I rejected the christ story around age 8. I told my mother that it seemed like a fairy tale. She got pretty upset.
I’m a history nerd, so maybe this won’t apply to you. But learning about the early stages of christianity has been a lot of fun for nearly two years. Who’d have thought, right?
If you enjoy reading and learning and you dislike the hold that religion has on society, you might enjoy learning about the earliest stages of the church. There’s so much material. The starter that I’ll recommend is The Passover Plot. I’ve become way more radical after this, but I think this might be a good bridge for readers who are beginning their exploration. Hope you enjoy!
it’s funny.
“jesus” (yeshua?) was a fairly common name. so was “joseph”. It’d be like a millenial named Michael naming their kid Brayden.
There was probably a dozen of them in that part of the world. There might have been a dozen of them in nazareth, even.
And, to be perfectly honest, faith healing/mystic scams were super common. usually they got knifed in the street or on the road, but the romans were getting pretty tired of all the dead bodies left lying around. (It was untidy. romans were a tidy people. /s. they just wanted to be the ones with the authority.)