I've been thinking about the point mykob4 brought up but, despite that I'm going to purse my theory anyway because it might just be an interesting one. All we know about Jesus comes from the christian bible so you might be tempted to regard it as unreliable anyway and not worth discussion on that ground alone. But I think there's always at least a grain of truth in all myth and legend and that it does a disservice to the intellect to dismiss them out of hand.

If Jesus did exist, he and he followers were certainly rebels against the belief and doctrines of their times. Let's suppose that he was a charismatic man with a genuine gift for expressing complex ideas in a simple language that ordinary people could readily understand and identify with. What was it that he was teaching that was so dangerous to the established order that they not only killed him for it, but killed him in such a horrifying and humiliating way? Remember that Jesus wasn't a christian - the idea of Christianity hadn't even been thought of then. The history of that religion, like many others, is soaked in blood and stained by torture, abuse, genocide and insatiable greed. It would be typical of the founders to turn a man's ideas against him, to twist and distort those teachings to their own ends. If his ideas weren't dangerous, they could simply have ignored him and his name would have been lost in the dust of history. So what were those ideas, and why were they dangerous? Could he have been teaching some form of atheism? Fantasy? Yes, maybe. Maybe you'll say the whole idea of Jesus is simply religious propaganda and not worth even considering - that the bible itself is fantasy, so why bother with it? These are valid and legitimate points of view, of course. But if they are, then so is mine. Just a thought, guys, that's all.