Clivedurdle

Should we be looking for a real Jesus as a forerunner of Wahhabism, Khomeni, Osama, Hitler and Pol Pot?

PyramidHead

"Obama?"

Clivedurdle

Doh! Something was bugging me there!

Clivedurdle

Let's have another go after an interesting name confusion - is it possible Jesus was a seriously nasty character?

ChuckE99

That collection of sayings is not thought to go back to a historical Jesus. I don't have the Jesus Seminar book in front of me, so I don't have their discussion of the passage. But it is likely these are concepts introduced into the gospels by later groups. Maybe Paul had an influence here, since he hated the body so much.

Newfie

Not completely out of character for a “meek and mild” Jesus really. After all, is it not more "profitable" to cut out a cancer from the body in order to spare the whole life? A lung, a breast, a testicle, or even a leg? It sounds a little extreme, but we accept the principle wholeheartedly when it comes to physical ailments. Jesus considered being “cast into Gehenna” a total loss of life, and a sacrifice of a body part completely justifiable in order to prevent this from happening. Not really all that radical coming from that point of view.

Clivedurdle

Our image is very much predetermined by the god is love gave his only begotten son to us stuff.

But what happens if we take the nasty stuff by itself - there is lots more - and ask was it tidied up? Might we arrive at an historial core similar to Mein Kampf? Even Hitler could be loving towards arian children and pets.


Has anyone attempted that? A Hannibal Lecter Jesus?

Toto

Bart Ehrman thinks that Jesus was probably an apocalyptic nutcase, in the same category as David Koresh. But - if Jesus was actually evil, the early church did a very thorough job of scrubbing the record, and there is no known way to recover this Jesus.

I can't think of anything that anyone can say on this topic that belongs in this forum.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Clivedurdle,

I don't think that the saying is much different than the common thinking of the time about sacrifice and physical pain. So I don't think it can be tied to tyrannical regimes. I do think it had a more precise origination. We should keep in mind that there was a cult of Attis and Cybele where the priests castrated themselves in Ephesus, where most of Paul's letters originate from. We should also remember that Eusebius claims that Origin in Egypt castrated himself. Isis, in Egypt, resurrected her dead husband Osiris from just his castrated penis.

It seems to me that the original intention of the passage has gotten jumbled and censored because of its reference to castration, but we can reconstruct along these lines:

[/QUOTE]

This pro-castration attitude is probably also reflected in this later passage in Matthew (9:12):

There is also this tidbit from Paul which seems to be really dealing with circumcision rather than castration:

Galatians 5:12,

Later, of course, the great philosopher, Peter Abelard, suffered this unfortunate fate at the hands of good Christians.

It may be suspected that some early Hellenic-Christian groups engaged in incestuous orgies. In opposition to them, perhaps the more restrained Jewish-Christians of Egypt urged castration for those over-zealous Christians taking the idea of the agape meal a little too literally. Perhaps too, some over-zealous Christians (in another direction) borrowed the castration practice from the Attis and Cybele cult for a while.

If this is true, it would seem ironic that in order to prove themselves men who did not succumb to the power of women, these men made the ultimate sacrifice by taking away their own manhood.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

spamandham

Although this passage fits the context of other moral imperatives in Matthew 5 and so is probably best interpreted as hyperbole, I can't help but wonder if 'body' here really refers to the church itself, and 'member' refers to a...'member'.

...it's better to get rid of a single trouble maker in the church, than to have the whole church be destroyed by Rome?