Stephen said
The lack of reference to a virgin birth in Paul’s writings and in Mark are really the only evidence in support of this assertion of ‘fact’The gospel of John seems to think that Jesus was born in the normal biological manner and doesn’t seem to think this is inconsistent with Jesus being divine. The author has one of Jesus’ opponents say this –
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
-John 6:41-42
I didn’t mention John because it was written late late. However how could the word be God and with God and then be made flesh and dwell among us and Jesus be born of a woman without there being a virgin birth? – the virgin bith seems to me implied and not neccessary to state outright, particularly since John does not have a birth narrative. The verse you quote supports my perspective, not yours :-), Josesph was Jesus’s adopted father – that is clear from Mathew and Luke!
Also, John 8 seems to refer to the Pharisees insinuating Jesus was a bastard –** you do not have permission to see this link ** Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God….
Let me repeat that there are precisely two of the 27 books of the New Testament that mention the virgin birth, and they deeply disagree with each other about how it happened, and what happened after it.
Furthermore, even the two gospels that mention it never have JESUS mentioning it. He never once seems to have brought it up.
If we’re going to discuss whether Jesus was born of a virgin and raised from the dead, why not discuss whether the Count of St. Germain is still alive? Or Elvis?
If you’re going to believe in miracles, without any proof, don’t be selective. Believe in all of them. Or none. (Okay, technically Elvis being alive at 83 wouldn’t be a miracle, unless he’s still eating the way he did back then.)
Me in bold
I not only don’t believe Jesus could do miracles, I don’t want to believe it. That would make him less, somehow. – This really doesn’t make sense to me. That Jesus did miracles (which in terms of winessed accounts and even historical Jesus critical analysis), there is overwhelming evidence. You might arge they were deceptions or false miracles, but you cannot sensibly argue that he didn’t appear to do miracles. If they were false, then that makes him less – yes!
His life, his suffering, would be meaningless if he knew all the time his pain, his death, would just be temporary. In beleiving Jesus did miracles, you don’t have to beleive he was omniscient, or that he knew exactly what was coming from the start of his ministry. Like you, I bleive he was fully man, albeit with great wisdom and goodness, but with limited knowledge
I think he believed he had to sacrifice himself (or at least be willing to do it) to bring about the Kingdom. Yes
Just because he Jesus is more remarkable if he’s just an ordinary human being, as opposed to some divine freak of nature. We’re surrounded by superpowered beings in the movies and TV these days. It’s so–mundane. Talk about an anti-supernaturalist bias! It seems to me because you are afraid of being disaappointed – so you take a low view of Jesus
If you can’t prove it, it’s not a fact. Yes
If you can prove it, it’s not a truth No (nonsense)
(it may be true to state that it’s a fact, but that’s not the same thing). Y
“Love is better than hate.” “Peace is better than war.” “Knowledge is better than ignorance.” Would you agree these are truths? How could you ever prove them?
These are unqualified vague judgments. If qualified, ie what exactly do you mean by ‘better’, then they can become factual. Anyway, we were not talking about such vagueries, we were talking aboiut the virgin birth an the resurrection – facts or falsities. You waould have done better to come up with a statemennt such as ‘the Mona lisa is beautiful’ This is neither a fact nor a truth.
I could easily come up with solid factual reasons to doubt all three. In pure Darwinian terms, probably all three are false, or at least dubious. Humans have by far the most knowledge of any animal that has ever existed–and will never last as long as the dinosaurs. Or cockroaches. Or the e. coli bacteria. So what’s so great about us? In objective terms, not much.
Facts are about what is or is not. Truths are more about aspirations, our desire to transcend the material universe, be more than eating machines out to reproduce ourselves. Nonsense, these are not truths or facts, they are desires
That’s why science can’t address truth, because science is only about what what is or is not real. We clearly disagree on the word ‘truth’ – you are clearly infleunced by relativism
And even that is very hard to determine at times. But science definitely can’t go beyond that without becoming corrupted. Science can very easily be turned into an ersatz religion, at which point stating something that goes against consensus isn’t an alternate view–it’s heresy.
