Jesus certainly didn’t think people would be saddled with sickly diseased bodies in the Kingdom–if for no other reason than they would all have sufficient faith to heal themselves.  Immortality is a tough point to argue–and I suspect he didn’t think it all the way through–he had faith God knew what He was doing.  But I find it hard to believe he thought life would go on as before, only without bad people.  

The Kingdom would be on earth.  That, to me, is indisuptable.  So did it make sense that people would go on having children?  Knowing as he did that good people often have children who turn out wrong?  Every new birth may be a sheep or a goat.  (Not a metaphor he took literally).  To preserve the Kingdom, it must only be people chosen by God as worthy  And how then can the Kingdom continue if they all grow old and die?  is it to only enduring until the last of them die off?

A puzzle many before me have tried to solve.  As Utopian Socialism spawned many attempts at an ideal community (all of which ultimately failed), Christianity also saw many experiments in communal living.  The monastic orders, naturally–but those were sexually segregated (as Jesus’ original followers were not), for obvious reasons (nature still found a way, as history teaches us).  There were communities like the Shakers, who aspired to live together as brother and sister, and many children were born as a result–not enough to sustain them longterm.  Either they succeeded too well in restraining their appetites, and died out, or they failed and ultimately ended up not much different from those around them.  But all of did, all the same, correctly intuit what Jesus was asking of them.  Live as if the Kingdom is already here.  And in the Kingdom, there is neither gentile nor Jew, slave nor free–male nor female.  

The Gnostics, who many new age people adore now, despised nature in the main, taught that the purpose of faith was to overcome the flesh (some exceptions, it’s a catch-all term). I’ve never thought much of this teaching, and I don’t think that’s quite what Jesus meant, but they got the general outlines of it.  They could never have made a lasting institution, and so they died out as well.  

Life can’t help but keep changing, and seeking to perpetuate itself, the good and the bad of it (to evolution there is no good or bad, just successful or unsuccessful).  I don’t believe Jesus despised nature–God loves the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.  But they are true to their natures, and we are not.  We know death is coming for us, and that fear of mortality is perhaps the greatest cause of sin.  We should help each other, and sometimes we do, but other times our natural competitiveness makes us enemies, rivals.  Even among the disciples, he chides them for seeking greater status within that tiny band.  

Its all about defeating the worst in our natures, while enabling the best.  It would seem easier to do this if we were no longer in mortal bodies.  

Glad you enjoy the observations.  Sorry about all the typos and garbled phrasing.  Bit frazzled earlier.  I’d edit, but once somebody responds, that option lapses.  🙂

These are all good points, but again, we’re trying to look into the mind of a visionary apocalyptic thinker who believed God was about to come down and take charge.   He was neither the first nor the last, simply the most influential.  And I think that’s less for his supernatural claims than his emphasis on personal behavior towards others.  

I’d like to buy your argument, because I prefer it, would rather focus on Jesus’ moral ideas.  However, we see ample evidence Jesus believed all things were possible through faith–healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, curing mental illness (which he saw as demonic possession), raising the dead, feeding the multitudes, walking on water, even changing the weather.  Never mind if he could do these things, the stories exist because he taught his followers it was possible.  

And with the kind of faith he believed would exist in the Kingdom, you could move mountains.  So how would there be earthquakes and floods and plagues?  There wouldn’t.  We would be empowered to prevent all that.  The world was imperfect before because humans were imperfect.  Yes, good and evil people suffered the same afflictions, but that was before.  Jesus wasn’t a scientist.  (Of course, Marx thought he was, and he still talked like everything would be perfect once the Revolution came.)  

Much more recently, some of the plains Indians believed they could ward off bullets and make the white men disappear from their land through faith in the old ways, the old gods (though there may have been some influence there from the Old and New Testaments, that had been foisted upon them).  That didn’t work either.  Nor was it very influential, because there wasn’t much else behind it–it was like the more traditional Jewish apocalyptic belief that all that was wrong was unbelievers being in charge and people not following God’s commandments.  

Jesus saw it was more than that.  We weren’t living up to everything we were capable of.  We’re still not.  

This applies to basically everything in those times, however.  Less to documents purportedly written by someone, but Bart has gone into some detail about the problems entailed there–inaccurate copying and forgery.  And of course interpretation, which is a dodgy business even when you know for an absolute fact who said what (and that’s not just a problem for ancient history).  

To name just one example out of millions, Robbie Robertson is still alive, and giving interviews.  We still don’t know what “The Weight” is really about, whether he wrote the entire song himself (as he claims) or his Band mates helped (as they claimed), whether it was originally Annie or Fanny being told to take a load off, whether the singer was in Pennsylvania or Palestine, or whether Crazy Chester was a real person with a dog named Jack.  We never will, most likely.  Art and religion are both fraught with ambiguities, because they come from the same place within us.  

You can never get around the difficulties completely, but this isn’t really a blessed are the cheesmakers situation, because we’re not talking about speeches given to great multitudes (or from a cross).  He would have repeated the same ideas (with variations) many times to his followers, and he was, let’s just say, a man who could turn a phrase you’d remember a long time.  Otherwise we have to believe a man of no appreciable gifts attracted a host of organizational and then literary and theological geniuses (none of the latter ever saw him) to put words in his mouth.  They did put words in his mouth, but his original words, altered though they must have been, were the inspiration, the foundation, of everything that followed.  Otherwise nothing makes any sense.  

First of all, there’s the Doctrine of Dissimiliarity–Christianity came to believe many things that don’t match up at all well with statements attributed to Jesus.  If they were just putting words in his mouth, they’d put only the right words in his mouth.  The ones that wouldn’t conflict with the changes they were making to his ideas, in light of the fact that the Kingdom hadn’t come, and they were actually creating a new religion, something Jesus never aspired to do.

