sooda
Veteran Member
I lived in Kuwait, Libya and KSA and spent a lot of time in Lebanon. What's your experience of Muslims?
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Your POV on the historical Jesus
- Thread starter Galateasdream
- Start date
I lived in Kuwait, Libya and KSA and spent a lot of time in Lebanon. What's your experience of Muslims?
I guess it is all in one's perspective since beauty is in the eye's of the beholder. No controlling influence, just a plumb line for establishing how good one is.
He isn't against sex at all since He created it.
But, no, just one death was enough since all sin was placed on Him and He went to pay the price so that we could be free from guilt.
Getting to know the range of people who attend the mosque in Bloomington, Indiana. Home of a big international university, IU.
Here's why your question is irrelevant.
I don't claim to speak for all Muslims. One thing I learned from the people I became acquainted with there is that Muslims are a huge and diverse group of people. They live in the fractious and politicized modern world, just like everyone else. They are no more monolithic, socially or religiously or politically, than any other group as huge as Islam.
So I stopped taking seriously opinions from people who tell me what "Muslims believe".
Tom
sooda
Veteran Member
Would you support Timothy McVeigh? Terrorists destroy civil society.
I don't, never did.
But plenty of conservative Christian Capitalists did, back in the day.
Why are you asking me this?
How come you don't respond to what I post, and go on with irrelevant questions?
And frankly, I consider the Presidents Bush terrorists. They both used violence against civilians for political purposes.
Tom
lukethethird
unknown member
Instead of using Jesus as a scapegoat, we could take responsibility for our own actions.
With all due respect - I didn't assume anything of the kind.
Indeed, I explicitly said, quite clearly (and you quoted this): "For example, the anti-family strain in the synoptic tradition, which critics of Jesus often cite as a negative...."
I never once said, nor intimated, that you had claimed this as a negative and neither did I attribute it to the Sermon on the Mount but the synoptic tradition (the thread is about the purportedly historical Jesus in general, and the Sermon on the Mount is a literary device of Matthew employed to assemble Q material for literary effect, so I was purposefully talking about the broader Jesus oral tradition of which the sayings in the "sermon" are but a part).
In sum, I was merely using the anti-family stance as an example of a critique I have commonly come across from others and illustrated how it might be contextualised in its own time and culture. That's all..........
I would note, since this is a thread about the historical Jesus, that your above quotation is commonly regarded as a Matthean re-working of the underlying Q source he shared with Luke, and scholars believe that Luke's "unified and briefer version is more primitive than Matthew's...Luke's version is not a redactional combination".
The Matthean version has an explication ("until all is fulfilled") that is uniquely Matthean in syntax
Luke's version reads:
Luke 16:16-18. The law and the prophets were in force until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached...But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one letter of the law to fail.
Matthew has Luke 16:16 placed in a different context in 11:13 and opts for softer wording: "For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John came".
Matthew's gospel was, apologetically, concerned with trying to prove Jesus fulfilled Hebrew scripture and is overwhelmingly regarded as addressed to a still Torah-observant community.
The Lukean version is much less honorific of the law: it begins with a clear statement to the effect that the Torah and Neviim were "in force" until John the Baptist comes but since his ministry the 'kingdom of God' has taken their place. We then have a much shorter, single sentence qualifying this radical abrogation about it being easier for heaven and earth to vanish than a letter of the law "failing".
Matthew, for his own homiletic reasons, appears to have greatly expanded this simple saying into an elaborate defence of the law.
If I may quote the historical Jesus scholar Dale Allison in his The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters:
"Another line from Q that raises questions about Jesus's faithfulness to the law is Q 16:16...Within Matthew's Gospel, with its unambiguous endorsement of the Torah in 5:17-20, this saying is difficult to interpret...The rhetoric is provocative - deliberately so, one suspects - and interpreters from early times have seen in Matt 11:13 and its Lukan parallel an implicit criticism of the law...Q.16:16 does assume a displacement. The Law and the Prophets are no longer the center of religious attention; something else - the kingdom - now is the center. The radical Jesus appears not only in Mark and Q....One feels the law's inadequacy even in Matthew's Gospel...When Jesus formulates his imperatives as contrasts with Moses, he is clearly signaling that Moses does not suffice....
