Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!njin!paul.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: ka@felix.uucp (Kenneth Almquist) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Missed Point Message-ID: Date: 25 Dec 90 05:55:52 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 146 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu djo@pacbell.com (Dan'l DanehyOakes) writes: > IT IS LOGICALLY INFEASIBLE TO ACCEPT JESUS AS "JUST A TEACHER." > First, all we know about Him is what the Gospels say.... [The Gospels] > have him claiming, repeatedly, to be the Savior, the Son of God, the > Son of Man, etc. And there are problems with reading these as claims to divinity. I don't recall that the term "savior" appears in any of the Gospels. The term "son of God" could be metaphorical (I recall that there is a reference to David being a son of God) and would have been understood that way by the Jews of Jesus's time (because the Jewish version of monotheism doesn't allow anything besides God to be divine). "Son of Man" is a code phrase for the messiah, and the term "Christ" is greek for "messiah". Although there were various views on the nature of the messianic role, the messiah (literally "the annointed one," which in itself implies a human *called into* service) was not a divinity. Jesus probably saw himself as the messiah, which suggests that he did not believe himself to be divine. There are a number of passages in the Gospel of John which have Jesus claiming to be God. However, a representative was considered to be the person being represented in a very significant way. So these passages are consistent with the view that Jesus was a human representative of God. This issue is more complex than I have time to do justice to, but in summary, the Gospels do not unambiguously claim that Jesus was divine. > Now, it is possible to claim that these are later interpolations or > additions by scribes etc., but if you choose to do this, how can you > assume that any of his "brilliant ideas" were not such interpolations > or additions too? In other words: we either accept the Jesus of the > Gospels or forget Him entirely. There is another alternative: read the Gospels the way historians read any historical document and attempt to separate the true from the false. This involves reconstructing the biases and intentions of the author so that these can be allowed for in judging the document, which is particu- larly hard to do in the case of the Gospels because we know so little about the authors. It is possible to make a case that early Christians preserved many of the teachings of Jesus but gradually elevated him to the status of a divinity. I won't attempt to do this because (1) I would have to dig into the reference books just to locate the most relevant evidence for this theory, and (2) the theory addresses the mindset of early Christians, and therefore cannot be defended or dismissed just by looking at a few pieces of "relevant" evidence. > What evidence do we have for [the Resurrection]? > > Four eyewitness accounts, the Gospels, plus some further such in the "Gnostic > Gospels." The testimony of Paul who claimed to have met him "on the road to > Capernaum" long after the Crucifixion. Enough eyewitness accounts, in other > words, to establish in any court of law that an event (murder, etc.) took > place. Many events in history are accepted as truth on less than that (there > are, for example, only _two_ accounts of the death of Socrates, and both of > them are second-hand.) The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts. And note that courts of law permit cross examination. If a prosecutor put on four witnesses whose accounts differed as much as the gospels, any competent defense attorney would rip them to shreds. As for the testimony of Paul, consider the testimony of Joseph Smith (the founder of the Mormon Church). If you don't believe Smith's testimony, why should someone else believe Paul's testimony? (Substi- tute some other religious leader in place of Smith if you are a Mormon.) The accounts of the death of Socrates written by Xenophon and Plato were (I believe) written not too long after the event. Therefore they qualify as contemporary sources while the Gospels do not. But even if the Gospels had the same degree of credibility as the accounts of the trial of Socrates, it would not matter in this instance. Suppose an account said that Socrates died of drinking something other than hemlock, something that all the scientific tests made today indicate is nonpoisonous. No historian would set aside the evidence of science based upon this account. Instead, the historian would assume that the account, while possibly accurate in many places, was mistaken about the cause of death. Based upon the evidence of the Gospels, it is fairly certain that Jesus was crucified. But all scientific study of death indicates that once somebody dies, they don't come back to life[1]. Perhaps Jesus died on the cross, perhaps he didn't; this is something that must be decided (if possible) using the limited historical evidence available. But no historian, thinking the way historians customarily think, would even consider the possibility that Jesus died and came back to life. [1] Theories can be consistent without being scientific. In fact any theory can be made consistent with the evidence if you have an omnipotent god manipulating the evidence. Thus it is *consistent* to believe that the dead can come back to life but we don't observe it because God decided to make it happen only once, or to believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago but God made it appear much older. However, those beliefs are not *scientific*.) > If you want to claim that these witnesses were lying, you have to give > an explanation for it -- and then you have to give an explanation for > why we should take the word of such liars about the "teachings" of the > man they're already accused of lying about. > > In other words, logically, you have an all-or-nothing situation. I suspect that the NT authors had mistaken beliefs and that they didn't accept the modern notion of the importance of literal truth. Outright lies seem unlikely to me. In any case, there is no "all-or-nothing situation". While the gospels are poor historical sources (being written long after the fact by people with axes to grind), there is nothing illogical about accepting some gospel claims as highly probable while rejecting others as false. Kenneth Almquist [The shorter Gingrich lexicon lists the following occurences of "soter" (Greek for savior) referring to Christ: Lk 2:11, J 4:42, Ac 5:31, 13:23, Eph 5:23, Phil 3:20, 2 Tim 1:10, Tit 1:4, 2:13, 3:6, 1 J 4:14, 2 Pt 1:1, 11, 2:20, 3:2, 18. I am not clear on exactly what you are claiming. If it is simply that the description of Christ in the Gospels is not the same as later Christian theology, I don't see how there can be any debate. (The claim was never that later Christology was present directly in the NT. Rather it is supposed to provide a philosophyical framework to deal with questions that arose after NT times. However it is supposed to be consistent with the NT evidence.) If it is that all of the claims about Christ's special role are legendary accretions, there's probably nothing I can usefully say. What I think is clear is that all of the NT writers give Jesus a special role as savior (in the sense of dying for us) and as having in some way a special unity with God. Beyond this, of course the specific images and conceptualizations differ. By the way, I believe your idea of Jesus as a human representative of God can be made to be consistent with the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. Recall that it is not claimed that Jesus as a human being is divine. The orthodox doctrine is always careful to avoid mixing humanity and divinity. The claim is not that we are dealing with a superhuman human being. Rather, a human being is united with God in such a way that both the human and divine nature are preserved unchanged. The way this union happens is not defined. I believe a functional or representational model can be formulated that takes as its starting point the Hebrew concepts of identity of a person and his representative, and sharpens it somewhat to deal with the specific case of Christ. --clh]