â The spirit of the Lord is upon meâ
According to Luke, Jesus opened his ministry in a synagogue in Nazareth with this statement. Today you may as well ask what it is like to be a bat as understand Jesusâ point of view when he said that.
The search for the historical Jesus began with Hermann Samuel Reimarusâ âThe Aims of Jesus and His Disciplesâ. Albert Schweitzer covers the event in his book, âThe Quest for the Historical Jesus: a critical study of its progress from Reimarus to Wredeâ.
Reimarus, born in Hamburg (1694-1768), was a professor of Oriental languages. The work was published posthumously by philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
Reimarus drew an absolute distinction between the teaching that Jesus proclaimed and taught and that of âthe apostlesâ. The preaching of Jesus contained two phrases of identical meaning âReprent and believe the Gospelâ and âRepent for the Kingdom of Heaven (or Kingdom of God) is at hand.
The Kingdom of Heaven must be understood âaccording to Jewish ways of thought. Neither Jesus nor John the Baptist ever explain this expression. This means that what Jesus meant must have been understood in itâs customary sense by the people of Galilee and Judea.
It follows from this that Jesus took his stand in the Judaism of his time. The new development was that the expected kingdom of thousands hoped for was âat handâ.
Belief wasnât complicated. People only needed to believe that Jesus was about to bring in the Kingdom of God. As there were many who were already waiting for this Kingdom, thousands believed.
This was all the disciples knew about the kingdom when Jesus sent them to proclaim its coming. Their hearers would naturally suppose that the disciples were talking about the customary meaning of the trope.
â The purpose of sending out such propagandists could only be that the Jews who groaned under the Roman yoke and had long cherished the hope of deliverance should be stirred up all over Judea and assemble themselves in the thousands. The belief that Jesus was the messiah, the son of God, did not involve anything metaphysical. The nation had been called the son of God in the Hebrew Bible. Kings of the covenant people were sons of God. The messiaah would be a son-of God in a âpre-eminent senseâ. Messianic claims were âwithin the limits of humanity.â
âIf, therefore, we desire to gain a historical understanding of Jesusâ teaching, we must leave behind what we learned in our catechism regarding the metaphysical Divine Sonship, the Trinity, and similar dogmatic conceptions, and go out into a wholly Jewish world of thought.â(Schweitzerâs paraphrase)
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The Jesus of the synoptic gospels was what they call a bhakta in Sanskrit. The aim of bhakti yoga is to direct the heartâs love toward God. He taught: âYou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.â (Mark 12:30-31;Matthew 22:37-40; Luke 10:27) which he saw as the essence of the Torah.
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That makes sense for directing the energy to proceed from the heart to the mind is synonymous or parallel with the âobjectiveâ of the patterns formed by the lotus Sutra, whereas, and I am going to jump over a large gap, that simulates the downward paths deconstructed (exoteric) routeâs decomposition, - compensation, or and this is difficult as it is within religious contexts,
However religious philosophy compensates for the nihilism whic tries to overcome that enlarging gap, that can not muster up a reason, or an assemblage of angels who can overcome that overcoming , except, by a reaffirmation to the usual construction processed inter-Alia.
The mystery of processing the heartâs energy (another form of yoga) toward the mind, shows the lotus crown to consist of a cognitively completed transcendence, a state of Being that was there, even before It got there, where was no where before.
Or, It never actually go through any DHARMA TO UNITE WITH ITâs OWN understanding, because iIT has both an esoteric and exoteric simultaneity, the Self Being the Other.
Simulation and is an axiomatic process, that takes place as simply as an amoebic cell division.
It guarantees the eternal, timeless energy that breaks the barrier between all structural manifestations and classes, between the inorganic and the organic, and between the types and calcifications that construe different species.
So, the defensive posture that goes to counter the instability of smaller particles of organization, are predicted by more ontologically founded presumptions, as was the ancient ideas which the atomists presented, and later Leibnitz adopted.
The ânuclear guiltâ over extreme defensiveness, can thus be grounded by the idea of the chasm between antiquity and postmodern structural differences, and fine tuned by neo-classical interpretations.
My Bhaktic interpretation of Christian devotion was a bit off topic. In 1835, âThe Life of Jesus Critically Examinedâ by David Friedrich Strauss was a milestone in the modern critical history in secular Jesus scholarship.