Susan Sontag once wrote “The opposite of fact is fiction. The opposite of one great truth may be another great truth.” Facts don’t contradict each other. Truths do. Sorry, I Strongly disagree again. ‘The opposite’ does not neccessitate contradiction etc etc…
That’s why when we say “Speak your truth” we really mean “Tell us what you see.” What you see is real to you, but not to everyone. However, some people speak a personal truth so remarkable that it leaves a lasting mark on everyone. Even those who don’t agree with it. That’s what Jesus was. We sort of agree here thank goodness
And you want to talk about whether he could do magic tricks. Feh. No comment
We have many accounts from antiquity of people other than Jesus performing what seemed to be miracles–do you believe only the ones about Jesus are real? Hey, maybe some of those Vegas magicians actually know magic! Can you prove they don’t?
I am not influenced by ‘relativism’, or any other ‘ism’ when I make the statement you accuse of being relativistic. It is a fact that science is about facts. That doesn’t mean scientists can’t also believe in truths (often very conflicting truths), but they’re not being scientists when they do it. (Just like you’re not being a scientist here).
“Truth is beauty, beauty truth.” True or false? Some would say the truth can be quite ugly at times. Your distinction between truth and desire is clearly influenced by your own powers of denial–your desire to believe the truth is something a person can possess like a physical object, which is often (not always) a precursor of fundamentalism.
You claim to be a scientist (nothing is a fact because somebody said it on the internet, but I’ll conditionally believe it). If somebody said to you “I saw a man who had been brutally killed and buried rise from the dead, just last week” would you believe it? There have been many modern instances of people claiming to witness fantastic things. Do you believe all of them?
Opposing truths usually do contradict each other to some extent, which is what ‘opposing’ means, but I agree that differing visions of truth can co-exist, though they very frequently don’t, as any student of history knows.
Why do you specifically believe the New Testament accounts of miracles? Aren’t there many more miracles in the OT? And didn’t the NT writers read the OT?
I can believe Jesus did faith healings, that worked the same way faith healings sometimes work today–the mind/body connection. But we also know that most such healings don’t tend to hold up to scientific scrutiny. Of which there was none back then. We have no first-hand accounts of any of Jesus’ miracles. We know many others in the same time period were believed to work similar wonders. But truthfully, I think most of the miracles in the NT aren’t meant literally. They are meant to symbolize who Jesus was, what he meant. Visual illustrations of deeper truths. That came to be taken literally, by literal-minded people. Of which I fear you are one.
I also fear you may still think The X-Files was a good show. I would gleefully destroy every copy of every episode not written by someone named Morgan.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Yes to all this. I beleive in real magic. Of course there have been other miracle workers thoughout history. Some of their mircales are false or hyped up or mythical, but others happen. Tghis of course also applies to Jesus’s mircales – some were hyped up myths – certainly the Childhood Gospel of Thomas stuff, maybe even some in the NT. ? As to Vegas, magicians like Criss Angel & David Copperfield to a lot of magic tricks which employ misdirection and deception, but there is a spookier element to some of their tricks – I recommend researching Criss Angel
I am not influenced by ‘relativism’, or any other ‘ism’ when I make the statement you accuse of being relativistic. It is a fact that science is about facts. That doesn’t mean scientists can’t also believe in truths (often very conflicting truths), but they’re not being scientists when they do it. (Just like you’re not being a scientist here).
