What Jesus really looked like

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Well I doubt he is white like the way some media portrays him.

I know that Jesus was Aramaic, and they had the typical semitic features olive skin, curly hair, If Jesus was alive today he would look like the guy making your donair or driving your cab. The modern European Jesus looks Germanic and was an idealized version of Christ. The European's of the time had and in some cases still have the view that christ looks like them, and that Jews being christ killers, look Jewish, its all quite raciest and illogical, like most religion.

A myth and parable are two different things. A parable is a short story that uses familiar situations to illustrate a religious or moral point (dictionary). Jesus told parables, but he wasn't one Himself.

Where are all the references in any Judeo-Christian religious text describing the Greek God Apollo or Zeus? How about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny? Aren't those generally presented as a myth rather than as truth.

The Jews of the time wanted nothing more than to discredit Jesus as the Messiah. Why didn't they call Him a myth? Maybe its because they wouldn't have gotten away with it. Maybe too many people of the time had relatives that met him.

Remember, not everyone back then knew how to read and write. The common practice was to tell children about what happened and make them memorize it word for word. Its not like they had TV or video games back then to waste all their time. Then those children would tell their own children and so forth.

If you choose to believe that the main character in the parable called the Gospel was a real person you are, paradoxically, agreeing ( if only partially!) with the Jewish treatment of the Gospels, which tried to persuade people that Jesus was not as important a figure as an inner archetype/mythical character of great power but a real man.

There are none, as far as I am aware. Why would there be any?

The point about the Christian myth is that it was a new one, an entirely original ( unprecedented) hybrid of monotheism and polytheism. Those archetypes/spiritual energies/inner aspects which had previously been represented ( in increasingly tired, hidebound, and ritual forms; the power they had originally had having been exhausted over time ) , by the gods/characters Apollo, Dionysius, Athena, etc etc, had found new vehicules in the blending of indian and greek myths known as the gnostic mysteries, a kind of enlightened polytheism.

When that "living", ( spiritually illuminating ), myth/"inner story"material came in contact/got mixed up with the ancient monotheism of the Jewish people certain/many elements were discarded, (eg: Sophia, the "goddess" of knowledge ) , and other elements, notably that of the sacrificed and reborn king, were kept.


Both these characters do have myth status in certain societies, and represent, as greek gods originally did, aspects of human behaviour, or archetypal energies.

But your separation of "truth" from "myth", your implication that they are in opposition, would seem very strange to people from the classical era, when myth was actually vehicule for the greatest truths.


Because that was the last thing that they wanted. If the archetype of Jesus, and the story about that archetype, attained the status of myth then the enlightened polytheism arriving from Greece and India would have "won". The Jewish religion was monotheistic; its myths were of one god; there was not supposed to be another character in its myth. And yet here was a new character being written into their myth, using their own stories/myths to support this insertion.

The Jewish religion had to convince people that Jesus was a real, historical, man. If they allowed/admitted that it was myth, a myth which interacted, for the first time ever, with their one god, their monotheistic myth was threatened.

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Last edited by ouinon on 04 Oct 2008, 4:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The extraordinary thing is how the hybrid, ( Christianity) , of polytheism and monotheism succeeded in taking monotheism ( which had been almost entirely confined to the jewish people until then), out to the rest of the world in a way which it had never done before. In a strange way the Jewish religion "won" because monotheism, if with the Christian "twist" of the Trinity, became the dominant religion.

Injecting just one of the archetypes/polytheistic myth elements present in the gnostic mysteries into monotheistic myth was enough to propel it across cultures. Really strange.

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