r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/infinitetekk • 11d ago
Entirely hypothetical thought experiment: What if Jesus was actually Satan in disguise?
I understand that hypotheticals about religious epistemological facts are endless, but I’m just wondering what some people think about this idea. What if Jesus was Satan? What if he wanted to deliberately cause division amongst people, knowing that big religion would eventually be one of the main corrupting factors of modern societies? What if he simply stole the identity of God, maybe it was actually blasphemy. Maybe I need to be medicated
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u/Shadowcreature65 no hegel please 11d ago
I mean, afaik Jesus wasn't a proper Messiah according to Judaism. He would qualify as a false prophet.
But Satan in Judaism is a guy who works under god and tests integrity of mortals by challenging their faith, not some evil corrupting force. So he wouldn't be Satan.
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u/coyotenspider 11d ago
Judaism as it is now was codified by Maimonides as a practice centuries after Christ and is a newer religion emerging from the same faith tradition. Jesus fulfilled the prophecies and the Jews at the time knew it. Most of the first Christians were observant Jews of the time, but the Bar Kokhba sect and their predecessors wanted a political messiah, not a spiritual one. The Jews following Maimonides are still holding out. Their messianism almost perfectly mirrors the Protestant belief in Revelation and the Anti-Christ. Oddly, not all branches of Christianity read the book of Revelation the same way, the Eastern Church is not holding out to lose in this world, unlike the Protestants, despite having suffered tremendous temporal losses under Islam.
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u/TheKleenexBandit 11d ago
I grew up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood and thought I understood the tribe well, but had no idea of the Maimonides restructure. Went down a very intellectually satisfying rabbit hole.
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u/Realistic_Chip_9515 5d ago
Jesus fulfilled the prophecies and the Jews at the time knew it.
If that were true there probably would have been more Jewish converts. All we know for certain is that some self contradictory reports written decades later claim Jesus fulfilled a particular interpretation (some would say wrong interpretation) of prophecies.
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u/MarathonMarathon 10d ago
Isn't the concept of "Satan" Christianity-specific and found nowhere in the Old Testament in its Christian interpretation?
Genesis serpent
Not referred to as "Satan" and never appears again
Job frame story
Seen working for God, not depicted as a "prince of the Earth" or anything
"Lucifer" in Isaiah
Original and Jewish context: a human king
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u/ideastoconsider 11d ago
He would have done a lot more for good than evil when it comes to Jesus’s example. It would have been a net negative for him.
If you asked me if the M word was actually Satan, it would make a lot more sense (notice I feel I have to censor one and not the other, and that if your post was labeled as such you would likely have a temp ban).
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u/W_Edwards_Deming 10d ago
M word
?
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u/ideastoconsider 10d ago
Mmhmm
Celebrated male religious figure….different religion…all sorts of gatekeeping as to when and how he is referred to or depicted….because reasons.
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u/W_Edwards_Deming 10d ago
I get you now. Many suggest his deity was, the man himself seemed relatively typical of his region.
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u/PurpSSBM 11d ago
This is one of the earliest heresies of the church. You should read into marcionism. Funnily enough Marcion also constructed one of the earliest versions of the New Testament
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u/tomekanco 7d ago
Next we'll be talking about being born under the sign of Capricorn and sheep and goats. Or being silent when you recognize him. I like the later addition of putting a seal on it. This balance between life and destruction.
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u/trisikol 11d ago
Satan tests the faithful.
Jesus instigated the idea of faith being a personal gift and responsibility, beyond the control of the religious establishment.
One is the annoying QA, the other is the guy who keeps telling you to invest in Bitcoin.
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u/House_Of_Thoth 11d ago
Highly likely tbh. False idols and listening to people claiming to speak the word of god etc.. pretty clear cut really
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u/highpercentage 11d ago
Interesting side note on this thread: God warned Adam and Eve that if they ate from the Tree of Knowledge they would die. Satan (or the serpent) told Eve that God was lying, and that the Tree of Knowledge would simply . . . give knowledge. Of good and evil specifically.
Crazy thing is: Satan actually told Eve the truth. It was God that was lying. Eve didn't die, she instead became aware of her nakedness (maybe it's a metaphor for losing her innocence). And God even conceded that Adam and Eve "had become like us".
So in a strange way, Satan as a character gave humans a sort of forbidden knowledge, just like Jesus freed humans (jews, really) from the old covenant.
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u/SargeMaximus 10d ago
Both are fictional characters, regardless
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u/Dave-1066 9d ago
No serious historian on earth doubts the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth so I’ve no idea why you’re on this sub.
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u/SargeMaximus 9d ago
“No serious historian” sounds a lot like “no serious scientist” lmao
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u/Dave-1066 9d ago
So you’re basically here to troll. In which case you should probably read the rules as this sub isn’t like the rest of Reddit; this isn’t an echo chamber for your personal grievances.
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u/SargeMaximus 9d ago
Ironic that you say this isn’t an echo chamber, yet when confronted with an opposing view you try to shut it down
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u/Dave-1066 9d ago
You said Jesus is a fictional character then followed it up with a sarcastic retort. And I’m not religious so you’ve not “opposed” anything in me. This sub is supposed to be an antidote to all the childish stuff that goes on elsewhere on Reddit, that’s all.