From the introduction by Otto Pfleiderer : âThe Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, which was published in the year 1835, marked an epoch in the history of theology. On the one hand, this book represents the crisis in theology at which the doubts and critical objections of centuries as to the credibility of the Bible narratives had accumulated in such overwhelming volume as to break through and sweep away all the defences of orthodox apologetics. On the other hand, in the very completeness of the destructive criticism of past tradition lay the germs of a new science of constructive critical inquiry, the work of which was to bring to light the truth of history. It is quite true that the Life of Jesus of 1835 was far from perfect, as judged by the present standard of scientific criticism, and Biblical science has long since advanced beyond it. Nevertheless, it cannot be disputed that it takes rank amongst the standard works which are secure of a permanent place in literature for all time, for the reason that they give final expression to the spirit of their age, and represent typically one of its characteristic tendencies. The liberating and purifying influence which such works exert.â
David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) drew out all the consequences from previous historical criticism when he wrote his Life of Jesus (1835). 1 It came like lightning and thunder striking the great synthesis arid all those who felt safe in it. Strauss showed that the authors of the Gospels were not those traditionally thought to be the authors. But more, he tried to show that the stories of the birth and the resurrection of Jesus are symbols expressing the eternal identity of what is essential in Jesus and God. This was felt as a tremendous shock. For decades later scholars tried to refute Straussâs Life of Jesus, and, of course, there were many points in it that proved to be invalid in the light of more research.
A footnote on Straussâs later development: It contains something tragic. Later he wrote another Life of Jesus, 2 this one for the German people, as he said. Here he developed the typical world view of the victorious bourgeoisie, not of the great aggressive bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, but of the positivistic materialistic bourgeoisie which had become victorious in the nineteenth century, and which he represented. This is characterized by a calculating attitude toward the world, a basic materialistic interpretation of reality, and moral rules derived from the bourgeois conventions. I mention this because of the tremendous attack which Friedrich Nietzsche made against Strauss in the name of the forces of creative life. He attacked this bourgeoisie resting undisturbed in its own finitude.
This has a lot to do with Gospel criticism, for from his bourgeois point of view Strauss eliminated the in-breaking of the divine into the human, of the infinite into the finite. The infinite was adapted to the finite. The image of Christ which Strauss and many later biographers produced was that of a domesticated divinity, domesticated for the sake of the untroubled life of the bourgeois society in calculating and controlling the finite reality. Here Nietzsche was the prophetic victor over Strauss, even more than any theologian.â
PAUL TILLICH A History of Christian Thought From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism
Schweitzer describes a different reaction as wellâ âthe life of Jesus the first landmark which it offers is the work of Hess, which appeared in 1768. But it held its ground for a long time side by side with rationalism proper, which failed to drive it from the field. A seventh edition of Hessâs Life of Jesus appeared as late as 1823; while a fifth edition of Reinhardâs work saw the light in 1830. And when Strauss struck the death-blow of out-and-out rationalism, the half-and-half rationalism did not perish with it, but allied itself with the neo-supernaturalism which Straussâs treatment of the life of Jesus had called into being; and it still prolongs an obscure existence in a certain section of conservative literature, though it has lost its best characteristics, its simple-mindedness and honesty.â
The liberal versus conservative Christian can be defined in terms of willingness of the liberal to entertain critical historical research on Jesus whereas the conservative is not. I am a liberal Christian in that sense.
Me too!
The problem with all the âLife of Jesusâ portrayals is that we donât actually know much about him, except what his followers wrote. Yuval Harari made the comment that the one picture that seems universally recognisable is that of Jesus, although we know absolutely nothing about his appearance. Iâd say that most Christians think they know Jesus in the same way, but they have no idea.
For me, it was a revelation to hear Aramaic and be explained the depth of his language. The philologian who informed me used the comparison that Aramaic/Hebrew is like an ocean, Greek like a river, and everything that followed like a puddle.
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Yes. My viewpoint on the history is limited by ignorance of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. Jesus likely spoke a Galilean variant of Aramaic, which was different from the Jerusalem dialect. Jesus or one of his apostles may have known enough Koine Greek to converse with people who were not native to Judea. I am dependent the interpretation of scholars who are expert on those languages for whatever insights ancient texts bring to the subject. A few sayings of Jesus have come down to us in Aramaic embedded in Greek texts. What other ancient Aramaic texts do we have about Jesus?
