Evacuate

Ok, for argments sake, I am going to assume that Jesus did exist and he was literate.

So here is my interpretation:

A few thousand years ago, Jesus, who claims to be the son of God (or God) is going around preaching to people. We all know his messages, I dont need to go into them. The important thing is that he though his messages and teachings were important enough to die for, after all, he was claiming to be the Savior of Mankind.

My questions:

1. Why didn't he write anything for his future followers? It just doesn't make sense that if he was willing to die for his cause that he would not have made a better effort in insuring the continuation and longevity of his message. Wouldn't he want his teachings to be as thorough as possible, it would still require faith to believe the message. All we have is hearsay about his birth, the events leading up to his death, and his ressurection. (Isn't there a gap of about 20 years in the Bible where there is no record of Jesus's life, correct me if I am wrong).


2. What happens if we do find writings and sufficient evidence to conclude the author is Jesus, and these writings contradict the Bible. (I could think of many things that Jesus could say that would change something or everything about Christianity, but I will leave that up to the forum.)


Personally, I do think that someday we will find writings from Jesus or at least a better record from the time he might have walked the Earth. It seems to me to only be a matter of time.


Thoughts?

Zeichman

1. No critical current critical scholar believes Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. Most scholars don't believe he intended to set up his own religious group (though those like Mack and Crossan believe he did intend to start a group of some sort) as distinct from Judaism. I'd say the silence might as well have extended to his birth. No critical scholar finds Luke's adolescent anecdote historically accurate, and the birth stories, are likely worthless as well. Most scholars don't believe Jesus was literate.

2. How would these documents be verified? If they are wholly out of alignment with the gospel accounts and existing non-canonical works, then odds are it didn't originate with Jesus. I, personally, wouldn't get my hopes up for such a document being found.

I hope this helps.

Ruhan

Obviously Zeichman is 100% correct when it come to the historic validity of Jesus. Evangelicals tend to ignore most scholars and just blindly accept the Bible as it is. In a sense they have more faith in the Bible (and it's canonization) than God himself.

Even if you were to ignore all the historical problems and for the sake of the argument, accepted that the Bible is in fact written by actual disciples (it takes a huge stretch of the imagination), then it still has various theological problems, some which you have touched on.

Obviously the Christian concept of God is that he has infinite wisdom and intelligence and that he is completely perfect. One of his characteristics had to be perfect communication skills (i.e. knowing how to communicate a message clearly and contectually to the relative audience). Now if you were in God's shoes and had to kill you own child in order to give other creations an eternal life, surely the way in which you communicate this message has to be equal to the sacrifice you made. It's completely illogical that a super intelligent being will allow his own son to suffer and die only to transmit this life saving message via scraps of manuscripts of copies of copies of letters written in various languages that are not used by all the recipients of the message.

As the Bible cannot be the creation of a super intelligent being, one has to start questioning the core message as no super intelligent being would logically endorse it.

RvV

Evacuate

Thanks for the imput, maybe my point was too obvious.

I have a question about canonization, what are the standards for canonization and who decides this? Do all Christians and/or Bible believers agree on this standard? I have had someone try to explain it to me before but I just became more confused. Would there be a different standard today compared to the original canonization of the Bible?

Thanks

Peter Kirby

I believe that we will never find new materials penned by the apostles or by Jesus. If they were in a library or monastery, they would be known by now. If they're waiting in the sand to be discovered, we should have found comparable writings from other individuals in first century Palestine. The only thing that comes close to this is the Dead Sea Scrolls, but unfortunately there will probably never be a cache of Palestinian documents found that holds a candle to significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. After all it is the only such find of truly ancient Palestinian scrolls we have made in over 150 years of trawling biblical lands.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

cass256

We don't know his messages, we only have writings claiming to contain his messages, and a word for word comparison shows they do not all agree. Religions do not agree on his messages, even today.

Maybe he did write. If it went against the beliefs of Rome, or the Jews at the time, do you think they would hve been kept to this day? If so, they are probably stored under the Vatican, hidden away.

How would anyone verify Jesus' handwriting? If he returned and stood on the top of the Vatican, how would you know it was Jesus?

They also found writings of Jesus' sayings at Nag Hammadi. Not may pay attention to what they say. for example the gospel of Thomas saying that "James" the Just would be the one who everyone was to go to as leader after "Jesus" was gone. Not many pay attention in that direction, and ignore the letter that is claimed in the Bible to have been written by James.

cass256

Really, what supernatural god would need to kill anyone at all? He could just say; "Your sins are forgiven. Now shape up, and you'll have eternal life!" I mean if he can speak the universe into being, he could speak sins into disappearing. what's with all the blood?

Ruhan

I agree with you 100%. My point is even if you want to accept all that as being true (which is true), the way in which it was communicated proves that it is not a message inspired by a super intellectual being.