Jesus Raised Himself from the dead

Faith & Science Conversation
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@Dale
i don’t know how to write

when i go to God, its like going to a friend.

i just went directly to God

as far as messiahs i don’t understand why there has to be messiahs, i don’t understand why God needs help with his emotions

i have nothing against people going to their messaiahs, example you go to jesus, i have nothing against that.

what i’m sad is when people goes to their messiahs is they claim others can’t have eternal life, unless they go through messaiah

if a person can go to their messiah and understand that others who doesn’t go through their messaiah has eternal life, i wish it was like that. how people believe. so understanding all have eternal life, cause a spirit can’t die., our spirit soul lives forever,

but i know spirit soul can’t die, spirit can block or allow

how do I explain what I know?

white light i seen white light and white light lives in all of us, we can block allow

our physical body dies but our spirit lives, now allowing is allowing white light (holy spirit) to flow

i think that’s what i keep learning from holy spirit is blocking allowing

but as far as jesus, as you demand me to answer., i don’t get a lot of ____ i don’t know word., about jesus.,

i don’t know how to write this

i don’t get plague by God to got to have jesus to help God with his emotions, as if God can’t get over his anger

i hope that makes sense

i would have questions as i read from others, example i think people think more like a calculator jesus, and the cross is the math and the = is risen, then they use a loop whole which is repent

cause its like they still sin and so they have a loop hole., cause they think what jesus did isn’t good enough so they need a loop hole and that to repent

that is confusing to me, that’s why i ask why do they keep adding to the cross

i have seen online where christians debate each other

i’ve seen a thread here of universal christians

if i understand correcly universal christians can have their messiah jesus while also agreeing that jesus save everyone

i personally don’t understand why God needs help with his anger. how does blood make God happy

even God needed sheep blood to make God happy

how is that love?

a lot of things on earth i don’t understand

i just know about drinking from holy spirit and i saw white light

but as far as religion, a lot of areas of religion there’s blood

and as far as earth, i undersand there’s suffering

so there’s a lot i don’t know

this is sloppy writing due to you pressue me

i did address this with terry

so question, why does God need blood to get over anger and be happy

i understand from block and allow, but i also understand learning from God how to block less and allow more with in siatuations; so i bascally keep learning from holy spirit in situation how to block less and allow more

that’s the aera i keep learning

as far as jesus, i told this to terry, what is sad for christians is when they accept jesus, then they got to go through pain of knowing the ones around them who didn’t accept jesus will be spiritiaul dead,

and but i don’t go through that, cause i know the spirit don’t die

so if i were going to do the accept jesus it would have to be the universal christian way

cause for one thing i do know is spirit never dies

so but then again what am i accepting jesus of., to make God happy as God gets blood?

see, that’s the other area, i don’t think through sin

i think through me can go to holy spirit just as i am, and its a relationship and learning from holy spirit

i don’t think through performance, no sin. I think i use the word block instead of sin

i’m not sure what all people have as sin

i do understand holy spirit is unconditional love

i’ll continue later

ok continue

i think I had the word block as how you would have the word sin

but i don’t think through wash sin, but instead learn from holy spirit how to block less and allow more of holy spirit, so i think more about learning

here is an example: i struggle around my dad who keeps wanting me to listen as he talks. and this drains me.

now i could be blocking holy spirit

so i’m still learning this but how to allow holy spirit more in that situation

so is that sinning and jesus had to go to cross because i get drain when listening to dad?

instead I think about i want to learn from holy spirit how i can allow holy spirit feed me and flow through me while i’m listenning to dad and also learn tools how to speak more to my dad, so it can be more a verbal back and forth conversation instead of dad talking non stop for hours

see there’s an example.

one time i was in an elevator, and i didn’t realize it, but i look at the corner wall and i forgot to face the person

i realized the person was upset

ok i felt bad about this.

did jesus need to die on the cross for that?

that was an awkward one because i never could be able to go to the person and explain that i forgot to exchange small talk

this is horrible writing

so maybe what confuses me about jesus, is how God wanted blood., and no broken bones either.,

its as if jesus bone was broken God still be angry

lets see, sin, oh, i remember a sin, I knew a familiy where females can’t cut hair., and a girl got gum in her hair

did jesus die on the cross just incase if the mother would use sissors to cut hair?

the mother refuse to cut the hair and torn the hair, however the mother lost it with her anger, teh girl was crying

i saw this

after that scene i never seen that family again, but it stay with me a memory, as i asked what is sin

what was it like for that girl when she goes to God

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Is there such a thing as injustice? And conversely, is there such a thing as justice?

