Posted: Feb 27, 2010 9:07 am
TimONeill wrote:Crocodile Gandhi wrote: Sure, this man did a great amount to shape the way that billions of people live their lives ...
Quite by accident. If the historical Yeshua ben Yosef (aka "Jesus") came back to see the weird bloated cult/s that arose in his name he'd probably die again of total horror and revulsion. He was a devout and ferociously monotheistic Jew, yet he would find himself turned into an incarnation of Yahweh. The guy would hardly be able to comprehend the insanity of what his ideas have been transformed into.
Nikos Kazantzakis touched on this in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ and Frank Herbert played with similar themes in his Dune novels, but I've always found the contrast between what the Jewish preacher Yeshua ben Yosef was trying to proclaim (as silly as it was) and the baroque monstrosities Christianity has evolved into to be one of history's most bizarre ironies.
I've toyed with the idea of a short story about a time traveller who rescues Yeshua from the cross and brings him to an intensive care unit in the present to nurse him back to health. When Yeshua recovers and comprehends what Christianity is, he becomes a vociferous preacher against Christianity and ends up being killed by fundamentalist Christians for blasphemy. I might have to write that one.
Sounds like a story I could read, however he would probably be killed by the folks who wished to get elected by the fundamentalists...