On the other hand, if you’re only 16 with a ruptured spleen*, and knew you were only going to stay in the army a weekend before they kicked you out with a 4F, the sacrifice is not so great.
If the punishment for sin was death(according to Geneses), then the thought of an after life would have no meaning, until people decided that maybe there was another life, like the Egyptians believed. People didn’t want to die but hoping there was something that lived on gave them comfort. If there was people who rose from their graves after the ressurrection why did they have to die again?
Jesus seemed to make a point of the fact that he had a bodily ressurrection,and was still in a human body;having Thomas put his fingers in the wounds and eating with the apostles telling them he was not a spirit.
To just die for 36 hours, and then knowing before hand you would be back, is no sacrifice as far as I am concerned. If my child told me on Friday they were going to die, but return on early Sunday morning, I would just say,“okay, do you want me to fix you some breakfast?” Such a death would be meaningless, Now if the child said it would live for thousands of years and live only for the benifit of others, or like our soldiers do, go into battle and not know if they would live or die, that is a much greater sacrifice, And Jesus being God (it seems to me) could have stayed on earth and taught people what God wanted, instead of having hundreds of different people saying what God wants, when each uses it’s own version of what they think God wants; and confusion rules!
Jesus also told those listening to Him, that he would return in glory with His angels before some of then saw death…He did not return then; unless some 2,000 year old people are still living on earth and no one knows them! Matthew ch 16 v 27-28
IMHO and according to my own study of the NT, Jesus crucifixion may have been inevitable but it was not necessary.
My reading of the NT tells me that Jesus taught something different than what is stressed in standard Christian theology.
Jesus stressed an inner transformation rather than a superficial following of a set of rules. He taught us to live a certain way and value certain things over worldly concerns, even our physical life. Most people, as his apostles demonstrated, like the idea of those values but when confronted with the realities of what living them can mean , quickly compromise.
I think Jesus knew that by teaching as he did, those in power would eventually get rid of him but he continued to live the truth he taught even in the face of physical death.
If Jesus knew that after physical death he would still live in some spiritual form then dieing isn’t a sacrifice. Coming to the mortal realm to experience that perhaps.
We’ve noted that Paul talks of Jesus resurrection as significant. Sure. It points to the reality of an afterlife and the reason for that inner transformation. Believing in Jesus, as I see it , is not the believe he was God’s only son and died for your sins, but rather believe in the path he taught and demonstrated.
So, since his death is not linked to salvation it was not theologically necessary, but probably inevitable as he held true to his teachings.
His resurrection seems more like a further explanation and demonstration of spiritual reality. A demonstration to his followers that life continues after the physical body has perished and that his teachings were more than words. That could be seen as theologically necessary to set things in motion, although those who grasped and followed his teachings didn’t need to see him to be transformed.
and I always carry a purse. I haven’t thought of that song in a long time.
Death is still death even if you come back to life afterwards. And I think that being crucified is one of the more unpleasant ways to die.
To use an analogy, would you tell somebody who was raped that their rape was meaningless because they were okay afterwards? It’s not like their rape was anything permanent - they stay in the hospital for three days and then get released just like they were before. It’s like it never happened.
Obviously that’s not the case. The experience of rape is a serious trauma even if the victim survives it. So why do you dismiss the experience of death so lightly?
Absolutely, It had to be…
It seems clear that Jesus wasn’t looking forward to the experience of torture and crucifixion {let this cup pass from me} but he did have one advantage that rape victims don’t have, the knowledge of life , eternal life, after that experience.
Are you saying resurrected Jesus still suffered from the trauma of the crucifixion? The question is being asked from a theological pov. In that sense I can see the experience itself as a sacrifice but not death. He knew what his physical death would lead to.
Theologically speaking I see his life and death as a form of pointing the way to awakening to the reality that we are primarily spiritual beings temporarily inhabiting these physical bodies. His death was the product of remaining true to his teaching that reality and his resurrection was a demonstration of that reality.
We’re not saying it was a walk in the park, but the average Christian seems to build it up as the worse ever done to anyone. First., as I said, Jesus was up on the cross much less time than average. I believe it was standard to leave them up there for days. Second, while it is a bad way to go, Christians developed far nastier ones to assist in the salvation of heretics. Third, I don’t know the official line about what happened to him Friday night and Saturday, but we know he wasn’t suffering, like the damned who suffer for eternity.
