I saw a spate of Christians, over Easter weekend and holy week more broadly, talking about the resurrection of Christ as a literal, historical, material event and the importance of it being that, insisting that if any of it was metaphor then it was all pointless.

And to be very clear, they meant -- and explicitly stated -- that they don't mean the resurrection was pointless if it was metaphor, they meant *everything* was pointless. No point to existence without it.

And there's a whole branch of Christian thinking going at least as far back as Paul that goes along these lines, but honestly... I don't get it.

Because if the resurrection of Christ is a metaphor, then the problem it solved is also a metaphor.

And in fact, to me, it's almost inescapable that most of our beliefs about Christ are metaphorical, because the problems that his sacrifice solved and the prophecies that he fulfilled by doing so didn't exist in religious thought until after he'd already died.

The literalists can tell you *why* they think God *needed* to incarnate himself as a son in mortal flesh and then live and die and be sacrificed for the sins of mankind in accordance with cosmic rules that no human being knew about until they needed to say how the dead Jesus won.

Jesus was supposed by his followers to be the messiah but he didn't actually do the things the messiah was expected to do. He was supposed to be immortal and triumphant but in the material realm it looked an awful lot like he was defeated and died?

So then you have to either admit he wasn't the messiah or the son of God... or you can make up a story about how he *meant* to do that, how it was all part of his plan, THE plan, the divine plan.

Invent whole new theories of the universe, of sin and forgiveness, to explain it.

Nobody, before the storied life of Christ, was waiting for the specific series of events to unfold. No prophecy foretold them. No learned theologians pondered the problem of mankind's sin needing an impossible kind of blood covering from one perfect sacrifice to stave off hell.

None of this stuff prefigured Christianity. It's... it is Christianity. Christianity arose out of the need to explain the Christ story as a triumph, as a spiritual victory even as it was a political/temporal loss.

And as the early Christians wanked out these ad hoc hypotheses they did extend them backwards, trying to tie them into some version of Jewish scriptures and shaping how Christians would interpret the "Old Testament" as containing a series of prophecies about Jesus specifically.

"So it's all made up? It's all pointless? It's all lies?"

I mean, I don't know. If you believe that all the copying and translating and interpretation that went into creating The Holy Bible was guided by divine inspiration from God, you can believe that about all of this, too.

It works as metaphor, and if you think metaphor means it's pointless because we're all damned from dying in our sins... that's metaphor, too. In the Bible, Jesus mostly speaks of hell in parables. Mostly about rich dicks who hoard resources and don't help their neighbors.

I think there's a solid argument that a "literal" reading of the gospels supports the notion that hell is a metaphor, a setting for parables and stories. There's probably some arguments against that. They don't particularly interest me because I'm not a literalist.