to Godspel
godspell said
It is very hard to follow Jesus’ precise meaning, even if we assume (as we shouldn’t) that we have precisely what he said about this matter. My own interpretation is that he thought the Kingdom and Gehenna were for those who were alive at the moment they arrived. The sinful people from before that time have already met with destruction. The question is, what about the good people who died before the Kingdom came? Perhaps his revelations didn’t cover that. He never claimed to know everything.
. . . In my opinion (I hate typing that, doesn’t it go without saying?) Jesus meant only the generation that he was speaking to. It’s beside the point what happened to those who came before. The point is not that every soul who ever lived is either eternally rewarded or punished. The point is that the world itself shall be transformed. . . . But even in Matthew and Luke, you see a new idea, of eternal punishment. Does that make sense to you? That for a tiny fragment of time, you fail to live as well as you should have–and for that you’re tormented for all eternity? What is the point of that? I don’t believe Jesus believed that. I agree with Bart that Jesus wasn’t talking about the Afterlife. But if I do think he was talking about that, I have to believe he approved the Doctrine of Eternal Pain.
Stevie Smith . . .
I agree with all the above, specifically
1. Jesus ministry was concerned with people alive at same time as he,
I dont believe that Jesus was preaching about what would occur to people who have already died. I do not see him spending much time at all discussing/teaching “resurrection of the dead” what exactly he believed about that is hard to say. I think Dr Ehrman is going beyond what is reasonable when he says Jesus believed dead bodies would be revived. [ I can find the place where he says that but hope you can search yourself]
2. eternal punishment does not make sense to me. I accept that part of Dr Ehrman’s thesis. tho rather than all the rigamarole about eternal torment not really meaning that I just think Jesus as can apocalypticist probably said “eternal” instead of “a really really really long time” as hyperbole to scare his listeners to repentance. I don’t think the only option for his [Jesus] belief other than “eternal torment” is “annihilation”. and I really dont think I have seen Dr Ehrman discuss other possibilties
3. I am not familiar with Stevie Smith but agree with her thoughts
Now the idea of all the dead being resurrected and judged exists in Christianity,. . .
I would read the Apostle’s Creed at mass, along with everyone else, and dutifully recite the words, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life to come, Amen.”. ..
But really, the idea of infinite punishment for finite sin never made sense to me. It’s disproportionate. Reincarnation makes more sense than that. Or Purgatory–your soul is cleansed, then released. But Purgatory was never meant to be a replacement for Hell. It was a workaround–because Catholicism typically wasn’t a pass/fail system. In Catholicism, God grades on a curve. Luther was more of a pass/fail guy, and Calvin said we’d all been graded before we were born.I tended to agree with the character of Peggy on Mad Men, a practicing Catholic,. . .
I dont know about Christianity in general or Apostle’s Creed in particular or have strong opinions other than that I think there is a lot of confusion about who Jesus is and what he taught.
again I dont think infinite punishment makes sense or coheres with Jesus teaching that God is his and our Father
I do not see any indication that Jesus taught reincarnation, a type of purgatory is possibly consistent with Jesus ministry in my view
no opinion on Peggy of Mad Men
———-
ok on to what I think as better option to annihilation
Mark 10
Jesus is talking about entering the Kingdom
** you do not have permission to see this link **
see even the “first” get into the kingdom but apparently not at the same time as the “last”
I believe this shows
1. Jesus thinks all will get into the Kingdom but
2. some will get into it only later, probably much much later
[ this is of course contrary to another of Dr Ehrman’s theories, as I understand it, that the Kingdom comes to complete fulfillment in a relatively short amount of time]
Godspell and Steven
godspell said
tom, let me ask you this–what ideas . . . would you not describe as nutty?
Stephen said
Weeeell…isn’t apocalypticism a little nutty anyway?
I usually consider to Jer 31:31 . ..
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.”
“It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them”, declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
I say this is NOT nutty because it just says the law of God is in the people’s hearts, somehow they know it, apparently without scripture or teachers. It does NOT depend on a magical ‘Son of Man’ character appearing on the clouds, pushing sinners into a fire pit, and the holy into earthly immortality, nor does not require revivification of corpses.
That concept, tho hard to believe a possible reality, to me is NOT nutty, and I think most likely somewhat close to Jesus’ view.
The belief in resurrection of the dead when the Apocalypse came did exist in Judaism before Jesus, and it’s not unreasonable to think he was familiar with it. Jews mainly did not believe in a heavenly afterlife (nor was this something to necessarily aspire to), but some did believe there was an earthly paradise coming for the faithful, where they would have immortal bodies. We have no direct evidence he taught this. Then again, we’re told he was physically resurrected, so where did that come from?
