Who was Jesus anyway?

[slappy]

My christian freind recently made the case to me that if Jesus wasn't the Son of God, then he had to be crazy. He says that this is a common argument for Christianity, or at least a common response to agnostics like me. In other words, most people are wary of calling Jesus a nutcase, but what else do you call someone who claims to be God, or at least The Son Of. I've never bought the idea that Jesus was just another moralist, but it never really occured to me that he was saying things that, if someone said them now, we'd all laugh at him and put him away. And if he wasn't crazy, what else do we do with him saying he's The Son of God and we have to follow him if we want to see heaven?

[Satan]

In the defense of Jesus (and who'd a thought that I would come to his aid) the dude did a lot of things which a nut-case couldn't do. You know, miracles and stuff.

According to that book, anyway...

------------------
Yer pal,
Satan

[WallyM7]

Those miracles are duplicated every day. Modern medicine can make blind people see, deaf people hear, etc. They can even bring back the dead. CLEAR! Zap!

If that doesn't count, what about those Evangalists on T.V.? They're curing people everyday. You don't even have to be there. Just put your hand on the screen. Even J.C. couldn't do that. And hey, how about those psycho, sorry, psychic healers?

Sorry, Satan. I know you were kidding. Feel free to use this post for wrapping fish.

------------------
You are unique - Just like everyone else.

[Monty]

Well, Jesus never did claim to be the son of God. His followers claimed that's what he is.

[Momotaro]

Ever heard of the Jesus Seminar? It's a groupd of two hundred Catholic, Protestant, and non-Christian scholars from around the world. They come from diverse fields such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and literary analysis. They met from 1985 through 1991 to debate the historical veracity of the New Testament.

Their conclusions about Jesus are interesting: he probably only said three of the eight beatitudes; he didn't predict that the world would end, or that he would sit in judgement with God; he didn't call on his followers to preach the Gospel to all nations; and the conversation Jesus had with his disciples at the Last Super is probably not the one found in the Bible, even though these words constitute a large portion of the Catholic Mass.

Sorry guys, but most of what we 'know' about Jesus is fabrication. In particular, avoid the Gospel of 'Psychedelic' John, he's just silly.

My feeling is that Jesus really was a great man, but we'll never know how great he was because of all the people that have added to and reinterpreted his words and actions. One more thing: the Jesus Seminar concluded that Jesus probably talked little or not at all about himself. He didn't think he was anyone special. Other people took care of making him say that.

------------------
Only humans do inhuman things.

[GuanoLad]

If Jesus existed, and he probably did, then he was a son of a carpenter who had some ideas (most of them I agree with) and knew how to make himself heard. Though few agreed with im.

He was posthumously martyred to the highest degree possible.

And like Robin Hood, he can not be proven to be real, may be a conglomeration of many people together, and the Myth is more powerful than the Man.

And he didn't have blue eyes, either.

[mok]

He was posthumously martyred to the highest degree possible.

Posthumously martyred, huh? Another miracle! Every other known martyr was martyred simultaneously with their death.

-m

[Pickman's Model]

I'm not going to get into a big flamewar here, so if anybody drops the first bomb, I'm not going to respond to it. I just want to make one comment, on the Jesus Seminar.

While most of these people are made to sound like "experts" in their field (and some of them probably are), if the rest of them are like John Dominic Crossan, then they have less credibility than Rush Limbaugh.

The estimable Mr. Crossan is a former Jesuit professor who was fond of revisionism to the point where all you could be certain of concerning Holy Scripture (by the time he got through with it) could be written on a scrap of bubble gum wrapper.
The minimalist and sensationalist conclusions of the Jesus Seminar are sorely lacking in credibility amongst scholars of a more serious bent, both Catholic and Protestant. Mr. Crossan's conclusions---that Jesus was merely temporal---ipso facto shoots down his credibility as a Catholic scholar right off the bat, as he has become involved in a heresy, a real old one, called Arianism.

Arius (250-336 AD) was a priest who came to the same conclusion about Jesus, and set off a real nasty heresy within the Church for some time. His conclusion was that Jesus was created, not divine, although he was later imbued with divine aspects by God. Crossan has pulled this old chestnut out of the scrap heap, blown the dust off it, and concluded that Jesus was created, not divine, although he was later attributed with divine aspects by his followers.

In short, Crossan has slapped a fresh coat of paint on an old heresy and is parading it around like it's something new. This has been tried before, and it will be tried again, but it still doesn't have any steam. The only people that Crossan, et al, are going to convince are the folks whose minds are made up already or those who are so gullible that they don't know any better.

[Jodi]

Well, I think there are several answers to this question: Who was Jesus as a matter of historical fact; who was Jesus as a matter of literature (a "created character," if you will); and who was Jesus as a matter of religious faith?

Regarding the first, all we really know about Jesus as a matter of historical fact is that the evidence indicates that such a man did in fact exist and caused a stir around the time Jesus is now assumed to live. It might have been a small stir made larger after his death and it might have been a large stir to start with. That's about all we know for certain.

As a matter of literary "fact," we have all the deeds and words attributed to Him in the Bible. Did He really do these things and say these things? Who knows? Some believe He did and some believe He didn't. There is precious little in the way of contemporary evidence, so all we have is conjecture. I find the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar to be suspicious precisely because they arrive at conclusions that are not warranted by the evidence (or lack thereof). The Beatitudes are a prime example -- Jesus only really said three of them? How could they possibly establish that? It makes it sound like they had a reporter on the scene. The truth is that we know precious little about the "real Jesus" -- about as much as we might expect to know about a person living in His time.

