LETS TALK JESUS.....

by Quentin 36 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  Terra Incognita

  From what I have read I've come to these conclusions:

  Jesus was a Jewish mystic and magician who believed that "The Kingdom of Heaven" was imminent. He believed that it was going to be preceded by miraculous healings. Those miracles would require "Faith" to initiate. He believed that God would not bring the Kingdom unless people reached out to Him in "Faith". He believed that no one had the "Faith" needed to start the miraculous chain of events that was necessary to bring about "The Kingdom of Heaven".

  Therefore, he developed the delusionary belief that he had a role to play by being a conduit for miracles and healing. Since miracles weren't real, but he wanted to believe that they could be, he started a ministry of faked miracles and healings hoping that he would impress and excite people to the point where they would develop enough "Faith" to spark real miracles.

  When thinking of "Faith" from Jesus' point of view, imagine Yoda instructing Luke Skywalker (Star Wars II) in how to use "The Force". Yoda says, "There is no think. Do or do not." (And didn't the trashed Millennium Falcon rise from the swamp?)

  To put it briefly, Jesus was a psychotic Jewish mystic/magician who sincerely thought he could spark the miracles that he thought were necessary to bring about "The Kingdom of God."
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  Terry
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  EntirelyPossible

  Jesus is real. Here is his picture. He goes by "The Dude".
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  Quentin

  My meds are kicking my buttocks be back around 2 or 3 AM....Terry that's the second post you've made tonight that's blank....
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  tec

  Yes, I believe He was a real living being. I believe He still is a real, living being - just in Spirit. I believe he was/is the Christ. The Messiah.

  Do I think some myth stuff got absorbed as the Church became established and grew in power and became allied with the government? Yes. But Jesus' very simple teachings didn't have anything to do with embracing riches/power of this world. I also don't know why someone who made something up out of thin air (or even just grossly elaborated), would die or suffer or be imprisoned for something/someone they knew was a fraud. (Paul for instance, and the other apostles)

  Sidebar question. Why was Saul ( Paul ) SO adamant about going to Damascus? Thats always puzzled me.

  What do you mean? Who was he going after, or why was he going after them?

  Tammy
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  Quentin

  Who was he going after, or why was he going after them?.....( tec ).....No Tammy, not the who. Acts tells who. It's the why, why travel all the way from Jerusalem to Damascus? Acts indicates there was a large, viable Christian Community there. Surly others were closer. It was the seat of a Roman Governor as well. Sometimes I think Paul was more of an enigma than Jesus.

  Eventually, the myth was conveniently used in the bible to represent something the real Jesus never was....( unshakled ).....There's that need for a back story. Perhaps Jesus having local notoriety was convenient for that purpose. As the movement grew a gap needed filling.
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  tec

  Quentin, maybe he was going to strike at this large, viable community.

  As for motivation, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Blaspheming against his God? Accepting some usurper as the Jewish Messiah? Thinking that their eyes are opened and the rest of the Jewish people are blind? How DARE they? The adrenaline that can come from that can quickly motivate a person to go to extremes... sometimes out of retribution, sometimes just to see justice done. Could also be as he said. That he was absolutely zealous for his God and for the law. He could have been a very devout man to what he thought was right.

  Tammy
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  Mad Sweeney

  There is a fragment of truth in every myth. The question is in the size of the truth-fragment in the Jesus myth. Here are my musings, which I posted on another thread a few months ago:

  A guy is born to a really young Jewish girl who is engaged to a middle aged Jewish man. They raise him as an average, lower-middle class Jewish kid in a town called Nazareth. He's naturally a precocious kid with an inquisitive mind and charismatic personality.

  When he reaches his teens he decides to travel the known world to learn everything there is to know. He goes all over the place and learns all kinds of stuff then in his late 20s he returns to his homeland. He sees what a screwed-up system his native people live under (both under the Roman political and the Jewish religious thumbs) and decides to do something about it.

  To convince Jewish people to listen to him, to let him save them so to speak, he knows he has to couch his teachings in the context of their worldview; he has to be the Messiah they've been waiting for. So he does. He collects a core group of followers and goes on speaking tours of the land. He teaches many of the same things Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, and other eastern wise men taught. Most people don't get it. Even his closest followers don't get it. They even say so and are quoted as saying so in the documents later written about the life and death of this teacher.

  He tries his best for three years to get through to the Jewish people but only a small handful really devote themselves to his teaching and few if any of them really understand what he's getting at because his point is clouded by the Jewish tradition he has to couch his teachings within.

  Then he's gone. Some say he is crucified. Others say he escaped and ran off to start a family. His followers begin an oral tradition about his life and teachings that takes on a life of its own.

  In the meantime, an opportunistic Jewish lawyer named Saul grabbed ahold of this man's story and added all sorts of fancy stuff to it, linking events in his life to prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures. These prophetic applications, along with what was left being passed around of the original stories continued to spread and be discussed like a crazy game of "telephone" until finally, a couple decades after his disappearance, someone decides to write some of it down. Then someone else does, too. And Saul, now called Paul, has been writing, too, a little about the teacher from twenty years earlier and a lot about how he wants this new religion to look and operate as a spinoff of Judaism.

  The rest, as they say, is history.
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  PSacramento

  While it's great to have an opinion, it wouldn't hurt for it to be an educated one.

  Something tells me more people here discussion Jesus have read about Alexander or Caeser than they have read about Jesus.

  And I mean read BOTH sides of the "argument".

  In the meantime, an opportunistic Jewish lawyer named Saul grabbed ahold of this man's story and added all sorts of fancy stuff to it, linking events in his life to prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures. These prophetic applications, along with what was left being passed around of the original stories continued to spread and be discussed like a crazy game of "telephone" until finally, a couple decades after his disappearance, someone decides to write some of it down. Then someone else does, too. And Saul, now called Paul, has been writing, too, a little about the teacher from twenty years earlier and a lot about how he wants this new religion to look and operate as a spinoff of Judaism.

  There is absolutely NO evidence of that or anything else in your post.

  Opinion should never be passed off as "fact".
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  trevor

  Opinion should never be passed off as "fact".

  The world as we know it, along with all organized religion, would cease to be if we followed this rule.