bd-from-kg

aikido7:

There’s nothing especially profound about a bunch of superstitious people making stuff up. It happens all the time. It also happens with dismaying frequency that this stuff then comes to be widely believed.

No doubt any number of ancient documents represented such a “complex amalgam”. These particular ones have survived because of a quirk of fate. Why should we waste our time pondering what part of them is historical and what part is mythology? Shall we do this for every such document that has survived? When are we allowed to start living in the present and getting on with our lives?

Naturally. If these results were communicated honestly to those in the pews, there would be few left in the pews the following Sunday.
We don’t get to “let” Jesus be God or not be God. We get to choose whether to dedicate our lives to a delusion or decide to face honestly the fact that we have no idea what the answers (if any) are to the “ultimate questions”, and that an eccentric itinerant preacher from a remote backwater of the Roman Empire didn’t have the answers either.
Good question. And if we decide to attempt to live facing forward, why should we have any further interest (other than combating its malign influence) in an institution based on the idea of living in the past, whose very existence is the product of a first-century mindset, and whose mission is the perpetuation of this mindset?

Frankly, you seem to be like a lot of “liberal” Christians I know, who have reluctantly concluded that traditional Christianity is false - that Jesus was not resurrected, that He was not God - yet are unable emotionally to cope with the obvious implication that Christianity has nothing of value to offer the world and should be tossed into the scrap heap of history.

The fundamentalists are more clearheaded than you. They understand with Paul that if Jesus did not literally rise from His tomb, it’s ridiculous to pretend that His life and teachings have any particular significance (other than historical). It’s time to take the final step and abandon Christianity entirely. Try living life truly facing forward.

[ December 15, 2001: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

aikido7

You raise some great questions and I would certainly like to dialogue with you. Unfortunately, most of it would be off-topic to this thread and might be as alien and disconcerting as dry land to most of the gasping fish flopping about on the sands.

If you agree to talk, I would like to continue this discussion by email.

If not, I will only add that I think I generally agree with you even though I feel you misunderstand me a bit; maybe I failed to communicate my ideas in a helpful manner.

Thanks for your thoughtful response!

NOGO

You speak of letting the REAL Jesus speak.
Right, was this spoken by the real Jesus ...

Matthew 23
29 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous,
30 and say, "If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.'
31 So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.
32 Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers.
33 You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?

Jesus is saying that the Pharisees are TESTIFYING against themselves BECAUSE they are the sons of those who killed the prophets. Then he tells them to fill up with their fathers' guilt and that they will go to hell for it.

So my question is this. Is it the real Jesus speaking here?

CX

&gt;&gt;My "conclusion" is that there
&gt;&gt;has been a failure to communicate
&gt;&gt;the results of sound biblical
&gt;&gt;scholarship to those of us in the
&gt;&gt;pews, resulting in an inexcusably
&gt;&gt;high index of biblical illiteracy,
&gt;&gt;a lack of curiousity about reality
&gt;&gt;and a real fear of the "intellect"
&gt;&gt;or "worldly wisdom"(code for "mortal folly") &gt;&gt;among believers.

I couldn't agree more. I have studied the NT at length and continue to do so in bothj translation and the original Greek. It is amazing to me how little believers know of their own texts. The problem, I think, is not with the academic community, but rather the Xian communtiy. The average person in the pew doesn't care what text critical study of the NT has to say. It requires tremendous effort and reading a lot of really dry academic jargonspeak to have a good conception of what mainstream biblical criticism says. Not only that, but I suspect for most people a careful study of the mainstream scholarship would present a tremendous conflict of faith. I personally cannot do the mental gymnastics that most biblical scholars do to reconcile their academic conclusions with their continued belief. A great number of biblical scholars have in fact lost their faith as a result of their study (like Dr. Michael Goulder) or modified it to the point that it is unrecognizable as Xianity in any real sense (Like Bishop John Shelby Spong).

I started studying Xianity because I realized that though I ahd been raised a Xian I had no real clue about what the bible said, where it came from and how it developed. Heck I was twenty-somthing years old before I even knew that the gospels aren't all attributed to Apostles. Unfortunately it was that study coupled with a study of comparative religion (I went to a Jesuit university) that killed any faith I might have had.

aikido7

Without going into too much detail, Matthew's community of believers needed a living Jesus that addressed their current concerns. Since there is a massive consensus that Matthew was written sometime 70 to 90 years after the crucifixion, I think we can take what his Jesus is arguing about with a historical grain of scholarly salt. This redactional invective does not match the difficult Jesus who counsels us to forgive others--even one's enemies--and compares the Kingdom of God to something unclean and out of control.

If I am not mistaken (and I may be--it's been awhile since I believe I remember reading this), that the Pharisees were not the problematic group in Jesus' own time that they later became to Jesus' followers in Matthew's era. One of the hallmarks of Matthew's gospel is to portray Jesus as "the new Moses," the one who fulfills the Jewish hope for a messiah/redeemer and so is "found" to be prefigured in the writings of the Hebrew Bible. Matthew was writing to a conservative Jewish audience, trying to get the message out about a Jesus who was pushing that traditional Hebraic envelope.

[ December 19, 2001: Message edited by: aikido7 ]</p>

CX

Can you cite a reference for that "massive concensus"? 70 to 90 years after the crucifixion would date GMt to the early part of the 2nd century (c. 99-123 C.E.). In my study I have not seen any scholar date GMt later then 85 or 90 C.E. Did you mean to write between 70 and 90 C.E.?

aikido7

</strong>

Of course: My addled brain and my sometimes impulsive instincts. (Please read my past postings for specific sources!).

<strong> I did and you are correct. It is careful reading like yours that ruins things for the rest of us!

(...thanks....!)

CX

Well I appreciate any opportunity to be a tiresome, pedantic drone.

NOGO

I see. You reserve the right to decide what the REAL Jesus said and did. In effect you reserve the right to rewrite the Gospels according to your view of who the REAL Jesus was and delete the rest.
Is more proof required of the mythical nature of the person you call the REAL Jesus (whether he actually existed or not) ?
You say that Matthew wrote this in order to sell Jesus to people with a long Jewish tradition.
It follows that the OT teaches that the children must bear the sins of their parents. So I conclude that you dismiss much of the OT as well as parts of the new. Do you believe that Jesus' blood was necessary for Yahweh to forgive mankind?
Was Jesus a human sacrifice to Yahweh? And isn't this notion firmly entrenched in the OT?
Please read Hebrews 9 and tell me if this has anything to do with the real Jesus?
In particular Hebrews 9 says that there can't be any forgiveness of sin without shedding of blood.

CX

We cannot know what the "real" Jesus did and said, because he did not write anything down and there is scant little attestation outside the New Testament. As such we can only hypothetically reconstruct what is plausible. Historical scholars do this with any important figure from antiquity not just Jesus. Jesus recieves perhaps more scrutiny because the claims his followers make for him are quite remarkable and people still believe them today. Whereas although the claims made for Pallas-Athena are equally if not more extraordinary, the cult of Pallas-Athena died out a couple millenia ago. I personally have no preconceived notions about what Jesus is likely to have done or said, except that as a freely admitted materialist I am dubious about supernatural claims.