Sorry to appear brutal for the things I am going to say; but I wish someone else had informed me of these when I was a young JW.
It was due to the political demands of the ruthless but superstitious Roman Emperor Constantine the Great who for political gain declared the Jesus cult to become the state religion. This was because his mother (as Finklestein alludes) came from the peasant class and had adopted the rustic Jesus cult. Constantine’s authority established the Catholic faith as the official religion with its chosen texts which later came to be called the Bible. All modern Jesus-belief, including JWs and yours Michelle, sprang from this Roman source.
There never was a primitive uncorrupted Christianity, there never was a real person called Jesus.
He was the saviour- god-man character of pagan theatre. The Jesus story evolved from paganism and was politically managed as the central figure of the establishment religion of Imperial Rome in the fourth century CE.
If you believe that Jesus is the son of God, you are parroting the Catholic church and ignorant of the pagan origins of Christianity. Besides how could anyone know who the invisible son is of an invisible father?
Constantine did not care a fig about the teachings of the Bible, as I said, it was for him a superstition; it brought him “good luck” in warfare. The fusion of all pagan belief in the new Roman Catholic Church; politically united the pious in a cosmopolitan Roman Empire. This religious and political unison was a platform of strength for the emperor. As it turned out, as history shows, the new religion out-lived the Roman Empire.
The Catholic fusion of beliefs in the fourth century Rome involved taking the folk literature centred on the universal astrological stories and clothed them in reverential language. The figure or character of a god-man saviour was recorded from the earliest writings in Babylonia and Egypt. Thousands of years before Jesus, Osiris (also called Krst) healed the sick, raised the dead, was born of a virgin mother called Meri, had twelve disciples, walked on water and raised his ‘friend’ Lazarus from the dead. Space does not permit me to list the rest of similarities.
So why not have Osiris in your heart as your saviour instead of one of his later imitations? Perhaps you might like the sound of Dionysus “The true vine” was born of the Virgin in the stable with oxen in midwinter, who turned water into wine at the wedding feast, was crucified went to the grave and was resurrected after three days. Or perhaps you might prefer the Virgin-born Great Shepherd Mithra, symbolized by a cross who was crucified and whose body and blood was commemorated every year at the spring equinox by a ritual last supper.
Christianity is pure pagan belief dressed up in a literary confection to obscure its origins. Jesus is just an imitation of the older God-man beliefs. There is no concrete evidence, no first hand eyewitness account of him...and my goodness! if a man could raise the dead he would have immediately become known and celebrated for his remarkable skills in the interconnected and literate Roman world.
Alas! True resurrectionists have always been a bit thin on the ground.
Since therefore Jesus is a literary figure not a literal one, the likely-hood of Jesus being a real person is at the same betting odds as Harry Potter becoming a breathing human being in the future and doing all of the things written about him. Please think about it.
Why didn’t somebody tell me these things when I was at school?