philechat

I have a feeling that most of Jesus' words are what others put in his mouth, however, like the various deities before him. He may be a philosopher or he may not, but stylistically I prefer Plato (even if I disagree with much of his doctrine).

Sabine Grant

Milieu is simply a French word which has no fancy connotation in my language. ( mi : center of.. middle+ lieu : place from latin locus). We do spell it with only one "L" though...

Sabine Grant

I appreciate your approach philechat... you used the word " prefer" which IMO points to what an individual considers inspirational for himself. Christ's teachings are inspirational to me in terms of human behavior. My favorites being his reminder to introspect oneself rather than pointing to other's faults, his modeling our ability to face the adversity of an angry crowd demanding the death of an adulteress and his protecting her from human judgement to set her free. I also value the fact that he demands authenticity from his followers thru their actions onto others.... that claims to love Him are irrelevent if they do not provide for others what they would provide for Him. He challenges our human nature to set aside our ego.

Unas

I have developed a suspicion that what Jesus thought when he discoursed on 'the Kingdom of God' is radically, irreconcilably different from what his unimaginative followers thought of as essential to that concept. I might even pose the question, Was Jesus a skeptic? He clearly doesn't conceive of God in the normal resentment-inflamed mawkish way that is so familiar to us today.

I must urge that we extricate his personality from the unskilful, loutish interpretive abilities of the riff-raff that idealized him. Is the proposition that Jesus was qualitatively differentiated from his surroundings, a break from the whole Judean heritage so unwarranted?