The divinity of Jesus Christ is an article of faith. I think it could have been "proven" then, and was proven then by His disappearance from the tomb and reappearance to the apostles after they had seen Him killed. But how could it be proven now? I don't think the alternative is that Jesus was nuts, though; I don't see why that follows. Jesus lived in an age of prophets, and I think it's reasonable to grant Him at least the status of a prophet even if we don't accept His divinity. It should be obvious, also, that if the Scriptures are taken literally, there is little room to doubt His divinity. I don't take them literally, though.

[pldennison]

Pickman, correct me if I'm wrong, but your problem with this "heresy" to which you refer lies not in whether it is actually true or not, but that it conflicts with Catholic doctrine? I don't know enough about the topic to comment, but it seems to me that to prima facie dismiss something that could be factually true simply because it conflicts with ideas that are a matter of faith is poor scholarship. You refer to those you are "too gullible to know any better"--to know what? That Jesus really was divine? IMNSHO, that's purely a matter of faith, and you can't be derisive towards others, even other Christians, for not believing it.

Monty says:

Well, Jesus never did claim to be the son of God.

And you say that I have never read my Bible Monty?

Matthew 26:63b-64a "The high priest said to Him, 'I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.' 'Yes, it is as you say,' Jesus replied."

Luke 22:70 "They all asked, 'Are you the Son of God?' He replied, 'You are right in saying I am.'"

Way back in the GGD, I said that Jesus was the King of the Jews. (Actually this may have been in the thread; Was Jesus the Messiah?) Someone replied that it was the Romans who gave Him that title, and that He actually never said He was King of the Jews.

Luke 23:3 "So Pilate asked Jesus, 'Are you the king of the Jews?' 'Yes, it is as you say,' Jesus replied." (Also Matthew 26:11)

Oh, BTW, you all know who I think Jesus is. (See above)
Adam

------------------
"Life is hard...but God is good"

[Keeves]

Satan wrote

In the defense of Jesus (and who'd a thought that I would come to his aid)

Kinda puts a new spin on the phrase "Devil's Advocate", now, doesn't it! I guess what goes aound comes around.

[furt]

Fair disclosure to start; I am a freind of the OP and it was an (offline) conversation with me that started the whole thing.

To summarize what I told him (and this is not my original idea, BTW, it's very old) and answer some of the above questions; There is ten times the documentary evidence for jesus than for any other ancient figure. IIRC, our whole evidence for many major figures like Ceasar, Plato, etc, rests on a handful of manuscripts (perhaps someone with access to research facilities can tell us exactly how many) dated, in some cases, centuries after the persons's death. By contrast, we have thousands of texts on Jesus, the oldest dating to 70-120 AD.

Most of these texts are Biblical, of course, and while some people assume that the Bible can never be accurate, most historians look at it as a reliable document (even if they disagree with the religious intent). And there can really be no doubt from the Bible that Jesus considered himself divine. Adam gives some quotes above. Others are "I am the Way, the Truth and The Life. No one comes to the Father but by Me," "If you see me you have seen The Father," and "I and The Father are One." Futhermore, we have Peter saying "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God," and Jesus not stopping him. We have Jesus forgiving other people's sins--not sins against him (Jesus), but ALL of their sins. Think for a moment how you would react if I told you that I forgave you for the nasty things you said to your wife or husband yesterday. You'd tell me to %$@# off and mind my own business. Yet people repeatedly ask Jesus for forgiveness for things that have nothing to do with him.

All of this, of course, in a fiercely monotheistic culture where only |God can forgive sins. And if you think that Jesus was some New Age guy trying to overturn Judaism and replace it, you gotta read those Gospels again.

Furthermore, we have some non-biblical accounts (Jerome being the famous one) from the same period which do not conflict with the Bible at all. But we can say with pretty solid historical certainty that Jesus was being announced as God Made Flesh and risen from the dead within the mid-first century AD; which means people who were eyewitnesses to the event were still around. They'd be able to say something were the apostles fabricating the whole he-claimed-to-be-God part. (And certainly were there followers who didn't think he was divine they'd have motivation.) We have no record of any such opposition.

Hence, it can be said with a pretty solid historical basis that Jesus made claims to divinity, and was being proclaimed as such at the very least within 50 years of his death (c. 30 AD), and in all probability very soon afterwards.

This does not make those claims true, of course, but it does eliminate the rather popular position of "Jesus was a good man/poet/prophet/moral teacher/proto-L. Ron Hubbard." A person who seriously claims to be Divine--and not in some "we're all God" sense--is either 1) a liar, 2) a loon 'on a par with the man who says he is a poached egg' or else 3) telling the truth.

The first two options seem unlikely, and the third distasteful. But there isn't much else choice.

------------------
"It all started with marbles in school..."

[Polycarp]

Satan said:

In the defense of Jesus (and who'd a thought that I would come to his aid) the dude did a lot of things which a nut-case couldn't do. You know, miracles and stuff.
According to that book, anyway...

Well, he had some good words about you, too:

The Devil can cite Scripture to his own purpose.

Nice to know you're returning the compliment!

