brighid

Well – let’s examine a modern day occurrence of a man who claims to be reincarnation of this Jesus and the THOUSANDS of people who follow him : <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,721142,00.html" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,721142,00.html</a>

Surely, if THOUSANDS of people believe He is the Son of God, according to the testimony of theists here – it MUST be true! Or maybe, it requires millions or billions of believers before the veracity of the claim is strong enough to “support” this argument. Amazing what people will believe! Maybe two thousand years from now the Siberian Jesus will replace the Judaic Jesus in future mythos and they will look back and say – how could anyone have believe HE wasn’t the Son of God!


Brighid

David Bowden

If I were a well-educated "Hellenized" Jew I would go beyond Nicodemus' late-night conversation in John 3.

I would remember the miraculous events outlined in the biographies of other religious figures, and ask Jesus himself about them.

I would ask him about earlier Jewish messianic figures, and I would ask him about the Essenes. (And I would probably go to other groups and ask them about Jesus.)

I would certainly ask him about Mithras/Dionysius religions.

I would talk to him about Plato and Lucretius and the stoics.

I would bring up the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and ask him to comment.

I would probe his mind on all subjects, mundane as well as philosophical.

I would ask him to weigh in on Aristotle's physical and biological ideas.

I would ask him to confirm or deny everything I heard about him that I had not personally witnessed, and I would record any denial and I would record who told me the things Jesus denied. If necessary I would contradict other disciples' oral traditions with Jesus' own testimony about himself.

I would ask if he were truly the son of Joseph (assuming his putative virgin birth was something I had heard mention of).

I would ask him what exactly it means to be saved. I would ask him how he comes by his knowledge of the truth.

And I would write it all down. I would provide physical descriptions. I would collect questions to ask him. I would try discourse with him concerning the skeptics' objections to him. I might even try to be official secretary/chronicler to the Twelve.

I would be Boswell to his Johnson, Arrian to his Epictetus. I would seriously be that interested in him. Wouldn't anyone*?

After the crucifixion, I would perhaps be convinced that he was yet another miracle-working charlatan with extraordinary persuasive gifts. Or I might be convinced that he knew everything and had been resurrected.

But I would write it all down, either way. Because I would know, from his own hints, that he expected to die soon, and I would know that nothing of his teaching should be lost, whether for skeptics to analyze or for believers to meditate upon.

I would thereafter, as long as I lived, keep asking questions about him, and about other first-century messiahs. I would publish all I knew about him.

I would try to get every reputable thinker to weigh in on my record, and I would add their thoughts to my record.

I would not allow his reputation to be exaggerated or distorted. If I lived long enough, I would comment on the writings of Paul and the other gospel-writers, verifying what matched my record and attacking anything that contradicted it. For instance, I would set the record straight, from the beginning, on what Jesus' thoughts were on the evangelization of non-Jews.

In short, I would strive to answer all the questions that any reasoning person would have had. If I believed in him, I would explain why, and how he persuaded me. And if Jesus failed to impress me personally, I would record that as well.

-Wanderer
(* - The fact that nobody at all did this back then makes it harder for me to believe what the later-written gospels say, especially about events to which the writers were not first-hand witnesses.)

[ May 24, 2002: Message edited by: wide-eyed wanderer ]</p>

sighhswolf

I would probably react in the same manner as most of the Jews of the time period.
I would remember that the Rabbinic authorities teach that miracles are not now nor ever were proof of the divinity of Jesus.
And that to base faith on miracles is not acceptable.
Rabbi's say miracles can be staged, people can be fooled by false "messiahs" and therefore the supposed miracles of Jesus would never qualify him to the Messiahship of the Jews.

Now we may not agree with the Jewish religion, but at least they had enough common sense to speak out about "miracle workers" not being from god.

The Rabbi's say without reservation that faith that is built on "miracles" is no faith at all....and it will fail in the most needed times.

So, for what it's worth I would have probably been of the same mindset as the Jews when they
refused to accept this imposter as messiah.

