I have been asked on a number of occasions what I think of Jesus. You know the one I'm talking about. Sometimes, I get asked this question by total strangers who apparently were told I'm an atheist by folks who know me. Once, a person asked me this question as the first words he ever said to me. "What is your opinion of Jesus Christ? Do you think he rose from the dead? Don't you believe he was God incarnate?"
Oy.
Well, let's start with the easiest one. Was Jesus God incarnate? Um... I'm an atheist. Hel-lo!! I don't believe in any god or any other supernatural-type critters that have sprung from human imaginations over the centuries. Period. So no. I don't bloody well think Jesus was any sort of god, regardless of what the Bible claims he said or did.
Did he rise from the dead? To start off with, I see no reason to think that any human being that has gotten to the state of "dead as a doornail" has ever been reanimated. Beyond that, I think we might want to back up a bit here. The first thing we need is to figure out whether this person actually lived before we can talk about dying and coming back from the dead. The more I read on the subject, the more convinced I become that Jesus of Nazareth is about as real an historical figure as Paul Bunyan. I invite readers to examine "The Jesus Puzzle" by Earl Doherty.
In this book, you'll learn that the New Testament can most readily be understood as the product of two separate religious traditions from the first century, neither of which originally believed that Jesus was an historical person. The letters by Paul and others were written without any belief in a physical human preacher/prophet from Nazareth. Go ahead. Look through all of those letters. You will not once see the word "Nazareth" in any of them. You'll not see any hint of the stories of Jesus' "ministry" or miracles or even the vast majority of his teachings. The one or two spots where they say things that sound like quotes from the Gospels, the writers never thought to mention that Jesus said the words. Even the letters titled "Peter" and "John," supposedly coming from the people who were most prominent characters in the Gospels say absolutely nothing about their memories of talking with Jesus the man. If the writers had wanted their readers to believe that they were the men mentioned in the Gospels, they would have written about their experiences while traveling around with Jesus in Galilee. They didn't even make a half-hearted effort to do that.
Next, look at the evidence from outside the Bible, concerning the events "recorded" in the Gospels. Is there a speck of evidence for a massacre of infants in Bethlehem... ever? What about a combination 3-hour shut-down of the Sun and major earthquake? Did anyone ever mention the occurence -- certainly it would be noteworthy! -- of dead people rising from their graves and walking into Jerusalem? Not a bit of it.
Go digging a little further. Did the Romans ever do such a daft thing as order a census of the Palestinian region, in which everyone was required to travel to their "ancestral home" to be recorded? Note that Luke says that Joseph went to Bethlehem "because he was descended from David." How stupid would they have had to be? What about the thing about a "virgin giving birth"? Look up Isaiah, chapters 7 and 8. I mean, read both of them, in context. The correct translation for the Hebrew word in 7:14 is "young maiden," and the prediction had nothing to do with a messiah, spiritual or otherwise, and nothing to do with a virgin.
The whole thing about the Gospels is that they were pieced together by a method called "midrash." This is the practice of skipping and hopping around in a book -- in this case, the Old Testament and some other ancient Jewish books -- and picking out a few things that look appealing, even if taken out of proper context, then patching the whole mess together into a story that is set more or less in the time of the writer. You see the same sort of thing today in the "Left Behind" series. One is just as realistic and believable as the other.
The basic idea here is that it certainly looks like Jesus is a purely mythical figure. Asking me what I think of him is as sensible as asking me what I think of John Carter of Mars or Alice, of Wonderland fame.
The fact that most of my neighbors consider this character to be a real entity who was a physical person that died, came to life again as a physical person, then went on to be something else, or to live in a parallel universe or whatever -- that's beside the point here. I see no reason to base my opinion of reality on the opinions of the majority. After all, at one point, the majority thought that the Earth was flat, stationary and at the center of the universe. Reality can only be determined by looking at the evidence and using reason to figure out what it all means. I find the evidence that Jesus is nothing more than a myth far more believable and sensible than the usual Christian view.
So I think that Jesus of Nazareth has far more in common with Obi-wan Kenobi than with the Emperor Tiberius. That, of course, has nothing to do with my opinions about the quality of the words the Bible puts into this character's mouth. Like Obi-wan, he was less than full-drawn, being nothing more than a mouthpiece for the religious community that dreamed him up. But many of the things that community had to say, and many of the tidbits added by later editors, were indeed sensible. Too bad the good stuff got mixed in with a great deal of rubbish that no sensible person should seriously consider.
But that's life, I guess.