I think Pickman's Model had a very clear post regarding the Jesus Seminar. I probably get as frustrated by people who abuse textual criticism to eliminate any shred of potential data from the Bible as I do by literalists who go to the other extreme. As for the Arian red herring, unless we get some posts from militant Arians (as opposed to militant Aryans?? ), can we call that a dead issue? It was a heresy in the early church; it was shot down. Maybe they had a point; maybe they didn't. I personally find a supernatural-but-sub-divine Jesus even more difficult to believe in than the simultaneously-God-and-man Jesus of orthodox theology (and I will grant that that concept is one Phil and David could have a lot of fun catching us in our own paradoxes with).

Adam, you are operating with a paraphrase Bible there. I do not disagree with you on this, but somebody's going to flag it, so maybe I'd better do it first.

What Jesus said was (the Greek or Aramaic for) "You have said so." There is a strong case to be made for what your translation gives, since such an assertion in Greco-Roman (and Jewish) courts was essentially a stipulation: "You have said so (correctly)" is the implication. But it is given by the Gospel authors as I wrote, and the usual interpretation is that Jesus was being quick- witted, since he was not by doing so making the (to the Jews blasphemous) claim but rather catching the opposition in their own trap, since he was stipulating something they had said in wording their question. By modern parallel, a D.A. cannot charge a witness with perjury simply for agreeing with him.

Polycarp: Read Furt's post above. He gives other excellent examples of Jesus saying that He is God's Son.

You probably think that the KJ version is a more accurate translation, right? (I used the NIV above)

Luke 22:66-71 - in the King James:
66) And as soon as it was day, the elders of the people and the chief priests and the scribes came together, and led Him into their council, saying,
67) "Art though the Christ? tells us. and He said unto them, "If I tell you, ye will not believe:
68) And if I also ask you, ye will not answer me, noe let me go.
69) Hereafter shall the Son of Man sit n the right hand of the power of God."
70) Then say they all, "Art though then the Son of God?" and He said unto them, "Ye say that I am."
71) And they said, "What need we any further witness? For we ourselves have heard of His own mouth."

This exchange clearly shows that Jesus said He was the Son of God, even without directly saying "I am the Son of God." He knew it, and the council questioning Him knew it, as evidenced by verse 71.

Certain translations, such as the Amplified, and NAS, directly quote Jesus as saying, "Yes, I am," when asked the question.

These passages, combined with Furt's, show that Jesus proclaimed Himself God's Son, on more than one occasion.

Adam

------------------
"Life is hard...but God is good"

[tomndebb]

ARG220:

These passages, combined with Furt's, show that Jesus proclaimed Himself God's Son, on more than one occasion.

No, Adam. It shows that you have failed to understand the point that Polycarp made. Whatever phrases Jesus uses to respond to the authorities, Jesus never says I am God.

------------------
Tom~

[David B]

Tom said:

Whatever phrases Jesus uses to respond to the authorities, Jesus never says I am God.

Well of course not! He didn't speak English!

Tom: You must not have read my post. Why don't you read it again, before making a judgement. Besides, what's the argument about anyway? Jesus IS God. There is no argument on that.


------------------
"Life is hard...but God is good"

[tracer]

slappy wrote:

My christian freind recently made the case to me that if Jesus wasn't the Son of God, then he had to be crazy.

This sounds an awful lot like the "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" argument, mentioned in the Atheism FAQ at http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/arguments.html#LLL .

------------------
I'm not flying fast, just orbiting low.

[tracer]

furt wrote:

IIRC, our whole evidence for many major figures like Ceasar, Plato, etc, rests on a handful of manuscripts ... dated, in some cases, centuries after the persons's death.

Many manuscripts have been attributed Plato himself, meaning that he wrote them. (Meaning that those manuscripts had to have been written while Plato was still alive, of course.) I believe a couple of them even survived the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria.

Virgil's Aeneid contains passages giving homage to Julius Caesar as one who was alive at the time the manuscript was written. Virgil died in 10 B.C.E., less than 20 years after Caesar's assassination, and wrote the Aeneid earlier than that. I'm not an Ancient Rome expert, but I'd bet you dollars to donut-holes that other contemporaries of Julius Caesar wrote about him while he was still alive.

Nothing at all was written about Jesus, by contrast, until 40 years after his alleged death.

------------------
I'm not flying fast, just orbiting low.

[C K Dexter Haven]

ARG: << Besides, what's the argument about anyway? Jesus IS God. There is no argument on that. >>

No comment necessary.

[Momotaro]

The comparison with Julius Caesar is not a good one. It's comparing a Emperor in his kingdom with an wandering ideologist who was against a much more powerful clergy that wanted him and his word to disappear.

As for Jesus's disciples, they seemed to have believed that Jesus's Second Coming was going to be in their own lifetime. It's only much later that they realised they might have to wait a bit longer, then they decided to put down what he had said.

The comparison with Julius Caesar is not a good one. It's comparing a Emperor in his kingdom with an wandering ideologist who was against a much more powerful clergy that wanted him and his word to disappear anyway.

Most scholars, religious or otherwise, will agree that the four Evangelists never met Jesus.

------------------
Only humans do inhuman things.

[Momotaro]

What the heck happened there!? Sorry.

[Pickman's Model]

Pickman, correct me if I'm wrong, but your problem with this "heresy" to which you refer lies not in whether it is actually true or not, but that it conflicts with Catholic doctrine?

