If Jesus christ was not the greatest prophet and messiah who do Atheists think he was?

Question

If Jesus christ was not the greatest prophet and messiah who do Atheists think he was?

Answer 1

By definition, atheist may think he was a great man (a minority are foolish enough to deny his existence) but, if you believe there is no God, you cannot believe in prophet or messiah.

I do, by the way.

Answer 2

You ask that question as if an atheist must have an opinion on jesus h christ. If you really must know my opinion on the jesus character is pretty much the same as my opinion of Harry Potter. Bad fiction

Answer 3

He's a plot device to make the Christian mythology work.

There virtually no evidence aside from the Bible to verify the existence of a Jesus Christ of Nazareth who performed miracles.  Were aliens to examine our culture a million years from now, they'd find more evidence for man named Santa Claus who flew around in a sleigh pulled by magical reindeer than a man named Jesus Christ who turned water into wine.

Answer 4

A wise and enlightened man.

Answer 5

Most likely a man, who's memory is being abused by the church and retroactive history to make people fall in line.

Answer 6

I think he is just as mythological as Hercules.

He could have had a living prototype, but the modern Jesus is mythological.

Answer 7

I doubt anyone like that ever existed, even in a 'These Gospels are based on a true story' sense. Pagan myth is full of precursors to the story of Jesus - the most original thing about Christianity is its literalism.

Answer 8

If Jesus Christ lived today, he'd be thrown in a mental institution. If a hippie looking man walked around claiming he was the son of God, would you believe him?  

Answer 9

If he even existed then he was probably just one of the many men going about telling others what to do and think.  

Answer 10

He was basically just a good bloke who honestly believed he was the son of God, and who had the charisma to convince others that what he said was right and true.

He was really the first hippy; a man who dedicated himself to encouraging peace instead of war and love instead of hate. That in a world where hate eventually collared, tortured and executed him for his troubles.

Nevertheless, he inspired the biographers of the day to write about what he did and where he went; they turned him in to the first real martyr.

Jesus was a man of many firsts.

The accounts of his life and times have inspired millions, over the passing millennia, to do great things and terrible things. So it could also be said that, albeit unwittingly, the man probably did more to effect the course of human civilisation -for good and for bad - than anybody who has ever lived since.

As an atheist I think it's fair to say that Jesus really was the greatest man who ever lived.

Answer 11

There may or may not have been a man called Jesus alive at that time. The myth of Jesus however is almost exactly the same as every iteration of the Indo-European solar myth which is millenia old.

Answer 12

A good man, who tried to do the right thing.

Martin Luther King would be a good comparison.

People then blew it all out of proportion in the same way the Iranians proclaimed the Ayatollah Homeni to be a piece of God.  

Answer 13

Somebody who may or may not have lived, who other people claimed was a great prophet and messiah. There are people around today who think george w bush is a great president and that westlife make good records - doesn't make them right.

Answer 14

the tooth fairy.

Answer 15

I think he's a combination of many people, some true some made up.  Lots of stories that may have started as true, but exaggerated by generations of oral tradition.  Some made up for the purposes of the book.  

Probably one popular demagogue, who's had existing myths forced upon his history.

Answer 16

They think he was just a man.

How absurd is that?  

Answer 17

The Jesus that Christians worship is not the real Jesus.

The real Jesus was a prophet of God and never told anybody to worship him, nor did he ever claim to be son of God. He was a man, just like me and you.

Answer 18

This question is faulty.

It assumes that all non atheists think that the greatest prophet and messiah was JC. This is far from accurate. Jews who practice judaism believe that Moses wasm, and Muslims (also mono Theists)believe that Muhammed (p) was the greatest prophet.

Then there are all the pagans and Buddhists who also believe in God/s who don't think that JC was ...

Answer 19

I think he was a fictional character.  Maybe a composite of self-proclaimed prophets who lived roughly around that time.  But if he really existed, then he was a guy who was charismatic for his day, and he claimed to be a prophet and the son of God.  Heavy emphasis on the word "claimed."

Answer 20

Myth.

It's quite possible that there was a man that was supposedly the Savior of the Jews, but you must remember, that according to many contemporaneous historians, there were several "saviors" saying the same thing. It's in Jewish prophecy, which is why so many were claiming to be the Savior.

Answer 21

a misquoted rabbi

Answer 22

Someone else said the following - I thought it was close enough.

"The first mention of Jesus in history was 82 years after his supposed death. Nobody heard of him when he was suppose to be alive because he didn't really exist. It is also when the Jews split from the Christians. They used to be one and the same religion until the Christians decided they needed a human mascot and made up the story of Jesus. When they did the Jews said, " what are you talking about, there was no Jesus." That is when the Jews split from the Christians because they knew that the Christians only made him up as their Earth mascot. The original Bible was written 400 years after his supposed death around 412 A.D. Of course we have had updated bibles written since as they at the time realized that what the 1st bible said didn't make sense to facts they were learning. In other words, God didn't make man, man made God. It's time humans of all faiths grew up and realize that we control our own destiny and even though it may be comforting to believe that there is someone watching over us, we are here on our own. We are children of the universe and this is the garden of Eden. We are what happens when you give hydrogen atoms 13.7 billion years of evolution and we are not the only ones in the universe."

~

Answer 23

His real name was Brian.

Answer 24

There may have been a real person or may not, even if there was, we have no way of knowing what he really said, or in what context he put it, because he didn't write it himself and there's no way to know how much of what he said had later been changed and taken out of context to suit whoever was pushing the christian movement, so in the end, even if he was a real person, he still might as well have been fictional, and probably is.  If real, he was certainly a mortal human being:)

Answer 25

To be honest I think Christ was a great thinker/philosopher going on the words attributed to him in the NT. Most of what Christ said is about living in the here and now and it is quite radical. Fellow atheists could learn a lot by looking at these texts. I think his greatest message of all was to treat others as you would wish to be treated. This could be the foundation philosophy for a great society if only people followed this very simple idea.

I meant to add that the only Christ we know is the one that is written about in the NT. Whether or not the person behind the texts is real, myth or otherwise is irrelevant. As the books themselves say "I am the word".