Jesus:
From a historical perspective, there is just as much historical evidence of the existence of Jesus as there is of Plato, Aristotle, and some people have said George Washington. You can research that for yourself. With that being said, just as much as the bible forces you to have a view on it, so does Jesus. So again, I will ask what is your view on the person of Jesus, not necessarily the deity of Jesus?
From a historical perspective, there is just as much historical evidence of the existence of Jesus as there is of Plato, Aristotle, and some people have said George Washington. You can research that for yourself. With that being said, just as much as the bible forces you to have a view on it, so does Jesus. So again, I will ask what is your view on the person of Jesus, not necessarily the deity of Jesus?
C.S Lewis expressed his idea in more than one place, but the most definitive appears in Mere Christianity:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: Im ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
The other thing is Jesus’s Radical Self-Concept as the Divine Son of God. Radical critics deny that the historical Jesus thought of himself as the divine Son of God. They say that after Jesus’s death, the early church claimed that he had said these things, even though he hadn’t.
The big problem with this hypothesis is that it is inexplicable how monotheistic Jews could have attributed divinity to a man they had known, if he never claimed any such things himself. Monotheism is the heart of the Jewish religion, and it would have been blasphemous to say that a human being was God. Yet this is precisely what the earliest Christians did proclaim and believe about Jesus. Such a claim must have been rooted in Jesus’s own teaching.
And in fact, the majority of scholars do believe that among the historically authentic words of Jesus--these are the words in the gospels which the Jesus Seminar would print in red--among the historically authentic words of Jesus are claims that reveal his divine self-understanding.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: Im ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
The other thing is Jesus’s Radical Self-Concept as the Divine Son of God. Radical critics deny that the historical Jesus thought of himself as the divine Son of God. They say that after Jesus’s death, the early church claimed that he had said these things, even though he hadn’t.
The big problem with this hypothesis is that it is inexplicable how monotheistic Jews could have attributed divinity to a man they had known, if he never claimed any such things himself. Monotheism is the heart of the Jewish religion, and it would have been blasphemous to say that a human being was God. Yet this is precisely what the earliest Christians did proclaim and believe about Jesus. Such a claim must have been rooted in Jesus’s own teaching.
And in fact, the majority of scholars do believe that among the historically authentic words of Jesus--these are the words in the gospels which the Jesus Seminar would print in red--among the historically authentic words of Jesus are claims that reveal his divine self-understanding.
Lets talk about Jesus’s Miracles. Even the most sceptical critics cannot deny that the historical Jesus carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcism. Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most sceptical scholars this century has seen, wrote back in 1926:
Most of the miracle stories contained in the gospels are legendary or at least are dressed up with legends. But there can be no doubt that Jesus did such deeds, which were, in his and his contemporaries’ understanding, miracles, that is, deeds that were the result of supernatural, divine causality. Doubtless he healed the sick and cast out demons.
1 comment:
I don't like to be "that guy", but I had to address this canard:
"Jesus:
From a historical perspective, there is just as much historical evidence of the existence of Jesus as there is of Plato, Aristotle, and some people have said George Washington. You can research that for yourself. With that being said, just as much as the bible forces you to have a view on it, so does Jesus. So again, I will ask what is your view on the person of Jesus, not necessarily the deity of Jesus?"
First of all, there is no credible historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. I do not know who told you that there is, but this person has not done his homework. None of the Gospels is an eyewitness account, and Flavius Josephus was the only historian to have independently written a very short passage that mentions Jesus in passing.
Second, at the Council of Nicaea, Jesus' divinity was put to a vote. Before this time, all the different sects and cults of Christianity did not have a unified view of who Jesus was.
I could go on, but I'm not looking to be contrarian and it sounds like you're pretty into reading the English translation of scripture and the whole sola scriptura mode, so I don't see much point.
Anyway, hope that's not a downer or anything, I just find it hard not to correct factual errors (grammatical and otherwise, I let slide).
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