Well, it certainly conflicts with Catholic doctrine, there's no doubt about that; (it conflicts with Christian doctrine, period), but that wasn't where I was coming from. I was looking at this from the historical viewpoint, as well as the hermeneutical, with perhaps a bit of the sociological thrown in for good measure.

My point was that guys like Crossan come up with this stuff where they either throw out, deliberately misinterpret, or otherwise dismiss 2,000 year's worth of textual examination, linguistic cross-references, comparisons with ancient texts both sacred and secular, and any number of other factors, and reduce a text (whether you believe it to be divinely inspired or not) to about three lines, and then they say, "See there? This is what the guy who originally wrote this meant to say---everything else is a lie or was added later, and only [b]I,[/i] with my magnificent brilliance, have been able to sort through the dross to tell you the real story." This is a little like Herbert W. Armstrong saying that everybody else in the history of the world got all religions wrong---he's the only one who ever got it right, because God Himself Personally Told Him So. Yeah, right. Personally, I think that tossing out 2,000 year's worth of work, which was accomplished by the most sincere and brilliant minds in textual translation and interpretation, to say that you're the only one who ever got it right is hubris to the extreme point of insult. I can imagine everybody from Augustine and Jerome to Kenneth Taylor and J.B. Phillips turning around to look at this guy and saying, "What?!?!? Why, you ignorant little twerp, we spent our lives putting this interpretation as close to a science as we could, and you toss 98% of it out because it doesn't fit your politically correct views? Who are you?!?!?"

I don't know enough about the topic to comment, but it seems to me that to prima facie dismiss something that could be factually true simply because it conflicts with ideas that are a matter of faith is poor scholarship.

Again, it isn't so much a case of me dismissing ideas because they conflict with matters of faith, it's a case of them tossing out a vast body of collected biblical scholarship and then taking the 10-15% they have left and saying, "This is what the whole thing was supposed to say." As an analogy, imagine burning down the Library of Congress, and the only thing you save out of it is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Clifford the Big Red Dog and saying "This is the most complete representation of all American literature produced since 1690. All the rest was wrong, lies, and garbage, so we threw it away." Either case is damned poor scholarship, if you ask me.

You refer to those you are "too gullible to know any better"--to know what? That Jesus really was divine? IMNSHO, that's purely a matter of faith, and you can't be derisive towards others, even other Christians, for not believing it.

Sure I can. It wouldn't be very nice of me, but I could do it. Fun aside, however, what I was referring to were the people who simply take what Crossan, et al, have to say at face value and say, "Yup, by golly, they're right----they have to be, 'cuz they're experts." Hogwash. Experts have agendas like everybody else, and if you don't examine what's being presented for shoddy scholarship, then you're being taken for a ride; or in other words, you're gullible. Other people glom onto stuff like this because it fits what they already want to believe---which is okay, if it's well researched and can be trusted, but this Jesus Seminar stuff just doesn't stand up scholastically----it's shoddy. It's sort of like dismissing all the data from all the moon shots in favor of some loon who insists that the moon is made out of green cheese because that's what you want to believe.

Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not talking about whether Christ was actually God or not; what I'm talking aabout is hermeneutics, or the science of translating and interpreting ancient documents. You can't allow bias into your work here.....you can't slant your information to fit your own purposes, you have to be as accurate as you can with what you have, and then base your conclusions on what you find. That's not a "matter of faith", that's called the scientific method. Crossan does not do this, friends: he has an agenda, and he intends to advance it. In one sense of the word, the Jesus Seminar people are just like the Enola Gay controversy all over again----i.e., "Did the United States drop the atomic bomb because it wanted to end the war and prevent both American and Japanese casualties, or did the United States drop the bomb because they were anti-Japanese racists who wanted to unfairly punish the sweet, anglic Japanese (who never did anything wrong, ever), and also prove to the Soviet Union that we had this fabulous new toy at the same time?" It's always completely black and white with these people-----totally one way or the other. Reality, however, is always a lot more complicated.

Thanks for your input, though----and for what it's worth, if this were something that flew in the face of Catholic doctrine and Catholic doctrine alone, I'd have to agree with you----that's a pretty poor reason for denigrating something and refusing to see that side of things.

[Momotaro]

Actually, the Jesus Council didn't simply decide wether something was true or false, but rather voted on each item and put them in categories of historical believability, nothing more. I realise I made it appear more absolute than it was. Many people in the Jesus Council were experts in the field of how historical accounts change over time.

------------------
Only humans do inhuman things.

[pldennison]

Thank's, P.M., for clearing that up. As anyone will tell you, exegesis, scriptural history and hermeneutics are not exactly my strengths. You don't have any questions about the Beatles, do you?

[Polycarp]

Adam: I completely agree with you about the deity of Jesus. What I was doing, and forgive me for ragging you on it, was to alert you that you were not quoting from a literal translation but a paraphrase, and that what Jesus is reported as saying is feeding in the contextual meaning of his words, not the actual words as recorded in the Greek Gospel texts. You apparently got defensive, thinking I was denying a tenet of your (and my) faith, and didn't grasp what I said.

Momotaro said:

Most scholars, religious or otherwise, will agree that the four Evangelists never met Jesus.

Well, actually, no.

