Jesus Lives Or Dies, You Decide

Great Debates
1

(for the purposes of this exercise pretend you are a Christian)

Ok, let’s say you are walking along the street one day, when all of a sudden BLAM! you are blasted back in time to Jerusalem circa 36 A.D. straight into Pontius Pilate’s office, (and luckily enough whatever brought you two thousand years back in time also taught you Latin, Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew).

Pontius walks up to you and, believing you to be a God.
asks you that he has a troublemaker on his hands, a man who goes by the name of Jesus, he says that it is up to you whether Jesus is crucified or freed, completely up to you, he will not kill him until you say that it is o.k.

So, what do you do?

If you don’t step in and stop Jesus’ death, then you will be directly responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, absolutely the worst sin possible. By not saving his life, you are violating your most solemn religious Christians oaths.

However, if you stop Jesus death, then Jesus can not give his life on the cross and can not free the souls of all Christian humanity from sin. Consequently, all who live will burn in hell. For God’s will shall have been averted, and humanity will not have been saved. Not only that, but there can be no ressurection, and no real significance to the Blood and Body of Christ. Christianity itself may fail to survive the failure of Christ to be crucified, totally nullifying the religious philosophical foundations from which you make your decision in the first place…

So, what will it be…
committ the ultimate sin?
or deny the will of god and force all humanity to lose Christ’s gift, and go to hell? perhaps, also the ultimate sin?

Toughie…

2

We are all responsible for Jesus’ death regardless of when we were born or what we believe. Also in the eyes of God there is no ultimate sin. All sin is equal. Not a toughie at all. :slight_smile:

3

I’m not responsible. I wasn’t even born yet.

4

All sin is not equal, btw.

5

>We are all responsible for Jesus’ death

When you go back to 36 A.D., Jesus has not yet died. You therefore are not yet responsible for a sin that has not yet been committed. Can you honestly say that you will condemn a man to death because in a past that you remember, but that has not yet happened and does not have to happen, he died.

So, using your same reasoning, if you allowed a man to drink too much, and that man drove afterwards, hitting a small girl and killing her. And then ‘magically’ years later, you went back in time, and the man asked you if he should drive drunk?
You would say yes, because you were responsible for the girl’s death in a past you remember (though again it has not happened yet) so that takes all need for ethical decision making out of your hands… how convenient for you, and how utterly inhuman.

>Also in the eyes of God there is no ultimate sin. All sin is equal.
All sin is equal? So lying because someone has a gun pointed at your head is the same as threatening to kill somebody unless they lied? So given a choice between allowing someone to be run over by a train or rudely assaulting them (i.e. pushing them out of the way without their permission), you would be in a logical quagmire? And would not be inclined to act in either way? What an inadequate ethical system.

6

well, after you make the decision, will you go back to your own time? If so I’d tell him to crucify him. If I had to stay there I would tell him not to crucify him.

7

<Keanu Reeves> Shoot the hostage! <Keanu Reeves>

What I would do would be to ask to speak with this Jesus person. I’d ask him to perform some sort of miracle for me. Maybe convert some H[sub]2[/sub]O into C[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]6[/sub]O. If he can successfully perform a miracle, I’ll proceed to ask him what he thinks I should do. After all, if he’s really the son of God, then he’d know better than me what needs to be done.

However, if he can’t perform the miracle, I’ll let him go. No point in making a martyr out of a Jewish carpenter with a God complex, after all.

If you believe that God intended for Jesus to die on the cross, then facilitating his death would not be a sin, since it would be acting according to God’s will.

8

If Jesus can forgive a murderer hanging on a cross besides his he can forgive me of anything I might say or do.

Shoving someone from the path of a train is not a sin its a favor.

Again, its humanity which tries to class sin into varying degrees not God. Humanity doesn’t have the last word on this. Its reserved for a higher power than us mere mortals.

9

Just a factual nitpick, btw. Jesus was already dead in 36 AD. If he was killed when he was 33 years old then the crucifixion could have ocurred no later than 29 AD.

10

pretending I’m a Christian

If the Big Man intended Jesus to die for my sins, it wouldn’t matter what I said. He would die through means other than Pilate’s say-so.

For the record, I’d say “no.”

11

>If you believe that God intended for Jesus to die on the cross, then facilitating his death would not be a sin, since it would be acting according to God’s will.

