Sven

Given his abysmal knowledge about other topics, I see no reason why he should do any better about history of Christianity.

Brunner's book is No Robots' bible, he will always wave it around and never accept that there's anything wrong in it.

No Robots

My reply is here.

Darryl

[QUOTE=Fortuna;4496652]Partially agree, yes.

But it also very much originated in the very special status that Jews gave themselves as being God's chosen people, and thinking of themselves (Jacob/Israel) as the son of the most High.
This elevated self-regard with which Jews traditionally hold for themselves contains the seeds of a belief in their human destiny that borders on divinity.
The claim for Jesus is that he fulfilled this special role that the Jewish claim for themselves in a radically different interpretation than was the norm for Jewish traditional thought.

There is a sense of divinity too, in the Jewish messianic literature that is not foreign to some of the very diverse traditions of Judaism that flourished in those earlier times. The Dead Sea Scrolls give hints of this. Perhaps as a means of survival against the dominant Christian culture, some of these traditions have been stifled over the last two millenia, but that does not mean that they never existed.

The idea of divinity also orginated, as related by Jesus in the Gospel of John, in Old Testament references which associated the kings( and the elite) as sons of God. This was the answer Jesus himself was purported to give the pharisees in answer to the charge of blashemy against the claims of his own divinity. He referred to the pharisees own scripture to back his claim on the basis that the scripture itself had made such claims about certain humans too.

Works of Hellenized Jews, such as the Book of the Maccabees, with its strong emphasis in the belief in a literal physcial resurrection of the body, rounded out the future Judeo-Christian belief in potential human divinity. This is the answer to Isaiah's mockery of the King of Babylon's own claim to divinity on the grounds that even the cedars of Lebanon stand tall and survive when compared to his own worm-ridden mortal corpse.

Eternal life, after all, is the main chasm that separates man from the gods, and this is what the resurrection bridges.