jakejonesiv

According to Brunner, what happened to Jesus' alleged physical body?

How can a "desire" to be "perpetually reborn in the hearts of men" be accomplished? Sounds like religion to me, and I though you were promoting Brunner as a logical alternative to atheists. Brunner is always trying to slip religion in through the back door.

Jake Jones IV

No Robots

Brunner has nothing at all to say about the ultimate disposition of the corpse. For him, this is on the same level as the disposition of the corpses of Mozart and Socrates: the mob and its leaders hope through neglect, torture and murder to kill the spirit of the genius, but it always rises out of the bodily grave.


How can the desire to immortalize a woman's beauty in a poem be achieved? The essence of genius, whether in the artist, the philosopher, or the mystic, is always and everywhere reborn in the hearts of those whose lives are transformed by the creative works of the genius.

Religion is the imitation in outward rituals of the genuine feeling of spiritual transformation. Brunner provides a religion-free doctrine of spirituality. This doctrine will be of interest only to those atheists interested in finding an alternative to materialistic monism.

Religion is always and everywhere trying to slip in through the back door, as Brunner never wearies of pointing out. Brunner has tried, and I think succeeded, in elaborating his doctrine in a way that precludes its distortion into religion.

jakejonesiv

According to Brunner, is Jesus spirit alive now and conscious?

Jake

No Robots

Is Christ's spirit alive, according to Brunner? Yes, as is evident from its continued real impact on people's lives. Is it conscious? In some individuals, yes: they are consciously aware that their inmost self is utterly dominated by the spirit of Christ. Paul gives the first and greatest testimony of this: "It is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me" (Galatians 2:20).

Doug Shaver

I asked for a quotation proving that real scholars are claiming that such people invented Christianity.

I've seen the arguments. None of them offers evidence that when Suetonius wrote "Chrestus" he meant "Jesus of Nazareth."

Real historians infer the characteristics of a culture from the documents produced within that culture.

No Robots

I have already quoted Vincent Martin as affirming that Jesus's disciples originated from the lowest social strata, including public sinners. He also identifies these same disciples as the founders of Christianity:

Once the witness of Jesus' disciples had made inroads among the pilgrims who ascended to Jerusalem and through them among the Jewish communities of the Diaspora, it was to be expected that, like Judaism, the new way would slowly penetrate the Gentile world. (p. 65)

Then let us leave this one to the judgement of the "lurkers" as well.


No quarrel here.

Doug Shaver

In what you quoted, he doesn't say they invented it. Does he claim that Jesus himself had nothing to do with what his disciples preached?

No Robots

Certainly not. The disciples preached whatever they understood of what Jesus said, did, and was. As Martin (p. 37) says:

It is the faith of the disciples, proclaiming that the one who had been condemned and had died a miserable death was truly alive and was the hope of Israel, which started the wrenching process at the grass root level.

Here is a quotation from Paul Johnson (History of Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk), p. 31) that I hope will further clarify this point:

His real appeal was to ordinary, uninstructed Jewish lay opinion, the Am Ha-Aretz, the 'people of the land' or lost sheep, especially to the outcasts and the sinners for whom the law was too much. This was Jesus's constituency.

Doug Shaver

Then he is not claiming that the disciples invented Christianity.

No Robots

If you want to be absolutely rigorous, you would have to say that neither Christ nor the disciples invented "Christianity":

The emergence of Christianity and of the sense of being a Christian has to be understood in relation to the separation between Judaism and Christianity.... This does not mean that the separation had been effected before the middle of the second century as once supposed; indeed, one result of the intensive work in the field has been to make it more rather than less difficult to assign a date to, or to speak unambiguously about, the separation.

Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World by Judith M. Lieu, p. 2-3.

The point is that scholars concur that what we call "Christianity" originated with the life and words of Christ. These were, subsequent to his death, proclaimed by the "sinners" who had been his disciples.

In a sense, you were correct at the outset: no scholar says that Christianity originated with the "sinners and harlots". Instead, to a man, they say that Christianity originated with Christ. Brunner is simply saying that if you eliminate Christ as the originator, you are inevitably forced to posit the "sinners and harlots" as the originators, which would be an absurdity. All I have been doing is showing how the chain of causality from Christ to the disciples to the proclamation of the Gospel is direct and unescapable.