I’ve heard several people say something along the lines of, “I think that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but I don’t believe he was a god.” However, among his teachings to the Jews he claimed to be God. In addition, he claimed to have the ability to forgive mens’ sins. He didn’t only forgive offenses against himself, but he forgave men for treading on OTHER peoples’ feet.
Clearly, if these claims are false, if he was only a man, he could not be afforded the title of “great moral teacher” similar to that given to Confuscious or Aristotle. He would either be a lunatic, on the lines of somebody claiming to be a refrigerator. Or he was a malicious deceiver. An evil person seeking to fool countless individuals.
I’ve not got the quote to hand but I remember C.S. Lewis’s take on this ran something like (from memory) “One way or the other Jesus believed the things he was preaching to the masses so either he was the true son of God or he was just some random lunatic. So please don’t give me any of this patronising nonsense about him being a ‘Great Moral Teacher’”. Sufficed to say I agree with him. His book Mere Christianity has a whole section devoted to this and a wealth of other aspects of Christianity and I widely recommend it.
DDG, I don’t know exactly how to break this to you but…
your chad is pregnant!
Mr. McPlad, He did not explicitly make any such claim. He identified Himself with the Father, claimed that “He who has seen Me has seen the Father,” and a wide range of other parallelisms that would strongly imply His Deity. He used the Koine Greek full-text phrase for “I AM” that every Jew avoided because it was God’s self-proclamation of Himself and His Name. But AFAIK He never out-and-out said, “I am God” or the equivalent.
If you want to get into a Christological debate, I’m game. But unless we need to do so, my statement is that of the earliest Christians: “When I see Christ, I see God.” I.e., in the portrait painted by the Gospel writers and in the words that He said, I see most clearly who and what God really is.
In my church, a priest or bishop can absolve me of my sins, not those against him but all my sins. Because he’s God? No. Because he’s an heir to the authority given by Christ to pronounce God’s forgiveness. (I’m sure you’re familiar with the Gospel passage.)
I believe Him to be the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. But I hesitate to make that assertion into a boundary line separating me from someone who thinks that He was a man sent by God (He was, of course, that too) and nothing but.
It’s not in the Marching Orders for Christians to try to draw those lines. And I choose not to.
We’ve already had this debate. To sum up my opinion: it’s a silly arguement made by a popular but decidedly sub-par apologist.
One can be a great moral teacher and also be nuts. Or a great moral teacher and have your teachings distorted and linked to exaggerrated claims of divinity by your followers. This was Thomas Jefferson’s view: that’s why he went through the Gospels with a pair of scissors.
One can even be a great moral teacher and a liar: or a hypocrite. Nothing precludes this is reality: it’s only precluded in the idealized apologist vision of the world where any false dilemna, no matter how crazy, must be rock solid.
Personaly, I don’t even agree that Jesus was a great moral teacher. All of his commonly praised teachings can be found first and elsewhere in much purer and better justified forms. And in addition to those borrowed ideas, he taught many things I consider decidely immoral.
The gospel of John is the only gospel to make explicit claims of Jesus’ deity. It is obviously different from the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, and was written with an obvious agenda.
I’m right in the middle of a study on Jesus and his message, comparing Jesus Seminar-type conclusions with more conservative evangelical conclusions. My gut feeling is that the truth about Jesus lies somewhere inbetween–he was much more than just a great moral teacher, but he was also much more human than conservatives will admit and his message had more to do within the context of first century Judaism than they will admit.
My personal feeling at the moment is that Jesus’ life, message and teachings point the way to a relationship with God and what is “truth”, not necessarily to a narrow and dogmatic belief “in Him”, which would be kind of hard for the native in Africa to do, wouldn’t it?
If this is a poll, I believe Him to be Lord and Savior, not just a moral teacher. He was and is God according to Colossians 2:9. And there are several scriptures which say that He died for our sins. I’m on break at work and don’t have time to list them. I did share them with Lekatt on his board but he chose to ignore them.
it would indeed, Carefree. This vast truth is hard for many to comprehend.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free - whether that truth comes via the “Son Of God” or through the “Greatest Urban Legend Ever Pulled Off” or something in between, it matters not.
After all, what person, theist or no, couldn’t get behind a philosopy of loving one’s neighbor?
Jesus was just a man, not a god. In the time of Jesus, a strong Messianic fervor had gripped the Jews, and there were many itinerant prophets wandering the Judean countryside, preacghing the arrival of the Messiah and the overthrow of Roman rule. Jesus was one of the godstruck men who idientified himself as a mothpiece of God.
When the gospels were compiled some 30-40 years after Jesus’s death, the apotheosis of Jesus as an incarnation of the Divine had begun, a sort of Jewish version of the dead-and-risen divine hero that was common among their pagan neighbors, like Attis or Mithras. Jesus was just a godstruck Jewish carpenter who was crucified for preaching against Roman rule, and then was deified by his followers.
The OP would do well to read up on the the growth of Messianic cults in first century Palestine, with an emphasis on the synthesis of Hellenistic philosophy and Jewish thought and the influence of Gnosticism in the Primitive Church.
Read The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels and Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox.
That’s not how I know. With all due respect, Gobear, I’d like to know with whom you believe I have a relationship. After innumerable intimate moments with Him, I’m pretty sure it’s Jesus.
Actually, Jesus was a prophet of God, but he was not divine. God is one and cannot be divided, according to the Qu’ran, which is God’s direct word as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. The Qu’ran says very clearly that God cannot have a son.
From Sura 19 (Mary):
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
That was addressed to His4Ever and her circular reasoning.
Libertarian, while you might be sincere in your religious devotion, you can’t really have a relationship with a being you cannot see or hear or touch. Do you guys go bowling on Thursdays? (I’ll bet God can pick up a 7/10 split easily.) Does He call you on the phone, e-mail you, send you postcards? All you have as a basis of belief is a dusty old book, and that is not the foundation of anything that can be called a relationship.
One can have a relationship with Jesus without him being God. I’m not saying he is or isn’t, just that it doesn’t seem to me to be that important.
I’m not an atheist. I know there is a God. I want to be closer to that God. Jesus points to God and gives us detailed glimpses of how that relationship should manifold itself–which is mainly (but not entirely) through our relationship with other humans.
I agree that post-resurrection church tradition piles a lot of other stuff on top of this very simple thing-- “love your neighbor”.
How? You’re still running intoo the you’re here/He’s not problem. Heck, by that logic, I might as well say that I have a relationship with George Clooney. No, I’ve never met him, I can’t hear him or touch him, but he’s real–I see him on TV and I think about him. In fact, that makes my relationship with George even more real than yours with Jesus.