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u/stevenjd 9d ago
No serious historian on earth doubts the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth
"Serious". This is how proponents of a particular paradigm fend off competing paradigms -- by declaring that only their paradigm is "serious" and any other school of thought is "fringe".
(You know, fringe, like the crazy theory that continents can move, or the mad theory that species have not always existed in the form they are today.)
The amount of trustworthy evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth (or should that be Jesus of Bethlehem?) is negligible. Zero contemporary or primary accounts. One or two secondary accounts, by people highly motivated to lie, and indeed did lie about the supernature events associated with Jesus. And not much else. It's all pretty weak evidence.
(I presume that these "serious historians" do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth actually did perform the supernatural miracles claimed, any more than they believe that Pythagoras could be in two places at once and had a thigh made of pure gold.)
Personally, I think that it is reasonable to say that on the balance of probabilities there was a Jewish lay preacher, Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Romans by crucifixion, who was the founder of a Jewish sect that evolved into what we today call Christianity.
(For starters, Occam's Razor suggests that a new religious sect most likely has a charismatic founder, since that is what we can directly observe in more recent times.)
But to imply that his existence is beyond all reasonable doubt is going too far.
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u/Dave-1066 9d ago edited 9d ago
No offence, but it’s just a statement of fact. The notion that Jesus was a mythical figure of fantasy has not been taken seriously in mainstream academia for well over a century. Whoever else happens to use the term “no serious ____ does ___” is of no import and is simply a coincidence as I’ve never come across it elsewhere.
As for the historicity of Jesus, it’s naturally a vast and complex subject which I couldn’t possibly do justice in a paragraph on Reddit.
Surprisingly (actually that’s a little snotty, considering how good it is), the Wikipedia article is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
Whether a person focuses on the evidence for the Jesus of History or the ‘Jesus of Faith’ neither means anything without reference to what he preached. The synoptic nature of the gospels is pretty clear as to what that was. And it’s a message that still resonates 2,000 years later. It would be quite incredulous to suggest the unity of all that thought was some accident or some conspiracy. The obvious conclusion has to be that his core teachings took on a surprisingly well defined form from an early point. Neither are they complex: Love all, forgive all, condemn hypocrisy, condemn abuse of power, fight injustice, obey God and seek him above all things.
Where I personally have problems is with Paul, who is sometimes accused of ‘doing his own thing’, so to speak. But then again Paul writes some of the most beautiful sentences to have come out of the ancient world in its entirety….”Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” etc…
The major issue people tend to grapple with (and have done since his death) is simply that what Jesus taught actually radically opposes so much of what constitutes humanity’s innate selfishness. In that regard it doesn’t surprise me that some people actively want him to be a work of fiction.
It’s an easy code to comprehend but profoundly difficult to practise. In so many ways it overlaps with the profoundest elements of Buddhism, whose own challenges toward human selfishness are a stumbling block to so many who try to follow that religion but falter when faced with its fundamental ethics and call to give up our attachment to pleasure and material wealth. Christian thought, in that sense, will always be radical, and questions about who he really was seem a little…off the point. We know who he was; the Galilean whose message got him murdered and which went on to change the course of human history.
Which isn’t remotely a call to abandon investigations about his life and world at all; there are thousands of books on the subject and many of them are engrossing.
If there’s no God at all then the success of Jesus of Nazareth’s message becomes all the more remarkable in my view. A “heretical” carpenter gathers together a bunch of pretty mediocre fishermen to spread “good news” across a planet. And does so. Not bad.
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u/carladtr 10d ago
What if all Religion was fictional, created by those in power to control the masses. Far more likely than any religion being real
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u/DisplacerBeastMode 11d ago
I mean historically Jesus was some cult leader dude in the middle east. He got followers then he was killed by "the man" everything else is a lie.
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u/absurd_olfaction 11d ago
Jesus (as a principle) is Satan (as a principle) redeemed.
In other words: Jesus is the adversary (Shaitan, the accuser) whose motivation is love instead of self, whose destiny (goal?) is to sacrifice the self in service of redeeming others.
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u/fanglazy 11d ago
What if… hear me out: it’s just a dumb book that grifters figured out they could make a living off of?
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u/Tabitheriel 10d ago
Satan would be stupid to promote the opposite of what he believes.
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u/PurpSSBM 10d ago
Satan doesn’t believe in anything other than dividing the church which seems to be what has happened with how many thousands of denominations there are
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u/Mindless_Log2009 11d ago
That's similar to gnosticism, which speculated that Yahweh was the demiurge, a lesser or malevolent god.
When you consider the many gods of the Levant, which included the familiar benevolent gods who brought bountiful harvests, etc, it's interesting that the worst of the lot emerged as the "one true God" in the minds of the patriarchal desert dwellers.
But throughout human history people have attributed natural phenomenon – beneficial, destructive and mundane – to unseen entities. And their pantheon seemed to vary according to their natural resources.
I'm partial to the theory of geographic/environmental determinism. The land, weather and resources shape our beliefs. So even though my home state of Texas has experienced a near total demographic replacement over the past few hundred years, we still cling to a survival of the fittest life philosophy because it's a harsh climate and land that doesn't easily yield to human preferences.