God in your view has set up a world where people die of starvation, drown, burn up in fires, suffer the ravages of painful diseases. So you say this God cloned himself and came down and suffered a tiny fraction of the pain he imposes on the world. Well, boo hoo. He should God up and take it, or, even better, he should have wandered down to earth and told his followers that he really didn’t want them torturing people in his name.
Ah, you must be reading the gnostics.
Certainly not - and I’m kind of scared that you would look at a long and protracted analysis and conlude it was one. Is analysis that incomprehensible?
I have to admit, this is a rather decent stab at arguing that Jesus was necessary. Conspicuously excluding the rambling and highly nonsensical tangent about sexist name-taking.
However, it doesn’t even try to explain why either his death or rebirth were necessary. As has been noted, Jesus was demonstrably already able to raise people from the dead - without marrying them. Also, nothing about getting killed or reborn is even claimed to have been contributory to this “marriage” occuring. Which leaves us exactly back where we started - Jesus (and/or God)could have just forgiven everybody and saved them from “death” without going through the whole human sacrifice/“just kidding!” thing.
Bolding mine - Why god needed the sacrifice rapidly becomes the whole issue. Remember my Goto 10? There are at least a couple of points where the logic breaks down, and getting past one of them doesn’t save you from the other. And you have to get past them all at once for this to work.
But such a demonstration is neither necessary for nor directly contributory in a functional way to the salvation of mankind, right?
Technically, I didn’t invent Christianity.
He didn’t say you did - he accused you of extending the propositions that “God […] has set up a world where people die of starvation, drown, burn up in fires, suffer the ravages of painful diseases,” and '[…] this God cloned himself and came down and suffered a tiny fraction of the pain he imposes on the world." He was actually pretty specific about that.
I mean no disrespect, but it was incomprehensible to the point of being pure jibberish. I was sure you were whooshing us when Revtim chimed in.
It had no biblical cites at all. No references to establish what the people who actually wrote the accounts believed, and no historical referenced to show what the first century Christians believed.
If you’re not whooshing us, then the kindest assessment is that you were witnessing to us.
Jesus didn’t get to make the plan, just follow the Father’s plan. The solution is ‘no contest’ or ‘Nolo contendere’ , Jesus will not contend with these worldly powers, He will not fight, the fighting stops with Jesus, but Jesus will count on the Father to appeal what was done and to set things right. Jesus had to die because He accepted the Father’s will, which was to allow the enemy to do what he wants with Jesus.
The question then becomes why did the enemy (or Satan if you prefer), kill Jesus. It appeared to be a very shortsighted mistake on his part.
Nope, It’s all there in the NT. I studied by asking a certain question and then reading through the NT with that question in mind. One question would lead to another until things finally seemed to fit together.
The parts you edited out were “God in your view has set up a world” and “you say this God cloned himself”. So I pointed out that these are the tenets of Christianity not some inventions of my own.
Personally, I’m mostly an atheist. But I don’t feel that a discussion of Christian beliefs has to be an attack on those beliefs. I try to respect people’s religious beliefs even when I don’t share them.
As for the issue of why God decided to send Jesus down in the first place, that’s really a seperate topic. I wanted to discuss one particular aspect - the distinction between the crufixion and the resurrection - without going off into a debate on the nature of evil and the problem of suffering and the symbolism of sacrifice and the relationship between God and Jesus. These are interesting topics but they’ve been discussed and debated in other threads, some of which I started. And I’ll admit I fed into this by responding to people who were discussing these other issues here. But can we please get back on topic here?
well, I’m not sure, but I suppose technically speaking, no.
you could say that Jesus appearance as well as other teachers was all part of the overall plan and God knew when these teachers needed to appear. If that’s the case, would it be necessary and/or a direct contribution?
If you’re lost how necessary is a sign pointing the way. Does it make a direct contribution? OTOH since I believe those who never heard of Jesus or never followed him have an equal opportunity at the transformation that leads to salvation, then, again no.