Did Jesus have ALZHEIMER'S? Or, just a really short attention span?

by Terry 13 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  Terry

  During Jesus' Farewell Address in chapters 13-17 of John we discover Jesus doesn't have a very good short-term memory or attention span.

  John 13:36

  36 Simon Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”
  Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

  Peter asks Jesus a simple and clear question about where he is going.

  Later we read in John 14:5

  5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

  Okay, that makes Peter and Thomas interested enough to voice concern about WHERE Jesus is going.

  What is Jesus' response?

  Read the follow up in John 16:5

  5 “Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’

  Alzheimer's??
• 

  AK - Jeff

  It is clearly impossible to make any sense out of this nonsense.

  I have been saying for a very long time that it would be so easy for God/Jesus to show us the way if they are really up there.

  JUST FRIGGIN' SAY IT!

  • Write a book that spells it out, instead of presenting a mish-mash of verse that can be interpreted in a thousand different ways.
  • Like the witch on the Wizard of Oz - write it in the sky, in all languages. Keep it up there like a heavenly billboard that says something like: "Believe in me. I am real. I am God. Here are the steps you must follow to get my approval"
  • Stop with all the 'Faith is what I want - I just want you to believe without any strong evidence to support it. That's what I want, delusional followers who need no solid foundational reason to accept me." Just tell us clearly, plainly, without riddle. I am pretty sure that it would work well.

  Oh well. God doesn't work that way. He is all smoke and mirrors, and as you say, perhaps suffering from memory loss.

  Jeff
• 

  Terry

  It is hard to snap out of it.

  You hear something all your life---why question it?

  The people you trust the most say it---why contradict it?

  The finest citizens and leaders embrace a "truth" and it is difficult to even imagine it can be wrong.

  The funny thing is that once you SEE IT you wonder how you missed it in the first place.

  Like waking from a dream all the things you were so SURE of become nonthing but fluffy cartoons.

  The bible as the "word of God" is an amazingly contagious, deeply embedded meme. Very hard to get anybody who believes it to find

  a way to be objective about it.
• 

  cult classic

  lol Terry alzheimers is right - once I started reading the bible w/o interference I was amazed at how much "information" I had "learned" was false. The bible is full of crap with some good moral stories thrown in for good measure.

  If God's ways are higher than our ways, how come we find all of his mistakes?

  I agree with you Jeff - If there is a God couldn't he find a way to express himself in a way that would appeal to us logically and without error? I would expect someone who created me to be able to do that. But if he didn't create us and we created him that explains all of the confusion.

  Cult Classic
• 

  Elsewhere

  Yup... one of the things I did after I was mentally "out" was to re-read the bible as if I had no foreknowledge of it. I read it as if I dug it out of the ground and was the very first person ever to read it.

  I highly recommend everyone do this... you'll be shocked at just how absurd the bible is.
• 

  Terry

  One of the best suggestions for bible reading comes from the Textual Critic/scholar/professor Bart Ehrman.

  He suggest you take any bible account in the gospels and read them HORIZONTALLY. Which is to say you list each of the "facts'

  and compare them to each other.

  Ehrman says most bible readers read the gospels one at a time and then mash them all together to create the reader's OWN VERSION which INCLUDES ALL the events.

  This, Ehrman reminds us, means that NONE of the Gospels match our own mashed version!
• 

  glenster

  I didn't make a big Internet search for interpretations, but I did look at
  John 16:5 in context. Jesus didn't refer to the past--he said in the present
  tense that none of the others ask "Where are you going?" What he explains
  afterwards indicates it's because the others seem grief-stricken by his upcoming
  fate, etc. See the NASB John 16 at the next link:
  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2016&version=NASB
• 

  Leolaia

  From Helmut Koester's classic work Ancient Christian Gospels (1990):

  Another aspect of the question of the integrity of the extant text of this Gospel concerns the order of its chapters and sections. Major disorder exists in two instances. The first concerns the sequence of chapters 4-7. At the end of chapter 4, Jesus is in Galilee, at the beginning of chapter 5 he goes to Jeruslem, chapter 6:1 says, "And after this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee," and 7:1 reports that Jesus left Jerusalem and went about in Galilee, because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Moreover, John 7 continues the discussion of the theme of judgement which had been initiated in chapter 5. If the order were chapters 4, 6, 5, 7, all these difficulties would be removed.

  The second major disorder is apparent in John 14:30-31. At the conclusion of this first part of the farewell discourses Jesus says: "I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go hence." But it only in 18:1 that this command is followed by an appropriate action: "When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples across the Kidron valley where there was a garden." In spite of the clear "Rise, let us go hence" in John 14:31, chapters 15-17 continue the farewell discourses. It has been suggested that chapters 15-17 are a later interpolation. But in language, style, and content these three chapters belong with 13-14. It is clear, therefore, that they are not in the right place. Chapters 15-16 may have followed John 13:34-35 because 15:1-17 is a commentary on the commandment to love each other, and 13:36-38 seems a good continuation of 16:31. This leaves John 17, the farewell prayer of Jesus. No satisfactory solution has been found for the placement of this chapter. Bultmann suggests to place it after 13:31a, i.e. after the designation of Judas and before the statement "Now is the Son of Man glorified". That John 17 was added after the displacement of chapters 15-16 had already occurred, is also possible because chapter 17 is characterized by a theological interpretation of Jesus' departure that differs markedly from the farewell discourses in chapters 13-16; its orientation is more explicitly Gnostic. (p. 249)
• 

  dgp

  Marked.
• 

  PSacramento

  I think it is a mistake to think that the Gospels were written all at once, like a novel.

  They weren't, like Leo mentions above.

  They were, probably, pieced together over years and perhaps even "edited" into a "book" format.

  You can very easily get "out of whack" sequence of events, espcially of the editor is more interesed in themes than chronology.