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Purgatory : What to Do With an Errant Jesus?

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  • Bishops FingerBishops Finger Shipmate
    edited June 2019
    All this seems to me to be what Her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I, is alleged to have referred to as 'a dispute over trifles'.

    BTW, @James Boswell II , I linked some while ago to one of many websites about 'Jewish Hyperbole', or deliberate exaggeration. Perhaps you'd care to comment on the possibility of Our Blessed Lord using this technique?

    Here's the link again:
    https://tentmaker.org/Biblematters/hyperbole.htm

    Incidentally, my user name here is Bishops Finger, so please refrain from shortening it. I am but an humble Digit, and not a fully-formed Episcopal person.
    :wink:
  • Sorry, Finger, but I am not all that impressed by your list of hyperboles. Sure, Jesus frequently spoke with intended exaggeration. We all know that. That doesn't mean, however, that he never spoke literally. See Dale C. Allison on that.

    But I am still waiting for Martin to reply to my last.
  • As I clearly stated, my user name is Bishops Finger. Not Bishop. Not Finger.
    :angry:

    It's not my list of hyperboles, but the thoughts of various scholars, and others. At least you've acknowledged that Jesus sometimes spoke with intended exaggeration, and I acknowledge, in my turn, that he sometimes spoke literally.

    The problem is, of course, in deciding which saying is literal, and which hyperbole. At a distance of 2000 years, and in a different culture/language situation, it doesn't get any easier, and, frankly, your guess is as good as mine.

    IMHO. YMMV.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    edited June 2019
    Toad, I would welcome your comparing my crud to Dan Brown's.
    Thanks for telling me what I should read or should have read, but I think my own website list is superior to yours. :smiley:

    To Lamb Chopped and Martin: I will soon try to get down to the brass tacks of what I have to say.

    Your website lists writers engaged in the Quest for the Historical Jesus. They don't, as far as I'm aware, deal with theology. The writers I list deal with eschatology, the very question that I thought you were discussing. If you want to know what the eschatology of the New Testament means for our time, read the Crucified God by Moltmann. Read the thoughts of men and women who write reflecting upon the destruction of Europe, the co-option of German Christians into the fascist project, the realisation that Germans, who considered themselves to be the most enlightened and advanced people on the planet, tried to exterminate the Jewish people on an industrial scale. Read the thoughts of those who grew up feeling complicit in the evil actions of their parents and then tried to reflect upon Christ and the New Testament in the light of their experiences.

    There may be theologians now who also write from the perspective of pain. I don't keep up with it. I'm just recommending stuff I know of that might appeal and be relevant to a continuing faith journey.



  • Guesses are not equally good, Bishops Finger. Scholarship trumps guesses.

    Toad, I genuinely admire your theological interests and applaud them, but the six scholars I listed all deal with an apocalyptic-eschatological oriented historical Jesus who "errantly" expected the end times to come soon. Note the title of this forum.

    Still waiting for Martin.
  • yeah but how is that new or different to what has been known about the gospels since the second century? That alleged mistake of Christ's has been chewed over and written about for centuries, surely!
  • Note the title of this forum.
    Purgatory?
    Sorry, Finger, but I am not all that impressed by your list of hyperboles. Sure, Jesus frequently spoke with intended exaggeration. We all know that. That doesn't mean, however, that he never spoke literally. See Dale C. Allison on that.
    And I am really not impressed by posts that basically respond to other shipmates with nothing more than "read this author who explains why you're wrong" or "read my website because it's too complicated to get into here."

  • Toad, actually, it first began to come to prominence as a scholarly discipline with the rise of Enlightenment thinking and the deists, and especially with the publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus', On the Intention of Jesus and His Disciples.

  • Guesses are not equally good, Bishops Finger. Scholarship trumps guesses.

    I disagree (in Christian Love™, of course). However scholarly we may be, we cannot (this side of Heaven, should such a state exist) KNOW.
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    yeah but how is that new or different to what has been known about the gospels since the second century? That alleged mistake of Christ's has been chewed over and written about for centuries, surely!

    Just so. Simon Toad is right, so how has all the scholarship of those intervening centuries helped?

  • Nick, I'm being pretty specific lately.