Oh yea by the way the Jews and the Rabbi's also say that the conditions that qualify the messiah based on Hebrew law are quite clear that the real "King Messiah" will be a simple ordinary human being with no supernatural powers at all.
In fact the Rabbi's say that the Messiah could be among us now as we speak.

I would have been more willing to accept this concept than the stupid, blind and unintelligent
faith of the Christians.
At least this view is based in reason and common sense.

Before christians decide that they have a messiah in the form of this dead guy Jesus, they should all read Moshe Maimonides Code of Jewish Law.
They should read the qualifications and accomplishments that must be attained before anyone could lay claim to the messiahship.
I would suggest Mishne Torah Kings 11:4.

Wolf

PS. remember that one of the strongest factors in the denial of the Jews of the messiahship of Jesus is based on his performance of miracles.




[ May 24, 2002: Message edited by: sighhswolf ]</p>

RJS

What do the Rabbi's attribute the miracles to then? Are they saying they are magic/slight of hand/etc, or are they saying they may be supernatural, but not from the Messiah? I'm confused, and maybe you arent an atheist, but I wasnt expecting a response like yours. I would think most people would attribute actual miracles (walking on water, rising from the dead, bringing the dead back to life, making the blind see, etc) to some form of higher power that we cant explain or understand. Thanks.

HRG

Your premises include an impossibility. I cannot be a witness to a specific supernatural act.

I can only conclude that something supernatural happened; but I cannot say whether the event that my senses register actually happened or whether my senses have been supernaturally misled (e.g. by the creation of photons in mid-air). After all, the connection between an actual event and my perception of it depends upon naturalism.

Thus I couldn't distinguish between an actual miracls by Jesus or another illusion woven by Loki. Note that Loki doesn't have to influence my mind - just a few photons that my retina will absorb.

Regards,
HRG.

sighhswolf

Rabbi Shraga Simmons explains why For 2,000 years, Jews have rejected the Christian idea of Jesus as messiah.
Jesus was not a prophet. Prophecy can only exist in Israel when the land is inhabited by a majority of world Jewry. During the time of Ezra (circa 300 BCE), when the majority of Jews refused to move from Babylon to Israel, prophecy ended upon the death of the last prophets -- Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.

Jesus appeared on the scene approximately 350 years after prophecy had ended.

To address your question of the perception of miracles, it is incumbent upon us to examine the reasoning behind the dismissal of these acts by Jewish Rabbinic authorities.

Judaism, unique among all of the world's major religions, does not rely on "claims of miracles" as the basis for its religion. In fact, the Bible says that God sometimes grants the power of "miracles" to charlatans, in order to test Jewish loyalty to the Torah (Deut. 13:4).

Maimonides states (Foundations of Torah, ch. 8):


The Jews did not believe in Moses, our teacher, because of the miracles he performed. Whenever anyone's belief is based on seeing miracles, he has lingering doubts, because it is possible the miracles were performed through magic or sorcery. All of the miracles performed by Moses in the desert were because they were necessary, and not as proof of his prophecy.

What then was the basis of [Jewish] belief? The Revelation at Mount Sinai, which we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears, not dependent on the testimony of others... as it says, "Face to face, God spoke with you..." The Torah also states: "God did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us -- who are all here alive today." (Deut. 5:3)


Judaism is not miracles. It is the personal eyewitness experience of every man, woman and child, standing at Mount Sinai 3,300 years ago.


The reason I say these things being a non-believer, is that the concept of and basis of christianity uses the supposed "miracles" performed by Jesus as proof of and validation of
his divinity.

Remember that during the time of Jesus, there were self appointed messiahs running around all over the middle east.
Some of these imposters had mastered slight of hand and practiced a form of mass hypnosis, illusionists, magicians.
There is absolutely no way that anyone today could verify any of the so-called miracles attributed to Jesus, and the christian faith could not have survived, without them.

I hope this explains my response better.
Christians blindly accept these exaggerated claims of miracles because "the Bible says so".
The Jews do not. Even though I am not a believer, I can say that the Jewish concept makes more sense than the "smoke and mirror" concept of christianity.
Wolf

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

The Other Michael

Don't forget Clarke's dictum about any sufficiently advanced technology (compared to that of the observer) being indistinguishable from magic.

