So, there’s the concept of the “Abrahamic religions” – primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – all of whom trace their roots back to Abraham, and all of whom, conceptually, worship the same God.
However, I’ve had conversations with Christians who absolutely believe that Jews and Muslims do not worship the same God that Christians do, because those faiths don’t recognize the Holy Trinity (i.e., the three aspects of the Christian God: the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit).
To this day I am baffled by how heroic, brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing and long-suffering communist revolutionaries have been, in the service of the most appallingly cruel regimes.
Mark 1 is the proto gospel. The others are conjecture with different biases. At best the disciples may have wanted Jesus to be the Messiah. They faked compliance with the prophecies. At the last supper they sold their garments and bought weapons to fulfill some prophecy. Jesus didn’t buy it. He often tells them he is not performing miracles and he is not God. He was definitely against creating a dogmatic religion.
The folks who picked up the story a hundred or so years later may have believed it. Or at least thought it was a saleable story that could lead to wealth and power.
And that’s why I’m a Unitarian. God is god (for any individual’s particular definition/interpretation/personal taste in godhood), Jesus was Jesus (whatever his paternity & fate after crucifixion), and why don’t we all just try to be nice to each other because we’re all in this together.
Cruelty is apalling when it is obvious and immediate, but when you mete it out in endless small doses over a long period, that is acceptable. And always better when it is happening to those people, over there.
Agreed.
In Mark the only person who understands Jesus message is the woman who touched his garment. He explains his message to her essentially the same as you express it.
I find the idolatry of Jesus within Christianity to be widespread. I’d like to be cautious, though, about painting with an unnecessarily wide brush. I’ve known individual Methodists, Catholics, etc, and entire congregations thereof, where the thing they revered was the message, and they tried to live the principles of the Sermon on the Plains and the Sermon on the Mount.
Why, one could compare Jesus to Nehushtan!
Religion, the homeopathy of philosophy?
There is an immense room for housing the irony of institutionalized Christianity. But it’s been commented on at great length already *.
At its core, the worst ironies and hypocricies stem from institutionalization itself. There’s an immense and unreconcilable gap between Jesus of Nazareth’s own attitudes and statements about how one should come to believe that what he was teaching is right **, on the one hand, and existing as a state Church that you had no choice about belonging to and no choice about what to profess a belief in, on the other.
I am not an early-Christianity scholar and I do kind of wish I knew more about the decisions and policies and the making-official of sanctioned Christian beliefs etc between the time when Jesus was alive and the time when Christianity became the official church of Rome – who did what, and for what reasons and in what social-political environment, and all that stuff.
But as an absolute amateur I’m not overly inclined to blame the original apostles. Or even Paul. Some of it was probably the tendency of any set of concepts and philosophies to only survive as a social force if they were, in fact, fossilized by an Authority that would restrict what could be said in its name. Which, in turn, is made more true by an overall rigid surrounding social environment where people weren’t free to engage in their own inquiries, and they certainly had that to contend with.
*including some 1960s-era Christmas pageants mocking preachers and congregations who fomented at the mouth against long-haired guys while representing Jesus of Nazareth as one, or for railing against the homeless and people helping them while telling us about Mary and Joseph having to sleep in an animal stable with the cows and sheep
** John 10:
10:37 If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
10:38 But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.
Thank you for your response. The role of Jesus in the Christian religion is, ironically, one of the more puzzling aspects to me. Why are so many Christians focused on anything but the Gospels? (I know many people who quote the Bible every day, but strangely never, ever quote the words of Christ. It can’t all be hypocrisy, or because the Gospels are too hard! They are not just quoting the guilt-making, thunderous wrath parts, either; they clearly read the Bible primarily for comfort, love, and joy but just don’t seem very interested in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.)
And indeed I’ve read serious arguments that nothing Jesus said applies directly to people after his time (for what they’re worth – I think nothing.)
He was shot in front of the Dakota building.
John died of Old age, something about age 90 or so. Maybe even 100.
James, the Brother of Jesus (aka James the less?), was stoned to death, and this is covered by Josephus. (James, the Brother of Jesus was one of the leaders of the early Church, right after the Crucifixion, so most assume he was one of the 12, but even if not he was an Apostle).
Altho true, the death of Peter has no outside corroboration, it seems quite plausible.
Right.
Thirty years is not that long, and the last one was 70 or so.
Yep. Peter and James wanted to keep Christianity as a Jewish messiah sect, but Paul wanted to convert the Gentiles. I suppose, that maybe, the sect might have continued on, there are quite a number of Chabad messianists around.
Note that there are far too many who claim to be Christians that do not follow the teaching of Jesus himself. Hate is not there. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. “Let those without sin cast the first stone” and so forth.
A facepalm is no substitute for a good head slap.
I know. Sometimes we have to make do.
That was Mark, the first one. John was written 90 - 110.
Yes, 30 years after the Crucifixion and 60- 70 years after . Not 70AD (Mark was maybe 60AD).
I’d like to second this, both the recommendation of the book, and this part of the summary.
I took a college course on “the history of the early Christians”, and we read a lot of primary sources (in translation) and everything Aslan wrote about that history, and the context in which Jesus preached, is consistent with a lot of stuff i read then. In particular, Judea was chock-a-block full of messiahs (or people who claimed to be such) and they were insurrectionists and a real threat to Roman rule and law and order in Judea. Their goal was to lead the Jews to throw off the Roman yoke.
Most scholars date the Gospel of Mark’s origins to circa 66-74 AD.