Jesus identifies himself as a fallible prophet, not as a God, when he can’t perform miracles in his home town: “4 Jesus
said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.’ 5 And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them (Mark 6:4-5).”
And Jesus was certainly fallible. He prophesized that the Kingdom of God would come in the lifetime of his listeners, and it never did.
Was Jesus a God or a Prophet?
You ask : “Was Jesus a God or a Prophet?”
You point out : “He prophesized that the Kingdom of God would come in the lifetime of his listeners, and it never did.”
It seems to me that your observation above answers your question … and beyond if I may say so. It is easy and obvious to exclude that Jesus was a god. Less obvious but, in my view, it is equally easy to exclude he was a prophet because what his prophecy did not happen.
This leaves us with either ‘a false prophet’ or perhaps an over enthusiastic teacher wanting to uplift the spirits of his contemporay fellow Jews. Alternatively, perhaps he never said these words himself, the narratives put them into his mouth long after his death. Another possibility is that perhaps Jesus never existed. In fact I joined this excellent website to investigate this very question.
Lef said
You ask : “Was Jesus a God or a Prophet?”You point out : “He prophesized that the Kingdom of God would come in the lifetime of his listeners, and it never did.”
It seems to me that your observation above answers your question … and beyond if I may say so. It is easy and obvious to exclude that Jesus was a god. Less obvious but, in my view, it is equally easy to exclude he was a prophet because what his prophecy did not happen.
This leaves us with either ‘a false prophet’ or perhaps an over enthusiastic teacher wanting to uplift the spirits of his contemporay fellow Jews. Alternatively, perhaps he never said these words himself, the narratives put them into his mouth long after his death. Another possibility is that perhaps Jesus never existed. In fact I joined this excellent website to investigate this very question.
If you have leanings toward “Jesus mythicism” you’ve landed in hostile waters with this website. I think there is no reason to believe that the central events of the religion (1 The Crucifixion, 2 The Empty Tomb, 3 The Resurrection) have any historical memory to them. Paul says Jesus died, was buried, and was raised “according to scripture (1 Cor 15:3),” which could either mean that (i) Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection were fulfilling scripture, or (ii) that Paul discovered Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection through an allegorical reading of Hebrew scriptures. In either case Jesus’ crucifixion in Paul serves a theological function, so it can be doubted as to whether it can be traced back to the historical Jesus (it could have served a theological purpose for the first Christians to invent these events and attributing them to Jesus).
As for the gospels on the 1 Crucifixion, 2 Burial, and 3 Resurrection:
(1) The Crucifixion in Mark:
Likely the clearest Prophecy about Jesus is the entire 53rd chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah 53:3-7 is especially unmistakable: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”
The only thing is, as Spong points out, Isaiah wasn’t making a prophesy aboout Jesus. Mark was doing a haggadic midrash on Isaiah. So, Mark depicts Jesus as one who is despised and rejected, a man of sorrow acquainted with grief. He then describes Jesus as wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The Servant in Isaiah, like Jesus in Mark, is silent before his accusers. In Isaiah it says of the servant with his stripes we are healed, which Mark turned into the story of the scourging of Jesus. This is, in part, is where atonement theology comes from, but it would be silly to say II Isaiah was talking about atonement. The servant is numbered among the transgressors in Isaiah, so Jesus is crucified between two thieves. The Isaiah servant would make his grave with the rich, So Jesus is buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a person of means.
