Judea in this era was a hotbed of messianic zealotry which was both a religious and a political movement. It even had its share of murderous fanatics, the Sicarii, who are named for the blade that they carried and used to stab Roman occupiers and the Jews who were seen to be assimilating or cooperating with the Romans.
If Jesus was an anti-Roman political leader, I really do not think that you could separate that sort of ideology from the religious connotations.
With that being said, I have seen the arguments that Jesus was a zealot before, and I am not sure I buy them. That ideology is certainly influential in his works, which makes sense given the time period he was operating in. However I am not sure how that fits with the majority of early Christians in the period immediately following his life being non-Jews; what appeal would a Judean independence leader have to them?
I suppose it is also possible that the Jesus known to us is a composite character, and that at least some of the people he is based on were political leaders.
Well, yeah; that’s why I prefaced my remark with a quick “if we take the account seriously”.
But, again, what fascinates me is that even if we figure, for the sake of argument, that the whole thing is shot through with fictional tweaks and trope-tastic additions, the story falls apart if people come across it and say, “what the heck? This guy has a dream where he’s told about the divinity of Jesus, and reacts as if an angel had said that to him while he was wide awake in real life? No, that’s implausible; folks back then didn’t react that way to dreams.”
But, instead, the story that got pitched — whether it was the unvarnished original, or a version that gor tweaked for consumption — apparently got accepted at face value by people who said, “well, yeah; that would’ve been the appropriate reaction from a sensible guy: if someone back then had a dream like that, and wasn’t a liar or a lunatic, then I’d expect the story to play out that way.”
Gotcha! Yes, I agree. The story as presented shows us how people back then thought about dreams, and combined with other sources I think we can confidently say that yes, back then people (at least, the people who are the target audience for the story) would hear “Joseph heard X in a dream” and unnderstand that to mean that Joseph learned true and valuable information through a supernatural source.
I consider myself a weak agnostic who leans heavily toward atheism. I find it more logical to live in a universe with no creator, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of one.
Quantum mechanics teaches us that the world we live in is weird, especially at the sub-atomic level. An underlying intelligence to the universe is no weirder than quantum phenomena like superposition, entanglement, uncertainty, tunneling, quantization, interference, and so on.
However, a creator based on the Judaeo-Christian God (or other gods invented by humans) is too weird even for quantum mechanics.
On the other hand, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny - they’re real.
I think some people believe in God because they want to make sense of the world they were born into, and God is a simple and familiar concept for humans to understand. Others believe because they think that life should be fair, and that being rewarded for good deeds, or punished for sins, is just and right. Yet others believe because they can’t imagine, or don’t want to face, that their consciousness will end - a state beyond sleep, where no dreams happen, and it lasts forever (i.e. they want an afterlife, and God offers that).
Plus, at the time the emperor of Rome was considered to be divine. Why would Romans who grew up with this belief listen to a mere mortal. So, Jesus began as a demigod, as you said, and then promoted to a real god, and then stuck in the Trinity to preserve monotheism.
Viewed dispassionately, the whole thing is a mess.
My take on the account of Judas Iscariot (almost literally “Judy the Knife”) is that he was a political zealot who got tired of waiting for Jesus to kickstart the Revolution. He decided that if Jesus got tried and sentenced to death his followers would rise up in rebellion. When that didn’t happen (the whole Barabbas thing), Judas hanged himself in remorse.
I’m not sure I agree with your distinction between an angel visiting a person awake vs. asleep (via a dream). If one is willing to accept that angels exist and can show up in dreams to deliver messages, presumably they do it in a way that is unique and compelling enough to distinguish it from a regular old dream.
Everyone else is hearing about the dream second-hand anyway so the dreamer just needs to be convincing. “It wasn’t a regular dream! I could move my arms freely, read actual words from a scroll, when I went to my Final Exams I was fully dressed and I had studied for them. So not a regular dream at all!”
Two people show up in the town square. One of them says “I was tending my herd in the valley. An angel came and gave me a message.” The other one says “I just woke up from the most amazing dream. An angel came to me and gave me a message.”
I don’t see why a person, ancient or modern, would believe one person and not the other. If you can accept a angel can fly down into a valley, why wouldn’t you accept they could show up in a dream?
I’m not at all convinced that that isn’t a distinction that the ancients would not have made.
I can accept the idea that they wouldn’t have rejected dreams as just dreams, but not seeing a difference between dreams and waking experiences, no matter how unreal they seem, requires some more evidence.
Because when seemingly supernatural things happen in a dream, and then I wake up, I say, “oh, it was a dream! Well, that explains it; stuff like that sometimes happens in dreams. You know, I once dreamed I was flying! And, when I woke up — and couldn’t fly — I concluded that I hadn’t been flying, and had never left the bed: that it was all just a dream.”
I’d react very differently if I witnessed seemingly supernatural things while awake; for me, “it was all just a dream” (a) completely suffices as an explanation when supernatural stuff turns out to have taken place while I was asleep, but (b) wouldn’t suffice at all to explain an event I witnessed while I wasn’t asleep.
Isn’t it like that for you? If you, like, see a murder happen in real life, that’s serious business, and you call the police; if you see it happen while you’re asleep and dreaming, and then you wake up, you — don’t? And so on?
Yes. If I had a dream about a visitation from an angel I would think it was just a dream. And that is likely true if I were an ancient me or a modern me.
If we accept that angels are not real, then anyone that asserts that they have been visited is either mistaken or being dishonest. In both cases they are not operating from a position of absolute logic. What they think is moot, no?
I thought the point you were making was not about the person claiming the visitation, but about the people hearing the stories of the visitations.
An ancient person hearing the story of a physical visitation might believe the story because it was plausible. However the same person hearing the story of a dream visitation would find it implausible because we’ve all had strange dreams and know how misleading they can be.
People hearing the story of the dream visitation could be convinced that although it was a dream, it was not a run-of-the-mill strange dream. It was a special dream, more like being awake then asleep, etc. Sure some people would fail to convince anyone, but some would be more convincing, compelling, or in a position of authority and would succeed.
Put it another way, there are just as many reasons to dismiss a story about a physical visitation as their are a dream visitation. “Sure an angel came to you last night in the fields. No one else was there to see it. Sure you aren’t making it up, you didn’t fall asleep and dream it, you weren’t drunk or eating those mushrooms” and so one.
In response to the bit about Lewis saying Jesus must have been liar or lord or lunatic, I said of Joseph’s dream: “And if that’s true, and Jesus had a dream like that, then — what?”
In such a case, Jesus would be the person having such a dream, and wouldn’t need to have been liar or lunatic or lord to react to such a dream the way Joseph did; as you say there, he could’ve been mistaken rather than being dishonest; Lewis set out three possibilities, but AFAICT missed that fourth one: Jesus could’ve been like unto someone who dreams about getting winning lottery numbers, and so puts down $2, and — well, didn’t actually get winning lottery numbers; it was all just a dream.
The god of the bible isn’t weird at all; he’s a fairly typical ruler of the Bronze Age, but with extra powers, in a book of very typical mythology of the era.
If it really were a divinely-inspired book, written by the guy who made all that crazy QM shit as the mere lego blocks as part of step one in creating an entire universe, I would expect a lot more weird stuff in the book. Stuff that only made sense to us centuries later. And stuff that we still would be scratching our heads about but will make sense to us at a future time with greater understanding.
