1. Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be God. It was later Christians who made him a god. As a Jew, Jesus never would have proclaimed or believed in his own deity.
Which is my understanding too. The Christians were trying to one-up religion by coming up with something new and improved. Gospel citations allegedly claimed to be quotations from a wise Jewish Teacher (Jesus) do not come right out and say, "I AM GOD, so, bow down and worship me." Instead, however, I recognize the quoted teachings of Jesus as a demonstration to show that all humanity is one with the divine in which everyone and everything are universal manifestations coming from God.
Sometimes when I hear bits of the Bible or think about it, I wonder if "god" in the Bible is actually really more like a king, someone who is alive and walking the earth. I don't understand why God was so involved then and not now and sometimes I can imagine these prophets being told what to do by a ruler actually speaking to them on earth. Like Jonah and tha whale. I can't imagine my perspective of God telling someone to go somewhere let alone punishing him for not.
Ancient religions in general did not think of deities as being as transcendent as our concept of "God" today. I'm reminded of this classicist's remark that "to the polytheistic practitioner, the gods don’t exist outside of creation, or even outside of the community, but as very powerful — and sometimes inscrutable — members of the community." Of course Judaism was not polytheistic, but it evolved out of Canaanite polytheism and only gradually developed a more transcendent understanding of its deity. Many of the older books of the Hebrew Bible reflect the older perspective, perhaps most famously in Genesis 3:8, when Yahweh "walks" through the Garden of Eden.
At the time of Christianity's emergence, the more transcendent view of Yahweh was pretty well established, but Jews were still surrounded and influenced by polytheists, and of course most converts to Christianity after the first generation or two were gentiles and not Jews. In the ancient polytheistic worldview, to quote another remark by the same author, "the line between great humans and minor gods is blurry, and it is possible to cross that line." Hence Point #3 in Kishkumen's opening post.
If this is so, then my entire belief system is wrong. Why believe in a Bible associating the stories to a being I imagine that wasn't involved at all? The meaning of god now and then would be two entirely different things. It makes sense to me that the old testament in particular are actually humans or maybe even aliens (you never know) because the god of the old testament is very different to the god of the new testament and again different to what we know now. I don't believe Jesus is god at all. It goes against every fibre of my being. We often attend a evangelist church and they are big on the trinity.
2. In making Jesus a god, early Christians were following the trend of deifying rulers. At a time when the Roman emperor was considered a god and worshiped as one, Christians made their heroic founder a god. For him to be less than the Roman emperor was unacceptable. He had to be greater than the Roman emperor.
Moreover, the Christian Jesus who was said to ascend into heaven was to return and crush the Roman empire and the gods of the heathen. But that day never materialized.
Jesus did not come back and he never will come back.
In the Early Modern Period, Christian intellectuals who were disillusioned with the Catholic Church, sought to purge Christianity from the “corrupting pagan influences” that had caused the Church to depart from the truth. One can sympathize with their desire to recover some kind of pure Christianity that they could embrace without having to be Catholic, and naturally this faith would take a non-Catholic form. It would instead seek to establish itself on the text of the New Testament. But, as I hope you can see, this quest to recover earliest Christianity in its Jewish roots was doomed at the outset, for numerous reasons.
Here are a few:
1. Judaism was always too complicated to be reduced to some pure original form.
2. The Judaism of the Hellenistic world was very much influenced by Greek culture and thought, even as it tried to distinguish itself from that Hellenistic world.
3.........
5. Mormonism’s restored Christianity is another version of this Early Modern Myth of non-pagan Christianity. .......
6. A historically informed Christianity is one that accepts that it is a synthesis of Hellenic and Jewish culture and thought. There is no purely Jewish Christianity. There is no Christianity without Hellenism. Jesus carries the attributes of a Jewish prophet, sage, and Messianic figure, as well as the attributes of a Hellenic hero and god. By Late Antiquity, Jesus became the one official god of Rome, having pushed all the other gods out of the sanctioned pantheon, but he was still very much a Roman god.
Kiskumen, these excerpts clarified for me what you mean by Jesus is a Roman God. The part that means the most to me is the implication that there is no pure Christianity to return to or distill out. I wish to hold to the historically informed Christianity which you point to. I think that there is room for improvement and growth but it is a path forward only. Judaism is a developing culture with roots in the same "pagan" world as other religions. In fact pagan can only have a meaning, not Jewish Christian, as those developed their distinct understanding and practice. As you point out there was no moment of pure Christianity to return to.
I realize that a return to original Christianity has a strong rhetorical appeal and was used but the idea has its limitation (which you are pointing out). I think it is reasonable for people thinking that things had developed in Christianity that were problematic, not just pagan, then going back to look at earlier time could be a strategy to attempt clarification. I think that is a strong point for the reformation. A doggedly literal Biblicism seems to be a weak end.
