Robert wrote
All I’m saying is that we have a better chance of understanding who Jesus was by seeing him in his Jewish context, and a better chance of understanding the gospels as having also arisen from that context as well as that of Pauline ‘Christianity’, which preceded the gospels.
Agreed, but this presupposes that your goal is to actually understand Jesus in his own milieu. The irony is that almost right from the start Christianity was able to flourish largely because it separated Jesus from his milieu. The problem with egordon’s project is precisely because it assumes the gospels somehow reflect the “real” Jesus.
We seem to have chased egordon away. Too bad since I was really curious about his ideas. But a bit of internet research produced ** you do not have permission to see this link ** which I hope to investigate further.
Stephen said
Robert wroteAll I’m saying is that we have a better chance of understanding who Jesus was by seeing him in his Jewish context, and a better chance of understanding the gospels as having also arisen from that context as well as that of Pauline ‘Christianity’, which preceded the gospels.
Agreed, but this presupposes that your goal is to actually understand Jesus in his own milieu. The irony is that almost right from the start Christianity was able to flourish largely because it separated Jesus from his milieu. The problem with egordon’s project is precisely because it assumes the gospels somehow reflect the “real” Jesus.
We seem to have chased egordon away. Too bad since I was really curious about his ideas. But a bit of internet research produced ** you do not have permission to see this link ** which I hope to investigate further.
I just don’t believe this to be true, that the first Christians divorced Jesus from his culture, from his own understanding of who he was. I would recommend the book “From Paul to Valentinius: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, by Peter Lampe.” Or “Antioch and Rome” written by Brown and Meyer, two careful and mostly nuanced Church historians. these make a strong case that the Roman Church was steeped in a Judeo-Christian understanding of Jesus. Ambrosiaster, writing from Rome, about the Roman Christians around 365 states that “It is established that there were Jews living in Rome in the times of the apostles, and that those Jews who had believed passed on to the Romans the tradition that they ought to profess Christ but keep the law…One ought not condemn the Romans, but praise their faith; because without seeing any signs or miracles and without seeing any of the apostles, they nevertheless accepted faith in Christ, although according to the Jewish rite (ritu licet Judaico).” The History of the beginnings of the Roman Church has of course been Pulverized by a ‘Catholic’ church that became more and more gentile in outlook and ritual and eventually led the charge against Judaism in the Mediterranean. Not to badmouth my own faith, as I am a Catholic, but I wouldn’t look for too much historical accuracy when it attempts to recount its own history.
jgabriel22 consider the tension in the gospel of Mark between the message of the pre-passion Jesus and the message about the crucified and resurrected savior. What is the gospel?
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Nothing about the crucified and resurrected savior.
When Jesus sends his disciples out, two by two, what is it that they preaching? It can’t be about salvation through the crucifixion and resurrection because he hasn’t told them about it yet! It’s the old old cliché, the religion of Jesus became a religion about Jesus. But the process of reinterpreting Jesus didn’t start with Mark.
Scholars have long noted Paul’s lack of interest in the pre-passion Jesus. For Paul the central episodes were the crucifixion and resurrection, not Jesus’s sayings or deeds. Paul never met Jesus and he claimed that his teachings were provided to him by Jesus through visions not through transmission from the disciples.
Jewish Christianity survived for a good while. But it was also marginalized. And how ironic groups that most closely resembled the views and practice of Jesus and his disciples were eventually considered heretics.
egordon said
Why has there never been a sect, cult, or denomination that followed ONLY Jesus Christ? Why is there no belief system that has as its only canon the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and perhaps Thomas? Or maybe just one of them, if that’s all that was available.
I mean, even if a Christ-only belief system is ultimately wrong (if there is such a thing as “wrong” in religion), it seems like a logical Christian way. Yet, I have found no evidence of any such cult.
Was there ever such a cult or sect?
My guess is that if such a cult existed, it could only existed before the four Gospels had been written in the earlier part of the first century. By the time the Gospels were written Pauline Christianity had already canonized Paul’s letters and any churches outside the jurisdiction of the Pauline churches were heavily Jewish Christian and didn’t share the high christology of Paul (except for the Johanian community which perhaps had an even more evolved christology). The Jewish-Christian churches perhaps had oral and written scriptures, but they were sequestered communities and thus had no interest in the gospels of other sequestered communities. After the Jewish state had been dissolved these sequestered churches began communicating more frequently with the wider Pauline church headquartered in Rome which gradually began to accept at least four of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) but likewise these sequestered communities accepted the Pauline epistles. We kind of see this in 2 Peter:
“Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. (2 Peter 3:15-16)”
By the middle of the second century Pauline Christianity is replacing the sequestered one-gospel [perhaps with other written canonized texts and oral traditions] communities.
In exchange the gospels are being adopted by the Pauline churches. This could perhaps explain why the Gospels have so few references until Justin Martyr.
Stephen said
To think that “random dice rolls” produced us is infinitely beyond believing in Santa Claus. Statistically, the probability of randomly producing just the first line of the Gettysburg Address is 1 over (8.437 x 10 to the two-hundreth power)….. And then the “Random Generator” wouldn’t even know what it had. Complex stuff does not happen randomly.“Random” events are not just random. Things happen for a reason
The problem is you don’t really understand the idea of “randomness” in nature. (The Infinite Monkey Theorem is practically a sign painted on the forehead saying “I don’t get it”. It doesn’t work that way!)
Let me turn you over to some folks who not only understand it but can explain it very well.
Go ** you do not have permission to see this link **
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Mlodinow is actually a Chopra shill. Here he is from the audience “challenging” Chopra’s lack of scientific understanding
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and then, voila, there he is everywhere else, co-writing with him, a book tour and speaking at his conferences. You decide. And just as an aside, PRNGs cannot produce complete randomness w/o producing infinite heat, wh/ is why they’re pseudo-. Last I checked almost 20 years ago, the Mersenne Twister was the best we had done, but none of the poker rooms were employing it. And let’s not forget Hoyle’s Fallacy of the junkyard tornado, or that god made the universe so vast to make dirt cheap. As for hidden variable theory, it’s been laid to rest too many times, but maybe finally
Sorry, last thing, but re: abiogenesis (vs. panspermia, et al)…They’ve demonstrated in the lab under extremely high pressures and temperatures that inorganic molecules (or compounds?) will combine to begin to form amino acids toward peptides and proteins, as would occur with meteorite impacts. Given that the vast majority of the universe’s baryonic mass is comprised of the interstellar media composed largely (some estimates are 95% as against a mere 5% of stellar masses) of this inorganic stuff waiting to assemble, organic compound formation is to be expected. Maybe consider something like the self-organizing quanta? Or the algorithm of the secret life of chaos?
Amino acid stability
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Self-organizing quanta
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Secret life of chaos
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We wouldn’t be the first to say we’ve seen the face of god in Mandelbrot iterations, or in the cosmic microwave background radiation, or was it a fingerprint (and Hawking’s initials!)? But be careful how you phrase the question–I try to remind the kids when I’m grilling for them, that I honestly can’t say where living and non-living separate in their steaks, or in their eating. The gun at my head has me saying that, in those terms, we’re “living” some kind of suspended animation between the two, and that otherwise it’s really just another false choice foisted upon us by Julian Jaynes’ corpus callosum. I can’t reach the site but here’s the book
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For geochemistry and quantum physics there are Schrodinger, “What is Life?” and entropy’s path of least resistance life forms which comprise 99% of earth’s biomass, give electrons rather than take, and have nothing to do with the evolution of only the last 600m years
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BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert