Sofia asked:

Are religions the product of human necessities of believing in something greater than they are? Did
religion originate in the incomprehension of universe? What if Jesus never existed?

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What is greater than human necessity, and who defines what the necessities of the human are?
Religion has been with us as long as the world itself, even if the human project is only late in the
developmental evolutionary line. Those humans who have a religious belief have always understood
that there is something greater than themselves and sought ways in which to engage with it,
understand it, an ultimately come to know it.

Hence the vital importance of myth. Myth is primordial and primeval in the human psyche and is the
ultimate creative human truth. All else flows from our 'world experiential psyche' that is our residual
'religious' memory from time immemorial.

Thus, religion does result from an incomprehension of the universe but from the desire to
comprehend the incomprehensible which even its its incomprehensibility can nevertheless be 'known'
in a religious manner. Thus all world religions, all faiths, all theistic beliefs have an understanding of
the mystical, or the numinous — those moments in the human project where the Unknowable,
Incomprehensible, God can be intuited rather than known. Intuition is more truthful epistemological
knowing or the knowing of mathematics because God cannot be known per se, but only intuited. Thus
the universe is comprehensible in the ancient psychic mythologies which predate the empirical
sciences of philosophy etc. because such myths are residual in the 'world memory' of mystical
encounter and psychic enlightenment.

What if Jesus never existed — then this question could neither be asked nor answered. If he did not
exist, then he would have had to have been invented really, or conceptually, or even literarily. This is
because he represents for those who believe him to be the Incarnate Word the perfection of all
human endeavours, thus if he did exist, then we would have to find another way of manifesting or
personalising what perfection and goodness we believe to be inherent in humanity. So that Jesus
would then become the sum total of everything that we ourselves would like to be and like our world
to be. However, the same question asked about Jesus can be asked of the Buddha, Muhammad
(Peace Be On Him), Confucius and other great religious and ethical teachers. We need to feel that
there is something more within us and to which we can attain, and which we can reach other than
evil, suffering, hurt and pain. Jesus and the other great teachers give expression to these longings.
So, if he had not existed he would have had to invent him!

Fr Seamus Mulholland OFM