Concerning Christianity and Politics

[Byzantine Mercenary]

Tuff and Byz, are you really interested in my personal beliefs? Well, I'll make it quick as I possibly can, and I'll try not to be tedious.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Most of the common beliefs of Christianity as it is practiced today were codified at the Council of Nicea. Up until that date, Christianity flourished in many different forms, including the gnostics, the Arianists and many, many others. Over the course of the last seventeen hundred years, almost every form of Christianity that doesn't conform with the Nicene Creed has been eliminated. Ancient texts turn up from time to time, and we're learning daily about the pre-Nicene Christians.

Trust me, this is actually important if you want to understand where I'm coming from.

After copious reading, my hypotheses concerning Joshua ben Joseph (or as the Greeks would say, "Jesus") are as follows: (And please remember, these are just my best guesses. I'm not saying they are correct, or that anybody else on God's green earth needs to believe them.)

• He was a real man, and not a fictional creation.
• Large parts of the Gospels are historically accurate.
• Jesus was believed to be a royal offspring by some of his contemporaries. (Technically, they believed he was a royal bastard.)
• When Jesus rose to prominence, his people expected him to lead a political revolution, and felt both shocked and betrayed when he proposed to lead a spiritual revolution instead. (If you really want to get into why I believe this, I can give you a reading list. I'm not going to go into it here -- too much of the discussion is in books. Actual books. That I can't link to. And I'm both too lazy and too suspicious of whether or not anybody cares to type passages into the Org.)
• Jesus' execution came as a culmination of both losing support from the Zealots who wanted a Son of David as a figurehead, and the notable bloody-mindedness of the governor, Pontius Pilate. (All of those reports about how Pilate didn't want to execute Jesus are most likely bunk. Check out Josephus or Philo of Alexandria for further details. The man was recalled to Rome from his governorship of Syria for being too brutal. Can you imagine how nasty a Roman provincial governor had to be to get nailed for brutality?)
• Accounts of Jesus doing miracles are probably accurate. I'm not going to even try to explain what I mean by this.
• Accounts of Jesus rising from the dead are probably bunk. Moreover, the entire "dying for our sins" theme has suspicious mirrorings of human sacrifice and the scapegoat ritual. I suspect that the death-to-cleanse-the-community theme is pagan in both inspiration and intent.

A couple of final points. I believe in Almighty God. I believe that Jesus was a real person with an astonishing message that still hasn't really sunk in after two thousand years. I believe that if Jesus had not lived and preached, the Christian Church would not have needed to invent him, since Jesus is a very inconvenient person to a religious bureaucracy. He talked way too much about the poor, said some wildly counter-intuitive things, and encouraged people to disobey their religious leaders when those leaders were behaving hypocritically. And then he'd turn around and encourage people to pay their taxes on time. Jesus was far too complex to be comfortable for people who want order and obedience.

There, I've laid out factors more than you really wanted to know about my personal beliefs. And for what it's worth, my priest is fully aware of my oddball views, and hasn't thrown me out yet.

If I have to accept a label (and I'm not sure I do) I'm probably be a pre-Nicean Christian. There would have been plenty of people at or before 325 AD who would have known exactly where I'm coming from.

[edit]

Just to respond quickly to another point someone raised:


Actually, it's not clear that Jesus claimed divinity. Don't make me break out my concordance to find the exact passages, but several times the "I am the son of God" is followed by "as are you all sons of God." And his discussion of his royal heritage, and "being on my father's business" has an alternative explanation, having to do with the sorts of situations temple women could get into with footloose royal sons. Philo of Alexandria believed that Jesus was literally royal, not spiritually, and his texts were written about a hundred years before the four Gospels.

References to Jesus' royal status are most abundant in the Gospel of Matthew. The statement "son of David" is used seven times in the Matthew (1:1, 9:27, 12:23, 15:22, 20:30, 21:9, 22:42). Only in Matthew does Jesus speak of "The throne of his glory" (19:28, 25:31). Matthew also spends a great deal of time trying to convince the Jewish people that Jesus was indeed the "King of the Jews" (27:29, 27:37).

[edit of the edit]

Apparently my oddball belief was not uncommon around the time of the founding of our nation. Avery Cardinal Dulles (bigwig Catholic theologian) wrote the following about Thomas Jefferson:

"In summary, then, Jefferson was a deist because he believed in one God, in divine providence, in the divine moral law, and in rewards and punishments after death; but did not believe in supernatural revelation. He was a Christian deist because he saw Christianity as the highest expression of natural religion and Jesus as an incomparably great moral teacher. He was not an orthodox Christian because he rejected, among other things, the doctrines that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the incarnate Son of God. Jefferson's religion is fairly typical of the American form of deism in his day."

i was definately very interested, this is an area im very keen on looking into myself, one question though, what about the prophecys for a messiah? do you still believe that jesus was the messiah?

[Lemur]

Wow Byz, you really want the whole enchilada. Okay, Lemur's nutball theology, part deux.

