lpetrich

He's at The Jesus Puzzle.

He has a long and very approving review of Richard Price's The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. Judging from ED's review, RP comes to the same sort of conclusion he does -- that the Gospels are little more than mythology, with very little of a "historic Jesus Christ" apparent -- if any. An interesting curiosity is that JC's divinity/sonship gets pushed farther and farther back in time in later and later documents:

Epistles - resurrection
Mark - baptism (he's God's adopted son)
Matthew and Luke - conception (God make his mother pregnant)
John - always existed (God's alter ego?)

I have it on order from Amazon, but it still has not arrived.

By contrast, he considers Mel Gibson's The Passion a very disturbing gorefest; he is turned off by the idea that a supposedly omnibenevolent entity wants a gross blood sacrifice.

For my part, I have no intention of seeing it even though it has Monica Bellucci (Mary Magdalene) in it.

spin

Gosh that's a tough call.


spin

Bernard Muller

Ipetrich wrote:
On the first item, you referenced Romans 1. However, Paul (1Corinthians, Galatians and Romans (later in the text 8:3,32)) and 'Hebrews' had Christ/Son pre-existent.
I think the statement in Ro1, at the beginning of his letter, was carefully worded by Paul in order not to offend Jews/Jewish Christians in Rome, soften them, and even attract their favorable attention (with "from the seed of David"), even if later, in the same epistle, he will unload against circumcision and the law, and mention (briefly) the Son's pre-existence.
To complicate things even more, GJohn started to be written (with the introduction) before GMatthew & GLuke.
Different places, different people, different Christianities! Not a clean one-way evolution!
About the making of GJohn:
http://www.geocities.com/b_d_muller/jnintro.html

Best regards, Bernard