1. Matthew is traditionally understood to have been written by Matthew Levi, whose call to be one of the 12 Disciples is recorded in the Synoptics. In point of fact, most liberal scholars believe the "Gospel According to Matthew" was written by somebody from Antioch ("M") who took Mark's Gospel, the Q source (see below), and Matthew's reminiscences, and wove them together.
2. Mark has so far as I know never been disputed, that it was written by the John Mark described in Acts, and contains Peter's reminiscences for the most part. (cf. Papias) Whether Mark knew Jesus at all is debatable; many think he was the young disciple at the betrayal and arrest who is mentioned only in his Gospel.
3. Luke is almost certainly the physician friend of Paul mentioned in Acts, and never knew Jesus in the flesh. His Gospel is considered by liberals as a mixture of Mark, Q, and his own sources ("L") -- many conservative scholars will buy into this as well on the basis of his introductory remarks to Theophilus.
4. John is variously ascribed, traditionalists seeing it as totally the work of Jochanan bar Zebedee, the youngest of the 12, and liberals as the work of "the Elder John" who was hanging out in Ephesus about the time it's believed to have been written, with editorial additions.

Q, from the German Quelle (source), for anybody who's seen references to it in various religion threads, is the hypothetical collection of teachings of Jesus that Matthew and Luke drew on to supplement Mark when they produced their Gospels, which share 10-20% of material that they and not Mark have. Nothing resembling Q has ever been found, but it's as much an article of faith to liberal scholars as the Rapture is to millennial fundamentalists.

My personal view is that Mark, Luke, and John were written by the traditional authors. John is reported to have lived to a ripe old age, and certainly could have mastered fluent literary Greek. He came from a well-to-do business family with a house in Jerusalem, lived in a time when Greek was a common lingua franca, and had at least six decades of living and working among Grecophones after Jesus' death to master the nuances of formal Greek. To say "an ignorant Galilean fisherman could not have written that" says far more about the ignorance of the speaker than of the fisherman in question.

Matthew is the interesting case. The early Second Century scholar Papias describes Matthew's work as follows: "First, Matthew the Apostle wrote down the logia of Jesus, though not in order." Logia is usually understood to mean "teachings" or something similar -- "words" in the sense it's used in "words to live by."

That does not describe Matthew's gospel, which has a clear and detailed account of what happened when, and when Jesus said what. (Never mind contradictions with Luke and John.)

My own hunch, which I've never seen anywhere else, is: Papias was telling the truth. Matthew did write down those logia. This collection is the mysterious Q. After Mark's Gospel came out, somebody arranged Matthew's somewhat haphazard collection using Mark as a frame story. This made Matthew's collection of teachings more coherent and fit into the whole atonement-salvation picture better, and the old collection was pretty well trashed, though Luke apparently had a copy, and reorganized its contents according to his researches, fitting it into Mark in a different order.

Which is probably boring except to Biblical scholars.

[furt]

Polycarp knows his doo-doo (And I know enough to know that he knows and it's not BS). Momotaro, "Most scholars, religious or otherwise, will agree that the four Evangelists never met Jesus. " is completely, utterly and absurdly untrue.

As far as The Jesus Seminar, yes they are serious scholars, though they enforce a Liberal orthodoxy; ie, if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you aren't invited. Moreover, the whole deal with the red, pink, etc cards is a stunt for the media attention, and they've admitted as much. One guy said something to the effect that they had to cut out more and more to get the same coverage.

[Surgoshan]

You know, it would really be nice if everybody told the truth. I mean, if everyone could be relied upon to say what they mean, mean what they say, and never tell a falsehood. Can you imagine a world in which experts report only the truth and act scrupulously? A world where people in positions of authority aren't even tempted to abuse it? I can't.

Those so-called experts have something they want to say, a point they want to make. They may not deliberately set out to create a bad argument and then shield it so heavily with words and loops that it's impossible to pick apart. It could simply have been the result of their unknowingly choosing incorrect premises, and then having to do a lot of work to get to the point they wanted.

"The point they wanted." That's the key. Those experts do not sit down and say, "Here are the facts, what can we prove?" They say, "Here are the facts, here's what we want to prove, how can we get from A to B?" If that path requires assumptions and the such, they won't hesitate.

Do not trust them. I'm not saying that the experts are necessarilly wrong intrinsically. Far from it. SImply take all they have to say with a grain of salt. Pick apart their arguments and see for yourself how they get from A to B. If you don't like it, then argue it, disbelieve it, or toss it in the outhouse and burn it. You are not constrained to accept someone's word simply because he is an expert.

Remember how I mention "people in a position of authority?" That's the men who wrote the Gospel. They had the most contact with Jesus. They were trying to push a minority-held political and/or religious belief across. If doing so meant fudging on a few details (or outright fabrication), it would have never have crossed their minds to do otherwise. Nothing superscedes morals like politics and religion (contradictory though that may seem).

So, who was Jesus? He was just zis guy, you know?

That's about all you can say as pure fact.

[Polycarp]

I am with you. Okay, assume the most reasonable level of skepticism. (Not the most extreme; that makes assumptions just as untestable as the Gospels' assumptions.) What do we have?

1. There was this itinerant rabbi named Yeshua (Jesus in Greek and hence in most modern tongues) who wandered around Galilee preaching what appears to have been a form of Reform Judaism with strong mystical elements.

2. He was accompanied for the most part by a band of followers, with an inner circle of twelve that were closest to him.

3. At one gathering, he somehow ensured that the approximately 5,000 people gathered to hear what he had to say got something to eat.

4. He went to Jerusalem for Passover, and while there, was arrested by the authorities and crucified.

5. His followers believed that he didn't stay dead, and were prepared to defend this assertion with their lives if necessary.