At the very least, the fact that the Pauline epistles and the canonical gospels were originally written in Koine Greek shows that the story of Jesus comes to at a cultural distance from Jesus himself. We have no eye witness accounts of Jesus.
Paul was a diaspora Jew. The story of his presence at the stoning of Stephen in Jerusalem is in Acts. Paul never recounts the story in his letters, nor is it in any independent historical account. Paul does not claim to know Jesus âin the flesh.â In Galatians he disparages claims made by Peter, James and John who actually knew Jesus personally, as âsupposed pillarsâ. Yet, it was his understanding of Christ that became the standard for the proto-orthodox church.
So, I see the effort to recover the Aramaic of Jesus as an attempt to get back to the historical Jesus. But, unless we have actual texts in Aramaic from that generation, I question how successful that effort can be.
Christian fundamentalism is based on five principles. The five fundamentals of the Niagara Bible Conference of 1895
The Niagara group presented five fundamentals as essential Christian beliefs in 1895:
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The inerrancy of the Scriptures
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The deity of Christ
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His virgin birth
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His substitutionary atonement
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His physical resurrection and future bodily return.
After the ridicule fundamentalists underwent following the Scopes trial, âFundamentalistâ became a pejorative label. Nevertheless, evangelical Christians hold the five fundamentals sacrosanct. One must believe all five or be labeled a heretic.
But really, The latter four follow from the first. Evangelicals hold that the Bible is word for word literally infallible. So every doctrine that appears in the Bible is infallible too.
Modern critical historical scholarship breaks with dogmatic church tradition. From this standpoint itâs possible to examine historical records of how the books of the Bible were written, edited and canonized as a natural human process.
Evangelicals hold that the Bible is the infallible Word of God. Read from that hermeneutical principle presupposes that the Bible speaks univocally. Such a view demands that one explain the numerous apparently theological and factual contradictions between the multiple authors.
Read critically one can see theological differences between the authors. A significant example of this is the four gospels. Large swaths of the narrative of the gospel of Mark is appropriated word for word in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. However, at points where they disagree or wish to add to Markâs narrative they make additions or deletions. Analyzed critically, these changes can be show three different points of view.
The earliest layer of the synoptic gospels is what Johannes Weiss called âQuelleâ (Q for short). These are mostly sayings of Jesus that are embedded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The greater part of both these gospel are made up of the Gospel of Mark with redactions plus Q.
The problem of historicity with respect to the proposition that Jesus is the Christ is the subject of the concluding un scientific postscript to philosophical fragments by Soren Kierkegaard. Part one of that book is entitled the objective issue of the truth of Christianity. He asserts that âwith regard to the historical, the greatest certainty is only an approximation, and an approximation is too little to build oneâs happiness on and is so unlike in eternal happiness that no result can ensue.â The historical critical method can never reach certainty. One is led down the primrose path of possible progress as new archeological finds, or newly discovered texts or a new mode of analysisâ perhaps a new algorithm or AI application is applied. You feel you have a better understanding of the lives and the times in the first century, their philosophies and culture and economic systems. You have, in other words : an approximation. A better approximation perhaps but an approximation none the less.
Conscious being that you find yourself to be, existence as an approximation wonât do. Whatâs the opposite of existence? Oh yeahâŚthere is none.
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âŚa pre-selected martyrâŚ?
Who? Jesus or the pope? According to the catholic church Jesus was a sacrificial lamb, the âlamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.â So the word âmartyrâ doesnât capture that meaning. âRedeemerâ is more like it.
The idea of âpre-selectionâ evolved. The earliest Christian writer is Paul who hints at Christâs pre-existence. Mainly Christ was prophesied in the Hebrew scriptures. Thereâs a stunning passage where Paul says that Christ didnât consider equality with God a thing to be grasped. Apparently Paul is quoting a hymn. This is evidence of early deification. The Gospels show a progression toward high Christology. The Gospel of John is the highest : opening with â In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God the same was in the beginning with God.â âWordâ is English for Greek âlogosâ. John goes on to say âThe logos became flesh.â So heâs talking about Jesus of Nazareth. So, here we have the incarnation of God in Christ.