    Martin?
  • @James Boswell II , do remember that different Shipmates are in different time zones in different parts of the world!
    :wink:
  • ***so how has all the scholarship of those intervening centuries helped?***

    Because we live post Enlightenment, scholarship can help us decide whether there even was a Jesus or not, and if there was, what he may or may not still mean for us today.
  • Nick, I'm being pretty specific lately.
    I disagree. You just keep citing Dale C. Allison. Other than the letters in your first post, you have posted very little that explains your position and supports it with your thought process, or at the very least why you find authors like Dale C. Allison persuasive.

    Martin?
    Does it occur to you that Martin (who lives on the other side of the Atlantic) might have some other things to do than reply as quickly as you might like? Patience is a virtue.
  • As I said earlier, I intend soon to get down to the brass tacks of what I think. But I got distracted.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Hostly Ahem

    @James Boswell II as you ought to have gathered by now, shortening or altering a Shipmate’s username is seen as impolite.

    If you want to specify who you are addressing, begin typing @name and the helpful software will supply a list.

    Firenze, Purgatory Host
  • Noted. I'm new here.
  • Well, like you, @Nick Tamen , I'm rather weary of waiting for James Boswell II to actually give us any of his ideas, so I'm off to do some light and gentle gardening. This had the potential to be an interesting discussion, but, sadly, that doesn't appear to be happening.

    At the risk of being repetitive, I still maintain that, for all the scholarship, Enlightenment, websites, Allison, et al, we can't be 100% certain of what Jesus said, or 100% certain of what he meant if/when he said it.

    I think the word to describe our response to this is 'faith'...
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host
    Noted. I'm new here.
    One thing that is really helpful in a discussion is to use the quote function. It makes it crystal clear that you are quoting, and who you are quoting. If you don’t want to quote the whole of someone’s post (and/or nested quotes within that post) then you can edit what is quoted, though it is courteous to indicate if you have removed material. As a newcomer you may feel you want to practice before doing it for real, so I commend to you the BBCode Practice thread in Styx which exists for that purpose.
  • I think the word to describe our response to this is 'faith'...

    With all respect, I hope to respect your faith responses. I hope you will try to respect my desire for historical support for mine.
  • Toad, actually, it first began to come to prominence as a scholarly discipline with the rise of Enlightenment thinking and the deists, and especially with the publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus', On the Intention of Jesus and His Disciples.

    Why do you discount all the thinkers who came before this?
  • I don't. I deeply value and make use of numerous thinkers of the past, including the ancient past. But the discipline of modern historical examination largely arose with the Enlightenment.

  • yeah, but the result of those inquiries, that the NT texts are written with the anticipation of the coming of the Kingdom of God has been known for over 1000 years. Why the big fuss over this? It just doesn't seem new at all.
  • What is relatively new is that 19th century scholars developed methods of textual criticism (Q, Markan priority, etc.) which forced them to admit that it was the earliest believers in Jesus and Jesus himself who were expecting the Kingdom and the Day of Judgment to come right away, in their own generation. Previously, church authorities had always worked out ways of interpreting the relevant texts to make them say something else.
  • When I said church authorities I of course meant those later than the first century.

    And now I will go to the library and (try to) begin working on some of those brass tacks I have been promising.
  • Bloody hell. I'm going to have to bloody do some bloody research now, because I don't reckon you are right. Obviously they didn't apply nineteenth century ideas in the second or third centuries, but I reckon they bloody well thought about everything. I'd love to hear what the Orthodox thought of it, they were top thinkers back in the day, before they were even Orthodox. I've got some patristics somewhere but it is bloody tough stuff for a modern lad to follow. I'll take a squizz at my bookshelf. I'm a book hoarder. I'm sure I have a translation of Augustine's Confessions, but its the City of God that will be interesting. I think I have a penguin paperback edition.

    In any event, as you point out, the particular method you refer to is getting a bit passe. I, for example, first heard about the Jesus Seminar in an ecumenical theological college back in about 2003. Their methodology was, as I recall, raising eyebrows back then among academics who were their peers. The lecturer who most got into them was himself trying to use sociology and cultural studies to interpret the oldest NT texts. He's written a book on the Church at Corinth, and he's probably written more by now. I can see his face but his name escapes me. I came away from my year or so sitting at this bloke's feet with the idea that the Jesus Seminar had been thoroughly discredited, just like Spong. Mind you, academics can be cruel and highly competitive.