Perhaps, if it happened, he'd just been trained by the Atlanteans or aliens and was wowing the locals with hi-tech. That seems more likely than "son o' god". But not very likely at all.

cheers,
Michael

Someone7

Well, if I witnessed Jesus' miracles personally, I would probably just conclude he is a sorcerer of some sort (that is, if I ruled out the possibility of illusion). There would be no reason to believe Jesus is getting his magical powers from a source other than himself, in fact, none of his miracles are very spectacular at all. If Jesus were a deity in his own right or getting magic power from a deity, he doesn’t demonstrate powers that one would expect a deity to possess.

The idea of an omnipotent, omniscient deity giving Jesus magic power is even more ludicrous. For some reason, this all-powerful entity decides to use some lowly Jew as his mouthpiece to humanity? An omnipotent, omniscient god could communicate with humanity much more effectively than that, if it wanted to. Indeed, why would this being want to communicate with such lowly creatures as us? What could it possibly want with us?

Obviously, the idea that Jesus is himself an omnipotent, omniscient deity is orders of magnitude more absurd than the idea of him receiving his magical powers from such a deity.

So whatever the source of Jesus’ magic, it would appear that Jesus’ power is quite limited. Also, Jesus’ ‘goal’ appears to be in character with a being of human intellect. So I would conclude that either Jesus is the mouthpiece for some minor supernatural being, or that Jesus can use magic on his own accord.

If this were AD&D, Jesus would be a 6th level wizard at best.

Wyrdsmyth

Let's say I was a freethinker who was well travelled, perhaps educated in Greece and Rome, and somewhat familiar with the various philosophers and religions leading up to that time... Judaism, the oracles of Delphi, Parmenides, Plato, Mithraism, Orpheism, the Eleusinian Mysteries, Epicurus, Lucretius.

If I saw any of these 'miracles of Jesus' and I was as seasoned as the above suggests, I'd probably not accept them at face value and want to investigate them further. I'd probably be somewhat familiar with religious staging, showmanship, and 'miraculous performances,' and I'd look for evidence that Jesus was a stage magician of sorts, trying to manipulate the crowds. I'd look at his miracles the way I look at modern day claims of the stigmata, crying statues and healing evangelists -- i.e., with rigorous skepticism. I start with the assumption that they're hoaxes, even if I can't immediately disprove them. I can't immediately show that David Copperfield doesn't have magical powers, either.

I often wonder: if skeptics near Jerusalem were present during the life of Jesus, why didn't they take more of an interest in him? Why don't we have any contemporary accounts of his life?
Why don't we have accounts from 'Lucretiuses' -- skeptical men who investigated the claims of his miracle-working?

Perhaps we need to look at the context. If there were several miracle-workers at that time, and the general consensus among learned folk was that they were just stage-magicians... there wouldn't be any great motivation to reveal them as charlatans. Perhaps our 1st century counterparts regarded Jesus as just one of many, on a big list of 'religious-performers,' the way we today look at cult leaders and faith healers, whose followers (even today) claim they are witnessing miracles and power that can only have a divine origin. Most of us just aren't interested in vigorously disproving every cult leader or crackpot faith healer.

Another possibility is there were such investigative and skeptical accounts of Jesus, but they were either destroyed, or simply not preserved or copied.

Jayhawker Soule

So, best I can tell, you, "being a non-believer", believe that someone named Moses performed "[a]ll of the miracles ... because they were necessary. Based on this firm foundation you then tell us what the purported witnesses felt about the whole thing. All of this rabbinic wisdom is offerred to suggest that the Jews are less sensible than Christians. Got it, thanks.

You can say it, but you might wish to read the Torah again with specific attention to it silliness and gross exagerations. Also ...

(By the way, one Orthodox explanation of Exodus 4:21 deals precisely with the need to show the Jews the superior power of YHWH, i.e., He hardened Pharoah's heart so that the plagues would be necessary so that the Jews would see that YHWH is tough and, in fact, tougher than the Egyptian God(s). Isn't exegesis wonderful?)