That’s addressed in Mark in the discourse with the woman who touched his garment. Jesus explains that the demons and miracles are nonsense spread by the medicine show for the ignorant. None of that is his message. She is the only one of the crowd who understands his individual humanist message.
The loaves and fishes is an odd theme. There seems to have been an issue of financing between Jesus and the disciples. What I get from Mark is that Jesus was financed by relatives and Mary Magdalen. The disciples passed the hat during their medicine show. Jesus did not agree with that. I suspect the loaves and fishes story was a case where the disciples came up short and Jesus bailed them out. The 5000 thing is an editorial embellishment.
As a Christian who isn’t a Biblical literalist, I have no issue with those being possible explanations for what’s on the written page in the Bible. I’m not an atheist or agnostic who is looking for “gotchas” in the Bible.
The issue, in my mind, is that many Christians – particularly those who cite passages in the Gospels such as these as evidence of Jesus’ divinity – believe that the Bible is literally true, and is the inspired word of God.
In their view, if the Bible says that Jesus walked on water, or fed 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish, then that is absolutely, literally, what happened, and there’s no room, in their belief, for non-literal explanations of those miracles.
Yes, and that is the whole point of Mark 1. That the disciples were trying to create a God and Jesus was trying to keep them from doing so. Jesus was a secular humanist who did not teach the Hebrew scriptures.
The Gospels are just a heavy sell job of the disciples agenda. A few years after the fact, some promoters picked up Mark and maybe some other fragments and began pamphleteering. Obviously, by then, it was profitable.
I believe in Jesus Christ and his humanist message. That has nothing to do with commercial ‘Christianity’.
When I was living in California someone newly arrived asked, regarding earthquakes, how you tell a foreshock from an earthquake. I said, by what happens a day or two later. If you get a stronger quake, today’s was a foreshock, weaker and it was the earthquake and the new one was an aftershock.
A few problems with this. Who, exactly, knows the issue is psychosomatic? Faith healers, confronted with a “real” illness, are well know to say “Jesus can’t handle this one, better see a doctor,” right?
To get a bit back on track, the point here is that reason and logic are pretty much always going to do better than faith. A good physician, confronted with what looks like a psychosomatic illness, can give sugar pills and a comforting prognosis - while monitoring to make sure there isn’t anything real going on.
Plus, on the average the downside of not treating a real illness is much worse than the downside of treating a non-real illness.
I consider myself a person of faith. I do believe that Jesus was the son of God. I do pray. My faith is a very personal part of who I am. I believe that the teachings of Jesus are rooted in love, especially the love of others.
I do not consider myself to be religous. I am not a member of a church. I do not regularly give monetary support to churches. I believe that many, maybe even most leaders and followers of churches are misguided and and provide false teachings.
Personally I say that the biblical “Jesus” stories are about a dude named Joshua, whose name was mangled during the translations through greek. Which is no big deal, except for religions which claim to be receiving direct communication from the person or from entities who know him personally. Because yes, my name can be rendered as Guillermo in spanish, but you can be quite certain that I and everyone who knows me will immediately correct you if you call me that.
I have a close friend who believes this. He is a Presbyterian minister and he had to explain to us what it means to be a conservative theologian. I find it baffling, because he is a highly intelligent, otherwise rational person. He likes to talk about theology and I am happy to listen, but he is not heavy on the proselytizing, which would be a problem. But every once in a while, in private, I turn to my husband and say, “Can you believe Friend believes X?”
The thing that really gets me is how can you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible if the version you are reading is in a translated language anyhow? What are the odds something got screwed up in translation? Pretty high, I’d wager.
I was raised essentially ABC – the semi-rational cousins of the raving fundies. And it was a liberal-ish era, in a Left-Coast town, so we were fairly flexible. But Dad was a seminarian-wannabe (he had a twelve- volume concordance in four languages that took up three feet of livingroom bookshelf) so he wanted to make sure we got properly indoctrinated.
I do not really remember active, aggressive brainwashing-type activity, but the effect was unquestionable. I really did believe that shit. There was a conversation with my girlfriend wherein we resolved that a “day” in jehovallah time might actually be millions of years to us, so the creation story would make sense if you read it right (the two conflicting chapters did not seem to matter to us, probably because we had not read the text carefully).
The basic fact is that you believe the stuff because you want to believe it. You need, at the core of your being, for it to be true, so you overlook its flaws and excuse the typos. The underlying message is from the divine mouth of jehovallah, so the actual errors on the page are defects related to the translations, not damning faults in the message itself.
If you genuinely want to believe it, you will make an honest effort to believe it. I mean, just look at what the Scientologists earnestly believe.
This needs to be answered. Your friend is not a conservative theologian, in fact by being a Protestant/Catholic he is at minimum schismatic and like many Protestants he appears to be drifting into beliefs that are possible heresy. I do not label any individual a heretic unless they have been so labeled by someone with authority in such matters and I am not a priest or bishop, but biblical literalism and the theory it comes from sola scriptura is a deemed heresy.
Heretical beliefs are never conservative theology.