For some reason people find the idea of the end of the world comforting. I don't know why, but it's true. So in every culture and every religion, you get these doomsday prophecies, and they turn up regular as clockwork. Maybe folks just don't like to concieve of the world going on without them. Or maybe it's that people get flummoxed by everything wrong in the world and want to blow it all up. Whatever the reason, it seems to this lemur that almost all of the apocalyptic and millennial prophecies come out of this tendency to wish the world would end.

The Jewish prophecies of a messiah are various and varied, and I don't pay them much mind. I do not believe the historical Jesus was the messiah in any meaningful sense of the word. This does not make what he had to say any less important.

[Byzantine Mercenary]

im always interested in the reasons behind peoples beliefs, surely the messiah wasn't meant to end the world was he?

i agree with what you say about people being attracted to the whole doomsday idea and try and avoid putting to much weight on that stuff (i personnally think revalation was proably an alegory for the fall of rome rather then about the true end of the world) but the whole idea of the messiah wasn't that more about bringing freedom to the jews again?

[ICantSpellDawg]

Wow Byz, you really want the whole enchilada. Okay, Lemur's nutball theology, part deux.

For some reason people find the idea of the end of the world comforting. I don't know why, but it's true. So in every culture and every religion, you get these doomsday prophecies, and they turn up regular as clockwork. Maybe folks just don't like to concieve of the world going on without them. Or maybe it's that people get flummoxed by everything wrong in the world and want to blow it all up. Whatever the reason, it seems to this lemur that almost all of the apocalyptic and millennial prophecies come out of this tendency to wish the world would end.

The Jewish prophecies of a messiah are various and varied, and I don't pay them much mind. I do not believe the historical Jesus was the messiah in any meaningful sense of the word. This does not make what he had to say any less important.

I understand what pre-Nicene Christianity was and i understand what most people believe about Thomas Jefferson's personal beliefs to have been. In addition, i find that MANY intelligent people who call themselves christian (at least on long island) believe very similar things to you. I disbelieve that Jesus was literal royalty in any way other than thousands of his contemporaries could have been and, on occasion, i disbelieve in his historical existence at all as related to the gospels.

If you simply view him as a good teacher and a man like we all are, what gives his message any more clout 2000 years later? similar messages had been around before him and his life, if not for his divine sacrifice, was inconsequential. He was not needed if the church was going to re-vamp the entire message later anyway. Perhaps the church decided that if Jesus was simply a man, his message would have died out much sooner. They put a muzzle on any heresy that attempted to declaw the tenacious faith.

My quips are with people who cling to religion because they have nothing else, but do not recognize that they have simply eroded the underpinnings of their own faith in god by their disbelief in Jesus' divinity. When you use logic to understand faith, the only place you can get is further from faith. Still, others do this and totally ignore certain parts that don't add up logically, retaining the shell of a comforting religion, but with the guts completely pulled out (ie: a belief in a god or the importance of royal succession while disbelieving the things that are obviously untrue, such as Jesus' divinity)

Others believe that the catholic church today is the embodiment of what Christ would want on earth. They believe that the Church, as you believe Jesus was simply a man, is an organization of men with divine guidance who interprets God's (and the divine Jesus) message and holds the faith together.

I have issues with this as well, but i do not view their message as any less logical than your own. They, at least, are a community who comes to diplomatic conclusions about faith while you believe entirely what you'd like to believe by reading books on your own without, from what i understand, any sort of "peer review" (i mean that your conclusions are individual and at odds with the beliefs of those around you)

[Byzantine Mercenary]

faith is not always illogical, now i keep my faith for many reasons only one of which is the bible, a lot of the reason is when god has worked right here right now, the sort of evidence that only i can truly understand as only i have experienced it (don't go and write it of as my illogical perceptions i can assure you it is not) christianity is the only faith that says all you need to do for forgivness is ask the sort of rule that you would expect from a loving god.

I know your probably going to say, ''but what about the old testament?'', well isn't that part of why jesus came? to correct the pharsees interpretations of the old testament?

he also fulfills all that the messiah was meant to do

[Blodrast]

but second, at the end of the day, ALL of my moral code comes from my belief in Christ.

dammit, Don Corleone, where were you a couple of days ago when I was struggling to bring light to all these infidel unbelievers in the Church finds wonderful, terrible news thread ?

[doc_bean]

So wait, you're saying the people who actively go against the teachings of the Church are actually devout followers? Forgive me if I dont subscribe to that definition....maybe the author of the article might agree with you though.

The Chruch and the teachings of the Church represent an ideal, which we should strife to achieve, however it is not always possible to do so.

You're muddying the waters about divorce. No one would say that a person who had a legal divorce should be denied communion.

The Vatican does, I believe, othwise at least the belgian "branch" of the church does.

[rory_20_uk]

The Church represents a point of view, which of course is an ideal as it is what they espouse. Depending on the church people that fail to be all they should be are either killed, excommunicated, have to give money or merely have to repent.

Discussing Christ on the basis of what records we have based upon what was written hundreds of years later is shakey at best. Especially when so much has been removed from the bible (the Gospel according to Judas comes to mind).

DC, you ascribe all your morals to Christ, but odds are you'd be the same if you'd never heard of him.