In a very compelling, short video, Bono, the lead vocalist of U2 talks candidly about his spiritual and religious beliefs.
I don't believe in Jesus, but I do believe in Bono, so I found the video compelling. However, Bono is a far more brilliant musician than he is a religious historian (or even demographer of contemporary religious affiliation because far fewer than half of the planet is Christian).
Bono, like so many today, misuses the word messiah. It means anointed ones (all Jewish kings were anointed ones) and more loosely messenger, but is not at all synonymous with divinity. When Jesus was asked who he was, he repeatedly described himself as "bar nasha" (son of man).
Bono argues that because so many people cannot be so wrong for so long, modern Christians must be right. This would only be true if the popularity of an idea makes it true, or if we have few or no examples of wildly popular ideas that were later shown to be wrong. We bled people for centuries to get the bad humors out and thought the Earth was flat and a few thousand years old, but that doesn't mean these ideas were correct. Billions believe in astrology but this does not make it true.
Also, this same reasoning could be applied to the billions of people who adhere to non-Christian faiths, some far older than Christianity. Since there are far more non-Christians than Christians, does this mean that they are right and Christians are wrong (modern Christians claim exclusivity so some hybrid reality is not admissible)?
Christianity reached Europe and Ireland not so much because of its compelling narrative but because it had become the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire shortly before it collapsed. All other competitive belief systems and their followers were systematically hunted down and killed or forced to convert. We simply don't know how many people in Europe, if free to do so, would not have renounced the faith of their fathers for this Mediterranean import because they were not free to do so. Throw in a public burning or two, torture a few dissenters to death, and you have yourself a totalitarian theocracy that held huge swathes of Europe in its grip until the Enlightenment.
At any rate, Bono is assuming, as many modern Christians do, that his conception of who Jesus was and what he represents has been accurately portrayed, faithfully transmitted and translated, and that he has had an opportunity to be exposed to alternate hypotheses and seriously consider them. Bono's faith was not something that occurred to him through divine revelation but was passed along to him as an accident of geography. Were his parents Hindu or Ireland a predominantly Muslim country, I might be impressed with his reaching out and finding Christianity spontaneously and by choice, but there is a certain inevitability to what he considers a miracle. Again, it could be true that people in Western and Northern Europe and their former colonies are correct and that billions of other human beings, most people on the planet, are incorrect, but then this argues that god is not universal and transcendental but regional.
Bono has a right, as do all of us, to imagine god or gods in our own way, to choose saints or intermediaries that personalize an otherwise unapproachable, distant deity, but my point is a simpler one: Jesus never said he was divine. None of those who knew him claimed that he was divine. Paul (who never met him) did not believe he was divine. Half of the first few centuries of Christians did not believe he was divine.
It's very possible, of course, that he was divine and simply failed to mention it, but this seems a rather glaring omission for what modern Christians especially of the evangelical variety consider a core tenet of their faith.
And by the way, even if Jesus did claim divinity (he didn't), this does not mean that he was right. It doesn't mean he was lying or even delusional either. Many men throughout history, even great teachers (which I believe he was), have simply been wrong.
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