[The conclusion] Jesus did not compose Matthew 5:17 with its ringing endorsement of the Law and the Prophets." (p.176)
[The conclusion] Jesus did not compose Matthew 5:17 with its ringing endorsement of the Law and the Prophets." (p.176)
Scholarship would thus suggest that you're rejecting Matthew (namely his missionary effort to appeal to Torah-observant Jews) rather than Jesus in this instance.
There is very, very little likelihood that your passage - other than the tiny sentence also in Luke - goes back to Jesus.
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So you were deliberately off-topic?
No, you didn't say it. I inferred it based on the assumption you were trying to be relevant to the discussion. My mistake.
This is a topic about the historical Jesus. In your original post, you stated that you find things to criticise in the Sermon on the Mount and which you deem to be negatives, and presumably by implication this criticism extends to the broader oral Jesus tradition from which the 'sermon' is derived and is a literary re-working of?
Why is my discussion of Jesus' anti-family statements also found in that same Q material, and often the subject of criticism from modern readers, off-topic?
I explained to you the reason why I brought this up, to make the point that some of the more bizarre-seeming or reproachable elements of the Jesus tradition, within or without Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, can be understood differently once you apply a contextual reading.
There's nothing I can add to that, because that's all I intended. I personally see the anti-family sayings as a sort of litmus / paradigmatic example of this, which is why I cited it as an example. I never said that you had cited this as a negative yourself and I made clear that I was referring to the broader synoptic tradition. If you deem that off-topic, OK - that's your view and I'm cool with it.
Can we move on?
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Yes, but my word "ignore" that you latched onto was specifically about the Sermon on the Mount.
Why on Earth would you assume that?
Because whatever the negative things being referred to in the phrase "I'm going ignore the negative parts of the Sermon on the Mount," they wouldn't be anything that's not in the Sermon on the Mount.
Well, no. You focused specifically on things not found within the Sermon on the Mount. Only things actually in it would have been relevant to the post you replied to.
Because I'm frustrated and annoyed, mainly.
The Sermon is seen as a summary of Jesus's broader ethics, and you were citing it in response to another post specifically about Jesus's ethics ("he had some bad things to say, and some good things to say"), thereby arguing that you found negative elements in his ethics, specifically in your post the Sermon.
And I then responded with a post talking about contextualising the 'bad'/'negative' side, within or without the Sermon because its just part of the wider continuum of Q material. I then cited an example that people have commonly raised to me of a very negative part of Jesus's teaching.
I think this is a bit overly pedantic and I don't really see the need to keep going on about this.
Well, I apologise for apparently making you frustrated and annoyed as that wasn't my intention. What do you want me to say?
If anything, this de-tour discussion about my motives / alleged off-topiciking is actually taking the thread off-topic and I ask again that we just amicably call it quits and move on.
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Originally, I thought you were deliberately trying to threadjack. While I don't understand why you behaved the way you did, I recognize now that this wasn't what you meant to do, and that I had jumped to a bad conclusion. Sorry for that.
How? Restitution? What penalties?
Interestingly enough, the Jewish rituals did use a scapegoat... two, in reality to symbolize Jesus Christ redemption.
Sand Dancer
Crazy Cat Lady
I think we should clearly state if we are taking a theological approach to Jesus / the synoptic tradition or a historical-critical one, to establish the "ground rules" of the discussion.
This thread, based upon the OP, isn't about the 'doctrinal' understanding of Jesus derived from religious belief, tradition or theory. It's about the historical person, whom a consensus of scholars believe actually did exist, and what we might say about his life and/or teachings with some degree of plausibility.
If one were making an explicitly apologetical argument, I'd see the merit of your holding Jesus to that standard but actual Jesus scholars don't because they aren't concerned with him as a figure of religious veneration, and as I see it we shouldn't necessarily be in this particular thread either.
Even though he was deified very early on by his first followers, following his crucifixion, there's no persuasive evidence (to me and the majority of actual scholars) that the historical Jesus actively proclaimed himself as some kind of god - indeed, it doesn't seem likely, even though his disciples obviously did after his death and their visionary experiences of his purported resurrection.