I don’t really see what difference it makes who gets into the Kingdom first. That isn’t what he meant. He means that the order of things will be turned upside-down. The rich and powerful shall be humbled, the poor and humble shall be exalted. And in many cases, the former shall not be in the Kingdom at all, but shall in fact be destroyed or permanently exiled (and presumably not in immortal bodies).
But again–it’s very unclear. And it might not always have been clear to him, either.
tompicard said
Godspell and StevenI usually consider to Jer 31:31 . ..
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.”
“It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them”, declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
I say this is NOT nutty because it just says the law of God is in the people’s hearts, somehow they know it, apparently without scripture or teachers. It does NOT depend on a magical ‘Son of Man’ character appearing on the clouds, pushing sinners into a fire pit, and the holy into earthly immortality, nor does not require revivification of corpses.
That concept, tho hard to believe a possible reality, to me is NOT nutty, and I think most likely somewhat close to Jesus’ view.
Except Jesus seems to have believed not all Jews would be saved (particularly some of the religious leadership), some gentiles would be (and even Samaritans), he’s a lot more interested in women as spiritual beings, and he emphasizes that people who are outcasts in Jewish society may in fact hold greater status in the Kingdom. Jesus and the author of Jeremiah would have disagreed about a great deal, but what they have in common is a deep anger at what they perceive as the lack of faith of the generation they are trying to reach. Jeremiah eventually gives up trying to save Israel from itself and gets thrown into a hole. Jesus also has a despairing moment, on the cross.
I think if you read Jeremiah through, you have to say it’s pretty nutty, though I wish we would stop using that word. Stop expecting it all to make sense from your POV. You’re not an ancient Palestinian Jew. The Greeks were nutty, the Romans were nutty, the Persians were nutty. Socrates was considered an absolute loon by Aristophanes. It’s a rich tapestry of nuttiness.
Stop expecting it all to make sense from your POV.
my apologies, from now on I will prefer theories that don’t make sense to those that do .
The idea that Jesus taught love for all mankind is anachronistic.
likewise apologies for my anachronistic views that Jesus’ teachings have great parallels to Jeremiah’s
On the second point (which wasn’t mine), it is clear Jesus thought you should love your neighbor, regardless of whether that person was the same group as you. Your neighbor is anyone you meet, anyone you come in contact with, but you’re only being a neighbor to that person when you treat him/her as you would be treated yourself. While I think that idea existed in Judaism before him, it wasn’t prevalent, and Jesus developed it in a way that was new and startling–and often offensive to his fellow Jews, who felt like they had to stick together to survive. Their Golden Rule was “Don’t do that to others which you find unpleasant” which is far more pragmatic and practicable. And is more about ethics (and diplomacy) than love. Jesus always had to take it a step further. Irritating. I can absolutely see how it would have been irritating.
“Love of all mankind” is a bit flowery. And a bit too abstract for him. Lots of people love humanity, in principle–then treat their neighbors like ****. The thing about abstract concepts you have in your mind is, they never talk back to you, or take advantage of you. They aren’t real.
It’s a cliche about Jonathan Swift that he loved individuals (certainly not everyone he met, which is deadly to satire), but loathed humanity. Jesus could have related to that at times, I bet (he speaks scornfully of the generation he was born into, and that’s the closest thing to ‘humanity’ he knew).
In the gospels, it’s quite clear he doesn’t love everyone he meets. But anyone who talks to him, really talks to him, says meaningful things that come from inside of them, instead of prating boilerplate–them he loves. Jews or not. Followers of his, or of his specific beliefs or not. The surface things don’t matter to him at all. It’s the soul inside that counts. A good soul is a pearl beyond price, and there’s never enough of them.
Your love for a vague concept (even in the age of air travel, no one has ever come close to knowing ‘All Humanity’) doesn’t mean anything to God. It’s your love for the people you encounter on a daily basis that matters. Wherever they came from, however they look, whatever they worship. He asked many hard things of us, but this is the hardest. I’ve never managed it. Though sometimes, on the subway, or in the streets, seeing all the faces around me, all so different, all wrapped up in their own struggles, I think how beautiful they are. And I wonder how much longer we’ll go on struggling.
Robert said
You’re being unfair to Ehrman. It is just a blog post giving a thumbnail sketch of part of his upcoming book. If you want to examine or critique his arguments, you have to first find his arguments. Of course Ehrman was referring to Daniel 12. Anyone familiar with the topic knows he was referring to Daniel 12.