“Truth is beauty, beauty truth.” True or false? Some would say the truth can be quite ugly at times. Your distinction between truth and desire is clearly influenced by your own powers of denial–your desire to believe the truth is something a person can possess like a physical object, which is often (not always) a precursor of fundamentalism. Neither facts nor truths are physical objects, they are statements or beliefs about physical objects of events
You claim to be a scientist (nothing is a fact because somebody said it on the internet, but I’ll conditionally believe it). If somebody said to you “I saw a man who had been brutally killed and buried rise from the dead, just last week” would you believe it? There have been many modern instances of people claiming to witness fantastic things. Do you believe all of them? Obviously not. I only happen to beleif one of them and I beleive it to be a truth or a fact – even if not provable, there is sufficient evidence for me
Why do you specifically believe the New Testament accounts of miracles? Aren’t there many more miracles in the OT? And didn’t the NT writers read the OT? I beleive in OT miracles as well and modern day ones, but not all
I can believe Jesus did faith healings, that worked the same way faith healings sometimes work today–the mind/body connection. Sure mind over matter may have played arole in some of Jesus’s healings – the guy on the bed may have had somatization or chronic fatigue, but the man born blind sure as hell needed more than mind over matter. Even the Pharisees recognized these sorts of distinctions as you know
But we also know that most such healings don’t tend to hold up to scientific scrutiny. Not so. Most alleged miracles today are neither proven nor disproven because thay do not occur in a controlled environment. I suspect some are hype and nonsnese, some are mind over matter and some are real mircales. The latter being rare of course – otherwise they woundn’t be miracles (Hume etc)
Of which there was none back then. We have no first-hand accounts of any of Jesus’ miracles. We know many others in the same time period were believed to work similar wonders. But truthfully, I think most of the miracles in the NT aren’t meant literally. Of course they are meant literally. There is aboslutely nothing in the text of the NT to support the idea that they were just symbolic. They are meant to symbolize who Jesus was, what he meant. Visual illustrations of deeper truths. They were this as well, especailly the semions of John vs the Dunamises of the synoptics That came to be taken literally, by literal-minded people. Of which I fear you are one. Literal-minded – yes I am literal-minded when the text is intended to be read literally and I am metaphorically-minded when it is not, such as the parables.
If you examine early Christian depictions of Jesus, he is in many cases quite feminine in appearance, even to the extent of having breasts, and at the very least sexually ambiguous. I have no idea where that tradition originated, and it seems odd if it had no basis in even earlier tradition. And why would there be any such tradition? This was a time of male dominance, to the extreme. Examine ancient iconography. It’s rather mystifying. Conservative pastors have attacked this early Christian art– “NO, that is NOT Jesus! He was a MANLY man, a MAN’S man! Rough and tough and ready to rumble!” And so on. Maybe too much time has passed for us to understand ancient artistic conventions. Maybe every generation invents the Jesus they need, or want, to suit the unique character of their own world. Maybe an art historian has an explanation. And yet, I am reminded of a wonderful tale by Isaac Singer, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”. Or something like that. I think Streisand starred in a theater version…
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Okay, so I examined it. And what I found is, zero physical descriptions of Jesus in the NT, or in other early Christian literature, and the earliest visual depictions are from over half a millennia later, and vary one hell of a lot. The only thing they all have in common is that none of them are meant to be literal depictions. They all have something to say about the artists’ vision of who Jesus was, what he meant. So of course they vary.
I am not, however, finding any pictures of Jesus with boobs. Link, please?
Neuro, your mode of response is just too time-consuming. I have made my points, and I don’t think you’ve really made any–“It could have happened” isn’t a point. Anymore than “Maybe we’re in The Matrix and it’s all a computer-generated illusion so our body heat can power The Machine City!” is a point.
PS: Neo shall rise again. When they remake those movies.
...how could the word be God and with God and then be made flesh and dwell among us and Jesus be born of a woman without there being a virgin birth?
How indeed? The mistake you’re making is to look at the John’s gospel through a Trinitarian lens. John has the highest Christology in the NT but this is still not the Trinity as it came to be developed much much much later by the Church. To John, the Logos is an Emanation that flows from the divine nature and can be said to have developed a separate existence, like Wisdom is said to do in the OT. The mechanism by which this Emanation takes bodily form is anybody’s guess but for John it seems completely compatible with a normal human birth. In John 6:41-42 this is exactly the question that Jesus’ opponents are asking. How can you be divine and also human, the son of Joseph? Jesus conspicuously does not answer the question. John, through Jesus, had a perfect opportunity to discourse on the “virgin birth” in reply but he leaves the statement that Joseph was his father unchallenged. John (or whoever wrote the book) didn’t know about the doctrine of the Virgin Birth and isn’t much interested in the mechanics of Jesus’ birth.
Also, there is no real evidence that John knew the synoptics. To assume that he did shows a lack of appreciation of how isolated and diverse these First Century Christian communities were. Following Raymond Brown’s analysis, the Johannine community which produced the gospel and the letters was isolated and inward, feeling betrayed, having recently been kicked out of the synagogues. They weren’t reaching out to other Christian communities.
