Part 3: The Uniqueness Of Christ
"Christ was either the greatest person ever, a liar or a lunatic" Various Christians
I have been told that I should let Jesus into my life because he was special, no one else claimed to be the Son of God, was crucified and then resurrected. I beg to differ.
"Apollonius of Tyana, is often called the "pagan Christ," since he also lived during the first century, and performed a similar ministry of miracle-working, preaching his own brand of ascetic Pythagoreanism--he was also viewed as the son of a god, resurrected the dead, ascended to heaven, performed various miracles, and criticized the authorities with pithy wisdom much like Jesus did." - http://www.columbia.edu/~rcc20/kooks.html written by Rick Carrier, studying for PHD in ancient History.
The above site is well worth a visit, as it looks critically at all the miracle workers who were performing at the time of Christ, and looks at how knowledge of them has been attacked by Christians through the Centuries. The best example is the following in the same essay:
"We also know that the cult that grew up around Apollonius survived for many centuries after his death. An inscription from as late as the 3rd century names him as a sort of pagan "absolver of sins," sent from heaven (Oxford Classical Dictionary, Third Edition, 1996). The emperor Caracalla erected a shrine to him in Tyana around 215 A.D (Dio Cassius, 78.18; for a miraculous display of clairvoyance on the part of Apollonius, see 67.18). According to one account, the ghost of Apollonius even appeared to the emperor Aurelian to convince him to stop his siege of Tyana, whereupon he also erected a shrine to him around 274 A.D. (Historia Augusta: Vita Aureliani, 24.2-6).
"Later Arabic sources even discuss the fame and potency of certain relics associated with him, which remained in use well into the sixth and seventh centuries, the last of them apparently destroyed by crusaders in 1204 A.D."
I am sorry to quote so heavily from this site, but the similarities between Jesus and Apollonius are remarkable. I am sure if I got approached today by a member of his religion, they would say "All you have to do is pray to Apollonius, and he will forgive you" in exactly the same way Christians do. I know, because I have been told, that if I pray to Allah, then Allah will show me the true path, that if I meditate on the Four Noble Truths then I will see that Buddhism is the right path, if I pray to Jesus and ask about the Book of Mormon, then Jesus will tell me that is the true path. I can see a pattern beginning to emerge, I wonder if I pray really hard to God, with the wish that he shows me that the Rowan tree in my back garden is the true path, will he tell me just what my wish is? I think I will leave that experiment until someone convinces me that there is a god.
Alright, so maybe Apollonius wasn’t crucified, but so what? Why was Christ crucified? Why did his daddy need such a horrific death for his son? An omnipotent, all loving dad could surely think of a better way to allow his son to die. I have heard that it all hapopened to fulfill the prophecies, but I hope not. That is like saying "I told you so" Hardly justification for a brutal murder. I have also been told that God needed a blood sacrifice, and again I want to know how can anyone, by definition, be called compassionate whilst demanding blood sacrifices?
So was he the greatest, a liar or a lunatic? He wasn’t unique and until we have more evidence, we cannot know. If the only evidence for his divinity is The Bible, then we need evidence that it can be totally trusted. If we doubt the Bible we doubt Jesus, and I doubt the Bible. If anyone can answer the queries I have in these essays, I will be very glad to listen, but before they win my heart they must convince my mind.
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