That much can be extracted from the four Gospels and contradicts no natural laws. (Re #5, his resurrection would; their belief wouldn't.)

Anything more than this is a matter of taking assertions made in the Gospels as valid, i.e., making assumptions, and as David has noted, is a matter of faith. (Even my quick-and-dirty summary makes the assumption that data found in all four Gospels and not "faith-oriented" is valid unless disproven, and that the extreme of skepticism is less valid than the moderate one. It would be possible to assert that the Jesus story was made up of whole cloth just as it is possible to assert that he is the Son of God; I'm trying to make the least number of assumptions in the above summary.)

So far, so good. Now:

The following assertion is a statement of fact regarding the mental orientation of certain people, not a "witness" or an assertion of the truth value of what they perceive. Do not challenge it as what it is not, or I will yell, scream, holler, and threaten to reveal your True Names to Vernor Vinge. A large group of Christians have subjectively experienced something that appears to be a mental/spiritual experience of the presence of an individual in their lives, guiding them and "speaking inside their heads," so to speak. This individual purports to be the risen Jesus of Nazareth, still alive and with a personality strongly resembling that depicted by the four Evangelists.

A person who for whatever reason doubts this phenomenon is certainly well within the bounds of reason. There are some Christians who find this phenomenon unreasonable. But it has been the experience of a large group of people throughout the past 2000 years. As such, it deserves analysis. A skeptic could easily take it as self-delusion, guided by a reading of the Gospels and incorporating wish- or fear-fulfillment. But whether true or not, it is a phenomenon that does require analysis.

[Lucky]

I agree the phenomenon needs analysis. And not only the Christian phenomenon. We also need to study what's going on when Hindu's feel they are communicating with their gods, and what Buddhists are experiencing on their road to enlightenment and...well, you get the idea. People of all religious persuasions make claims of having some sort of experience that they perceive as communion with god. Of course, some Christians will tell you that Satan is manipulating all of those other poor fools--an argument I would find offensive if it weren't so laughable.

------------------
"I think it would be a great idea" Mohandas Ghandi's answer when asked what he thought of Western civilization

[Polycarp]

Of course he is, Lucky! Whaddaya think he's doing with all that music stuff? (Do you realize that we on the SDMB are the only people with proof of the old 60s-70s radical right Christian claim that Satan is behind all that popular music!

[thirdwarning]

In regard to Jesus claiming to be God, there is also the reference in John 8:56-58, where people objected that he had made himself out to be greater than Abraham, and he answered that
"..Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad."
"You are not yet fifty years old," the Jews said him, "and you have seen Abraham!"
"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was, I am."

Everything I have read says that this is clearly a reference to the talk that God had with Moses at the burning bush--an identification of Jesus himself with God, that the Jews of the time would have recognized as such. And apparently they did, because they tried to stone him for it.
(And just for the record, this is NIV, but the parallel in the KJV says the same. Just to stay out of that discussion again.)

[Polycarp]

Yep. My understanding is that "I am" (yego eimi in Greek) as Jesus uses here is

(a) the emphatic form, used when one wants to stress (M. Ali: "I am the greatest"; G. Foreman: "No, I am the greatest" - Foreman would have used the yego eimi form if they'd been arguing in Greek)

(b) carefully avoided by the Jews because it was the name God gave for himself. eimi by itself means "I am" as soy or estoy does in Spanish or sum does in Latin. When speaking Greek, they would never use the pronoun with it. Chaim can give you the Hebrew for the Exodus quote, but what it amounts to is that Jesus is simultaneously using a form of the verb to be and the translated form of God's Holy Name.

(c) totally unexpected present tense. The English "Before Abraham was, I am" catches the flavor but doesn't stress it as much as the original would.

So in just using the verb form, Jesus is making a claim to equivalence with God.

[tracer]

I thought the words for "I am" only sounded like the Name of God in Hebrew, not Greek.

[The Ryan]

Furt
Member posted 09-17-1999 01:30 PM

There is ten times the documentary evidence for jesus than for any other ancient figure. IIRC, our whole evidence for many major figures like Ceasar, Plato, etc, rests on a handful of manuscripts (perhaps someone with access to research facilities can tell us exactly how many) dated, in some cases, centuries after the persons's death. By contrast, we have thousands of texts on Jesus, the oldest dating to 70-120 AD.

Quantity != quality. The fact is, people were much more motivated to talk about Jesus than Caeser, Plato, etc., just as today people are more interested in talking about whether Elvis is alive than details about Rutherford B. Hayes' life. That doesn't mean that there's more evidence that Elvis is alive than for Hayes' existence.

And there can really be no doubt from the Bible that Jesus considered himself divine.

Of course there can. You really shouldn't assume that which you're trying to prove.

Adam gives some quotes above. Others are "I am the Way, the Truth and The Life. No one comes to the Father but by Me," "If you see me you have seen The Father," and "I and The Father are One."

How does the fact that Jesus is offering access to God show that he is God? Doesn't it imply that they are separate? The other two quotes can be interpreted in many different ways.

Futhermore, we have Peter saying "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God," and Jesus not stopping him.

There's that deceptive tactic again. Son of God != God.

We have Jesus forgiving other people's sins--not sins against him (Jesus), but ALL of their sins. Think for a moment how you would react if I told you that I forgave you for the nasty things you said to your wife or husband yesterday. You'd tell me to %$@# off and mind my own business. Yet people repeatedly ask Jesus for forgiveness for things that have nothing to do with him.