Lastly, the Christologies of the gospels are so different from one another and Paul that’s it’s totally bizarre how many people still think they’re all saying the same thing.
Hi Stephen I’m not a trinitarian (and I don’t even knowingly look through a tinitarian lens) and I fully agree with what you say about the development of tinitarianism – I’m a big fan of Bart’s book How Jesus became God – though I don’t accept hos own personal christological conclusion. I also never suggested John knew the synoptics and I agree that there are wildly different christologies amont NT authors – but we are talking about one small very human element of Christology – the virgin birth and that I am argiuing was a given. I may be wrong and am open to persuasion. I think your point about emanation is interesting, but very speculative and likewise your argument that John didn’t challenge his Pharisaical notion of Joseph being Jesus’s father and and didn’t have Jesus deny his father was Joseph and must therefore have beleived that Joseph was Jesus’s biological father. My own amateur speculation (for what it is worth :-)) is that there was no need for John to challenge this notion, or to mention the virgin birth, because everybody knew about the virgin birth claim and that Joseph was only Jesus’s adopted father – even the pharisees, which is partly why they were making the point and hinting Jesus was illegitimate. Also I postulate that Jesus didn’t deny Joseph being his father, because Joseph was his legal and adopted father. Likewise Paul did not need to mention the virgin birth – it is implicit and asumed in both Paul & John’s writings and didn’t need to be explicit. Prove me wrong! I am open to persuasion…
Again. 27 books in the NT. Two of them mention the virgin birth. Their accounts of it are not logically reconciliable, and involve believing too many things the historical record can’t support. Jesus himself never refers to it. If one believes a virgin can give birth, it still doesn’t make any sense.
It’s a myth. That Christians didn’t widely accept until well after everybody who had known Jesus was gone.
It was very likely the whisperings that Jesus was illegitimate that led to the virgin birth stories, not the other way around. It also provided justification for him being the Messiah, due to a misreading of Isaiah, and of course they both have him born in Bethlehem, but they can’t agree whether he was already living there, or if he had to go there for a nonsensical census that involves uprooting a large part of the population and taking a heavily pregnant woman on a long dangerous trip For what reason? Her ancestors didn’t come from there. She has family in Nazareth to care for her. It’s typical contrived writing–we have to get the baby born in Bethehem, but we know Jesus is from Nazareth. And the Messiah can’t have been born in Nazareth.
By the time John came along, nobody cared where Jews believed the Messiah would be born. John is frankly a bit bothered at the notion Jesus even had to be born in the normal way. Mary is just symbolically Jesus’ mother, and he just hands her over to ‘The Beloved Disciple’ from the cross, which of course did not happen. (Seriously, where did Mary even come from? There’s no mention of her coming to Jerusalem. By the time she heard about her son being crucified, it would have happened already. Did somebody text her, and she got an Uber?)
For Godspell, a rather long but interesting article on “Effeminate Christianity”. As for the boobs, I actually saw that (really) in a coffee table book on Christian iconography years ago. Too many years ago. One of the articles I referenced online mentions such a depiction, but I found this article and it also offers an explanation. The roots seem quite pagan, which should not surprise us.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Right, but that means those roots don’t go back to actual memories of Jesus, any more than the virgin birth does.
There are numerous images of Jesus as a blue-eyed blonde, as a black man, as a man from Southeast Asia. People all over the world have been fascinated by him, and everybody tends to see him on their own terms, which is fine for devotional purposes, but wrong from the POV of history. We can’t know what his sexual persuasion was (he clearly liked being around women, but that doesn’t rule out him being what we now call gay, or bisexual, or maybe he ). We can know that if he’d been some kind of hermaphrodite, there’d be some mention of it. In both Christian and anti-Christian literature.
You’re essentially trying to use two mythical conceptions of Jesus–of him being born without two humans having sex, and of him somehow transcending gender boundaries–to justify each other. Doesn’t work. And all humans, without exception, including those with hermaphroditic traits, are born because a man and a woman had sex. So was Jesus. Personally, I like the boring but workable explanation that Joseph and Mary jumped the gun while still just betrothed, it was a minor scandal, and some vague memories of gossip about it provided the basis for a really weird conflicting story that a huge number of people take as gospel now. Literally.