I think Professor Hurtado was right in concluding that the apostles, following Jesus's death, had powerful spiritual experiences which induced them into believing that the historical Jesus they had known in life, son of the carpenter, was actually a divine being that had merely been incarnate in human form and was revealed as his true glorified self by (in their eyes) apparently conquering death.
Hurtado contends on pages 119 - 124 of his now standard treatment of the topic in the book, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity:
"…The overwhelming majority of scholars in the field agree that there are at least a few passages in Paul’s undisputed letters that reflect and presuppose the idea of Jesus’ preexistence…
Most scholars take these verses to reflect a belief in the personal preexistence and incarnation of Christ…
Paul’s formulaic statement in 1 Corinthians 8:6 indicates that already at that early point in the Christian movement believers were attributing to Christ not only preexistence or foreordination, but also an active role as divine agent in creation...
It is also important to note that this development happened quite early and quickly, and was more like a volcanic explosion than an incremental process. Indeed, we should probably judge that this remarkable development emerged within the very earliest years, perhaps more accurately within the earliest months, after Jesus’ death, ca. 30 A.D.
One of the factors that generated this remarkable devotion to Jesus in earliest Christian circles was, of course, the impact of the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. During his own lifetime he generated and became the leader of a movement that was identified specifically with him. Jesus was regarded by his immediate followers and more widely as an authoritative teacher...
At the earliest stage, we should probably posit powerful experiences as a factor. These likely included visions of the risen and exalted Jesus, perhaps prophetic oracles declaring his exaltation, and also a fervent searching of scriptures to find the meaning and validation of their experiences..."
Most scholars take these verses to reflect a belief in the personal preexistence and incarnation of Christ…
Paul’s formulaic statement in 1 Corinthians 8:6 indicates that already at that early point in the Christian movement believers were attributing to Christ not only preexistence or foreordination, but also an active role as divine agent in creation...
It is also important to note that this development happened quite early and quickly, and was more like a volcanic explosion than an incremental process. Indeed, we should probably judge that this remarkable development emerged within the very earliest years, perhaps more accurately within the earliest months, after Jesus’ death, ca. 30 A.D.
One of the factors that generated this remarkable devotion to Jesus in earliest Christian circles was, of course, the impact of the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. During his own lifetime he generated and became the leader of a movement that was identified specifically with him. Jesus was regarded by his immediate followers and more widely as an authoritative teacher...
At the earliest stage, we should probably posit powerful experiences as a factor. These likely included visions of the risen and exalted Jesus, perhaps prophetic oracles declaring his exaltation, and also a fervent searching of scriptures to find the meaning and validation of their experiences..."
If they did convince themselves that a man had conquered death and ascended to God's right hand, its understandable why an ancient person (with that conviction) would deify the said man.
Bart Ehrman, as with the majority of scholars, concurs that this is the most likely sequence of events.
his 2014 book How Jesus Became God:
How Jesus Became God The Exalt Bart D
"…If Jesus was the one who represented God on earth in human form, he quite likely had always been that one. He was, in other words, the chief angel of God, known in the Bible as the Angel of the Lord…If Jesus is in fact this one, then he is a preexistent divine being who came to earth for a longer period of time, during his life; he fully represented God on earth; he in fact can be called God…
And as it turns out, as recent research has shown, there are clear indications in the New Testament that the early followers of Jesus understood him in this fashion. Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord—in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors.Later authors went even further and maintained that Jesus was not merely an angel—even the chief angel—but was a superior being: he was God himself come to earth…
As the Angel of the Lord, Christ is a preexistent being who is divine; he can be called God; and he is God’s manifestation on earth in human flesh. Paul says all these things about Christ…[He believed] that Jesus was in God’s form before he became a human; that he had open to him the possibility of grasping after divine equality before coming to be human; and that he became human by “emptying himself.” This last idea is usually interpreted to mean that Christ gave up the exalted prerogatives that were his as a divine being in order to become a human..."
And as it turns out, as recent research has shown, there are clear indications in the New Testament that the early followers of Jesus understood him in this fashion. Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord—in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors.Later authors went even further and maintained that Jesus was not merely an angel—even the chief angel—but was a superior being: he was God himself come to earth…
As the Angel of the Lord, Christ is a preexistent being who is divine; he can be called God; and he is God’s manifestation on earth in human flesh. Paul says all these things about Christ…[He believed] that Jesus was in God’s form before he became a human; that he had open to him the possibility of grasping after divine equality before coming to be human; and that he became human by “emptying himself.” This last idea is usually interpreted to mean that Christ gave up the exalted prerogatives that were his as a divine being in order to become a human..."
