aa5874

As far as I understand, 2000 years ago, literacy was very limited and literature, whether theological or secular was not prevalent as it is today. Information was more than likely to be spread by word of mouth. The abilty to mass produce literature came about 15 hundred years later. I don't think there was much of a wide audience.

I do not know if you aware that the author of John implies that Jesus apparently never went to school. John 7:15, And the Jews marvelled saying, How knoweth this man letters, having never learned'.

Diogenes the Cynic

"Son of Man" (actually "Son of Adam") did not mean God. It's normal meaning was "human being." it may possibly have also been an inderect reference to the Messiah (by way of an allusion to Daniel) but either way, it wasn't God. The verse you quoted can be read as saying either that human beings are still their own "lords" even on the Sabbath (I could argue that the SOM sayings originally had a humanist message intended to disentangle morality from ritual or sterile written law) or, at most, it's a statement that the Messiah is King even on the Sabbath. That's a less interesting message (and kind of tautological) but still a possibility. Neither of those interpretions would amount to a claim to Godhood. The Messiah wasn't God.
"Son of God" was an honorific for kings, not a literal claim to divine descendancy. At most they would have thought he was claiming to be the Messiah (i.e. the heir to the throne of David). They might have thought he was crazy or wrong but they wouldn't have stoned him or thought he was blasphemous. The Jewish Messiah is defined by accomplishments, not by birth. The Jewish answer to someone who claims to be the Messiah is "prove it" (by fulfilling the requirements) not "burn the witch."
There was nothing blasphemous about claiming to be the "Son of God," nor was it a claim to Godhood.
Well, in point of fact, we don't know WHAT the disciples claimed or believed. There certainly isn't a shred of evidence that they thought he was a God (or even that they ever claimed he had been physically resurrected).

One thing we DO know us that he wasn't the Jewish Messiah. He fulfilled none of the requirements.

Amaleq13

U.S. pop culture reference to a 60's television series and/or recent movie based on the series.

lee_merrill

It was however interpreted that way in reference to Jesus in NT times:

Matthew 4:3 And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."

This would not be "if you are of noble birth, do a miracle."

There is more than a shred, actually.

Hebrews 1:8 But of the Son he says, "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom."

This is one of many verses (re "Jesus as God" by Murray J. Harris).

This also is untrue, but I'm a little weary of discussing with people who make sweeping claims and mention no evidence. One requirement fulfilled was that he was a descendant of David, for instance.

Regards,
Lee

Johnny Skeptic

Now that is cute. You do not have one single shred of evidence that the God of the Bible is not an evil imposter, and yet you have the audacity to use the word "untrue". A deceptive, evil God could easily predict the future, could he not?

Even in an apologetic sense, what evidence do you have that Jesus was a descendant of David, Micah 5:2, perhaps? If so, what extra-Biblical evidence do you have that Jesus was born in Bethlehem?

Diogenes the Cynic

Matthew had a different understanding of the Messiah but the way the NT authors understood the Messiah is beside the point. Their redefinition of the Messiah has no bearing on what that concept meant to Jesus or his contemporaries.
This quote does not come from a disciple or from anyone else who ever met Jesus so it's obviously not evidence. Like I said, there is not a shred of evidence that Jesus disciples ever thought he was God. We have no writings from them and no real idea what they thought. We don't even really know that they existed at all.
This isn't so much a requirement as a partial definition. The Jewish Messiah, by definition, an heir to the throne of David. That wasn't enough to make someone the Messiah, though. The Messiah isn't the Messiah until AFTER he fulfills the requirements, none of which were fulfilled by Jesus. Having said that, according to your own Gospels, Jesus was NOT a descendant of David, Josephwas. Of couse, those genealogies are bogus and contradictory anyway, but even if they weren't, Jesus still fulfilled none of the requirements of the Messiah.

Loomis

Fat chance.
For more info: Hebrews 1:8

For info on the list: B-Greek (The Biblical Greek Mailing List)

All the best,

Loomis

Gamera

I'm speaking for scholars who face the reality that we get texts as we get them. I realize there are some fantastical scholars who generate theories about texts instead of dealing with the texts in front of them. But I find that, wel, fantastical.

Why, all of them. That's all we have. A bunch of texts.

Aber das einfach ist! We interpret the texts we get. Interpretation is inevitable. But what we interpret is the texts we get, not some other text that didn't make it to us. The former is what real scholarship is about -- confronting a text as it is. The latter is a form of nostalgia for what never was.

Well, there you go again. The texts say what they say. You argue against what the text says by using another part of the text. That literally makes no sense.

The texts says Jesus said he was God. But you have an agenda. You can't accept that Jesus (whom apparently you don't want to imagine as either God or mad) said this. So you construct another narrative from another text (the narrative of "he could have used another framework") and impose that on the text we have. Of course why you privilege that other narrative and other text, you don't say (and can't since all we have is texts)

Total conceptual incoherency.

Gamera

But Jesus wasn't a priest in the Temple. Yet he proclaimed the forgiveness of sin. You seem to want to give his statements an innocuous sense. That's not what his audience thought. They thought he had claimed to have forgiven the various person's sins -- he himself.

And when they confronted him with that, he didn't say, "hey, you got me wrong here, guys, I'm just saying God forgives them, not me."

No, he didn't respond that way. He responded by arguing that his healing of the persons indicated that he had the right to forgive sins.

Thus the context refutes your interpretation and clearly shows Jesus was claiming to be God.

pharoah

OK, I'll concede that Jesus did claim to have power to forgive sins. However, I note that neither you or Lee addressed my point about JTB. How was JTB's claim that his baptism was for the remission of sins any different than Jesus's claim to forgive sins by the spoken word? Both practices were a significant departure from the norm of that time. By your reasoning, doesn't JTB's baptism mission prove that he was claiming to be God?