    You mention textual criticism and that brings to mind the genius of Tony Campbell, a Jesuit priest and prolific writer on the Old Testament. I was one of three students who got to spend two hours with him each week talking about the Deuteronomic History. He loved the old textual criticism, the yahwhist, the elohist, that's what I can remember. But of course it was all for naught if you didn't have a firm grasp of Hebrew. I remember at the end of the semester he said something like, "It's all bullshit you know. Fundamentally flawed. I've got a new theory and I'm publishing a book debunking this stuff soon." It was textual criticism still, but with an added Tony twist. He was such a likeable character and so absolutely in love with his topic that we all just toasted his success with our mugs of tea.

    Textual criticism is OK as a method, but you need heart. You can't step outside the circle of faith and expect to do legitimate biblical criticism. Otherwise its just words on paper, and we have plenty of those.

    I have meandered off the track remembering my happy days at Bible College. The Jesus Seminar was a real blast from the past, and took me back. Textual criticism for me always leads to Tony. They split a few years ago, the United Faculty of Theology. It was always a fraught marriage, with the Jesuits, Uniting Church and Trinity College for the Anglicans. I find it very sad, as a committed ecumenist. It was such a beautiful environment in which to study.
  • Your professor was right to give you the impression that the Jesus Seminar are largely discredited. See what I say about them on my website.

    And textual criticism CAN well be practiced by non believers -- Ehrman (atheist), Sanders (agnostic), Fredriksen and Levine (Jews), Aslan (Muslim) -- as well as believers -- Meier (Catholic), Allison (Protestant).

    But do you think we could now stick to talking about the historical Jesus?
  • A FEW BRASS TACKS
    Let’s begin by trying to establish a few Jesus “facts” that most historical researchers can agree on, for they are found in the earliest available strata of New Testament writings, Paul’s letters and/or Q and/or Mark. (I will simply state all this without giving evidence for it, because that has been abundantly done by others – and I fear that much of this will despite that already seem somewhat “dry”.)

    Yeshu (Jesus) was probably born in Nazareth of Galilee (not Bethlehem of Judea), the Jewish son of a construction worker tekton (Gk, often translated carpenter) named Yosef and a mother named Miryam. He had four brothers, Yakob (James), Yudah (Jude or Judas), Yoshe (Joses) and Shimon (Simon). He also had at least two sisters whose names and number are never mentioned.

    If anyone had asked the people of Nazareth if there was anything special about the family of Yosef, they might have said, No. Or, they might have remembered that Yosef did claim to be descended from King David, a claim he may have based either on archival evidence or simply on a family tradition.

    Davidic descent, however, was probably not considered all that important because David had produced numerous progeny and there may have been hundreds if not thousands of Jewish males in the time of Yosef who could claim descent one way or another from King David (such descent being passed on paternally.) Still, descent from David did suggest one significant possibility: In David’s lifetime, a prophet named Nathan had allegedly told him that a son of his body would always sit ruling from his throne. In other words, David was promised by Yahweh an eternal earthly kingdom(!), a promise which, however, came to an end with the defeat of Judah and their ruling class’s exile to Babylonia. After that, there were no more royal sons of David on the throne, and that held true through numerous subjugations to other nations, the Babylonians, Persians, Medes, Greeks (Ptolemies, then the Seleucids), and in Jesus’ day, the Romans.

    However, because it was believed that a divine promise could not simply be set aside, the expectation had emerged among the Jewish people that a future “son of David” would yet appear, one who would be anointed, not with the mere oil of a royal coronation, but with the Spirit of God itself, in order that he might free them from all their enemies and rule with righteousness over a reconstituted Israel. And that specially anointed (“messiah-ed”) one, it was believed, would ultimately rule the world. Moreover, according to Nathan, Yahweh had promised that “I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me.”

    Against that background, the boy Yeshu grew up in Nazareth.