But the synoptic Jesus says very self-effacing things like: "the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others" (Mark 10:45). This doesn't give me vibes of some kind of self-proclaimed god-man demanding worship or obeisance, as with the later Johannine portrayal of Jesus. We do have historical cases of such (largely sociopathic, I have to say) individuals in religious history - as for instance the Egyptian Pharaohs, Caesar Augustus, Antiochus Epiphanes, Hong Xiuquan and the Inca Emperors - who claimed for themselves a divine status.
The Markan tradition has him getting baptised for remission of sins by John the Baptist, not something a self-touting perfect god-man would have been liable to do. Later gospel accounts - Matthew, Luke and John - all struggle over how to deal with this inconvenient factoid. They include it, because its an inescapable part of the oral biographical traditions they received (evidently) and Mark's account, but they try to 'redact' its more troublesome implications and are very uneasy about the whole affair.
The sayings material in the synoptics contain very little self-declarations by Jesus of his status and we have real killers like this one: "And Jesus said to him, Why do you call me good? None is good, save one, that is, God" (Luke 18:19).
Subsequent generations of theologians have agonised over the clear face of this saying, where Jesus effectively seems to deny that he's a morally infallible or perfect being and distinguishes himself from the Deity. Its obviously a likely contender for historicity, because Luke calls Jesus "the Lord" on occasion and in the Book of Acts has Peter refer to Jesus as: "the author of life [whom] God raised him the dead" (Acts 3:15), so we know that he, just like the other earliest Christians, believed in the pre-existence of Jesus as a divine being. He wouldn't have included the Markan saying in 18:19 unless he really felt that it was genuine, because it just doesn't support his agenda.
Obviously, we can't discount the possibility - given the very early emergence of this belief in his incarnate divinity - that Jesus did or said things that may have convinced some of his devoted contemporaries that his learning or ethics derived from some higher source and that he couldn't possibly be just a mere mortal, but the evidence is strongly suggestive that Jesus himself didn't actually claim such a divine status. For some reason, people who had known him in life came to believe this about him and preach it to others, but his actual words in the synoptic tradition don't advent to this in an unambiguous way as being traceable to him.
If we look at modern Rastafarianism, we see something similar: Haile Selassie never claimed to be the second coming of Christ but the belief developed - even in his lifetime, during the 1930s - among Ethiopians that he was:
Haile Selassie - Wikipedia
Today, Haile Selassie is worshipped as God incarnate[170] among some followers of the Rastafari movement (taken from Haile Selassie's pre-imperial name Ras—meaning Head, a title looking equivalent to Duke—Tafari Makonnen), which emerged in Jamaica during the 1930s under the influence of Leonard Howell, a follower of Marcus Garvey's "African Redemption" movement. He is viewed as the messiah who will lead the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora to freedom...
In a 1967 recorded interview with the CBC, Haile Selassie appeared to deny his alleged divinity. In the interview Bill McNeil says: "there are millions of Christians throughout the world, your Imperial Majesty, who regard you as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ." Selassie replied in his native language:
In a 1967 recorded interview with the CBC, Haile Selassie appeared to deny his alleged divinity. In the interview Bill McNeil says: "there are millions of Christians throughout the world, your Imperial Majesty, who regard you as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ." Selassie replied in his native language:
I have heard of that idea. I also met certain Rastafarians. I told them clearly that I am a man, that I am mortal, and that I will be replaced by the oncoming generation, and that they should never make a mistake in assuming or pretending that a human being is emanated from a deity
For many Rastafari the CBC interview is not interpreted as a denial of his divinity...After his return to Ethiopia, he dispatched Archbishop Abuna Yesehaq Mandefro to the Caribbean to help draw Rastafari and other West Indians to the Ethiopian church and, according to some sources, denied his divinity.[196][197][198][199]
Throughout his life, until the day he died, Haile Selassie remained an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian and did not claim to be a divine being in human form. Yet this belief emerged around him and those so convinced just couldn't shake the conviction, for some reason.
