Chili

Different Jesus in Luke and John then in Matthew and Mark.
Notice also that Luke and John goes to heaven while Matthew and Mark goes back to Galilee for some more purification, which after all was a cleansing period between Egypt (was it?) and Jerusalem on high. Now then, to spend another 40 years in purification is very little short of hell on earth . . . if Luke an John sends him to heaven on earth.

bacht

I also don't believe in god-men or incarnated spirits or whatever, but Mark and John seem to buy all the supernatural stuff.

We don't really know what happened during Jesus' career, assuming such a man existed. If he came to Jerusalem and prophesied against the temple he should have expected a reaction from the authorities yes? So if he was caught off guard he's some kind of fool or half-wit. If he deliberately sought to provoke a reaction then what was his plan? To get himself killed for nothing? This is crazy.

Maybe the point is that Jesus was sane while surrounded by insanity (kind of true actually in the lead up to the first revolt). But Mark doesn't say this overtly, though there is a theory that this book was some kind of allegorical description of the end of Israel.

If you think Jesus' moment of anxiety rings true I would suggest this is a tribute to Mark's storytelling rather than a reliable bit of history.

Juststeve

Bacht:

Just musing for a moment but I think one of the difficulties we have understanding this subject is we really don’t know for sure what Jesus’ companions thought. His companions left no records. We have the writings of Paul who was not a companion, and we have the gospels written by anonymous authors at least 40 years after the fact and beyond. What is this evidence of? On the assumption that the authors thought what they were writing was true it is evidence of what some people thought at the time.

Was Jesus surrounded by crazy people? Not necessarily. Judaism has a long tradition of awaiting the Messiah and there have been plenty of cases in Jewish history when persons arose who were believed to be the Messiah. Judaism has accommodated this fact by recognizing that the person suspect of being the Messiah wasn’t the Messiah at all. Christianity may in actuality be the cult started by a few Jews who were unable to accept the fact that Jesus wasn’t who they thought he was. I’m not content to say that any Jew who awaits the Messiah is crazy, or even any Jew who thinks the Messiah has appeared.

Let’s push the question a bit further. If Jesus thought himself the Messiah would that make him crazy? I’m not sure that it would. It would make him wrong but not necessarily crazy. Remember that the Jewish conception of the Messiah is not that he is a God/Man. He is an ordinary man chosen by God to do extraordinary things. I do not believe in such but I wouldn’t argue that those that do are all crazy or else we would need to enlarge the asylums.

Steve

bacht

The messiah question is problematic. Obviously Jesus did not present himself as a military deliverer of the nation. Was he a spiritual saviour, rejected by his own people? This is the familiar Christian interpretation.

The NT writers were apparently expecting a New Age, either a global apocalypse or the opening of a new way into heaven ie. afterlife. Both ideals are a bit nutso imo, and the Jewish scriptures don't really support afterlife speculation (seems to have arisen in the Persian or Hellenistic periods).

Was Mark presenting Jesus as an alternative to people like the Zealots or other political agents? Maybe, but to what end? Was he really expecting a Kingdom of Heaven? Utopian, or metaphysical, but not realistic is it?

The only thing Jesus seems to have accomplished while alive was to become known publicly around Galilee and Judea. Was he a Jewish Cynic? Maybe, but such people tend to ignore society rather than reform it.

Schweitzer proposed that Jesus was forcing the kingdom by his mission to the temple. If so then Jesus was just another failed idealist, unless one wants to imagine the post-70 or post-135 world as renewed, which is ridiculous. The results of Jesus' career seem to have occured without anticipation ie. a new religious movement borrowed from the Jews and embraced by Hellenized gentiles, with the rabbis quietly moving on to Talmudic Judaism.