    To be continued. (I'm hoping this will soon get more interesting.)
  • Martin54Martin54 Deckhand, Styx
    Now that's more like it, a bit of cut and thrust. Sorry I was on a train in Amsterdam at the time of your previous post and have been amusing my grandson with spinning brass coasters and taking drink whilst trying to pursuade my daughter that we can only make a difference collectively. I will respond Sir, as much as you need, but my initial response, PWD, is that you have to overcome the dialectical synthesis of the simplest explanation due, owed to the text with a superior and yet still Occamian, parsimonious, elegant antithesis.

    I have tae do bugger all.
  • Martin54Martin54 Deckhand, Styx
    You know, Martin... you’re alright

    Steady SirPalomides. Steady. Don't rush to judgment. I will turn and rend you yet.
  • Better stop drinking.
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    edited June 2019
    In re textual criticism--

    you might want to consider the difference between so-called "lower" and "higher" criticism. There are plenty of us who hold to the lower without having an ounce of confidence in the higher. I'm one.

    Oh, and I've got that tune running through my head too. Thanks for that--
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    Yeshu (Jesus) was probably born in Nazareth of Galilee (not Bethlehem of Judea),

    Question. If:

    a. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem;
    b. Birth in Bethlehem was considered so critical to a person's claim to being the Messiah that both Matthew and Luke were forced to pretend he was, with the latter inventing an entirely novel census process in order to explain it,

    Then how did Jesus convince himself that he was the Messiah? Surely he would have known he wasn't, because he was born in the wrong place? (Your view seems to be that he genuinely considered himself to be the Messiah, and was wrong.)
  • I'm one.

    I'm not.
    But "put him in the tomb until he rises."


  • He's done that. Do we need a second rising, or shall we put him in the breadpan as is and bake?
  • If:
    a. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem;
    and
    b. Birth in Bethlehem was considered so critical to a person's claim to being the Messiah that both Matthew and Luke were forced to pretend he was, with the latter inventing an entirely novel census process in order to explain it,

    Then how did Jesus convince himself that he was the Messiah? Surely he would have known he wasn't, because he was born in the wrong place. (Your view seems to be that he genuinely considered himself to be the Messiah, and was wrong.)
    _________________

    Excellent question, Ricardo. Let's perform a little thought experiment:

    Suppose an ancient questioner had said to Jesus,
    Q: "You can't be the Messiah, for you were born in Nazareth, and there's a prophecy that clearly states you had to be born in Bethlehem."

    YESHU: Does it say that? Quote it for me.

    Q: "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah...out of you will come forth for me one who will be ruler over Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from ancient times.."

    YESHU: That applies to me.

    Q: How so?

    YESHU: My ancestor David came out of Bethlehem and I, through my father Yosef, came forth from the loins of David. So I too came out of Bethlehem.
    ______________

    I'm not being cute. I really don't think the historical Jesus would have had any problem with that prophecy.
    ______________

    Note too John 7:41-44 where the charge that Jesus cannot be the Messiah because he is not from Bethlehem is not given any kind of answer.
  • Ricardus wrote: »
    (Your view seems to be that he genuinely considered himself to be the Messiah, and was wrong.)

    Ricardus [not Ricardo!] I am convinced that Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah, and that belief was based largely if not entirely on his experience at his baptism.

    Now, could he have been the Messiah and at the same time have erroneous expectations of the future? There my faith is of two minds.
    No. But Yes.

  • Modern scholarship rolls the stone of his (partial) irrelevance against his tomb.

    Is that stone somehow removed? Does he yet rise into relevance?
  • Is modern scholarship so united? That's new.
  • Serious question: do you think he’s dead? Not metaphorically or in the past, but right now, in the crassest physical sense?
  • Yes. But No.
  • I thought of a better line.

    Is modern scholarship so united? It must be the parousia.
  • Modern scholarship rolls the stone of his (partial) irrelevance against his tomb.

    Is that stone somehow removed? Does he yet rise into relevance?
    Meaning?
    Yes. But No.
    Meaning?

  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Someone--Albert Schweitzer?--said he didn't believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but he felt compelled to follow him anyway.
  • @Lamb Chopped

    Paul said Jesus is God's Yes. Could that be enough?
  • James Boswell IIJames Boswell II Shipmate
    edited June 2019
    @Nick Tamen

    Meaning?

