Jesus: abandon your families

[_quark]

Thanks Liz, for taking the time to compose a decent argument in opposition to the hypothesis of this thread. This is an interesting debate for sure.

[_Ceeboo]

Buffalo authored this? Go figure. :)

Rather than offer alternate conclusions/interpretations to what my friend Buffalo suggests, I will suggest the following as a Christian.


As a Christian, the central message of the entire New Testament is one that is deeply rooted in (and consistently teaches about) Enormous Love, Compassion, Kindness, Forgivness, Being Forgiven, Offering Forgiveness, Helping those in need, Feeding the hungry, Clothing the naked, and perhaps the greatest and most valuable gift of all, the tremendous Grace that we are all freely Given by the one, and only one, who can give this gift.



Peace,
Ceeboo

[_Dr. Shades]

This is more evidence, to me, that there was friction in Jesus's childhood due to Joseph's resentment over not being Jesus's natural father.

Let's face it, Jesus sure did harp on the whole "My Father" thing quite a bit. He seemeth to protest too much.

[_bcspace]

Buffalo authored this? Go figure. :)

Rather than offer alternate conclusions/interpretations to what my friend Buffalo suggests, I will suggest the following as a Christian.

As a Christian, the central message of the entire New Testament is one that is deeply rooted in (and consistently teaches about) Enormous Love, Compassion, Kindness, Forgivness, Being Forgiven, Offering Forgiveness, Helping those in need, Feeding the hungry, Clothing the naked, and perhaps the greatest and most valuable gift of all, the tremendous Grace that we are all freely Given by the one, and only one, who can give this gift.

More specifically what Jesus is saying is to not let family relationships get in the way of belief, knowledge, and practice of the Gospel which is more important. The family itself is intrinsically designed to facilitate the Gospel in people's lives. But when it doesn't, we should be willing to do what it takes to improve our spiritual condition. Maybe it means abandoning the family, but I think in most cases it means being respectful and patient with them when they are not in harmony with the gospel while also not allowing them to affect our standing wih the Lord.

[Guest]

I think that in order to really interpret the meaning of these passages, they need to be put back into context.

We also have to keep in mind that since the Bible has gone through many translations, phrasings have changed over time.

For example, when Jesus answered to his mother in the first segment regarding the wedding at Cana:

2Jesus also was invited to the marriage, with his disciples.
3When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."
4And Jesus said to her, "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come."
5His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."(John 2:1-5)

"Oh, woman, what have you to do with me" means "Mother, what do you need me to do?"

This is evident because in verse 5, the mother not only shows no offense to his comment, but also further instructs the sevants to "do whatever Jesus tells them to do."

Please excuse me disagreeing with you. But what you are doing is simply rewriting the passage so as to remove a difficulty in it. If you did that through the whole Bible you would end up with a pretty bland book: indeed one criticism of the Book of Mormon I have heard is that it is all far too easy to make sense of to be a real ancient text.

But John was written in Greek. And the Greek of the phrase you reinterpret has a definite meaning, which is not hard to decipher, even if it is at first sight rather strange:

τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί, γύναι;

The first word means 'what', the second is the word 'me' in the dative case (to me), the next word means 'and' and the one after that means 'to you (singular)', then you get the vocative form of 'woman' (O woman).

So the words mean literally 'what to me and to you, woman?'

Sounds bizarre. But to someone who knew the Old Testament, as the writer of John certainly did , this is a well-known pattern of speech with a familiar significance. See this online commentary, for instance:

(literally, “What to me and to you, woman?”) This phrase is a semiticism. The Hebrew expression in the Old Testament had two basic meanings:

(1) When one person was unjustly bothering another, the injured party could say “What to me and to you?” meaning, “What have I done to you that you should do this to me?” Examples: Judges 11:12, 2 Chr 35:21, 1 Kings 17:18.

(2) When someone was asked to get involved in a matter he felt was no business of his, he could say to the one asking him, “What to me and to you?” meaning, “That is your business, how am I involved?” Examples: 2 Kings 3:13, Hosea 14:8.

Meaning (1) implies hostility, meaning (2) merely disengagement. Meaning (2) is almost certainly to be understood here as better fitting the context (although some of the Greek Fathers took the remark as a rebuke to Mary; I feel such a rebuke is unlikely).

So we are stuck with a strange scene. Jesus at first tells his mother to get lost, it seems. "Stop bothering me, Mom!" But she is perversely confident that he will respond to her implied request, and that is just what he does. ("Okay, okay. I suppose it's the only way to get some peace ..")

Isn't that a lot more true to life about mother-son relationships than a smoothed out version of the story?

[_quark]

As a Christian, the central message of the entire New Testament is one that is deeply rooted in (and consistently teaches about) Enormous Love, Compassion, Kindness, Forgivness, Being Forgiven, Offering Forgiveness, Helping those in need, Feeding the hungry, Clothing the naked, and perhaps the greatest and most valuable gift of all, the tremendous Grace that we are all freely Given by the one, and only one, who can give this gift.

In my opinion, much of the beauty found in the New Testament comes to us in the form of interpretations of the believers. Thank you, Ceeboo.

[_Blixa]

Buffalo authored this? Go figure. :)

Yeah, I know, right? His source link spells out the limits of this "argument." Given that, I think Hoops and Jason have offered the best responses.

[_Yoda]

So we are stuck with a strange scene. Jesus at first tells his mother to get lost, it seems. "Stop bothering me, Mom!" But she is perversely confident that he will respond to her implied request, and that is just what he does. ("Okay, okay. I suppose it's the only way to get some peace ..")

Isn't that a lot more true to life about mother-son relationships than a smoothed out version of the story?

The bottom line, though, is even if your interpretation is correct, Jesus did as his mother asked...and Mary, knowing he son as well as most mothers know their sons, knew that when it came down to it, he WOULD do as she asked.

[_Chap]

So we are stuck with a strange scene. Jesus at first tells his mother to get lost, it seems. "Stop bothering me, Mom!" But she is perversely confident that he will respond to her implied request, and that is just what he does. ("Okay, okay. I suppose it's the only way to get some peace ..")

Isn't that a lot more true to life about mother-son relationships than a smoothed out version of the story?

The bottom line, though, is even if your interpretation is correct, Jesus did as his mother asked...and Mary, knowing he son as well as most mothers know their sons, knew that when it came down to it, he WOULD do as she asked.

Well, er ... that is what I sort of said, isn't it?

[_MrStakhanovite]

WTF is up with that website? I'm reading the guy's testimony, check this out:

Once I abandoned religion, I ventured into the world of ideas. "The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant excited my passion for classical philosophy for many years. I read extensively and played with their ideas from every angle. My breakthrough came through Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. It was from her, that I learned that most philosophers were overly abstract, authoritarian and divorced from reality.

And of course, later in life:

In what they call the Austrian School of Economics, the theory is founded on the psychology of human behavior as opposed to the mathematical theories of the Keynesian and Monetarist schools. In Austrian theory, the creation of wealth starts with individuals aiming to improve their lives through spontaneous market processes. It is too complex to be mathematically quantified.

Conversely, the other schools empower bureaucrats to manipulate the market economy according to the goals of government policy. This is a large topic on its own. Suffice to say that the politically popular theories of economics are based on intervention in the market process. By intervention, they distort the pricing mechanism and create volatile business cycles. If you wonder why the economy has been doing so badly, they are the cause.

This guy and Droopy would get along quite well.