And yet Dante places Judas on one of the lowest circles in hell.

And many christians throughout history have persecuted Jews for the nominal reason that they facilitated his death, despite the logic you just stated.

The tradition of Western Christianity would seem to be against you in the blame game, most Christians have not seen Judas as an agent of God.

And, actually, the Bible seems to give it both ways.

For example the quote, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son”, clearly indicates predetermined purpose,

but, when Jesus is on the Cross, he asks “Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Although this is a quote from another Biblical Text). Clearly indicating that he did not intend to be sacrificed, or perhaps just having second thoughts?

Hmm, you pose another interesting question.

What do you think Jesus would say?
As I wrote in the first post, Pontius will not sacrifice Jesus unless you (or I) say so, so the only way for Jesus to sacrifice himself is for him to explicity ask me to kill him. Which would go against the basic theme of the Bible, that Jesus accepted his fate, but did not pursue death for its own ends, can Jesus ask to be crucified?
Even if that crucifixtion is necessary for world salvation?
To accept sacrifice is to be fatalistic. To embrace it is martyrism. But to explicitly ask for crucifixion for the sole purpose of your own death is to ask for suicide! A sin!
But Jesus, according to Christian doctrine, is perfect and cannot sin.
He would have to sin in order to fulfill the will of God.
Something he can not do.
Either way, he fails and is imperfect.
And “PUFF” dissapears in a cloud of paradox!

Weird.

12

Well DtC a little more of a nitpick is that some believe Jesus was born in AD 3 so the AD36 fits. But if you are the expert on this I’ll defer. 8)

13

Myles, all your mental masturbation doesn’t change what happened. What are you trying to prove?

14

Johnny Bravo, how do you know what God intends?

You were blasted back in time to 29 A.D. Obviously God wants you to play some part or role, or maybe Satan does? Otherwise you would not have defied the laws of physics, your being there in and of itself changes history irrevocably. The instant you are in Pontius Pilate’s room, you have changed the world forever and nothing you can do will stop yourself from affecting the world you find yourself in?

Maybe God planned for you to help save Jesus and change history from the very beginning,

maybe he does want Jesus to die and your preventing his death this way will only cause him to die another way,

but maybe not, maybe the Bible was right, and this is the only chance the world has for salvation, maybe it all rides on what you say right here, right now,

You Just Dont Know

15

If Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great then he could not have been born any later than 4 BC because that’s when Herod died.

I don’t know of any serious scholarly theory that Jesus was born in 3 AD or that he was born after the death of Herod the Great.

16

SunTzu2U,

Obviously I am not going to go back in time.

That is not the point.

I’m pretty sure God isn’t going to try to create a boulder that he can’t lift,

I’m pretty sure killing their own grandfather is the last thing on the mind of any timetraveller.

And I’m pretty sure no one has actually ever tried to walk only half as far as they walked the first time, and half the next time, and so on, ad infinitum.

Nor, I’m almost positive, did P.E.T.A. have to potentially file an uncertain complaint against Schrodinger because he may have killed half a cat, or allowed the possibility of a half cat’s death.

These are stories we use in something called philosophy.

Was Schrodinger a mental masturbator?

I think the fact that I’m using integrated circuits and electronics proves otherwise.

17

Of course I don’t know. Please note the presence of the word “if” preceding my statement. Maybe I should’ve bolded and highlighted it? Shot it up a few font sizes?

I have no idea why I was just targetted here.

18

What are you trying to prove? Again?

19

I’ll go for what’s behind the curtain, Monty.

20

Okay. First time poster. Don’t know what all the buttons mean. Still haven’t read the directions on my VCR. I only have a couple of points. So there was this Last Supper. Jesus was there with his people. He commented on the fact that one was going to betray him, yet didn’t have Judas “taken out”. Later when he was grabbed by the guards, he told his buddies to back off and even healed one of his enemies. I’m going strictly from memory here, but in the many interpretations of “why have thou forsaken me?”, the one I believe is that in order to let go, to get the job done, there had to be a separation between God and Jesus; so Jesus was truly alone, without God for a time, for the first time. Bummer, bad time.

So if I were back there suddenly, but with the story/knowledge that I believe to be true; I would have to respect Jesus’ agenda and let him go. I honestly don’t believe anyone would have had the power to change what appeared to be a plan, destiny, whatever. I am a Catholic republican, don’t hurt me…IWLN