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This is an interesting point…so, how did the immaculate conception actually work according to Biologos theology? Did God plant an embryo inside Mary or was it actually a sperm?

for reference, the Old Testament regularly makes mention of men’s seed. I think from memory isn’t there a story where a man allowed his seed to spill on the ground instead of inside a women…was he not punished for doing this? I will lookup the story and edit this post if someone else doesn’t find it first…,oh my wife reminds me, the women was Tamar (Judah’s daughter in law)

Here is the biblical text

ח וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוּדָה לְאוֹנָן, בֹּא אֶל-אֵשֶׁת אָחִיךָ וְיַבֵּם אֹתָהּ; וְהָקֵם זֶרַע, לְאָחִיךָ. 8 And Judah said unto Onan: ‘Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother.’
ט וַיֵּדַע אוֹנָן, כִּי לֹּא לוֹ יִהְיֶה הַזָּרַע; וְהָיָה אִם-בָּא אֶל-אֵשֶׁת אָחִיו, וְשִׁחֵת אַרְצָה, לְבִלְתִּי נְתָן-זֶרַע, לְאָחִיו. 9 And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother.

clearly the bible uses the term seed as a description of the word we use “sperm”.

this suggests that indeed it was sperm that God implanted into Mary via the Holy Spirit.

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In which case–if I read the two genealogies of Jesus, in Matthew and Luke, aright–Jesus was not the biological descendant of King David. Y-chromosomes are inherited by males only from their biological fathers. They get their X-chromosomes from their mothers. To be a male human, it takes an X and a Y chromosome. Meanwhile, neither Mark nor Paul say anything about Jesus’ conception at all.

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Personally, I think this is a leap for a few reasons.

Firstly, what v9 describes as being spilt on the ground, I would argue is Onan’s ejaculatory fluid (which, obviously, includes sperm) but not his sperm cells alone. So to say that seed = sperm cells in the bible, is, I think, A. mistaken and B. to import a bunch of scientific concepts not known to either the human writer or audience of the text.

Secondly, I would direct your attention to the different usages of ‘seed’ in the Bible, indeed, even in the two verses you quoted. In verse 9 ‘seed’ refers to Onan’s ejaculate, but in v8 Judah uses the same term figuratively to refer to offspring.

Thirdly, the point of the verses is not even about Onan’s ‘seed’ whether figurative or otherwise. Rather, it is about his dereliction of duty in favour of his own pleasure and selfishness, and the abhorrent way in which he treats, Tamar, his brother’s widow as worse than a prostitute whilst simultaneously condemning her to a life of poverty and ignominy. Which, in Tamar’s mind, leaves her with no option other than to take the desperate action of seducing her father-in-law, Judah.

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We already had this discussion in another thread.

correction… there are some significantly different issues raised in your question. Besides the incorrect use of “immaculate conception” (which beaglelady has pointed out), I don’t know if anyone suggested embryo implantation in the other thread. Embryo implantation is way too magical for me. I can see God arranging pregnancy in a virgin for that is only unlikely not impossible according to the laws of nature. I don’t believe in God trashing the laws of nature He created, and I frankly don’t see any necessity. It buys into the excessive preoccupation with genetics as if that is what makes the difference between good and evil. It connects with racism and eugenics. It replaces the teaching of Jesus being 100% human with Jesus being something genetically designed by God. It might fit well with creationist ideas of a special creation of Adam but not with evolution.

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The “immaculate conception” is a Roman Catholic dogma that is about the conception of Mary. Not the same as the virginal conception of Jesus.

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Immaculate conception is the belief that Mary was free of original sin. The theological problems with this are many.

