Then he was not omniscient at all. There is no such thing as limited omnisceince. The quality of ‘no limits’ is an intrinsic, *necessary *component of omniscience. In fact, there are only two such components, the other being ‘knowledge.’ Remove either of them and whatever you have, it is not omniscience.
‘Limited omniscience’ makes about as much sense as ‘dry water.’ There ain’t no such creature. The two terms contradict themselves.
Then he was not omniscient at all. There is no such thing as limited omniscience. The quality of ‘no limits’ is an intrinsic, *necessary *component of omniscience. In fact, there are only two such components, the other being ‘knowledge.’ Remove either of them and whatever you have, it is not omniscience.
‘Limited omniscience’ makes about as much sense as ‘somewhat dry water.’ There ain’t no such creature. The two terms contradict themselves.
While I agree that “limited omniscience” is a logically contradictory construction, I still think the basic idea is somewhat coherent if badly phrased. Perhaps a better construction might be a (temorarily) “surrendered” omniscience?"
No problem. Although you would have to assert a subsequent memory loss as well.
However, if he is not omniscient temporarily, then he is not God temporarily.
Isn’t God ‘outside of time’? Is He subject to temporal limits?
I agree, it still raises all the usual problems associated with a triune godhead.
It’s also consistent with the view that the message wasn’t nearly as important as the person. What, really, did he have to say that hadn’t been said before about appropriate behavior? “Be good to each other”? “Treat others the way you want to be treated”? “Love God”? “Take a look at your own life before you condemn others”? He reminded people of those things, but the big story was himself. His incarnation, his death, his resurrection. Writing down any of his “message” would only have put the emphasis in the wrong place.
See, this is why I don’t post very often. Other people get here before me and say it better than I do. Oh, well, I tried. 
No, sorry, this makes no sense. Jesus, if the bible is to be believed, made a splash before he died. He did so in significant part because of what he said . He did not do so because he simply lived and died. Heaps of people did that.
They should have made it easier to hold a pen.
A large part of that splash was because of what he did, miracles and such. People remember someone who goes around healing people and feeding large groups in supernatural ways. But those were largely for two reasons, for compassion’s sake, and to get people’s attention. In the meantime, while he had their attention, he was forgiving sins, predicting his own death and resurrection, and identifying himself as God. (And yes, I know those are a matter of interpretation. Not going to argue about that.)
No, he didn’t. It was because of what he did after he died.
What was the other part? Were there not speeches of significance?
Furthermore, there are many, many people who are reported to have done supernatural things. A vanishingly small number of those end up as the basis for a world religion. You have to assume that Jesus did something else (by way of speeches etc) to attract a following.
The problem with that logic is that it should apply equally well to the Evangelists, yet they somehow managed to get their own words and ideas written down and disseminated perfectly well. Why couldn’t Jesus, if he had existed, have done as much? Answer: He could have. And the fact that he didn’t is (admittedly somewhat weak) prima facie evidence that he did not exist.
Also, it has been said here that the difference is that Paul and the Evangelists had a “Christian” community to help with the documentary problems, but that, too, is an unpersuasive argument. What Paul et al had was a Gentile community. They were by no means the only Christians around, as the first “Christians” were Jews, and the Jewish Christians were as capable as anyone else of writing things down and copying them. Therefore, the lack of any written, truly contemporary records from Jesus or anyone else is actually rather strong evidence against the historical Jesus hypothesis.
Please don’t argue the idea in itself, just learn of the idea: Many churches believe that Jesus represents the ideal human, in a sense. Given an inhuman spirit by virtue of also being fully God, he was human but able to fulifill the purposes of God completely: John 3:34 For God sent Him, and He speaks God’s words, since He gives the Spirit without measure.
The point being that Jesus would have been limited to the level of a human, but also suceed to the ultimate human ideal, being able to connect with God in the fullest human form. There are many points in the bible where he’s able to figure out exactly why things are happening or people are saying things, he’s sometimes able to heal, to perform other miracles, but doesn’t fly around the room or strike enemies with lightning (ok, he walks through the wall after the resurrection.)
I’m sorry, I really do not understand what you are saying here.
Describe him any way you want; but if you say he had limited omniscience, you might as well say he only drank dry water. The terms are mutually exclusive. Just find another term. To state that he had limited omniscience, and oh by the way was illiterate, is to speak nonsense.
Just say he had really neat special powers. Unfortunately, the ability to read and write was not one of them.
Darn. I’m not trying to say that he had limited omniscience. I guess I didn’t say that explicitly.
Yeah, this might be harder than I’m used to, for someone who’s not ramped up on the minutiae of Christian theology. I’ll try again:
Orthodox (mainstream at all) theology says Jesus was fully God and fully human, in a unique and admittedly mind-warping way. So, if he’s fully human, then he presumably has to learn to read by practicing, he cuts himself a few times with the carpentry tools, and he can’t tell you where it will rain next week.
But if he’s fully God (spiritually, I assume), then he has no blocks between himself and the Father, so he can be given information and power on a need-to-know and need-to-use basis, in a way that hasn’t been entirely been seen before or since. So he comes out with lots of prophecies, wise sayings, psuedo mind readings, raising of the dead.
I think you’ll find that his ability to read is mentioned a number of times above. Even if that weren’t mentioned specifically in the Bible, I think saying he was illiterate would still be surmising from the lack of evidence instead of real evidence. Plus, at the age of 12, he was holding his own in biblical discussions with learned adults. It could have been all read to him, but I personally suspect that level of understanding at that time means he was studying on his own a good bit.
Yeah. It’s so mind warping that I can’t get mine around it. Humans have limits, God (presumably) has none. It’s part of the definition. If the definition gets to change whenever it is convenient, then why bother defining God at all?
It seems to me that what you are saying is that Jesus was some sort of in-between being who was more than human but less than God, with a pipeline to the Almighty that only conferred information one way.
Time would be a factor here. Most scholars conclude that the earliest Gospels were written somewhere around 70 AD or later; forty years after. (The letters of Paul were written several decades earlier. The hypothesized “Q” document (a collection of the sayings of Jesus) would have been written earlier than the Gospels, but I wouldn’t hazard a guess when.)
Paul wrote for a specific reason: he needed to be in communication with congregations he was not able to visit. One impetus for the writing of the Gospels may have been that the apostles were dying.
There’s an interesting comment in one of the surviving fragments of Papias, an early Christian writer. He notes that he preferred the living voice rather than books; he very much preferred learning about Jesus from either the apostles or (failing that) from people who had heard the apostles. Our preference for texts was not universal.
As I suggested in an earlier post, one could test this. We have the names of rather a lot of Roman-era people who were known as teachers or other public figures. Rabbis, governors, sages. How many of them wrote anything that survives? I think you will find that the answer is: surprisingly few. Where are the writings of Socrates?