    Go search.

    (Repaired user name. Names with spaces need to be enclosed with quotes after the @ symbol. BroJames Purg Host)
  • <tangent>My problem with What shall we do with the drunken sailor? running through my head is that it featured in an Only Connect last season and Victoria Coren Mitchell gave the explanation that it was based on the disappointment of a sailor's wife, lamenting that his drunkenness had led to erectile dysfunction. </tangent>
  • @Curiosity
    Go repent.
  • Martin54Martin54 Deckhand, Styx
    Re Bethlehem etc. If our Terran Incarnation event is true, He knew. He always knew His Father's presence. I don't know how. One can explore that. The real, objective, true sense of an utterly benign personal, communing, resonating Sentinel (2001) presence at least (beautifully explored in Greg Bear's Darwin's Children, in a materialist encountering God in her head). Mary would have told Him everything as he asked at least, if not from earliest bedtime stories. At 12 He knew His mission. And bowed His head to it for 18 years without breaking the surface. If He is the sole human-divine perichoresis, then the fragments, the crumbs from that table, are of Him, by the Spirit, tumbled through earthen vessels.

    A couple of small glasses of white Cotes du Rhone and Sancerre. No headache!
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    If:
    a. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem;
    and
    b. Birth in Bethlehem was considered so critical to a person's claim to being the Messiah that both Matthew and Luke were forced to pretend he was, with the latter inventing an entirely novel census process in order to explain it,

    Then how did Jesus convince himself that he was the Messiah? Surely he would have known he wasn't, because he was born in the wrong place. (Your view seems to be that he genuinely considered himself to be the Messiah, and was wrong.)
    _________________

    Excellent question, Ricardo. Let's perform a little thought experiment:

    Suppose an ancient questioner had said to Jesus,
    Q: "You can't be the Messiah, for you were born in Nazareth, and there's a prophecy that clearly states you had to be born in Bethlehem."

    YESHU: Does it say that? Quote it for me.

    Q: "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah...out of you will come forth for me one who will be ruler over Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from ancient times.."

    YESHU: That applies to me.

    Q: How so?

    YESHU: My ancestor David came out of Bethlehem and I, through my father Yosef, came forth from the loins of David. So I too came out of Bethlehem.
    ______________

    I'm not being cute. I really don't think the historical Jesus would have had any problem with that prophecy.
    ______________

    Note too John 7:41-44 where the charge that Jesus cannot be the Messiah because he is not from Bethlehem is not given any kind of answer.

    If the problem of Jesus' birth in Nazareth could be explained away so easily, then why did Luke in particular feel the need to invent the whole rigmarole about the census? Couldn't Luke just use the same argument?

    I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, I'm just sceptical about reconstructions that are based on speculation about what we think people would do.

    Here is my alternative explanation for the census narrative. Luke got the account of the journey to Bethlehem either directly or indirectly from Mary. Mary knew they were going to Bethlehem for some bureaucratic reason involving her husband, but didn't know what exactly, because a.) it was a long time ago, b.) she was very young at the time, c.) she had other things on her mind at the time, d.) Joseph sorted the details because it was his problem, not hers. Luke put together the best account he could from the garbled details available to him. Matthew, on the other hand, was a civil servant and familiar enough with Roman bureaucracy to know Luke's account made no sense, but didn't have a better explanation, so just stated baldly that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

    Why do I think this is plausible? Because if Luke's account was purely and intentionally fictional, I think he'd make something up that made a bit more sense. I write stories as well, and sometimes the hardest problem can be getting one character from A to B in order for C to happen when there's no sensible reason to them to be in B. But if I do need to make up a reason, I'll make up something that makes sense; if I need to get Joe from Glasgow to Pembroke, I'll invent a legacy or something, I won't say 'In 1948, when Neville Chamberlain was prime minister, a census went out through all the British Empire, and so Joe went to Pembroke because he was a descendant of Henry VII.'

    There, an explanation which is consistent both internally and with my subjective impressions of how people behave. And which is therefore, I submit, about as likely to be true as any other reconstruction that comes out of New Testament scholarship.
  • Martin54Martin54 Deckhand, Styx
    Bravo.
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