  1. It says that Jesus wasn’t needed for dealing with original sin.
    a. It just took divine magic. Then why didn’t God didn’t do this earlier and rid us of the problem of sin long ago? We are left with the idea that God does things not for any reason but just because He arbitrarily feels like doing it that way. This sort of Christianity does not interest me.
    b. It took a long breeding program to produce a woman without original sin. So Jesus was without sin just because of His parentage? I guess this buys into a view of sin I cannot agree with.
  2. I do not agree with the idea that infants are born with sin (original sin, that Mary was supposedly born without). How? Is sin in the blood or the genetic code? Is original sin something that requires a scientific solution – by growing babies outside a human womb or by genetic alteration?
  3. It is almost as if they are trying to justify making Mary into a semi-deity as an object of worship. I can sympathize with those wanting a female deity in their religion.

From Wikipedia connecting to my preference for some of the theological positions of the Eastern Orthodox.

Eastern Orthodoxy never accepted Augustine’s specific ideas on original sin, and in consequence did not become involved in the later developments that took place in the Roman Catholic Church, including the Immaculate Conception.[66][67] In 1894, when Pope Leo XIII addressed the Eastern church in his encyclical Praeclara gratulationis , Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimos, in 1895, replied with an encyclical approved by the Constantinopolitan Synod in which he stigmatised the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and papal infallibility as “Roman novelties” and called on the Roman church to return to the faith of the early centuries.[10]

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I don’t agree with the dogma either, but I see you don’t understand it. BioLogos claims they want closer ties with Roman Catholics. Catholics would do well to stay away from here, which they do anyway.

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  • And I say: the whole shtick–from Mary’s “Immaculate Conception” to “Jesus’ Conception in a Virgin”–very likely had more to do with early “educated” Jewish Christians trying to wrap their heads around the Son of God’s incarnation in a human body without contracting Original Sin.
  • If God can incarnate, two biological parents (i.e. Joseph AND Mary) wouldn’t have forced Him to perform a mundane magic trick.
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The argument if sperm is used there is no lineage to David is untrue…there is lineage through both lines as they (Joseph and Mary) were, as was customary in Jewish culture with marriage, part of the same family anyway.
That is also why there are two differing accounts of His geneolgy.
May I throw another “log on the fire”…
One of the respondants made mention of a sinless Jesus and posed the question is the sin in the blood or elsewhere such as in the genetic code.
If Jesus was sinless, and had no apparent physical blemish in Him, why after he was resurrected did no one recognise Him? Does this not suggest that even in the incarnation, Jesus was far less than perfect…I would argue spiritually this was also the case in the sense that he was just as vulnerable as we are.

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Show me your genealogical charts and I’ll show you mine. “part of the same family” is a “work-around” contrived to maintain Jesus’ descendency from King David AND preserve Jesus’ purity uncontaminated by Original Sin. Our God is quite capable of stepping into humanity without getting sullied by the mud hole that He steps in to.

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I don’t know what beaglelady thinks there is to understand about it. Frankly I don’t think the Catholics understand anything about it either. Are Catholics like the Muslims where they take offense at any disagreement or criticism? Perhaps some are. I suspect there is quite a spectrum of attitudes.

Here it is in the Catholic catechism second edition.

490 To become the mother of the Savior, Mary "was enriched by God with gifts appropriate to such a role."132 The angel Gabriel at the moment of the annunciation salutes her as “full of grace”.133 In fact, in order for Mary to be able to give the free assent of her faith to the announcement of her vocation, it was necessary that she be wholly borne by God’s grace.

491 Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, “full of grace” through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:

But from catholic.com, it is described just in the way I stated.

The Immaculate Conception is a Catholic dogma that states that Mary, whose conception was brought about the normal way, was conceived without original sin or its stain.

And here is the Catholic encyclopedia

The subject of this immunity from original sin is the person of Mary at the moment of the creation of her soul and its infusion into her body.

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Screenshot 2022-11-11 at 13-26-57 Jesus Raised Himself from the dead - Faith & Science Conversation - The BioLogos Forum

Neat! A Seventh Day Adventist who subscribes to “low Christology”.

