In the recent thread about “What religion would Jesus be…” there were a lot of statements about the doctrine that Jesus espoused. A lot of them were along the lines of “Jesus told everyone to love each other, and to follow their spiritual path, and shun uptight organized religion…”
Is this really true? It’s a nice story- a really good guy comes along and tells everyone to get along and not worry too much- but it doesn’t ring true with my limited understanding of the Bible.
So…
Was Jesus all peace and love, or was there more to it? What exactly did his followers believe in? Did he consider himself a practicing Jew, or is that not even a useful way to think about it? Or is the common vision of Jesus only marginally based on the bible?
I know this is a big question, but it’s something I’d like to know more about. I’m not interested in the truth or untruth of the Bible or the modern church. I just want to know what is written down.
Actually, I was just going to point out that he wasn’t adverse to doing a little Buford Pussar action on the moneylenders in the Temple. And given the multiple and often conflicting accounts of his actions in the relatively brief time between being a noteworthy personality and being nailed to a tree, one wonders how much of his actual words and story have been edited to suit the needs of those who came well after him.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. I was too busy talking to Big Nose.”
“I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’”
“Ahh, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?”
“Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”
I haven’t trusted anyone’s accounting of anything since I saw Rashomon.
Well, there’s that thing where Jesus was hungry and found a fig tree, which bore no fruit, so he just cursed it and caused it to wither:
I always thought that to be a bit uncharacteristically spiteful and hot-headed. I mean, it wasn’t even fig season, it’s a bit much to expect the tree to have fruit just because you want some right now, dammit!
And then just to kill it outright, I mean, couldn’t he just have let some termites loose on it? That was probably somebody’s fig tree, and that somebody was all looking forward to making delicious fig jam, or baking a nice cake!
The parallel passage in the Matthew gospel goes a bit more into detail (before this, by the way, he instructs two disciples to essentially go and steal him an ass and a colt, so that he could ride into the city in style, on the justification of ‘the lord hath need of them’):
Here, he ties his killing of an innocent fig tree in with a promise of supernatural powers for the true believers. Also not exactly good style, if you ask me.
But then again, everyone’s allowed to have an off day now and then.
What exactly do you mean by “peace and love”? Yes, Jesus was all about the love. But that’s a pretty wide thing (according to Paul, it’s pretty much everything worth having). It includes kindness but also firmness and toughness, wisdom and ferocity, as appropriate. Jesus was not the happy-daisy Buddy Christ we tend to get served, a graham-cracker pablum, a tasteless gruel offered up mindlessly. He was a fighter. In fact, he was quite capable of being pretty wild and out-there, and generally did battle with the leading figures of his day (the Jewish priesthood) by completely changing the grounds from under them. They kept trying to offer him a binary choice, which human society usually does. He turned it around and showed that their entire view fo the question was wrong.
And along the way, he was pretty strong about getting things right. He demanded that people come to follow him (and hence God) without anything else beforehand. Parents, spouses, money, reputation. Principle had to come before the personal. This is hard lesson. I don’t know many people who can live up to it.
For mainstream Christians, the only source we have for what Jesus taught and said and did while he was on earth is the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—the first four books of the New Testament). So, if you really want to know what Jesus was all about, you can start by reading these four books. (You could probably get away with skipping Mark, since most of what’s in it is repeated in Matthew and/or Luke.)
Well, there was also the part where he constantly urged his followers to give their worldly goods to the poor, but when one of the women spent an exorbitant amount of money on perfumed oil and annointed him with it, one of the other disciples objected, and Jesus’ answer was that it was okay, because there would always be poor people.
Wow…13 posts and nobody could come up with a single reference to Jesus’ love-based message? Nobody remembers that whole “turn the other cheek” thing? The Sermon on the Mount? The Prodigal Son? The Good Samaritan?
Lots of folks remember, no doubt, but it’s kind of redundant to harp on good stuff in what is billed as The Good Book. When the question is whether Jesus was supposed to be really “all peace and love,” the operative term is all.
Examples of the opposite are just the natural focus, that’s all.
Okay, it’s been a long time since I dipped into the bible (I prefer my fiction to be entertaining) so I may be totally off base here, but I never got the impression that Jesus was primarily focused on peace and love. It always looked to me like his priorities were:
Follow me and worship god like I say to.
Rich, powerful, and aggressive people tend not to do that well. So, you’re better off not being rich, powerful, and aggressive.*
So what the heck, give all your stuff away (though that’s not actually necessary**).
And as long as you’re giving it away, distributing it to the poor is a good way not to help any one person be too rich to want to follow me. Though washing my feet is good too.
So, it wasn’t actually about charity and peace and goodness, it was all about gathering the sheep. Is this impression I’d gotten that far off-base, scripturally speaking?
that’s what I got from the sermon on the mount
** that business with the rich guy who wouldn’t take “you’re fine” for an answer.
