It was 50/50 whether to put this in Factual Questions or Great Debates. I’m guessing it’s going to result in a debate, so…
I’m a former devout Christian (now atheist Buddhist) reading a book called Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife that traces the development of Judeo-Christian notions of the afterlife throughout history. It’s got me rethinking how I used to interpret the Bible back in the day, realizing that like many Christians I took it completely out of historical context.
It’s been forever since I’ve actually read the Bible. But I’m wondering… If you stripped away everything in the New Testament but Jesus’ actual life and words - is there still a case that he believed in his own divinity? Or did he maybe just see himself as a reformer of Judaism? What do biblical scholars think about this?
A lot of Jesus’ words - like “My Father in heaven,” “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” “Before Abraham was, I was!” etc. certainly shows he thought he was God or at least somehow connected to God in a way mere average mortals weren’t.
Very truly I tell you,’ Jesus answered, 'before Abraham was born, I am! John 8:58
I think the interesting question is, can Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross be meaningful if he knows he is god rather than just a man? Or his time in the desert and temptation by the devil. If he is god then the devil never had a chance (I think I have asked that here before but I don’t have time right now to search for it.)
I think that the authors of the 4 gospels had different takes on this, and as a result the new testament is inconsistent. In Matthew, Jesus sounds a lot more like a Jewish reformer and less like a god, and in John he sounds a lot more like a god.
Yeah, Jesus was clearly convinced that he was a prophet of the Israelite Yahweh. Brian, on the other hand…
Self-proclaimed prophets were a quadrans a dozen in Roman Judea. Jesus just happened to grasp the zeitgeist, so to speak, although like all great rock stars and poets he passed long before the peak of his poularity.
The Q text idea is that the surviving gospels are based on an earlier lost book that had actual, unembellished, Jesus quotations, and that it is possible to discern most of the earlier, more accurate, book by looking for commonalities in the New Testament gospels.
One way to consider this is to think about Chabad messianism. This raises the possibility that a Jesus-like figure would first deny being a God but that if enough of his supporters kept on saying he was one, he might become uncertain on this key point.
So – the chances that Jesus claimed something so – to my ears – preposterous, as that he was a God, are low, but not zero.
fyi, the Jewish messiah is not a god, the Jewish messiah is a man who leads the people into (spiritual, but originally military) victory. No one thought or thinks Schneerson was a god.
Jesus almost certainly didn’t think he was a god, either. I believe that was added after his death, as his cult was enriched with ideas from other, non-Jewish cults that were popular. But I think that John, writing decades after Jesus’s death, did believe Jesis was divine.
from the wikipedia entry on John:
while the author was familiar with Jewish customs and traditions, their frequent clarification of these implies that they wrote for a mixed Jewish/Gentile or Jewish context outside Palestine.[citation needed]
A lot of the gospel of John doesn’t really jibe with mainstream Jewish theology of the time, even messianic, reformist Jewish theology.
One thing I remember is this passage where Jesus “reveals” himself to a disciple and the disciple cries, “My Lord!” And Jesus replies, “It is as you say.”
But that seems like it could mean, “You said it, not me.”
Do they? Because his words also include the bit about how “I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
Seems to me you could argue that, to the extent that (or ‘inasmuch as’) he’s saying he’s one with the Father, he’s also saying he’s one with mere average mortals: that he is the mere mortal who was sick and in prison and didn’t get visited; that, if the mere average mortal is him and the Father is him, then the mere average mortal is — ?
I guess it depends what Greek word is being translated, but “my lord” could be what you say to the king. And the messiah was the king. The king of David’s line who would bring Israel back to its former glory (militarily and/or spiritually).
King Saul was the first messiah. The Jews of occupied Israel were looking for a new annointed king. That’s why Rome executed people who made claims (or whose followers made claims) about them being “messiah”. Quite a lot of them were explicitly trying to organize sedition against the Roman overlords.
Exactly. The word did/does not mean in Judaism what it means in Christianity.
I’d like to note that we have no idea what Jesus of Nazareth actually said. We know what people, some of whom may have known him, wrote or dictated later on that he said.
Matt 27:46. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli,lemasabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” ).
It does suggest that Jesus did feel separated from God at that moment. And since God is one God, (Deut 6;4) would seem to suggest that Jesus didn’t include himself in that at that moment.
Interesting bit here. The Son of Man sitting on the throne who says these things is mentioned in earlier texts (centuries earlier.) Son of Man is not Jesus, it’s Abel, considered the first righteous man in existence. So Jesus is probably not talking about himself.
The book I’m reading says that Jesus likely did say these words because they directly contradict the beliefs of the person who wrote them. They imply that salvation, eternal resurrection, is attained through good works, rather than belief in Christ. He doesn’t say to the goats, “You’re being annihilated because you don’t believe in Jesus.” He says “You’re being annihilated because you weren’t kind to the less fortunate.”
It’s very interesting to look at these writings with more context than I ever had before.
And that’s why they probably called him Son of God, Savior, etc because Caesar was called those same names. They were effectively saying, “You’re Caesar’s replacement, the true king.”
I wonder at what point Jesus realized he was in deep shit.
The problem with analyzing Jesus in the Gospels is that so much of those 4 books may be false, that you can’t do any sort of fair analysis.
For instance, if even just one of the many miracles in those books happened, then Jesus had strong legit reason to believe he was God or some special agent of God. If a man could actually, in fact, resurrect people from the dead, calm a storm with a rebuke, or turn water into wine, or make a little bit of bread and fish suddenly multiply to feed 5,000 people, then he has perfectly valid reason to think, “Wow, I’m not some mere mortal.” And everyone around him would have valid reason to believe as well.
But if none of those happened, then the man has no valid reason to feel that way. But that requires deleting over half of the Gospels. And then if half of the Gospels are made-up, then how do we know it’s not all made-up?