There are consistent themes that reflect an underlying sensibility, a vision that holds together, and makes sense if you consider it on its own terms (as you must do with any visionary, since they are basically all a bit crazy).  Does this vision make sense if it came from an imaginary person (whether based on a real one or not) advocating for ideas that don’t match up with much of what he’s saying?  

Of course they all had agendas, but the agendas were at odds in many ways.  Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, all have different and competing visions of who Jesus was and what he meant.  And there were many other interpretations that haven’t survived, we can be sure.  So how would they best convince people their version was the right one?  We have to assume they did use words Jesus was known to have spoken, perhaps parsing them a bit fine, certainly misquoting him at times, but they did have to work with the material at hand, which was the living memory of him.  A man probably nobody who met him was ever able to forget (maybe Pilate, but screw him).  And those who met him were compelled to talk about him, convey as best they could the reasons they had found him so compelling.  The oral tradition was a powerful one, leading to the creation of a literary tradition, that took great liberties with the material–but that’s how history is made.  And we’re discussing history.  

This happens with biographies of modern people as well, you know.  We argue vociferously over the true meanings and motives of people who are still here.  Maybe it gets clearer later on, when the smoke clears. Maybe it doesn’t.  

It’s much more than a bit of a complication, but it’s an unavoidable one, and I think we tend to hold Jesus to a higher standard than other historical figures of that time, precisely because he was turned into God.  But that’s no excuse.  All the more reason to behold the man.  

There’s basically no physical description of him, so I’d assume he was pretty average in that regard.  I don’t see how he could be traipsing all over the place on foot if he was physically weak.  

Lincoln was an exceptionally tall strong man, natural athlete, raised in a situation where it was very hard to gain more than a rudimentary education, but the hunger was there in him, and his stepmother encouraged that (the father, not so much).  So the physical took a back seat to the intellectual, and he found a way to gain the knowledge he hungered for, and achieved a destiny no one would have predicted, looking at him as a boy.  The circumstances of one’s birth are not as important as the nature one is born with, but Jesus would have needed to leave Nazareth to satisfy his nature.   

As to the spiritual stuff, I do not despise it in the least, but it’s not what we talk about in a historical context.  Jesus was a historical figure.  He was a real person, with real strengths and weaknesses.  We don’t need any explanation for his influence other than that he was an exceptional man.  That doesn’t mean there’s no force out there shaping us for ends we can scarcely imagine.  But it moves in mysterious ways.  To say the least.  

You know, I went back and reviewed that quote from Mark, and what comes before it–and it’s definitely a threat.  Also in Matthew, but there’s a significant difference, because in Mark he’s addressing both his disciples and a crowd of onlookers. In Matthew, only his disciples. 

So it makes a bit more sense in Mark. Jesus would know that in any large crowd of people, there would be many–if not most–who would not be found fit to enter the Kingdom, but would still live to see it–and wish they hadn’t.  Remember Gehenna.  They will taste death after they see the Son of Man (whoever you think that is, different thread) usher in the Kingdom, but where’s the punishment in that?  Before the Kingdom, everyone died.  It’s not a punishment.  Or if it is, it’s for the sin of Adam and Eve, not for any committed in one’s own right. 

The Kingdom is about reversing all the injustices and inequities of the world (Utopias often are about precisely that).  In the world that existed before, good and evil both tasted death, and the evil (which includes most rich people) might often have an easier death than the good (mostly poor people).  No afterlife (except for a very select few, like Elijah), so there was no punishment for an evil life, no reward for a good one.  Until now. 

In the Kingdom, the goats will be forced to see what they have given up by leading a self-centered existence, before that existence is brought to a fiery end.  The sheep will know eternal (or at least greatly extended) life in a good world, which Jesus does in fact promise to the listeners.  He who saves his life shall lose it, he who loses his life shall save it.  Meaning that those who live for others instead of themselves will become immortal, but those who live for the enjoyment of this life will perish for all time.  It’s not your soul you are saving but your bodily life–which makes no sense if you’re just going to live a short mortal lifespan then die like the goats, albeit less horribly.

Jesus is probably concerned that some of his disciples are in danger of not making it to the Kingdom–he’s just upbraided Peter for his lack of faith–but the certainty in his pronouncement–that some of the people hearing him will taste death when the Kingdom comes to bring life (and bring it more abundantly)–makes far more sense in the context of his addressing a large crowd.  Many called, few chosen.  He’s not sure all his disciples are worthy–he may not be sure he’s worthy–but he’s sure at least some of the people there are unrepentant sinners who will not reform their lives, and so will lose them in the very near future, when the Kingdom comes with power.

You have to admit, it tracks.  I don’t like it any more than you do, incidentally.  But while Jesus was wrong about the Kingdom’s imminence, I can’t honestly say I disagree with him about the scarcity of truly good people. 

It does a bit.  Because that’s not much of a threat if everybody’s going to die anyway, regardless of how they live. 

In your version he’s saying “You should live a life of self-denial, restraining your desires, doing good to others, even those who hate you, embracing voluntary poverty even if you’re already poor, and in a short time you will get to live about the same existence with the same amount of time you would have lived anyway, with all the same ailments and afflictions and disasters of the life you live now but you won’t die right away and there won’t be any mean people because they’ll all die and then they’ll be sorry, but not for very long.”

In my version, it’s all of that plus “You will live in a world without disease, physical infirmity, or natural catastrophes, for a very long time, possibly forever.”  It’s a better incentive plan, you must admit.  Honestly, if I were in that crowd, and I had my eye on my neighbor’s ass and possibly his wife’s ass, I might think “Eh, I wasn’t going to live that much longer anyway.” 

He who saves his life shall lose it, he that loses his life shall save it.  What did that mean to Jesus, if everybody was going to die?