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I think Luke adequately explains this problem when he wrote

23 Jesus Himself was about thirty years old when He began His ministry.

He was regarded as the son of Joseph, the son of Heli,

The other explanation has always been that one of the genealogies is in fact down Marys family clan lineage (even though Joseph is included). That is because, as I stated before, it was customary for Jewish families to intermary within their clans. There are plenty of examples of this throughout the Old Testament (remembering the OT ends just before the genealogy commences in Matthew Chapter 1)

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  • So Jesus can raise himself from the dead but we can’t let him be sullied by having a human Y-chromosome contributor? I dissent.
  • And in spite of the “miraculousness” of Jesus’ conception, Mark and Paul don’t mention it? How remarkably odd, IMO.
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are you dissenting because the idea of God implanting sperm into Mary is something that a religious person cant stomach…are you therefore suggesting sperm is the result of sin and therefore evil?

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  • I’m dissenting because contriving a “work-around” to maintain Jesus’ descendancy from King David AND maintain Jesus’ sinlessness from his conception to his ascension is precisely that: a contrived work-around, which–in my view–was promoted by “educated” Christian Jews who had difficulty explaining how God could incarnate AND Jesus could be sinless from conception to death.
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The entire biblical translation requires considerable understanding of Jewish culture of the day in which its various books were written…so much so that even in order to translate, the context of statements made has to be considered in every instance. I don’t view the method used to facilitate accurate translation as a workaround any more than the interpretation of Jewish genealogies for Jesus in Matthew and Luke. I would go a step further and state that science requires far greater workarounds for many of its hypothesise than does the genealogy of Jesus (not being anti science here, just making an observation)

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  • “In every instance”? I’m not afraid.
  • In the link to my thread that I posted above, I quoted a portion of the Babylonian Talmud:
    • Shabbat 145b-146a:
      "Rabbi Yoḥanan then explained to them: Why are gentiles ethically contaminated? It is because they did not stand on Mount Sinai. As when the snake came upon Eve, i.e., when it seduced her to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, it infected her with moral contamination, and this contamination remained in all human beings. When the Jewish people stood at Mount Sinai, their contamination ceased, whereas gentiles did not stand at Mount Sinai, and their contamination never ceased. Rav Aḥa, the son of Rava, said to Rav Ashi: What about converts? How do you explain the cessation of their moral contamination? Rav Ashi said to him: Even though they themselves were not at Mount Sinai, their guardian angels were present, as it is written: “It is not with you alone that I make this covenant and this oath, but with he that stands here with us today before the Lord our God, and with he that is not here with us today”
      (Deuteronomy 29:13–14), and this includes converts.
    • Yevamot 103b:
      “The Gemara answers: He implants filth in her and contaminates her, as her body accepts his semen. As Rabbi Yoḥanan also said, based on his understanding that the serpent seduced Eve into having sexual relations with him: When the serpent came upon Eve, he infected her with moral contamination, and this contamination remained in all human beings. When the Jewish people stood at Mount Sinai their contamination ceased, whereas with regard to gentiles, who did not stand at Mount Sinai, their contamination never ceased.”
    • “With regard to the Jewish people, who stood at Mount Sinai and received the Torah, their contamination ended, whereas in the case of gentiles, who did not stand at Mount Sinai and receive the Torah, their contamination has not ended.”
  • Although I’m told, by a knowledgebale Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, that the Rabbi Yohanan in the readings above would have been a 2nd century Jew–I think I remember–it’s not unreasonable to believe that he was not the Jew who came up with the doctrine of moral impurity, Jewish presence on Mt. Sinai being a “purification” from that “original sin”, the presence of “guardian angels” at Mt. Sinai standing in for later converts’ to Judaism, and Gentiles continued moral impurity.
  • Jesus, born of Joseph AND Mary or Mary alone would have been sufficient to claim that “he stood at Mt. Sinai” and was cleansed of all moral impurity at the time of his conception, but being not being a genetic heir of King David would have–as far as “educated Jews” are concerned–precluded him from being a direct genealogical descendant of King David.
  • Your belief that the inability of folks to recognize Jesus after his resurrection supports a conclusion that Jesus was “not quite perfect” is unfounded. I say, it would be surprising to find anyone who knew Jesus before his crucifixion “to recognize” Jesus after his resurrection".
  • My claim, that the two genealogies are a “work-around” solution to a non-existent problem stands. No further argumentation will persuade me to think otherwise. Case closed.
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