Or you could evaluate the contest of the area of perceived conflict to see if you are interpreting the passage correctly. By the logic you are following, Psalm 14:1 says clearly “There is no God”, so the Bible clearly justifies being an atheist.
I have shown you how the passages you have brought up, when put in the context of scripture, clearly do not mean what you say they mean as they have been lifted out of their context. If there are other verses were there is a perceived conflict, I would be happy to address them if I can (there are some things I will not be able to explain given the depth of the Bible and my finite capacity).
I recommend you spend some time to study the Scripture so you can have a better understanding of it, I have found it very profitable.
I could get into all sorts of productive conversation about the passages you mention. But if you really cannot bring yourself to simply acknowledge that Jesus is in obvious fact presented in the gospels as being more than a typical, mere mortal man, in a different category than any of the other men who are invited in some fashion to participate in his service or who receive various accolades, the I fear our discussion would simply prove fruitless.
You can say the same thing about a believer in Jesus. According to the New Testament, a believer in Jesus is also more than a typical, mere mortal man, and is in a different category than any of the other men.
My bigger point, is that the Gospels present conflicting and confusing portrait of Jesus. There are people today, who are believers in the Gospel, who do not consider Jesus to have been divine. And, ultimately, this issue cannot be resolved, for these are the questions about how a given text is interpreted.
As I’ve said already, Jesus claimed that John the Baptist was greater than ANYone born of a woman, while Jesus too was born of a woman. This doesn’t really square with the “Christ is God” theology, so this text is simply ignored or interpreted to mean something other than what it actually says.
The goal of my post here is to (hopefully) convey that a good case can be made either way. That Christ was God and that Christ was NOT God. Each side will have problem texts to address.
Concur, there will always be difficulties whenever anyone reads Scripture with an agenda, and ignores even the obvious immediate context of any statements, ripping them from their context to create a theology (or a difficulty) that would not exist with a fair reading.
For instance, I can’t help but notice how you’ve conveniently forgotten to mention (twice now) that Jesus in the very same breath also says that the least person in the kingdom is greater than John the Baptist. That by itself (entirely apart from larger theological questions) would mitigate the idea that somehow Jesus is making an absolute statement that should be taken woodenly literally, so best ignore that particular text, as it would not square with the use you want to make of that passage.
I am not sure that I am parsing this correctly. Are you saying that Jesus existed (or might have existed) but not as described in the Gospels? Or are you saying that it is probable that he did not exist at all? And what does never “existed physically” mean? Is that just a redundancy or are you suggesting he might have existed/exist as a spirit only?
And what of the confusion his ministry causes as recorded in scripture? I do not see how that equates to a “clever explanation”. Why can it not just be a natural reaction as stories about miracles spread by word of mouth to a people who, for the most part, did not have the full context in which to understand what they were hearing (or even if they were actual witnesses), a context that would not arrive to the masses until decades after Jesus’ death?
If I witnessed a miracle today I might ask modern versions of the same “Who is this?” variety.
This is enough for you to state your conclusion as “probable?” Or is there more? If not, it seems to me, like the Scots say, “Yer jaiket’s oan a shoogly peg.”
SuperBig V is a Jesus Mythicist, a school of thought that has about as much scholarly credibility as flat earth. They claim Jesus is not a historical person. It’s nonsense.
Well, that’s an even better support for Deification, a point I’ve also been making. Not sure how it hurts my point, namely, that on this earth, here and now, according to Jesus, no man is greater than John the Baptist (presumably includes Jesus himself, as he was born of a woman). In the kingdom of heaven, everyone will be greater than John. There too, presumably this means greater than Jesus too, for John is THE greatest, according to Jesus.
I am not sure where you think that I have misconstrued anything. It hasn’t been conveniently forgotten.
Well, there is strong credibility to a claim that the Gospels contain fictional material. The only debate is how much of the material is fictional. The debate has not been settled, as far as I’m aware. On the other hand, flat earth being nonsense is a settled matter. At least in my view.
There are miles of space between “the gospels may not be completely factual,” which I grant is true, and “Jesus of Nazareth never existed as a real person,” which no serious historian accepts as a valid claim.