Okay, but then for the sake of speaking to non-specialists, who probably only know Roman concepts of deity from books about mythology, I think it might be important to start out by clarifying that. So by calling Jesus a Roman god, you are not asserting that he differed from Pluto and Dionysius by no more than they differed from Apollo and Neptune. Instead, it seems, you're saying that "god" was really a very broad category in Roman minds, a category that included their Greek-derived pagan pantheon but that was by no means limited to them, or even to beings comparable to them.
I can see that you're still making a non-trivial assertion, if you are adding that many Romans would have been quite able to recognize the differences between Jupiter and Jesus and Julius Caesar, but would nonetheless not have seen those differences as all that important.
On that front, though, I'd wonder how the philosophical and gnostic-y traditions fit into the Roman attitude to gods. Wouldn't a keen Neoplatonist have been pretty reluctant to lump the Logos and Jupiter, let alone Julius Caesar, into the same category?
About Neoplatonists you are correct, to my understanding. They could be real hairsplitters when it came to the differences of status and divinity in their vision of the cosmos. That’s where Christian theologians learned their trade. Average people did not make such fine distinctions. Philosophers did.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
Kiskumen, these excerpts clarified for me what you mean by Jesus is a Roman God. The part that means the most to me is the implication that there is no pure Christianity to return to or distill out. I wish to hold to the historically informed Christianity which you point to. I think that there is room for improvement and growth but it is a path forward only. Judaism is a developing culture with roots in the same "pagan" world as other religions. In fact pagan can only have a meaning, not Jewish Christian, as those developed their distinct understanding and practice. As you point out there was no moment of pure Christianity to return to.
I realize that a return to original Christianity has a strong rhetorical appeal and was used but the idea has its limitation (which you are pointing out). I think it is reasonable for people thinking that things had developed in Christianity that were problematic, not just pagan, then going back to look at earlier time could be a strategy to attempt clarification. I think that is a strong point for the reformation. A doggedly literal Biblicism seems to be a weak end.
I agree, Huckelberry. History can help us see the past more clearly, but we can’t return to the past. We can move forward with the benefit of hindsight and memory.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
Which is my understanding too. The Christians were trying to one-up religion by coming up with something new and improved. Gospel citations allegedly claimed to be quotations from a wise Jewish Teacher (Jesus) do not come right out and say, "I AM GOD, so, bow down and worship me." Instead, however, I recognize the quoted teachings of Jesus as a demonstration to show that all humanity is one with the divine in which everyone and everything are universal manifestations coming from God.
It's complicated but also simple, I think.
I like your way of thinking about Jesus’ relationship with divinity.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
If this is so, then my entire belief system is wrong. Why believe in a Bible associating the stories to a being I imagine that wasn't involved at all? The meaning of god now and then would be two entirely different things. It makes sense to me that the old testament in particular are actually humans or maybe even aliens (you never know) because the god of the old testament is very different to the god of the new testament and again different to what we know now. I don't believe Jesus is god at all. It goes against every fibre of my being. We often attend a evangelist church and they are big on the trinity.
Some liberal Christians (and I assume liberal Jews as well) think of the Bible as representing stages in the evolution of people's understanding of divinity. They believe ancient people did receive revelation, but in terms that they could understand given the limitations of the worldviews imposed by the cultures they lived in, and that as those cultures evolved, so did the revelations they received. Not being an adherent of an Abrahamic religion, I do not subscribe to this view, but it certainly fits with the evidence better than fundamentalism does. I'm reminded of Mark S. Smith, who has written detailed hypotheses about how Jewish monotheism evolved from its Canaanite roots, yet is apparently a practicing Catholic. I don't know whether he subscribes to this viewpoint, but it's the only way I can think of that he could square his religion with his scholarship.
Of course, only you can decide what makes sense to you.
Last edited by Manetho on Sun Nov 12, 2023 4:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
…in the end there was a compromise called the Trinity, which made God three persons in one. The method for creating that compromise was a culturally pagan one. It never could have happened in Judaism proper.
I'd be interested if you could elaborate on this point a little. Is it that the reasoning by which the compromise was worked out was more in line with Greek philosophy than Jewish tradition?
The idea of the Trinity itself seems un-Jewish because it's not rigorously monotheistic, but, as someone not very familiar with Jewish theology of this period, I've recently learned about the trend of elevating the angel Metatron to the status of a "lesser Yahweh". Apparently the trend eventually (in late antiquity? The timeframe seems to be pretty uncertain) received a backlash, which may account for the legend of Elisha ben Abuyah's heresy, which sounds like an attack on those who exalted Metatron too much. Nothing new to you, I'm sure, but it's an interesting example of how hard it is to maintain rigorous monotheism.
Hey, here is an LDS cosmology question I was wondering about. Have LDS elders of the past commenced populating their planets with their horde of sister wives, or is everything on hold until the end of the upcoming millennium?
