RUmike

Two non-theists are allowed to argue, ya know Basically I just don't think it's right to blame Jesus himself for future Christian acts. I am speaking of the historical person Jesus, as just a person, and not God, because obviously I do not believe such a thing. If Jesus was in fact God, then yes, I blame him for all future atrocities that he did nothing to prevent.

Jedi Mind Trick

Yes, I think we did.

Clivedurdle

This I think might make the Jesus character into a magician and practitioner of sympathetic magic!

Mimicking the creator as a reason for doing something is found throughout druidic thinking and more recently animist beliefs. And this is the basis for morality? A superstitious magical reason or a hope of a reward?

RUmike

I'm not supporting it, just simply relaying the info.

EthnAlln

I wonder how it squares with the prevalence of divorce among evangelicals. John Hagee, for instance, the lard bucket from San Antonio is now with his second wife, the first one being very much alive.

The Sermon on the Mount, in general contains counsels of perfection. That in itself is antithetical to the general message of Christianity, which is precisely that you can't be good, you aren't going to be good. I wonder that no one sees the disconnect there. On the one hand, you have all this strict teaching about avoiding lustful thoughts (based on the totally discredited premise that thinking and doing can't be separated), not getting divorced, blessing those who curse you, taking NO thought for tomorrow (stupidest advice ever given), etc. On the other hand, you have what Paul later made of Christianity: acceptance of human imperfection and a magic formula for curing the supposititious sin affliction.

Incidentally, it isn't absolutely certain that the phrase "except for adultery" is about simple adultery. The Greek is "parektos logou porneias," which means "except by reason of prostitution." I don't know of any context where "porneia" (source of the word "pornography," of course) means simple fornication, although it is a cognate word. My Catholic catechism said that these words referred to marriages that were illegal under Jewish law, and did not mean that adultery was grounds for divorce. Sheer buncombe, of course, tortured out of a plain text to support a previously decided-upon position. But again, I suspect the exception was added later by a legalistic editor. Jesus almost always liked sweeping statements, without a lot of codicils and subparagraphs.

EthnAlln

I remember reading, some time around 1956, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were new, a book which claimed that large portions of the Sermon on the Mount were found in the works of an Essene Teacher of Righteousness, who was crucified a century before Jesus lived. But I haven't heard anything about that in several decades. How did the debate on that finally turn out? The author of the book I read believed that both Jesus and John the Baptist were Essenes for part of the 18 years of Jesus' life on which the Gospels are silent.

EthnAlln

Right. As I well remember, when the concept of a just war was explained to me, loving one's enemies can mean killing them. But treating them with kindness presumably could not.

EthnAlln

I think RED DAVE has made this point, but how does one square Jesus' advice with his behavior, as in his anathemas against Khorazin and Bethsaida and Capharnaum (Matthew 11:20--23), his anathemas against the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23), and the cleansing of the Temple (Matthew 21: 12--17)?

Can anyone imagine Gandhi driving people out of the Temple with a cord? Can anyone imagine Socrates responding with such fury against people who disagree with him? Frankly, I think we've got much better role models than Jesus to follow. And then there is the salient fact that some of the advice in the Sermon on the Mount is really terrible, terrible advice. It places no value whatsoever on rationality or on participation as a citizen in the affairs of the community. The whole tendency of Christianity, like Islam, has been "rule or ruin." Don't be "unequally yoked" with unbelievers; withdraw from the secular society around you unless you can dominate it. One can certainly find individual verses where Jesus seems to recommend the opposite, such as his comparing his followers to leaven or salt. But that teaching is contradicted by his explicit advice to shake the dust off their feet when leaving a city that refuses to accept their message.

Clivedurdle

Not a personal response to you, just trying to widen discussion to - are there not obvious magical bits in the som? If so, how is it a basis for morality?

RUmike

That's a good question, and something I was wrestling with earliar. Personally I'm still trying to figure out what I make of the incident at the Temple.

Historically speaking, I'm not so sure that Jesus said the passages you cited. I definitely think he did something against the temple cult, but exactly what and/or why I don't know. People like E.P. Sanders, in trying to save Jesus' Jewishness, claim that it was a symbolic destruction and not a cleansing, because how could a Jew be upset with what needed to go on for the festival? But E.P. Sanders also rejects what Jesus said about the Sabbath simply because he "couldn't imagine" Jesus saying that, so I take what he says with a grain of salt. My professor claims that during Jesus' lifetime, the selling of animals and exchange of money was moved from outside of the temple to inside, suggesting that while the practice needed to occur for the festival, it didn't need to occur in the temple, setting Jesus off. Unfortunately the evangelists didn't leave us with much to speculate on, and in all liklihood didn't really know exactly what happened there. It certainly doesn't seem to cohere with "love your enemies" very well, but again, he was only human.