Secondly, assuming he was real, Jesus never said he was the Messiah. He never claimed to be God or a god.
Actually, He did. You're probably unaware of the context. To His audience, the implicit claims were explicit enough, and their reaction was as one might expect.
Son of Man is not descriptive other than all male human beings are sons of man.
Quite right. But he's not making any claim to divinity by using this phrase (except at His trial).
I think that the phrase was inserted by Pagan converts to the Jesus Cult who wanted to emphasize that Jesus was not only a god but also a son of man.
That's highly unlikely. 'Son of man' has a Scriptural context which pagans would be unaware of. The humanity and divinity of Jesus was emphasised by the Evangelists, often
against both Jewish and Gentile assumption — that He was either one thing or the other — only His followers were claiming that He was both.
The most important item for Christians to rethink is the fact that Jesus never claimed to be a god or the High God.
I would rather suggest the more important issue is for you to reassess your erroneous assumptions regarding Christianity. It's apparent you don't know nearly as much as you assume to.
If Jesus didn't think he was god, why do his followers cling to the mistaken view? Jesus was deified sometime in the second to third centuries by the increasingly paganized "Church."
Nonsense, and easily demonstrable as such.
There were various debates about what he was. Some thought he was pure spirit. Other thought he was a human body inhabited by God like space aliens taking over humans in Sci-Fi movies. Others thought he was a god but a created god subordinate to the High God.
Docetism, paganism and Arianism, respectively. All refuted vigorously from their first appearance.
The Gospels seem to lean that way.
You obviously don't understand the gospels.
Finally Christians moved further away from the Jewish human Jesus and created the Trinity.
Er, no.
Trinities are the hallmark of most Indo-European Pagan religions. Mithraism is the closest to the Trinity model for Jesus.
Amergin, repeating an error does not make it any more true.
Actually, triunes are indeed evident in many religions, which itself should mark something significant ... perhaps because the Trinity is a reality, and nature religions reflect the truth to some degree?
The main point however is that where Mithraism and Christianity coincide, it's historically evident that it is Mithraism that follows Christianity — the
earliest evidence is found in Rome, in the 2nd century on, so the Cult of Mithras would be taking elements from the Christian cult.
The Zoroastrians also had a dark God similar to the Christian Satan/Lucifer. Angra Mainyu is the original source of Satan.
And again, you misunderstand the Christian iconography.
You also fall into the common modernist trap (it seems to me) that everything must derive from somewhere else — no one is allowed an original idea, and no-where can similar ideas crop up independently, which is nonsense, when one considers man is man everywhere.
The idea of an evil agent, or an agency of evil, is universal — it does not rely on word of mouth, but rather observation — so that many cultures have an evil agent/agency of evil does not mean they're copying each other, but rather they're facing the same issues.
The Christian idea of satan/evil differs from the Jewish idea because the metaphysic is different, the paradigm is different ... Satan is not a god in the Christian tradition, so any contiguity with Zoroastrianism is purely superficial. A proper understanding of the concepts within the two traditions soon reveals them to be remarkably different.
Thomas
