Forums → WEPR → Jesus of History vs. Jesus of Faith
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I love this subject in Christianity. I find myself drawn to books on this topic, which has led me to a number of theories. So, I will clarify what the Jesus of History and the Jesus of Faith mean.
Jesus of History - using ALL the certified scripts, texts, and scrolls that were deemed authentic (just like some of the Gospels in the current Bible) to make a theory on how his life went and what his message REALLY was.
Jesus of Faith - using the current version of the Bible to form a mystical man as the head of this great religion. Purposing that there was a "Golden Age of Christ" etc, etc, etc.
Now, I want to write an exert from one of my favorite books. This book was written by Michael Baigent and he has spent the last 30+ years researching this sort of thing. So, the conclusions that are made in the following exert are backed up in his book and many other texts. If you wish to have a list of these to check the creditability, just ask me:
During the course of our journey, we have discovered that Jesus rejected the political activity of his Zealot supporters. This is a crucially important piece of information that has been missed. We have seen too that there is no evidence that he died on the cross; in fact, what evidence survives suggests otherwise. And if he didn't die on the cross, where does that leave the resurrection? His divinity? His equality in the Holy Trinity? These claims all disintegrate once the spin stops...
...And crucially, we have also discovered that there is no evidence to suggest that Jesus intended to be worshiped as a god. On the contrary, his teachings indicate that he wanted each person to have the opportunity to travel to the Far-World to find the Divine for himself or herself--or as he put it, to travel to the kingdom of heaven and to be filled with the "Spirit of God."
Where did Jesus learn all this? Not in Galilee, but more likely in Egypt, where the Jewish community appears to have been more diverse than the Jewish community in Palestine and to have nurtured a more mystical approach to religion.
Further, nothing in our findings suggests that Jesus EVER planned to start a religion, let alone encourage others to write down his words and organize them into an official collection of sayings. In fact, quite the reverse is more likely. I suspect that he wouldn't have minded at all if people forgot him; what was more important to him was that people should not forget the way to the kingdom of heaven, a notion not restricted to Christianity and Judaism.
It should be clear now that history is malleable: we have our facts, but we never have enough of them to able to put our hands on our hearts and say, in all honesty, that we know for certain what happened. ALL HISTORY IS A MYTH, a story created to make some sense out of the few events we can know. The past is a hypothesis erected to explain and justify the present.
In some ways this does not matter, for myths exist to communicate meaning, not history. But in the scientific age we want to know that the myths we live by are, if not true, at least based upon some approximation of the truth. We want to know that Jesus was really crucified, that Caesar was really murdered by Brutus, that Paul did have a mystical experience on his way to Damascus. All these events are PLAUSIBLE, and there is no intrinsic reason why they might not be true.
But what do we do with beliefs such as Jesus walking on water? Jesus being raised from the dead? Peter founding the Roman Church with infallible popes? None of these beliefs is plausible, and there is no intrinsic reason why any of them should be true. Yet many believe them.
I hope that you at least get the idea of what those statements are conveying. We can see that to base truth upon a written word makes it vulnerable to all the problems of interpretation and translation, to say nothing of religious distortion. The danger is that books foster a dependence upon belief rather than knowledge; if there has been one underlying theme, it has been that we need to travel the road for ourselves and experience its hardships, pleasures, and insights directly rather than secondhand.
My questions are these:
- Why are so many Christians hell-bent on not being open to others ideas that are JUST as authentic as the ones in the Bible?
- Shouldn't these notions only further their faith?
- These notions that say that Christianity was not meant to be a religion in the first place is very monumental. Is it possible to change Christianity as we know it?
- Why do Christians think the Bible is the ONLY way?
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My topic is not meant to upset anyone, only to spur debate. Please keep this friendly and whether or not you agree with me or anyone that posts here, do not insult anyone or judge.
- 17 Replies
You say that it has nothing to do with the truth of the matter, it's the ideas that have been created, redone, and remixed over the years to suit the needs of the current believers, yes?
It saddens me. I've read so much on Jesus and I love his life and what he did. It is so obvious that he didn't mean to start a church or religion. I see him like Ghandi.
(So do I, actually, but I'm not sure how many people would understand this kind of thinking.)
That's kinda what I'm saying, Asherlee, but not just that the ideas have been remixed (though surely they have!) I've said before that everything was highly contextual, and it's no less so with Jesus. He did introduce certain imperatives that seem quite unequivocal to me, particularly the evangelical imperative and also the exclusivity of his status as, well, God (seeing as people interpret the Holy Trinity as one to varying degrees of articulateness). What seems clear to me also across the translations is the strength of the conviction that carried through the faith.
I'm not arguing about miracles here, what constitutes a miracle, whether one occured. I'm saying that the mindset is instrumental here: have you heard of spin-doctoring? Have you ever managed to convince yourself into believing something that you didn't think was true simply by forming the conviction that it was, or following what other people told you?
Now consider a case where it's not necessarily a lie, but simply something you don't know and need to convince yourself via an act of faith. Is there something there? Is there not and you're deluding yourself? Does this actually matter? Does it actually affect a Christian's belief, or an atheist's belief?
Again I think that in the discussion, which, I acknowledge, is extremely important, of whether God or any religious element or that which is not immediately tangible etc. is real, many have lost sight of Jesus' real purpose (the 'Ghandi type' vision, if you will). Who here can truly claim to actually live by Jesus' example, as opposed to merely expounding a belief?
At best, a Second Coming is not about having faith, but about the results wrought upon ourselves by our failure to exert it properly.
To start I'd like to say that I've seen a couple of my favorite debaters here, Ash, Strop, Kane, Chilliad. That ast the very least makes this worthwhile.
Ash I'll try to friendly, but I can't make any promises about offending people. (sorry)
JOH is a blessing and a curse. Histories that are contrdicting and all. JOB, which I personally have always, even when I was a kid, is comic relief to me. But my mammaw, grandmother for you northerners, has always said, "Roy(grandfather) has always been the reader and philosifer. All I know is Jesus, and that's enough for me." In one sentence she does sum up most christians, as eye already noted.
With so many people that don't read up on a subject, the starting work of this belief has been pushed aside from view. As it was said earlier about coma, apostles martyerd, crucified or not, it all comes down to, like the christians said, belief. They believe, almost maniacally, in his divinity. Well read people who do very little research can find many texts that not only punch holes completely through it, but can find a much, much better story than what's in the bible.
It's just that at the time of his "deat", there was a time of religous revolution. Where Jews, Pagan, Hindu, and the newly formed christian sects were all in an uproar about the political uproar about recent injusticies that were going on at the time, so they needed a good and rightious story of life, triumph, and a there-after to keep them happy. Jesus just happened to be in the right place at the right time to fill that spot, whether he or his 'followers' wanted to be or not. Basically he got the short end of the stick.
Now take the movie Dogma. After that movie came out, and a few years had gone by, I met people that in religious debates, they were quoting line from it like it was the Gospel according to Kevin Smith. Are you kidding? Even when he wrote it, there wasn't an original idea, accept maybe Rufus, in the whole thing. Sidenote, what ever happened to the hierarchy of angels in the christian belief anyway? My point is, that one person took a few ideas, that they picked up from somewhere else, and put them out there for the whole world to see, and they based a following around it. Seriously, I have friends that still qoute that movie like gospel. Sad.
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