- Liar
- Lunatic
- Lord
- Legend
There are four Gospels and four different versions of Jesus. He isn’t a single character in the Gospels. I would argue that he doesn’t claim to be God in any of them, but I could also argue that the character depicted, for instance, in Luke is pretty wise and ignore the other Gospels.
Lewis is also simply wrong that a deluded or mentally ill person can’t have wisdom.
Where did I inject an islamic jab?
You’re not really going to play it this way, are you?
Do you have a reading comprehension problem? I specifically said you don’t have to worry about getting your head cut off unless you have a time machine. You remember the dark ages of Christianity don’t you?
And this is a rebuttal of what I said how?
As a believing Christian, I have a lot more respect for the OP than for the “Well, we don’t REALLY know what Jesus said…” circle-jerk. We have three deposits of material on Jesus- what became the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers & NT Apocrypha of the early Orthodox Catholic tradition, and the Nag Hammadhi & other Gnostic texts. All three of those have Jesus making extraordinary claims about what He was & what He did. If I were not a believer in Jesus but of his historical existence, I would concede that he purported to be the Messiah & Son of God, whatever that meant, that he purported to do miracles & healings, and was able to convince enough people of both his nature & his abilities that he posed a threat to the Jewish religious & Roman political establishment.
Sorry, Friar, but none of those writings you mention are contemporary with Jesus, none come from eyewitness testimony and all are highly compromised by religious agenda and bias. Moreover, they don’t agree with each other.
Your assertion that he posed a threat to the Jewish religious establishment lacks any basis, since none of the sayings attributed to him in the Gospels contradict Judaism in anyway. They actually say he told his followers to obey the Pharisees and every letter of Jewish law. Even claiming to be the Messiah was no crime under Jewish law.
The notion that he was any kind of threat to the Romans is, of course, laughable. At most, he was a nuisance and a possible threat to the peace in Jerusalem during Passover.
I dont think it’s correct to say that it’s not.
It needn’t be, but it might be.
NOTHING we have is contemporary with Jesus. The eyewitness issue is really a matter of faith & opinion, not scholarship. John claims to be eyewitness testimony & Luke claims to be compiled from interviews with eyewitnesses. No one can prove it is not.
Do they disagree in much? Certainly! What do they agree in? That Jesus was a man who made extraordinary claims about his nature & his deeds. The truncated gelding that the Jesus Seminar crowd puts forth has nothing compelling to him. No wonder Verhoeven can’t get funding for his movie. If Jesus is not Messiah-Son of God, then let him be a grandiose madman, con artist or cult leader. Not some simp who is only respected by the JS ilk for mouthing platitudes against wealth & power.
I see that it lies peeled, and ripped, and shredded to mere threads that will blow away on the sweep of a passing mourning dove. Oh, wait.
Jesus is like everywhere, man.
Well, no. You see it’s that whole Father/Son/Holy Ghost thing; with three identities, he’s automatically banned as a sock.
And the Holy Ghost is banned as a sheet.
Many theologians say a generation is 100 years! There were people who lived to be in their 90’s and remember Methuselah was to have lived 900 years!
I guess you should ask Matthew or Jesus next time you see him. Tell him how confused his disciples writings made people think differently, and why you are the only true translator of what was written!
That’s a big part of the problem.
No, this is a matter of hard, critical scholarship, the majority of which has been done by believers.
John claims no such thing. John contains an appendix in which a third party claims that the author was a witness, but that is not a claim made the author himself, and internally, we can show that John was not written by a witness.
Luke does not claim this at all. Luke says he examined sources that “have been handed down to us,” not that he interviewed witnesses, and as a matter of fact, we know what those sources were - they were Mark and Q. Where his sources don’t help him, Luke makes it up. We know, for instance, that nobody had to go to their ancestral home to register for any Roman census, and no witness would have told Luke that they did.
They don’t agree on what those claims were.
That’s a matter of opinion. He has nothing supernatiural about him, but so what?
If you guys want an anthropological answer … my opinion is that Christianity started as a very typical millennial movement. That is, there was a population ripe for millenial promises (being under stress from Roman occupation), and various groups formed out of this population, and would have whether a historical figure known as “Jesus” existed or not - I picture the population as being like a super-saturated solution, requiring the merest seed of leadership to create movements large and small. The truly remarkable thing about Christianity is not Jesus, it is how Christianity managed to spread and take over long after Jesus was dead and gone.
In fact, other millenial-movement type leaders that emerged from the same culture were far, far more important in their own lifetimes than Jesus - such as Simon bar Kokhba. The difference is that his movement did not survive him.
Thus, to a great degree, what Jesus actually said and thought doesn’t really matter (and is in any even unknowable - even assuming, as I do, that he’s a historical figure and not simply mythological - which is likewise unimportant). It is what his followers did that caused Christianity to survive when other similar movements died out leaving not a trace that is significant.
Since you asked, I already had that answer. It is a spiritual generation. The birth of the souls come in generational groups which have been ‘typically’ about 70 years. Within our society are young and old souls, the old ones are parents to the young some ‘good’ and others ‘bad’. the coming of the Kingdom that Jesus speaks of happens for the young souls at 70 yr intervals and has happened and will continue to happen till all is complete here. This is the harvest of the angels, and exposes the meaning of Jesus statement that some will not taste death till His Kingdom comes with power.
The older souls have chosen their place and living out what they decided - whatever side they chose.
I was interested in the other explanations.
And I hope I’m not the only one.
We haven’t the slightest idea what the disciple John thought, said, or claimed; ditto Luke. The “John” and “Luke” whose name is on the books are probably not the John and Luke most people think of. Fact is, we don’t know who wrote those books. We just know what name was slapped on, and it was probably chosen to lend an air of authenticity by name alone.
So if you say, “John says that Jesus says…”, you are quoting an unknown author who was not an eyewitness and not bound by any ethics other than religious piousity. For all we know, they made shit up and people took it as gospel.