OK. But back to the Alan Watts post above, how much of what’s written in the Gospels do we accept as fact? Why aren’t the gnostic gospels just as valid? As mentioned above all of this stuff has to be taken with several grains of salt because the it was edited together by people with their own agenda, suffers from translation problems, and the very provenance of the source material is questionable.
Instead we have the self-fulfilling prophecy of “The Bible is perfect because it’s The Bible.”
Jesus, the Dude abides!
It’s silly, misleading and reductive to frame this discussion in terms of “what Jesus wanted”. We are discussing mythology here. There is no credible evidence for Jesus as a historical figure.
Let’s discuss this as it really is - a debate about interpretation of a text, and the ethics of worship.
And that brings us back to the question of whether or not Jesus actually existed as a single person (rather than an amalgam of several). We don’t really have much to go on outside of the Gospels, which all have the problems that you mention.
Reminds me of a classic King Missile song
As I read the text, I don’t think it matters whether Jesus said “a” or “the”, since he’s basically just quoting scripture. He was an excellent debater, and loved to take the sacred Jewish texts and throw them back in faces of the leaders of the Jewish establishment, who he believed were corrupt, hypocritical, and missing the point of what those texts said. In this situation, Jesus is being accused of blasphemy for saying he’s a/the god, and he turns it around and points out that it’s hypocritical to say that he is blaspheming when there is text that’s even broader in a text that he knows they don’t believe to be blasphemous. By exposing their hypocrisy, he exposes the fact that they don’t really want to kill him because he’s a blasphemer, but rather because he threatens their power.
Me too. For what it’s worth, I find his work just as inspiring and grounding as I did way back when. There’s always a chance with a prolific writer and speaker that he said some weird shit at some point, but I’ve never come across it. He and Lao Tzu are, to this day, the only people in all of history that have spoken directly to my “soul”.
Extremely well said, thank you!
Mom told me that Buddha had said, “I am not a god, I am only a man who is enlightened. Anyone can become enlightened.” Like her, I much prefer that viewpoint.
Stephen Batchelor has interrogated Buddhism in much the same way that Watts does here with Christianity, and arrived at similar conclusions regarding the shape of modern Buddhism compared to its earliest form. If you like that quote, you’d probably like Batchelor’s work (assuming you haven’t run across it already).
If we’re gonna have Faith that some written text is the Divinely Inspired Word of GAWD it might as well be in the new edit published last Thursday
Job’s woeful tale is a much older epic stolen from the Bedouin.
That’s honestly a very complicated question, and there are bunches of atonement theories.
Basically because they’re later works, lack authorial clout, match poorly with each other and the canonical New Testament books both in terms of events portrayed and of theology, and were mostly used by small fringe groups. There are very good reasons why we got the four synoptic gospels we did!
I’m pretty sure that if you deny the historicity of Jesus, you’ll have in consistency’s name deny the historicity of most figures of ancient world we know of.
Well the three synoptic ones yes. The other one is extremely dubious and about 50+ years later and from a hugely transformed political and theological situation.
I’m with those who would toss John (and therefore John’s Apocalypse) and replace it with something like the Sayings Gospel of Thomas, it is a much more consistent text.
Plus Thomas Didymus (twin in Aramaic and Greek) gets western Christians knickers’ in a twist him being rabbi yshua bin yosef’s twin bro and all.
Eastern churches derived their legitimacy from Jebus’a family rather than spurious “bishops”.
Pretty much the only real sources for him are the gospels and derived traditions, so it all depends on how likely you think those are to have made him up whole cloth compared to other histories. That said the general consensus of historians seems to be not that likely.
Are we… projecting? 
In politics, having a great bod’ and being charismatic is all.
That’s clearly a statue of the non Christian God Atlas that has been appropriated by the church into a testament that the original artist probably did not agree with.
