Who is Jesus Christ to you?

Some guy who lived a long time ago, had some teachings that were pretty smart, pissed off some important leaders, and got killed. 60 years later, when the religious leaders in charge noticed his movement was stealing their members, they made up some stories about how he was the son of their god and had come back from the dead. This way they convinced the followers of Jesus that they had been a part of the old church all along.Then they wrote all this down in the bible, made up some miracles, put words in Jesus's mouth to keep themselves in power, and did pretty well for themselves.So, who was he? I wish I could say a great thinker, but honestly, with so little (if any) of his true message recorded, no one can know. If I had a time machine, though, I'd love to find out what he really had to say.But if he really was so great, why didn't he write his own book? Authorship wasn't unknown at the time.------------------
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Why? Because (surprise, surprise) somebody believes something totally different than you with (shocking!) as much justification for their beliefs (a holy book, some prophecies, centuries of tradition) as you have for yours?------------------
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I'm not familiar with any written works by Jesus. Perhaps you could point some out? Because all you really have is some writers saying "Jesus said he is god". Somebody telling you what Jesus said is not the same as Jesus saying something. It's putting words in his mouth, in fact. (I think you've railed against that in your posts?)Anyway, maybe Buddha or Mohammed didn't say they were god, although they may have been great men. The Pharohes did call themselves gods, you know. In both China and Japan the emporers were held to be the direct offspring of God, as well. And the things they did and left behind were cretainly great as well. Do you hold them to be gods as well?The thing is, calling oneself "god" is not generally regarded as a sane thing to do. Only liars and crazy people call themselves gods, as far as we know.Again, there's not really any evidence for Jesus's supposed resurrection. I mean, somebody told you he rose again, somebody who wasn't even there to see it, but why do you believe them? Jesus certainly isn't around today (unless he's hiding). If he did anything other than die then evidence is needed before such an event is to be accepted.Sure, it's an issue of faith. If you simply accept these things on faith, fine. But when you try and rationalize them to the rest of us, a lot of us see a pitiable attempt to lie to oneself.As it turns out, I can make an intellectual decision on the matter. Since it has never been shown that God intervenes in the world in a capacity that could be recognized to be statistically significant (i.e. different from random chance), I can decide that gods don't exist. Makes perfect sense to me and answers many more questions then it raises, unlike belief in the god of the bible.