Being prepared to die for your beliefs is pretty good evidence that you believe your beliefs. But having a conviction doesn’t make you right.
There’s also a disconnect between faith and facts.
WTELF
Well, don’t reject a good pelt that’s left over. Can make for a warm winter coat.
And there was also St. Hubbins, (the patron saint of quality footwear), in the gospel according to Spinal Tap.
Two, incredibly, weak arguments . . . but at least they’re not Pascal’s Wager.
There are literally thousands of hours of YouTube videos explaining just how bad they are.
Start here,
Then learn about The Flying Man,
You’re missing the meaning of these stories. The point is that his disciples initially lost faith but then regained it. They are there as an example of what Christians should do if they start feeling doubts and are very much in fitting with the rest of the message. The other possibility, if you want to take the description in the bible as accurate, is that after Jesus was died, some other guy decided to continue his ministry by pretending to be him. But thanks to a fair amount of desire for it to be true and confirmation bias he convinced them that he was Jesus reincarnated.
I’ve never quite understood that - Judas had so much faith that Jesus was the Messiah and was going to usher in the new kingdom that he felt all he had to do was give him (Jesus) a little push to move it along. He lost faith when his choice was killed in front of his eyes and the kingdom was not ushered in.
The multiplicity of details in the apocrypha doesn’t lend to them being accepted as unimpeachable history. There are, for example, four differing accounts of how the apostle Matthias died.
This is also true in the canonically accepted books of the Bible as well.
Without Judas the road to Calvary gets a lot longer.
You can read* “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me.” as a order as easily as you can read it as an accusation.
*What this might be in the original language notwithstanding.
Here is the best rendering of the story of Jesus ever,
I would definitely go see Jesus & the Twelve Stooges when it comes out.
I’m Xian, and the argument doesn’t work for me. I tend toward Bultmanian theology, which posits that resurrection is a metaphor for the apostles keeping the faith in Jesus’ teachings. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was more a son of God than they were. According to the NT he taught his disciples to pray “our Father…”.
^^^ This.
Jesus of Nazareth brought the word. Calling him himself The Word is a metaphor at best and a sacrilege at worst. Messengers are important but not in the same sense that the message is important. Some strands of Christianity have dipped him (or his corpse) in gold and set it on the altar to be worshiped. That would have appalled him. Even if, for the sake of argument, he had an ego on him, and would not entirely turn down some admiration, to have his message, which was his purpose in life, ignored in favor of worshiping his persona would utterly nauseate him. That’s idolatry. We’re all children of God. Not all children of God happen to have borne a message as important as the one he brought to us, but we’re still intrinsically divine and need to learn to live up to that.
To be fair, Jones didn’t exactly give his parishoners much choice in the matter.
Do you consider that the traditions which use or follow the Nicene Creed would all fall into this category of (inappropriately) worshiping Jesus himself? IMO not only do Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Eastern Orthodox explicitly subscribe to the Creed, but also most Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and other mainstream Protestants would assent to the basic theology encapsulated in this section:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
Later in the Creed, there is also “With the Father and the Son [the Holy Spirit] is worshiped and glorified.” I.e., all three members of the Trinity are God, and to be worshiped. I don’t presume to understand the Mysteries, nor do I necessarily believe them, but this is the basic formula for billions of Christians.
This is just the argument in the OP writ large: ‘several people believe it, so it must be true.’
I asked my uncle, a strict American (not Southern) Baptist about this. He said that the literal ressurection was vital to his faith, and proving it wrong would cause everything to collapse. He had no problem with the concept of each “day” of creation being on Og’s clock, perhaps hundreds of millions of years long, but jesus absolutely had to have returned from death (and, of course, proving otherwise is essentially impossible, so his afterlife-insurance was safe).
But I do not argue that it must be true at all. I’m asking a different question.
You’re using the exactly the same argument to support this (slightly) different question, though.
Speaking as a Jew, absolutely. The Messiah will be a man. A human being, of the line of David. Only God Himself should be worshipped, not his messenger. And Jesus, as best as we can tell, agreed with this.
This idea is interesting to me, and I see support for it in the Gospels. If true, it does seem to mean that the bulk of Christianity has gotten it all wrong from almost the very beginning (and that’s the question I’m asking about the Creed; is that what it really means?) But I think I’m hijacking.