Then, as Dr. Robert Price says
The substructure for the crucifixion in chapter 15 is, as all recognize, Psalm 22, from which derive all the major details, including the implicit piercing of hands and feet (Mark 24//Psalm 22:16b), the dividing of his garments and casting lots for them (Mark 15:24//Psalm 22:18), the “wagging heads” of the mockers (Mark 15:20//Psalm 22:7), and of course the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34//Psalm 22:1). Matthew adds another quote, “He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him” (Matthew 7:43//Psalm 22:8), as well as a strong allusion (“for he said, ‘I am the son of God’” 27:43b) to Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20, which underlies the whole story anyway (Miller), “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life: for if the righteous man is God’s son he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture that we may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”
As for other details, Crossan points out that the darkness at noon comes from Amos 8:9, while the vinegar and gall come from Psalm 69:21. It is remarkable that Mark does anything but call attention to the scriptural basis for the crucifixion account. There is nothing said of scripture being fulfilled here. It is all simply presented as the events of Jesus’ execution. It is we who must ferret out the real sources of the story. This is quite different, e.g., in John, where explicit scripture citations are given, e.g., for Jesus’ legs not being broken to hasten his death (John 19:36), either Exodus 12:10, Numbers 9:12, or Psalm 34:19-20 (Crossan). Whence did Mark derive the tearing asunder of the Temple veil, from top to bottom (Mark 15:38)? Perhaps from the death of Hector in the Iliad (MacDonald). Hector dies forsaken by Zeus. The women of Troy watched from afar off (as the Galilean women do in Mark 15:40), and the whole of Troy mourned as if their city had already been destroyed “from top to bottom,” just as the ripping of the veil seems to be a portent of Jerusalem’s eventual doom.
And so we can at least propose there may not be any historical content with a fairly comprehensive exegetical reading of The Passion of the Christ in Mark.
Paul also doesn’t mention Pilate, so this may be a Markan invention.
(2) The Empty Tomb (Mark 16:1-8)
Price comments that Crossan and Miller and Miller note that the empty tomb narrative requires no source beyond Joshua (=Jesus, remember!) chapter 10. The five kings have fled from Joshua, taking refuge in the cave at Makkedah. When they are discovered, Joshua orders his men to “Roll great stones against the mouth of the cave and set men by it to guard them” (10:18). Once the mopping-up operation of the kings’ troops is finished, Joshua directs: “Open the mouth of the cave, and bring those five kings out to me from the cave” (10:22). “And afterward Joshua smote them and put them to death, and he hung them on five trees. And they hung upon the trees until evening; but at the time of the going down of the sun, Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees, and threw them into the cave where they had hidden themselves, and they set great stones against the mouth of the cave, which remain to this very day” (10:26-27). Observe that here it is “Jesus” who plays the role of Pilate, and that Mark needed only to reverse the order of the main narrative moments of this story. Joshua 10: first, stone rolled away and kings emerge alive; second, kings die; third, kings are crucified until sundown. Mark: Jesus as King of the Jews is crucified, where his body will hang till sundown; second, he dies; third, he emerges alive (Mark implies) from the tomb once the stone is rolled away.
The vigil of the mourning women likely reflects the women’s mourning cult of the dying and rising god, long familiar in Israel (Ezekiel 8:14, “Behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz;” Zechariah 12:11, “On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo;” Canticles 3:1-4, “I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him but found him not; I called him but he gave no answer,” etc.).
(3) The Resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 27:62-28:20)
Price argues Matthew had before him Mark’s empty tomb story and no other source except the Book of Daniel, from which he has embellished the Markan original at several points. (Matthew had already repaired to Daniel in his Pilate story, where the procurator declared, “I am innocent of the blood of this man,” Matthew 27:24b, which he derived from Susanna 46/Daniel 13:46 LXX: “I am innocent of the blood of this woman.”) (Crossan). First, Matthew has introduced guards at the tomb and has had the tomb sealed, a reflection of Nebuchadnezzer’s sealing the stone rolled to the door of the lion’s den with Daniel inside (6:17). Mark had a young man (perhaps an angel, but perhaps not) already in the open tomb when the women arrived. Matthew simply calls the character an angel and clothes him in a description reminiscent of the angel of Daniel chapter 10 (face like lightning, Daniel 10:6) and the Ancient of Days in Daniel chapter 7 (snowy white clothing, Daniel 7:9b). He rolls the stone aside. The guards faint and become as dead men, particular dead men, as a matter of fact, namely the guards who tossed Shadrach, Meschach, and Abed-nego into the fiery furnace in (Daniel 3:22).
