Mark 2:15-17

[cartesiandaemon]

“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”This is another of the famous quotes, and one I quite like

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I've sometimes hypothesised that Jesus's life story might be adequately explained by coincidence: the odds are that one long-haired hippy cult leader every few thousand years will get lucky and have everything go right

[atreic]

If Jesus wasn't divine

I think if you want to work with that as an axiom, you need to bite the bullet of 'but claimed he was divine' or 'and never claimed he was divine, this just got ret-conned in by over excitable disciples', pretty quickly. If the former, I don't think you can _be_ a 'very good man' if you're actively misleading people; although presumably you could be very good and insane. If the latter, then I think your important qualities are probably not a property of your saviour/saint, but a property of their followers (although clearly there must be some correlation between the two)

[cartesiandaemon]

I remember hearing about the supposed trilemma of Jesus -- liar, delusional, or God but only recently seriously thought about it. But when I thought about it, it didn't surprise me at all that a charismatic leader of a big movement might be both (a) moved by social justice and (b) delusional: in fact, I'd almost expect it, lots of great people have some really weird aspects, and the trope of "someone who seems totally whacked out, but turns out to be right surprisingly often" is common in stories and to some extent in the real world

[atreic]

Well, yes, I think 'he said sensible stuff about being nice to each other, so clearly wasn't mad about being God' argument has so many holes in it you can use it as a sieve, but it's worth thinking about.