Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Jul 27, 2022 6:58 pm
I suppose I'm lucky in being able to stand in York Cathedral and be completely awestruck without having to believe the nonsense that goes with it.
I think what you are looking for is the historical (which means scientific) point of view. About this, there is an essential criterion to follow in the critical science of history: never despise, never devalue anything or anybody, never assume that things or people are stupid or nonsensical. Assuming that something is stupid or nonsensical means just not wanting to admit that we don’t understand. An academic serious historian never says that something is nonsense or stupid. On the contrary, you can find a lot of history scholars that have no problem to admit that they do not understand a lot of things. History and archaeology are full of unexplained things.
About the historical relevance of Jesus, the question becomes cultural. Obviously, it is very difficult to determine how much Jesus influenced the culture of his time and, more in general, our Western culture. However, I think some prudent things can be noticed. You already noticed the objective results in architecture and art. We can be pretty sure that a lot of philosophers, more or less indirectly or explicitly, have been influenced by the messages contained in the gospels; we can find a lot of more elements in literature.
I think that Jesus was a key figure in Western culture because he was born in a period when three great cultures where meeting, facing and conflicting each other: Greek, Latin and Hebrew culture. Greeks were already famous at his time for their culture of sport, the body, philosophy, and Jesus, to some extent, imitated the style of Greek philosophers: interest in debates, keeper of a group of disciples that worked like a school of thought, critical mentality. The Hebrew culture was strongly based on the relationship with God intepreted in a context of rules that must be respected. Romans were the founders of modern law. In this context, Jesus applied the criticism typical of Greek philosophy against the legal mentality of Jews and Romans.
I would say that, in his position at the crossroads of these cultures, he made an intelligent elaboration that I would synthetize this way: he opened the door of criticism against religion, rules, laws, conceptions about human being, by comparing these things with the self criticism of conscience, attention to subjectivity, connection of reason with the claims coming from heart, that is, from our being human.
I would even say that, from a historical point of view, he was just a product of the meeting of these cultures: in that historical-geographical context, if Jesus didn’t exist, I think that cultural context would have created all the same another Jesus, somebody else with his characteristics.