Right. It’s going to be fascinating seeing him lay out his arguments, which will draw heavily on Jewish Apocalyptic thought, certainly the strongest influence on Jesus, which is not to say we can assume he didn’t diverge from it.
Why be so mad at Bart, tom? Most Christians in the past two millennia have believed Jesus was talking about Hell–a perpetual torture chamber, and not just for monsters.
Here’s a favorite film scene of mine–you a Wallace Shawn fan?
** you do not have permission to see this link **
(Thankfully, I was a post Vatican II Catholic.)
Robert said
That is, the “wise” and “those who lead to righteousness” are the same group of people; the people in this group will be raised up and made to “shine like the brightness of the sky,” that is, to be “the stars.”
Personally, I wonder if Daniel might be alluding back to Abraham’s vision in Genesis, when God tells him to look at the stars in heavens and count them if he is able, as an image of how numerous his descendants will be. Who knows if this was . .
That is an interesting observation, which I had never heard before, and would not debate,
And it raises another question in my mind. . .
if that’s an accurate interpretation that the “righteous” at the time of “resurrection” will have almost incalculable descendants, that is contrary to how some scholars interpret Jesus view of the Kingdom. Those scholars think that Jesus taught that in the approaching Kingdom was one where there are no more births. I personally do not feel that was part of Jesus’ ministry.
I think we’ve had this discussion before (one of the reasons I won’t stick much longer is that sooner or later, in such a relatively narrow area of discussion, you run out of things to say).
The Kingdom, is to me, a noble and revelatory idea–but also a nutty one, because it means history will stop. Evolution will stop (not that Jesus knew what that was, but he knew about change, he saw it happening).
If children keep being born, then some of them will be bad people. Jesus’ idea is that only the good people will remain. Into each generation, goats are born. Maybe he thinks that if one generation is all sheep, there won’t be any goats. But Adam and Eve were both good people when God created them, he’d reason. All are corruptible. And just a few bad apples will spoil the whole barrel, and everything will be back where it was. (Or God just keeps ordering up new Gehennas?)
Life is inherently messy, inherently dynamic, inherently changeable. There is no final result. You just keep going until you can’t. Evolution isn’t about one perfect form, but endless temporarily viable forms. But humanity has this notion that things were better in the past, and will be perfect in the future. It never works out. And we never agree on what perfect looks like.
I don’t know how far Jesus thought it out, how certain he was of what God’s Kingdom would look like. But part of his fondness for children could have been predicated on his knowledge that soon there might not be any more. And you must realize, at least some of the time he’s not talking about literal children, but about a childlike responsiveness and innocence in adults.
…it is clear Jesus thought you should love your neighbor, regardless of whether that person was the same group as you.
No I don’t think this is clear at all. You can make a good case it seems to me that Jesus’ ministry was intended for Jews only and a subset of them. What we have to avoid is anachronism. And remember that the traditions that go back to the historical Jesus were filtered through the sensibility of first, Paul, who claimed his ministry to the Gentiles was revealed to him in a vision and who had little interest in the pre-Easter Jesus, and the gospel writers who were in the main gentiles.
A quick example – Matthew 10:23. It’s hard to see under what conditions a later generation of believers would make this saying up so if it does go back to the historical Jesus it reveals no plans at all for a ministry to the gentiles.
That quote just means he’s working his patch–and his patch contains a whole lot of Non-Jews. I agree Jesus considered his primary ministry to be to his own people, but that’s not germane to the discussion. He thought he only had a few years, and he also thought you didn’t have to be a Jew to be in the Kingdom (if you disagree, take that up with Bart).
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is all we need here to prove the point. Samaritans were not considered Jews, even though they came from a shared earlier tradition. There was intense bad feeling between the two groups. Which is precisely why Jesus chose a Samaritan for his story. To say that your true neighbor is the one who will help you out, and that belonging to the same religion, or the same ethnic group, isn’t the point. And I would assume that story got him a lot of criticism from some quarters, because he’s saying a Samaritan is a better man than a priest and a Levite. And there are plenty of other stories that make the general point that he judges people by the content of their character. I agree it got accentuated by later gentile Christians, but it was there in the original message.
Jesus was not saying “All religons are equally good.” That would be anachronistic, I agree. (And honestly, it’s not so easy to find anyone who really believes that now.) He believed Judaism was the only true religion, but nominally following a religion is not sufficient, and neither is being of Jewish descent. You can’t possibly think that, given his antipathy to much of the Jewish leadership.
He was saying that people will only be judged by their behavior, and that many if not most Jews (and gentiles) will be found wanting–only those of both good will and good action will make the grade. Bart has said exactly this. What is your counter-argument?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)