But, all this is downstream from the Jesusâs original movement. Jesus died around 30 AD. John was probably written around 100 AD. Little is known about the presumption community the anonymous author of the gospel is writing to. Most of what scholars think they know is extrapolated from the text. Speculation is extended to the relationship of Johns gospel to the Epistles of John I II & III and the Book of Revelation. These together are referred to as âJohannineâ. Itâs basically a hypothetical community.
So, this all happened in the context of a civilization with a meta narrative different than the one that prevails now. Itâs easiest thought of as another universe. That way the miracles make sense. It also makes sense in the context of the Hellenistic literature of the time.
Wrong thread
Yes, the Pope Han not resolved the long standing issues surrounding heresy, the forefront of that has to do with the long standing issue with Gnosticism.
Just saying
The problem I have with the way that Christianity developed (I canât speak for other religions) is that what was interpreted into the narrative became fact for those in power, who required the congregation to believe in these âfactsâ as a source of redemption.
I can fully identify with someone who says that a certain narrative âsaved his soulâ just like someone could say that a piece of music âsaved his soul.â There are many instances in which the regaining of meaning, purpose, and direction has been like a new lease of life for me, too, especially after my idealism was broken and disillusionment made me doubt everything I had built my life upon. Such an experience could be imagined to be what the disciples went through, but suddenly, hope grew into assurance and life, and the traditions they were steeped in took on a new meaning.
An example of an abstract source reviving life is Emily Dickinsonâs poem âHope is the thing with feathersâ, which I rediscovered after a bout of depression while sitting in my garden watching the blue tits flying about in what seemed like wild abandon. The sight of these and other birds, coming for the seeds we had scattered, reconnected me with nature and hope.
I think that our experience of life is that abstract at times, and that it is more of a gut feeling that finds its narrative, than purely a narrative. The elders of the church I used to visit emphasised the âWORD!â above experience and feeling, but in reality, they are entwined, and you canât separate them. They must find each other to resonate together and give us direction.
There are very few facts about Jesus that canât be disputed, beginning with whether or not he actually existed. The institutional view of Jesus as the Christ begins with Paul and heâs the first Christian writer.
Being âborn againâ at 19 years of age was a life changing experience for me. I testified to that many times in church meetings and preached the gospel on the college campus and in the streets as part of church outreach. (We didnât consider gospel preaching to be proselytizing.)
But, as far as what his original disciples went through, even Paul, not being among them, thatâs something he had to try to imagine. He experienced God revealing Jesus to be Christ in himself. He describes the experience very differently in his letters than the descriptions given in Acts where Paulâs road to Damascus conversion is repeated three times with significant variations.
Now when you say âidealismâ there youâre talking about high minded ethics not metaphysical idealism. Right? The execution of Jesus, was likely an unanticipated crisis in the lives of his disciples. Did Jesus really predict his own death on the cross as portrayed in Mark? There are no first person eye witness accounts of the resurrection unless you count Paulâs. But, look, in the broadest sense you can count everyone who believes or even imagine it. Such a person enters the story. Imagination is closer to heart of human con
Itâs easy to see divinity in birds especially if you donât eat them.
Right, theyâre entwined like the breath and the life force. If we make any separation we have a dualism. That gets close to the essence of what we are in a material sense.
I have no doubt that a personal experience seems very real, I have had them myself, but the point is that we interpret our experiences according to the paradigm that is currently prominent in our lives. We see it with people with drug or otherwise induced hallucinations all the time, and I believe these people that they are seeing what they believe to be seeing. The most common hallucination I experienced was that which Parkinson medication caused, and it was very consistent. When ten and more patients see âfishesâ under their beds or on the floor, you believe them that they are seeing these things.
The thing is that I am not seeing them, and I must make a decision. Am I blind, or are they hallucinating? We can assume, of course, that the majority of human beings are insensitive to what is really there. Or we can assume that there are reasons to believe that they are suffering a hallucination (such as hallucination inducing drugs) and come to the conclusion I have come to.
With regard to religious hallucinations, we know that there are multiple aspects that can make us assume things. From our own experience, such as I have explained, a paradigm change with the surrender of all that we have formerly believed was true, can have a strong affect on our decision to believe something. It is a personal critique which many of us reject, but we are very impressionable beings.
The thing is that I didnât see âdivinityâ in birds, but nature. It aligned me with reality, which is far stranger than anything I could imagine. Hope was there, because I realised the unity of all there is. Every fluffy creature was as much an expression of spiritual life as I was. But it was my interpretation of what I saw and nothing objective. When tears flow because I have seen something touching in a video, it isnât objective but my interpretation of the pictures. The psychosomatic interaction is so deep that we have the impression that it is an external force.
What is metaphysical idealism more than a feeling that is supported by arguments â for the moment? How is that different to âhigh minded ethicsâ that had me believing that my life was following a higher plan? In what way would the realisation âEli, Eli, lama sabachthani?â be different? It is an interpretation of events, just as we interpret everything.
The decision whether someone is hallucinating, or a saint is a further interpretation, because there is nothing measurable except the reaction of the person involved. Those who hold on to their commitment are often saints but can also be deemed fanatics. Look at Jeanne dâArc or Mother Teresa, who have also been called fanatics. For me, spirituality is humble, and the most important thing is to follow our own principles â which, to be honest, is hard enough.
Exactly.
As I understand it, nature is God as perceived through the senses. In traditional language God is omnipresent in nature. When we donât see God everywhere (including in ourselves), itâs due to our ignorance of who we are and that is something that only can be realized by first person insight.
As I read the gospels, Jesus was a guy who saw this and sought to help other people to see it too. Out of ignorance, the church that prevailed turned Jesusâs paradigm around to become its polar opposite. Jesus, they insisted, was uniquely divine and should be worshipped as God by the rest of us worthless sinners who only Jesus can save. What if , instead, Jesus was simply a man who realized who he was and that is what we are here to do as well?
The gospels can be read through the lens of historical probability. That was my intention when I started this thread. But, they can also be read through the lens of metaphor. Metaphorical readings of the Hebrew Bible goes back at least to Philo in the first century, Philo allegorizes the Bible in Platonic categories. Paul allegorized the Hebrew Bible as well.
From the metaphorical POV the question of miracles is not whether or not they are possible but what do they mean in the context of the story? Changing water into wine is impossible. So to do so would be a miracle. But what does it mean to change water to wine in the context of a wedding Jesus is attending where the wine has run out? Itâs one of several signs that appear in the gospel of John alone. Another is the resurrection of Lazarus. These are spectacular miracles to be left out of the synoptic gospels. What is going on here? I havenât found an explanation.
The possibility of metaphorical interpretation raises questions. Why metaphor? Because spiritual matters cannot be expressed directly. Cognitive science shows that we use metaphorical language far more than we are aware. This is especially true of the spirit which cannot be spoken of literally.
The substance of religion is spiritual reality. SR cannot be accessed by the five senses. It must be accessed within. It is who you really are in your heart of hearts. I first discovered this through Christianity more than 50 years ago. But, I realized it more fully through Vedanta. A person who grew up in Vedantist culture might have a deeper self realization through Christianity.
I worked as a crisis counselor I observed patients hallucinating. Some were spectacular. Once I got a phone call from a guy in a phone booth who was hearing voices telling him to murder the Pope who was visiting Miami that day. I dispatched the police to bring him to the hospital. Another patient said he saw Fred Flintstone knocking at the door of the crisis stabilization unit. Hallucinations may be bizarre or funny but they remind me that ordinary, normal perception that discloses truth is the real miracle.
Itâs the difference between a philosophy that reality is equivalent to mind, spirit or consciousness and the belief that won can achieve oneâs highest ethical principles. Oneâs metaphysical perspective encompasses oneâs interpretation of events. âParadigmâ in this context would refer to oneâs metaphysical position. Before my own spiritual breakthrough, I experienced a metaphysical paradigm shift from a default materialist perspective to a idealist one.
I think the naive realist perspective of most Christians today is an obstacle to their spiritual realization. The religion versus science dichotomy is based on that. In the course of this thread about the historical Jesus, my own thinking has gone through a paradigm shift from materialist to idealist metaphysics which I am attempting to bring to bear on the subject.