Just wondering. There is a thread floating around in GQ questioning how Jesus would come back if he would, or already has, I don’t know. Now if he has committed sins before, what’s to stop him from committing more sins? What if he already came back, as say… Bin Laden, but hung with the wrong crowd and became who he is today.
Extreme I know, but I wonder. FWIW, I do not believe in Jesus or God, but am interested in what the Bible says about him committing sins, if any.
Oops, feel free to move to Great Debates, that is where I intended this thread to go.
Jesus was entirely sinless, which (AFAIK) is why he was born to the sinless Mary.
I’m an ardent Catholic, but I wrestle a bit over this one:
When Jesus was twelve, Joseph took Him and Mary to Jerusalem to observe the feast of Passover.
Coming back, Joseph and Mary join the caravan, thinking Jesus has, too. But in fact, He stays behind. After a full day’s journey, Joseph and Mary search for Jesus in the caravan, and not finding Him, they return to Jerusalem. Three days and three nights elapse before the parents discover Jesus in the temple, engaged in a dialogue with the priests.
If you have ever lost one of your kids - even for a fraction of a minute - you might have some idea of the terror Mary and Joseph endured over those three days and three nights.
And if you say they weren’t really worried, why would Mary say, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”
Anyway, we have a Commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother.
Did Jesus violate this Commandment? And if so, did He not sin?
Moving this to Great Debates.
I’m an ardent Christian as well, and I’ve wrestled over the incident of Jesus acting like Buford Pusser without the big stick in the temple as described in Mathew 21. Mind you, considering how distasteful , greedy and self-serving I find TV evangelistic solicitation today, I would expect that to express it physically by smashing their cameras would be immoral or at least illegal.
I don’t have a cite, but… I’ve heard that one of the apocryphal Gospels describes a young, pre-teen Jesus turning a tax collector into a statue of salt. Church elders in later centuries decided that this maybe shouldn’t go into the Bible, but that doesn’t mean Li’l Yeshua didn’t actually do it.
Well, many Christians believe that Jesus was a part of the trinity, meaning that he was God.
So a better question might be, did God ever commit a sin?
Remember, he turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, effectively murdering her for the sole sin of turning around to look…
he kills all the firstborn sons of Egypt, not just the sons of the guilty, but all the first born sons.
He demands Saul to committ genocide against his enemies and then takes away his power when he cannot bring himself to do this,
there are many, many, other examples of God engaging in a sinful behavior.
However, if you look in the Book of Job, he reminds Job that God is beyond human understanding, and thus never actually committs sins, we only think he does because he wants us to think so.
I think a similar argument could be used for Jesus.
How about the time Jesus turned on his own family and then said that anyone that didn’t do the same to theirs and follow him was lost?
[sup]actually I think this was a later addition and therefore Jesus didn’t say it. However, if you take the Bible literally you are stuck with it.[/sup]
Cite, please? Where did Jesus “turn on his own family”?
Luke 14:25-26:
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: 26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-- yes, even his own life-- he cannot be my disciple.”
If God created us in his image then he is guilty of creating original sin. If nothing else, he is guilty of having a twisted sense of humor for that whole life/death thing.
[ul]
[sup]Thanks, Qadgop[/sup][/ul]
Qadgop, you must remember that according to the Christian religion, Jesus’ teachings superseded and overwrote the earlier Ten Commandments, therefore if his teachings and the writings of the Book of Exodus or Leviticus disagreed, it was an example of why Jesus was sent to the world, to correct and make necessary changes to the religious precepts of the true believers, therefore Jesus, in that context, was right and the normal limited Ten Commandments no longer relevant, in that interpretation.
There are other examples of how Jesus’ teachings changed from those of the Old Testament, and this example like all of those, is not an example of a sinful Jesus.
Any evidences of what we interpret to be a sinful Jesus also always work up against the same problem. Humans are mortal, fallible, and only capable of limited understanding. Logic can not be the ultimate litmus test for whether Jesus was a sinner, because logic is a human creation and Jesus transcends humanity.
At least according to one strict interpretation of the Bible.
Sure, but we should also recognize that taking this SORT of out essentially moots the issue, and makes “Jesus was sinless” into a meaningless statement. I’m not sure that’s really the sort of victory a stict interpretationist would much like.
myles Jesus said that he was not here to change the law. He did shorten the 10 commandments to: 1)Love the Lord, thy God with all your might and 2)love thy neighbor as thyself. To me that means the #1 replaces the first three commandments and #2 replaces the rest. So, love thy neighbor is the same as loving your parents. That is not what the quote in Luke says. It says to hate them. If you take the Bible literally, then there is a problem. For me it is a matter of words being put in the mouth of Jesus.
Is there any human that hasn’t sinned? Jesus was human and so of course he sinned and probably on more than one occassion. The trial and error nature of life by it’s very nature makes you prone to sinning and no one is perfect because everyone is human. If Jesus was an alien, that would be another story since as an alien the definition of what is a sin or what isn’t would be different if it existed at all.
I asked for an example of when Jesus “turned on his family.” The passage in question illustrates nothing of the sort.
Moreover, it’s clearly a figure of speech. Jesus himself demonstrated lovingkindness toward his family, and especially his mother, so it’s obviously not a case of literally hating one’s family. (I’ve also read that this is a typical case of hyperbole in either Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic, but I don’t have a cite on hand for that.)
I don’t see how that obviously follows. According to the Biblical accounts, Jesus was the exception to the rule. One cannot prove that Jesus sinned simply by stating “But of course everyone sins!”
Well if he wasn’t human, what was he? An alien? Also keep in mind that the bible was written, by a human or group of them. Moreover, many many years later, more than a thousand, people believed that the earth was flat.