All of this, of course, in a fiercely monotheistic culture where only |God can forgive sins.

So if someone challenges the religious orthodoxy, they must be claiming to be God, right? Catholic priests claim the ability to forgive sins. Are they claiming to be God?

Furthermore, we have some non-biblical accounts (Jerome being the famous one) from the same period which do not conflict with the Bible at all.

At least, there's no conflict that Fundamentalists will admit to. But no conflict != corroboration.

But we can say with pretty solid historical certainty that Jesus was being announced as God Made Flesh and risen from the dead within the mid-first century AD

I doubt that. Why do none of the Gospels explicitly state such an important part of Christianity, unless it was added on later? And why is it that virtually every quote used to support idea that Jesus was God comes from John?

which means people who were eyewitnesses to the event were still around. They'd be able to say something were the apostles fabricating the whole he-claimed-to-be-God part.

How? Produce a transcript of everything Jesus ever said? How do you go about proving that someone didn't say something? That's ridiculous.

We have no record of any such opposition.

Absence of evidence != evidence of absence. Especially when you have a bunch of religious fanatic running around killing anyone who disagrees with them. And the fact is that we do have record of such opposition, but Christians just dismiss it as irrelevant heresy.

This does not make those claims true, of course, but it does eliminate the rather popular position of "Jesus was a good man/poet/prophet/moral teacher/proto-L. Ron Hubbard." A person who seriously claims to be Divine--and not in some "we're all God" sense--is either 1) a liar, 2) a loon 'on a par with the man who says he is a poached egg' or else 3) telling the truth.

The first two options seem unlikely, and the third distasteful. But there isn't much else choice.

First of all, why are you so quick to dismiss the "we're all God" interpretation? Secondly, how does being a loon preclude the possibility of being a nice guy? Thirdly, does believing in an incorrect religious belief make one a loon? Then the vast majority of the world's population is insane, and quite possibly all of it. I don't believe that Jesus was God. You apparently believe that this belief is false. Do you believe that I am insane? If so, why are you trying to sway me with logic? Whether or not Jesus was God is a religious question. Whether he was a poached egg is a factual one. There's a big difference.

BTW, I think you can give C.S. Lewis a run for his money. Lewis averaged only about one major logical fallacy for every two pages. You've made about half a dozen in just one page.

You've provided quotes which suggest that Jesus was God, but there are plenty that suggest the opposite:

"'All things have been handed over to me by my Father'" Matt 11:27
How can someone hand something to himself?

"'but to sit at my right and at my left is not mine to give but is for whom it has been prepared by my Father'" Matt 20:23
If it isn't his, and it is God's, then that means that God != Jesus, doesn't it?

"'But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone'" Matt 24:36
Again, if God knows, but Jesus doesn't, then Jesus != God.

"'let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will'" Matt 26:39
If God and Jesus have different wills, then they must be different people.

"Why do you call me good? No one but God is good." (don't remember the location)
Yet another distinction between Jesus and God.

There is also a place where Jesus claims that God has corroborated his story. Corroboration implies separate identities.

These are just a few of the many instances in which Jesus implies that he is not God.


------------------
-Ryan
" 'Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter.' " -Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

[Momotaro]

furt said:

Momotaro, "Most scholars, religious or otherwise, will agree that the four Evangelists never met Jesus. " is completely, utterly and absurdly untrue.

Really? I've always heard the opposite of that. Maybe I live in a parallel world, but anyway, Polycarp really does know his doo-doo better than I know my doo-doo. I know when I don't have a prayer.

P.S. Thank you, furt and Polycarp, for sinking my boat politely.

------------------
Only humans commit inhuman acts.

[Gaudere]

But we can say with pretty solid historical certainty that Jesus was being announced as God Made Flesh and risen from the dead within the mid-first century AD

"After his death, his followers decided Jesus had been divine. This did not happen immediately; as we shall see, the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the fourth century."

---A History of God, Karen Armstrong ("Britain's foremost commentor on religion", spent 7 years as a Catholic nun)


Also some more of her comments that might be applicable here:

"Paul never called Jesus "God". He called him "the Son of God" in the Jewish sense: he certainly did not believe that Jesus had been the incarnation of God Himself: he had simply possed God's "powers" and "Spirit", which manifested God's activity on Earth and were not to be confused with the inaccessible divine essence."

"Mark's Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters."

"The Psalms sometimes called David or the Messiah "the Son of God", but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh. Nobody since the return of Babylon had imagined that Yahweh actually had a son, like the abominable deities of the goyim."

"Jesus himself used to call himself "the Son of Man". There has been much controversy about the title, but it seems the original Aramaic phrase (bar nasha) simply stressed the weakness and mortality of the human condition. If this is so, Jesus seems to have gone out of his way to emphasize that he was a frail human being who would one day suffer and die."



------------------
"Eppur, si muove!" - Galileo Galilei

[thirdwarning]

---A History of God, Karen Armstrong ("Britain's foremost commentor on religion", spent 7 years as a Catholic nun)

Whose opinion is this? I'm assuming it's not just yours. Karen Armstrong did spend some time as a Catholic nun, most of that time wishing she weren't, "kicking against the traces" as it were, and got out as soon as she had the chance. This is according to her autobiography, so I'm only saying what she said herself. She found the religious life very difficult, and finally decided it was not for her. I'm not sure that her opinions on Christian belief should be considered unbiased.