To provide an appearance of the risen Jesus to the women at the tomb (something conspicuously absent from Mark), Matthew simply divides Mark’s young man into the angel and now Jesus himself, who has nothing more to say than a lame reiteration of the angel’s words. He appears again on a mountain in Galilee (Matthew 28:16) which he now says Jesus had earlier designated, though this is the first the reader learns of it. There he dispenses yet more Danielic pastiche: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” This is based on a conflation of two Greek versions of Daniel 7:14. In the LXX, “to him [the one like a son of man was] … given the rule… the authority of him [the Ancient of Days].” In Theodotion, he receives “authority to hold all in the heaven and upon the earth.” The charge to make all nations his disciples comes from Daniel 7:14, too: “that all people, nations, and languages should serve him” (Helms).
john76 said
Lef said
You ask : “Was Jesus a God or a Prophet?”You point out : “He prophesized that the Kingdom of God would come in the lifetime of his listeners, and it never did.”
It seems to me that your observation above answers your question … and beyond if I may say so. It is easy and obvious to exclude that Jesus was a god. Less obvious but, in my view, it is equally easy to exclude he was a prophet because what his prophecy did not happen.
This leaves us with either ‘a false prophet’ or perhaps an over enthusiastic teacher wanting to uplift the spirits of his contemporay fellow Jews. Alternatively, perhaps he never said these words himself, the narratives put them into his mouth long after his death. Another possibility is that perhaps Jesus never existed. In fact I joined this excellent website to investigate this very question.
If you have leanings toward “Jesus mythicism” you’ve landed in hostile waters with this website. I think there is no reason to believe that the central events of the religion (1 The Crucifixion, 2 The Empty Tomb, 3 The Resurrection) have any historical memory to them. Paul says Jesus died, was buried, and was raised “according to scripture (1 Cor 15:3),” which could either mean that (i) Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection were fulfilling scripture, or (ii) that Paul discovered Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection through an allegorical reading of Hebrew scriptures. In either case Jesus’ crucifixion in Paul serves a theological function, so it can be doubted as to whether it can be traced back to the historical Jesus (it could have served a theological purpose for the first Christians to invent these events and attributing them to Jesus).
As for the gospels on the 1 Crucifixion, 2 Burial, and 3 Resurrection:
(1) The Crucifixion in Mark:
Likely the clearest Prophecy about Jesus is the entire 53rd chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah 53:3-7 is especially unmistakable: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”
The only thing is, as Spong points out, Isaiah wasn’t making a prophesy aboout Jesus. Mark was doing a haggadic midrash on Isaiah. So, Mark depicts Jesus as one who is despised and rejected, a man of sorrow acquainted with grief. He then describes Jesus as wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The Servant in Isaiah, like Jesus in Mark, is silent before his accusers. In Isaiah it says of the servant with his stripes we are healed, which Mark turned into the story of the scourging of Jesus. This is, in part, is where atonement theology comes from, but it would be silly to say II Isaiah was talking about atonement. The servant is numbered among the transgressors in Isaiah, so Jesus is crucified between two thieves. The Isaiah servant would make his grave with the rich, So Jesus is buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a person of means.
Then, as Dr. Robert Price says
The substructure for the crucifixion in chapter 15 is, as all recognize, Psalm 22, from which derive all the major details, including the implicit piercing of hands and feet (Mark 24//Psalm 22:16b), the dividing of his garments and casting lots for them (Mark 15:24//Psalm 22:18), the “wagging heads” of the mockers (Mark 15:20//Psalm 22:7), and of course the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34//Psalm 22:1). Matthew adds another quote, “He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him” (Matthew 7:43//Psalm 22:8), as well as a strong allusion (“for he said, ‘I am the son of God’” 27:43b) to Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20, which underlies the whole story anyway (Miller), “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life: for if the righteous man is God’s son he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture that we may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”
As for other details, Crossan points out that the darkness at noon comes from Amos 8:9, while the vinegar and gall come from Psalm 69:21. It is remarkable that Mark does anything but call attention to the scriptural basis for the crucifixion account. There is nothing said of scripture being fulfilled here. It is all simply presented as the events of Jesus’ execution. It is we who must ferret out the real sources of the story. This is quite different, e.g., in John, where explicit scripture citations are given, e.g., for Jesus’ legs not being broken to hasten his death (John 19:36), either Exodus 12:10, Numbers 9:12, or Psalm 34:19-20 (Crossan). Whence did Mark derive the tearing asunder of the Temple veil, from top to bottom (Mark 15:38)? Perhaps from the death of Hector in the Iliad (MacDonald). Hector dies forsaken by Zeus. The women of Troy watched from afar off (as the Galilean women do in Mark 15:40), and the whole of Troy mourned as if their city had already been destroyed “from top to bottom,” just as the ripping of the veil seems to be a portent of Jerusalem’s eventual doom.
