masses at the time.
Look, there are some basic precepts of New Testament Christian thought (don’t be an asshole) that are good things. It gets rather muddled quickly after you mall be away from that.
Yeah, like how scientology has some good stuff in it like try to improve yourself and the world but then they force a path that doesn't lead in that direction and use it all as an excuse to take money from you.
The first thing we really know about the early church is Paul walking around collecting money and telling people things they wanted to hear, like you don't need to chop off your foreskin to get saved - and saved from the horrors of an event they very clearly taught was coming in their lifetime.
How they managed to keep such an obvious scam going for almost two thousand years is honestly the most impressive miracle
Almost no one respectable in the scholarship, including atheist scholars, thinks that's the case.
And it would be the only instance I'm aware of where someone at the nascent stages of a cult made up a leader and immediately had major schisms around what that made up leader was saying.
Literally the earliest Christian documents we have are of a guy who was persecuting followers of Jesus suddenly going into areas where he had no authority to persecute, literally "if you can't beat them, join them," and then telling people not to pay attention to a different gospel "not that there is a different gospel" or to listen to him over alleged 'super-apostles.'
The next earliest document is a gospel that's constantly trying to spin statements allegedly said in public by Jesus with secret teachings that only a handful of their own leaders supposedly heard.
Not long after that is a letter from the bishop of Rome complaining his presbyters were deposed in the same place Paul was complaining about them receiving a different gospel, and how young people should defer to the old and women should be silent (so we know the schism was supported by the young and women, who just so happen to be at the center of a competing tradition which has extensive overlap with Paul's letters to Corinth).
For all of the above to have occurred within just a few decades of a made up person would be even less believable than that said person walked on water. Personally, I don't believe either of those scenarios.
P.S. Carrier is a history PhD, not a biblical studies PhD, and a bit of a pompous moron. For example, he managed to miss one of the most interesting elements of early Christianity regarding the Gnostic references to cosmic seeds because his head was so far up his own rear that he couldn't see past a (straight up bizarre) theory they were talking about a cosmic sperm bank. Nope - it has to do with Lucretius's "seeds of things" but that's a long discussion for another comment. Point is, I'd be wary of taking anything he says too seriously.
The historicity of Jesus is that there was a Christian movement that was suppressed by Rome. But I'm not sure we can verify, even, it was led by an apocalyptic prophet. There were no texts before Mark, as the movement was entirely word of mouth, and as per all games of telephone, evolved with each retelling.
What scholarly consensus does assert is the scripture is not univocal, inspired or inerrant, and the narrative bends with every era to affirm the morality of the time. This is to say, it's not a source for right or wrong, but a tool used to give authority to external beliefs. Whether that is to justify charity and compassion or to justify genocide against gays and Palestinians is up to the individual.
I completely agree - Paul is certainly apocalyptic, but something like the Gospel of Thomas has very different ideas, such as:
You see a similar notion opposed in the Epistles:
(It's worth noting that while 2 Timothy is classically considered to be forged, it is the only disputed letter to have the same relative amount of personal reference as Paul's undisputed letters - he happened to talk about himself a lot like a covert narcissist is prone to, and that may offer another perspective on authenticity that's been missed by scholarship to date.)
That's a spurious claim based on an argument from silence and at odds with Papias's description of a sayings work we don't have, as well as a number of scholars estimating the date of a early core for the Gospel of Thomas, which Paul even seems to quote from as among the collection of resources in Corinth, potentially even as a written document.
Even an earlier form of Mark probably predated the version of Mark we have today. And the Pauline Epistles are documentary evidence that predate Mark (and likely even informed it).
While the first part is true, the second is a gross oversimplification. The morals of some people at the time. For example, there was a massive women's speech movement going on in the first century that the church was opposing, including regarding women's speech in early Christian circles. So the scriptures that are misogynistic in the NT don't necessarily reflect the broader morals of the time so much as the reactionary morals of a select few controlling that version of the narrative.
Same with how Jesus was suddenly talking about marriage being between a man and a woman in a gospel whose extant version is dated after 70 CE, relevant to gay marriage having become an institution in Rome after Nero married two men in the 60s CE, but much less relevant in the 30s CE when he was allegedly saying it.
So keep in mind scripture only reflects morals of a select few of the time (and at the time of various edits).
The point he makes about the only evidence for JC’s reality as a person is other people much later pointing at each other and saying “he said so”.
If, as he said, any real evidence beyond hearsay can be produced it might he credible.
They aren't much later on. A number of the texts are composed within decades of his death. It's much later in that we have copies, and they definitely had some edits along the way, but they are pretty early.
There's arguably much better evidence a historical Jesus existed than a historical Pythagoras, for example. Do you doubt Pythagoras existed?
Or even Socrates - we only have two authors claiming to have direct knowledge of events around what he said, and the earliest fragments of their writings comes from the same collections of texts as early Christian writings, and the only full copy of Plato is centuries older in production than the earliest full copies of both canonical and extra-canonical texts.
What evidence for Socrates or Pythagoras do we have beyond hearsay?
Ok that’s fine, but please examine the differences in motivation.
Let’s say Plato etc are indeed made up. There’s little money to be made or social control gained via their fictitious being.
Let’s go further down that path.
The ideas and examinations of nature, and the basic sciences of understanding our universe, even if done by one or more people under the guise of some fictional characters are still incredible foundations for rational thinking over the next two and a half thousand years. Again: advancing understanding and what we know as ‘science’, not direct social control and making money off the punters.
Religion… well… That’s something else.
There are huge profits to be made from telling people stuff about how various magical creatures can inflict punishments, heal illnesses and forgive bad behaviour.
The motivations are clear. Humanity hasn’t changed a crumb in several thousand years.
Follow the money.
Which text do you think was written within decades?
Anyone attempting to make the 'everyone agrees' argument about a religion instantly loses all credibility, like if you can't understand why that's a fallacious argument then you've got zero chance understanding the evidence.
"Most credible scholars, including most secular scholars agree" is different from "most people agree."
You might want to actually look into why they agree before talking about understanding evidence.
For very obvious historical reasons there has long been a huge bias in this field of study, it's currently very clearly still a hot water issue with most scholars not wanting to cause problems for themselves.
Regardless the old consensus is rapidly changing, even the faithful are having to accept that more and more of the Bible is clearly not based in history for a multitude of reasons. You can try and be snarky all you like but I've looked at a lot of the debates and the reality is the argument for a historical Jesus is very weak and the argument for a mythic creation is pretty good.