Likewise, it does appear to have been a development soon after Jesus's death.
Like Selassie, he obviously made a deep impression on his followers.
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The 'Angel of the Lord' motif is interesting. It was the Angel of the Lord who alone walked through the carcass sealing the Covenant with Abraham.
The reason being post resurrection faith, and being penned decades later. When narrative is applied to the 'sayings' tradition they are used by the writers for their particular purpose which serve 'their' particular community, church, and realized no problem with taking literary license.
We really cannot ignore the Christological development traceable within the Gospels; from the ascending Christology from Mark with the Baptism of Jesus, to the birth of Jesus in MT and LK and finally the descending Christology of John.
The reason being post resurrection faith, and being penned decades later. When narrative is applied to the 'sayings' tradition they are used by the writers for their particular purpose which serve 'their' particular community, church, and realized no problem with taking literary license.
We really cannot ignore the Christological development traceable within the Gospels; from the ascending Christology from Mark with the Baptism of Jesus, to the birth of Jesus in MT and LK and finally the descending Christology of John.
The idea that "low christology" preceded high christology is no longer held by the majority of scholars.
Since Larry Hurtado's pioneering work in the 1980s, the consensus in scholarship - as typified by my quotation from Bart Ehrman's book - is now that high christology, the belief that Jesus was a divine being who descended from the heavenly realm where he had previously existed from eternity to take on human flesh, was the earliest christological theology as reflected in the earliest Christian literature, the Pauline epistles.
Scholars have, also, changed their approach to the synoptics - which they believe do advent to the divinity of Jesus even though that isn't their focus because they purport to be accounts of his earthly life and career, not theological tractates.
Paul does not elucidate this belief in any great depth, he mentions it in passing as something that his audience already takes for granted. Illustrative of this is the pre-Pauline hymn in Philippians 2:6–11, in which most scholars (including Ehrman and Hurtado) see the preexistent and divine Jesus described as first becoming “incarnate” as a man (vv. 6–8):
Philippians 2:6-11
5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus:
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth
Since Paul's letters were written in the 50s, and this doctrine is already an assumed, uncontested belief at that point, scholars date the hymn to the 30s CE - not long after Jesus's death, giving it time to disseminate this widely.
As Hurtado has noted: "we have evidence from ancient Jewish sources (especially apocalyptic texts such as 1 Enoch) that the “preexistence” of eschatological figures was a Jewish theological trope. This evidence suggests that Jesus’ preexistence could well have been an almost immediate corollary of the conviction that God had exalted him uniquely to heavenly/divine glory".
The early Christians took this established tradition - which they applied to Jesus in the aftermath of their mystical resurrection experiences of the glorified/ascended Jesus - and did something with the ideas of incarnation and exaltation that no Jewish author had ever done before with Enoch, Melchizedek, Adam or Moses: they accorded Jesus an active role as co-eternal divine agent with God the Father in creation (incarnation) and claimed that God the Father now willed that Jesus be given cultic worship in the same context as that owed to God himself (exaltation), both of which were a “novel mutation”. The result is something that does not cohere with prior patterns of “principal agent” thinking and practice but is still a sort of aberrant development of them.
So, descending incarnational christology was there from the beginning of the Jesus movement - just not seemingly from Jesus himself but rather a belief that emerged amongst his earliest circle of followers. Adoptionism actually seems to have been a much later belief, somewhat counter-intuitively.
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nPeace
Veteran Member
Yes, Indeed. These are indeed claims. They are also your opinions.
I don't understand everything you said though, but I think I get the main point, in your claims... I think.
BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Yes, but textual criticism is not an exacting form. I do it personally for annual English conferences, where I co-chair several panels.
Here's the point you don't seem to grasp.
There's no objective evidence that the Christ described in the Gospels existed. Even evidence I would fully expect, were the Gospels accurate, such as an uprising of the people who knew that Jesus had preached, been publicly executed, and then reappeared a week later. According to gospels, there were thousands of such people. I would expect effects of that stupendous event to at least be noticed, especially before the Ascension. Certainly just after.
But no.
Nobody noticed anything until St Paul created new religion, based primarily on turning the meaning of Messiah completely upside down.
Tom