And so we can at least propose there may not be any historical content with a fairly comprehensive exegetical reading of The Passion of the Christ in Mark.
Paul also doesn’t mention Pilate, so this may be a Markan invention.
(2) The Empty Tomb (Mark 16:1-8)
Price comments that Crossan and Miller and Miller note that the empty tomb narrative requires no source beyond Joshua (=Jesus, remember!) chapter 10. The five kings have fled from Joshua, taking refuge in the cave at Makkedah. When they are discovered, Joshua orders his men to “Roll great stones against the mouth of the cave and set men by it to guard them” (10:18). Once the mopping-up operation of the kings’ troops is finished, Joshua directs: “Open the mouth of the cave, and bring those five kings out to me from the cave” (10:22). “And afterward Joshua smote them and put them to death, and he hung them on five trees. And they hung upon the trees until evening; but at the time of the going down of the sun, Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees, and threw them into the cave where they had hidden themselves, and they set great stones against the mouth of the cave, which remain to this very day” (10:26-27). Observe that here it is “Jesus” who plays the role of Pilate, and that Mark needed only to reverse the order of the main narrative moments of this story. Joshua 10: first, stone rolled away and kings emerge alive; second, kings die; third, kings are crucified until sundown. Mark: Jesus as King of the Jews is crucified, where his body will hang till sundown; second, he dies; third, he emerges alive (Mark implies) from the tomb once the stone is rolled away.
The vigil of the mourning women likely reflects the women’s mourning cult of the dying and rising god, long familiar in Israel (Ezekiel 8:14, “Behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz;” Zechariah 12:11, “On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo;” Canticles 3:1-4, “I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him but found him not; I called him but he gave no answer,” etc.).
(3) The Resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 27:62-28:20)
Price argues Matthew had before him Mark’s empty tomb story and no other source except the Book of Daniel, from which he has embellished the Markan original at several points. (Matthew had already repaired to Daniel in his Pilate story, where the procurator declared, “I am innocent of the blood of this man,” Matthew 27:24b, which he derived from Susanna 46/Daniel 13:46 LXX: “I am innocent of the blood of this woman.”) (Crossan). First, Matthew has introduced guards at the tomb and has had the tomb sealed, a reflection of Nebuchadnezzer’s sealing the stone rolled to the door of the lion’s den with Daniel inside (6:17). Mark had a young man (perhaps an angel, but perhaps not) already in the open tomb when the women arrived. Matthew simply calls the character an angel and clothes him in a description reminiscent of the angel of Daniel chapter 10 (face like lightning, Daniel 10:6) and the Ancient of Days in Daniel chapter 7 (snowy white clothing, Daniel 7:9b). He rolls the stone aside. The guards faint and become as dead men, particular dead men, as a matter of fact, namely the guards who tossed Shadrach, Meschach, and Abed-nego into the fiery furnace in (Daniel 3:22).
