Who Is Jesus Christ: If you are still here, this article is for Christians and non-Christians alike who may be open-mindedly looking for simple facts about the origin of Christianity, and want to understand for themselves how Christianity may have come about, and maybe what Jesus was really trying to tell us, beyond the myths and legends of the Christian institution, and what that institution has become.
In addition, this is for the parents of Christian children who want to be relatively certain that their children are getting the straight story, because if they aren’t, they will certainly be disillusioned when they become teens and learn differently from all the various sources that are out there now. The following are the opinions of POCM, so information in this article should be checked out further for yourself before making any concrete conclusions.
POCM claims “ancient Pagans (prior to Jesus) believed in various levels of divinity, with miraculous powers, coming down and going up to its home in the sky. Divine beings cared about people, listened to and answered their prayers. Gave them the power to prophesy. Even gave them a better deal in the eternal life that comes after death.”
POCM references ancient sources and invites people to decide for themselves if the Christian godman story is similar to Pagan godman stories. In other words, POCM suggests that the original Christian Church fathers collected all the current myths and spiritual ideas of the time and created a Christ myth. POCM says, “The ideas came first. The facts came later. The facts were made up to fit the ideas…. although we imagine that the meaning of Jesus comes from the facts about Jesus, the truth has to be the other way around. Back at the very beginning, the facts about Jesus were adjusted to fit with the meaning of Jesus.”
In other words, Jesus was not the only one who professed to be the son of God in those days. This has relevance because the main sticking point of Christianity, and one that makes Christianity so divisive regarding other religions, is their belief that Jesus is truly the son of God, and therefore no other religion has relevance. But what if Jesus was not the son of God? Then Christians may pay more attention to what he taught about compassion and caring, rather than His authority of being a divine. This would make a big difference in Christian attitudes and foster an openness, rather than judgmentalism, toward other religions. It would be a peaceful thing, and Christians could truly become Peacemakers, as Jesus suggested in His Sermon on the Mount.