[Gaudere]

Who's unbiased? Probably not anyone posting on this thread. If you have a material objection to what she's said, I certainly want to hear it, but saying she's biased doesn't necessarily mean she's wrong. I'll listen to what you have to say even if *you* are strongly predjudiced to believe in Jesus' divinity! FWIW, she certainly didn't seem across-the-board opposed to the concept of the trinity.

The little bit of information I gave about her was from her bio. I simply wanted to give some background on her so you would know I wasn't quoting my next-door neighbor or the author of The Satanic Bible.

------------------
"Eppur, si muove!" - Galileo Galilei

[Polycarp]

Eek...this thread took off without me!

tracer said:

I thought the words for "I am" only sounded like the Name of God in Hebrew, not Greek.

Correct. The Divine Name (yod-he-vau-he) is, if I have my facts completely right (and I welcome correction), the archaic causative infinitive; what He said to Moses on the mountain was the 1st person singular of this form, quirkily if accurately translated as "I am-eth" (using KJV English to represent the archaism inherent in the verb form).

Because of this equivalence in Hebrew, when Greek became the lingua franca of the ancient world, including Galilee and Judea, the practicing Jews of the time made it a point to avoid using the Greek translation of this. The equivalent would be if Chaim or Keeves, speaking Spanish, made it a point to use "soy" or "estoy" without the pronoun "yo" even when emphasis would call for it, because "yo soy" would be the Spanish translation of what God called Himself. Sorry I wasn't clearer on that.

==================================

Reviewing The Ryan's post, it becomes obvious that any further analysis of this thread's main point requires getting into the doctrine of the Trinity. I am not thrilled about going in that direction; the whole thing is a metaphysical construct that attempts to explain to mortal minds the inscrutable interior composition of God. As such, it sets itself up for target practice by any card-carrying skeptic. But here goes:

The following assertions are statements of Christian dogma, not allegations of provable fact. Please criticize on that basis, not the other.God is one. God manifests himself to the world in a multiplicity of ways, in particular as Creator, through the person of Jesus as Redeemer, and within individual spirits as Strengthener. We understand these two apparently contradictory statements by suggesting that his "substrate," his underlying substance, is one, but within that unity are three personae (using the English "person" as transliteration opens the door to some misinterpretation). Jesus explained these three personae in the Farewell Discourse recorded in John as having taken place after the Last Supper, just before he went to Gethsemane and was arrested.

• The Father is God in the classic connotative sense, Chief Honcho of the Universe, the omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent Big Guy Up There. (Note that Gaudere has taken the lead on explorations of how this set of capacities interfaces with free will and the apparent contradictions contained in that set of assumptions.)
• The Son is/was/will be co-eternal with the Father but took on human form and nature as Jesus of Nazareth, without giving up his godhood but becoming totally human as well. This is not a 50:50 proposition, as in "this ball is half red and half blue" but a 100:100 proposition as in "this ball is totally red and totally round." (This has some interesting implications about human destiny, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin explored.)
• The Holy Spirit is, to quote a Methodist creed, "the divine presence in our lives, giving strength and help in time of need." He is the voice of God guiding the Christian to do right (when the Christian bothers listening to Him).

Okay, that's orthodox dogma (with my spin on a bit of it). Jesus nowhere claims to be identical to God, but he does advance claims, particularly in John, that are tantamount to assertions of his divinity.

In Mark, he refers to himself predominantly as "son of man." This term, however, had picked up some fascinating connotations by this time. The Jewish equivalent of the cartoon guy with the sandwich board saying "The world will end tomorrow; have you made your peace with God?" had taken Daniel's use of the term to set it off as meaning an apocalyptic figure who would work God's will in the end times. It did not mean what it meant for Ezekiel, i.e., a descendent of Adam and therefore in a subordinate position vis-a-vis God.

Did the terms used in the Gospels for Jesus get some interpretation? Absolutely. Are they compatible with the "we're all God" interpretation? Absolutely not, unless you take Jesus as schizoid (a plausible assumption but not one I personally make). He claimed unity with God but on the same token depicted God as other than, over and above, humanity. No pantheistic or panentheistic interpretation stands up to the Gospel teachings. (I.e., David or Phil would say they are as likely -- in their eyes not very -- but they are incompossible with the Jesus and the God depicted in the Gospel.)

That said, by orthodox Christian doctrine, ARG220 is the Son of God. So am I. So is Jeffery and so is Tom and Pickman's Model and Jodi. We are sons of God by adoption through the gift of his grace received through baptism and faith (some difference of opinion as to the relative importance of these two, which we won't get into). Jesus was the one son of God from the get-go, the one who had no father but God (this is the theological implication of the virgin birth doctrine; it was not, except in the eyes of some ascetics, to suggest anything unholy about sex). He's the registered member of the God Club; the rest of us get in as his guests.

Jesus makes it pretty clear that he is (1) in some way equivalent to God, on a par with him, in some mystic union with him, and (2) subordinate to God, doing his will, lacking divine knowledge, all through all four gospels.

Needless to say, there can be (and if I know this board will be) some heated argument as to the validity of his claims. But it's important not to misinterpret what it appears he understood himself to be, insofar as that can be understood from the gospels. (The evolution of the theological understanding of the disciples as to who Jesus was is a separate question from who Jesus thought he was.)