To provide an appearance of the risen Jesus to the women at the tomb (something conspicuously absent from Mark), Matthew simply divides Mark’s young man into the angel and now Jesus himself, who has nothing more to say than a lame reiteration of the angel’s words. He appears again on a mountain in Galilee (Matthew 28:16) which he now says Jesus had earlier designated, though this is the first the reader learns of it. There he dispenses yet more Danielic pastiche: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” This is based on a conflation of two Greek versions of Daniel 7:14. In the LXX, “to him [the one like a son of man was] … given the rule… the authority of him [the Ancient of Days].” In Theodotion, he receives “authority to hold all in the heaven and upon the earth.” The charge to make all nations his disciples comes from Daniel 7:14, too: “that all people, nations, and languages should serve him” (Helms).
As I said, Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection in Paul serve a theological function, so it can be doubted as to whether they can be traced back to the historical Jesus (because it could have served a theological purpose for the first Christians to invent these events and attribute them to Jesus). Biblical scholars commonly use this hermeneutic process to exclude attributing miracle stories to the historical Jesus.
John76 :
Thank you for the information provided.
It was only a few months ago that I discovered the Gospels had not been written immediately after Jesus’ death and that the actual writers were not the apostles themselves witnessing directly. I mention this so that you understand where I come from and I am certainly no scholar either.
I spoke of my discovery to a lady friend on Facebook and Skype. She shared with me a ton of information which tickled my curiosity. Her personal conclusion is that Christianity was established mmore by Paul than Jesus and it was never supposed to develop into a separately organised religion. Paul marketed the nascent sect so well – making it so easy to acquire converts to the sect – that it grew very fast. Then it had a lucky break in that it attracted the interest of the Roman emperor who saw an opportunity to control the masses via religion.
In conclusion, Christianity is a constructed religion which borrowed some concepts to claim a divine descendance from G-d Himself.
As I am puzzled that about 2 Billion people around the World are said to belong to this set of beliefs, I just wanted to know more about it and in particular wheher it was founded on facts or on myths. I have been reading avidly on the Internet for several weeks now and frankly the more I read and the more I find myself lost into abracadabra like mystical arguments and disputes. I had noticed the name of Bart D Ehrman. I found his blog, subscribed and I have been reading his take on all sorts of issues for at least 12 hours a day.
My impression of Bart is very positive, he is a learned man, a true scholar analysing each issue objectively. Now I know he does have ‘a point of view’ (Agnostic) but he strikes me as a reliable source of information. I shall make up my own mind as to what I conclude from the facts and opinions gleaned on this website.
All I want is to come closer to “the truth” … whatever it is.
Jesus is the LAST Prophet, he said so. Where does that leave Paul and his cronies?
“But be on guard I have told you ALL things beforehand.” Mark 13:23
In John’s gospel speaking to the Samaritan woman “The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming; when he comes, he will tell us all things. Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am he.” John 4:25-26
Since Jesus told us everything that we need to know what else is to be revealed? Nothing
As to the arrival of the kingdom of God, it arrived right on schedule, I’ll start a thread on that in a few days. The kingdom is much different than the O.T. , Paul or Rev imagined.
follow-j said
Since Jesus told us everything that we need to know what else is to be revealed? Nothing
How do you know Jesus said anything? We don’t even know who WROTE the Gospels and who ever they were they all had different agendas as has been illustrated by Bart time after time after time.
follow-j said
Dr Bart thinks that Jesus was a real person, unless he couldn’t speak, he did say quite a bitThere are differences in the gospels. Dr Bart and others have noted that some sayings are not genuine. The truth is in there. Check out the thread: The kingdom of God arrived on schedule.
But there’s no way to prove Jesus actually said anything found in any NT book. I didn’t say he didn’t exist. I very much believe he did, I just don’t think he was divine. You have words on a page attributed to Jesus. That’s all we know. We don’t even know if any of the authors heard Jesus speak or if they’re just repeating things they heard 3rd, 4th, 5th hand or much much greater. Those authors were writing 40+ years after the death of Jesus. As you’ll see in Bart’s new book memory is incredibly fallible, especially 40+ years after the fact. I have a book of Aesop’s Fables. Those are also words on a page. Does that mean that foxes and goats and ducks could speak 2,000 years ago? Authors can make the characters of their stories say whatever they want them to say.
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