Of course it would be silly to claim that there never was any person names “Jesus” or Joshua historically. No mythicist makes this claim, and neither do I. Plenty of Jesus’s existed, and still exist to this day. I think Gospel accounts are entirely fictional. Just compare Jesus’ sayings in Synoptic Gospels to Jesus’ long speeches in John’s Gospel. John ch. 17 is one pretty long speech. So, if you are historicist, what was the historical Jesus truly like? Like the Synoptic Jesus or GJohn’s Jesus? How could both be true?
At any rate, I don’t think a debate here would do justice. I have my opinions and your have yours. Nothing wrong with that.
What is the point of this? You do not actually believe that I was challenging you about whether any person named Jesus existed in biblical era Palestine, do you?
Have you (or has anyone including Ehrman) demonstrated that they are inconsistent? If so, I am not aware of it.
My views are that John is (a) very different from the other Gospels and that it is (b) not a reliable guide to the word of the historical Jesus. That will be important for my discussion of Jesus’ view of the afterlife, and so I will devote several posts to the issue as a kind of sub-thread.
I think I must be reading you wrong, surely you’re not suggesting that a real person would only speak in short sayings or else only long speeches, and if you have both attributed to the same person it’s a contradiction?
Sorry, but a Ehrman’s blog is no more convincing than a link to Richard Carrier’s misuse of Bayes’ theorem. I stayed mostly quiet on this thread, but in fact I do not think Ehrman has offered anything novel regarding the question of the self-consistency of the gospels. All his points (that I know of) have been argued for centuries. It is true that he has packaged them and marketed them attractively.
Well, here is the situation. A Gospel is supposed to be a ‘historical’ account. If one Gospel talks about Jesus as being someone who talks in short parables, and then another Gospel talks about Jesus as someone who said no parables, but only long and winded sayings, I think a reasonable person is justified in doubting whether both Gospels talk about the same person.
Of course, ANY contradictions about Jesus can be explained away. In fact, I would be shocked if you could come up with a hypothetical contradiction that could not be harmonized. To harmonize the accounts, all one needs is to create a Gospel according to (Their name) and then they have a perfectly harmonized account of their own version of Jesus. Anyone who engages in harmonization ends up creating their own version. It’s inevitable.
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for some real world research to me. Get some college students to sign up for a study and have them write about someone they interact with daily. See if the length of quotation has more to do with the person speaking or the person writing about them. Let me know what you find out.
I will not give Bart any more thought whatsoever with his statement that he does not believe in the afterlife. He has nothing to add, in my opinion.
Best Wishes, Shawn
When discussing Christianity with non-believers, I get vague quotes and references to either Bart Ehrman / The Jesus Seminar or even worse, Reza Aslan.
I believe you are correct that Bart’s personal beliefs about The Bible and Jesus heavily color his interpretations of scripture. I think in general, we can look at the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus’ day, who were also very blind to the truth of who Jesus was, despite having memorized much of the Old Testament / Tanakh (consisting of the Torah, Pentateuch, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim). There is over 300 prophecies that they had access to that pointed to Jesus as the Messiah; all of which they refused to believe that Jesus could possibly be the fulfillment of. Much of that is because they desired a powerful God-King that would obliterate their enemies, make them the reigning super power of the world and that they’d be able to rule over their enemies with an iron scepter. They wanted a Superman in a manner of speaking rather than the full character of God made flesh.
Most Jewish Rabbies refuse to read from Isaiah 53 - which is part of the Haftarah - to the point that it is usually considered a forbidden chapter of Isaiah in most synagogues. The reason being is that it’s nearly impossible to read and for you not to come to the conclusion that it is a prophecy about Jesus.
The other thing I’d keep in mind is that the Holy Spirit illuminates scripture for us and gives us the ability to have understanding. The unsaved like Erhman and many Jewish Rabbi’s who deny Jesus as The Messiah, are lacking the Holy Spirit and are further deceived by their own flesh and the evil spirits of this world.
Isaiah 53 like 42-48 and 55-59 are not part of the Haftorah which are set readings much like those in Christian Lectionaries which don’t contain everything either. It is read and commented on in other settings. Jews see the servant in 53 as the people of Israel.
I think I must be reading you wrong, surely you’re not suggesting that a real person would only speak in short sayings or else only long speeches, and if you have both attributed to the same person it’s a contradiction?