Robert said
Neurotheologian said
Robert said
What evidence of the supernatural are you speaking of?1. Consciousness – the fact that there is experience / mind at all (this is the biggest of all the elephants in the room and my favourite subject
). I would inlclude under consciousness: sensation & perception from (all 5 senses especially touch and vision), logical thought, conception, all shades emotion (especially pain and pleasure of various types), a sense of morality and conscience, a sense of justice, a sense of beauty and a sense of free will (which I could argue elsewhere is real and not illusory). Human consciousness, of course, is what makes us people. The fact that any of this exists, although clearly dependent, in every aspect, on brain function, cannot be explained by physical science (ie by ‘natural’ causes). Consciousness is therefore supernatural until proved otherwise (which I don’t believe it ever will). This is what the book I am writing will be principally about. …
Neurotheologian, I’m coming back to this aspect of the discussion for very coincidental reasons. I’ve been listening to the the last two installments of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 Space Odyssey books. Are you familiar with the series? I used to be a fan of science fiction as a boy and decided to listen to these books as nostalgia and wondering how the story progressed beyond the 2010 movie.
Anyway, without giving away any spoilers, a distinction is made there between intelligence and consciousness. You seem above to make intelligence only one aspect of consciousness. What do you think of artificial intelligence? The android Data and The Doctor in the Star Trek series also takes up the question of whether their forms of artificial intelligence achieved some form of consciousness or personhood. Can you please say more about how you understannd some of these issues?
Interesting and topical question – I have a chapter on it 🙂 Shall I reply here or shall we a) start a new topic or b) email about it? (my email is ** you do not have permission to see this link **)
Robert said Neurotheologian said Robert said……
Can’t possibly say how annoying that is.
Never was a huge fan of Arthur C. Clarke’s writing style. Or audiobooks. I can watch old STNG repeats endlessly, but Data seems more like a metaphor for someone with Asperger’s Syndrome or some related condition than a realistic depiction of an artificial intelligence. People with Asperger’s and autism definitely relate to him.
Obviously intelligence and consciousness are related, but to what extent can one exist without the other? Artificial intelligence, so far, seems to just be us creating extensions of our own intelligence, advanced tool use. It doesn’t exist on its own. And SF literature is full of reasons why we should consider keeping it that way.
Here is a rather off the wall idea– everything has some degree of consciousness. A carbon atom, an organic molecule composed of that carbon atom, and the sunflower composed of a complex of carbon atoms and organic molecules. This means that a gestalt is in some sense “real” and aware of its identity. The thought of a carbon atom, translated crudely into human terms, would be: “carbon atom” and would be very specific as to energy state, position, history, etc. The awareness would be very simple and yet highly specific, and would BE what the carbon atom IS. And so on. When we get to structures of sufficient complexity, a more complex consciousness emerges, a more complex sense of self emerges. In fact, I don’t think that is an original idea. Seems appealing because it solves the problem of consciousness and subjectivity by making these things universal. Just as you can build complex structures from simple components, you also build complex consciousness in the same process. Until you arrive at something that can ponder the subject. But it also leaves the question of what consciousness actually is unanswered. Well, you can’t have everything!
RICHWEN90 said
Here is a rather off the wall idea– everything has some degree of consciousness. A carbon atom, an organic molecule composed of that carbon atom, and the sunflower composed of a complex of carbon atoms and organic molecules. This means that a gestalt is in some sense “real” and aware of its identity. The thought of a carbon atom, translated crudely into human terms, would be: “carbon atom” and would be very specific as to energy state, position, history, etc. The awareness would be very simple and yet highly specific, and would BE what the carbon atom IS. And so on. When we get to structures of sufficient complexity, a more complex consciousness emerges, a more complex sense of self emerges. In fact, I don’t think that is an original idea. Seems appealing because it solves the problem of consciousness and subjectivity by making these things universal. Just as you can build complex structures from simple components, you also build complex consciousness in the same process. Until you arrive at something that can ponder the subject. But it also leaves the question of what consciousness actually is unanswered. Well, you can’t have everything!
It’s not original, but your thinking is sensible. The position you advance is called panpsychism. It has a recent reurgence of popularity. It does not solve the hard problem of consciousness but it solves the interaction problem (between the mental and the physical)
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