Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: djdaneh@pacbell.com (Dan'l DanehyOakes) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Missed Point Message-ID: Date: 3 Jan 91 09:01:15 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA Lines: 253 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article ka@felix.uucp (Kenneth Almquist) writes: >djo@pacbell.com (Dan'l DanehyOakes) writes: >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. Our beloved Moderator addressed this directly, and, I believe, pretty conclusively in his endnote to your article; he listed two uses of the term in the Gospels and better than a dozen in the Letters, not all Paul's; clearly your memory on this matter is not accurate. >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). David was referred to as _a_ son of God. Jesus said that we could all become sons of God; but He referred to Himself as _the_ Son of God. Further, it was clear that he meant this in a more substantial way than the reference to David when He said -- referring to Himself -- "The Son and the Father are one." Consider: ...he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove to alight upon him; and a voice from heaven was heard saying, This is my Son, my Beloved, on whom my favour rests. (Matthew 3:16) I am the way; I am the truth and I am life; no one comes to the Father except by me. If you knew me you would know my Father too. (John 14:6,7) Everything is entrusted to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son and those to whom the Son may choose to reveal him. (Matthew 11:27) And, most importantly, In very truth I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am. (John 8:59) This last is so important because "I am" refers to the answer God gave when Moses asked who he should tell the Israelites sent him: "I am that I am; tell them I Am sent you." That quote is from memory; I don't have a copy of the O.T. handy. But it is clear that in the terms of Judaea in the First century, if Jesus was "just a man," He was blaspheming the Name of God. As a result, those who were present picked up stones to throw at Him and kill Him. (They couldn't do it, though.) These are clear claims to a special relationship to the Father, and in the first and last cases to _identity_ with God. That pretty well destroys any claims that Jesus was "just claiming the special titles of the Messiah," I think. He claimed to be God and the son of God. As a secondary evidence: he went around forgiving people's sins. Who can do this? Answer: God. Now: Either He was God or He was not. If He was not, He either believed He was or He did not. These cases cover _all_ possibilities. If He was not God and did not believe that he was, then He was a liar and should not be revered as a great teacher. If was not God and He did believe that he was, then He was a madman and should not be revered as a great teacher. If He was God, then He was not "just a teacher." In _no_ case is it logically feasible to refer to Him as "just a great teacher." >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. Nobody claimed (at least not that I recall) that Jesus wasn't human. It's this nonsense about him being _just_ human we have to deal with. It doesn't wash. >Jesus probably saw himself as the messiah, which suggests that he did not >believe himself to be divine. Jesus certainly saw himself as the Messias, and said so even more often than he mentioned his divinity. >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. Care to support this claim? And to explain how it relates to "Before Abraham was, I am?" -- from the reaction of His hearers, they clearly didn't think He was speaking in the mode of a representative! >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. I get the impression you haven't read them in some time: or how did you miss the passages quoted above? >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. Yes, please reconstruct the biases of the authors. Reconstruct the biases of Matthew, in particular, a taxman, hated by his fellow Jews as a sort of first- century Quisling, enriching himself by serving the Romans: what sort of bias would he have? One which would lead him to drop everything and follow the first Messiah to come along? (Remember, there was no shortage of self-proclaimed Messiahs in the first century A.D.; Judaea was full of 'em.) Or one which would tend to make him disdain Messianic prophecy until it was, as it were, shoved up his nose? >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. Such a case would ignore plenty of early records. >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. Nonsense. They all agree on the basic facts. People who witness the same event produce wildly different testimony only minutes after the fact; there have been any number of experiments to confirm this. What might be suspicious would be if the Gospels agreed on every little detail: _then_ we might suspect a conspiracy to defraud. >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.) I'm not a Mormon, and I'm not going to call Joseph Smith a liar. But he's a single individual; we've got four, here, twice as many as required to convict an American citizen for treason (according to the Constitution). Though there were folks who apparently saw his tablets, he's the only one who saw the really important stuff. >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. But then, nobody is claiming divine intervention in the case of Socrates. >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. Really? There's an awful lot of Christian historians out there! (Or do you just wave your magic wand and define them as not being historians in this case _because_ they're Christians. After all, you said "thinking the way historians customarily think," which lets you define anyone who doesn't think the way you want them to out of existence. (Christian historians beware: Big Brother is watching, and does not approve.) >[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. Bushwah. However omnipotent God may be, two plus two is still four, because that's how the cardinal numbers and addition are defined. In other words, logic applies. > 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*.) Really? That's mondo fascinating, but it's bushwah again. Science has to cope with extremely rare events. (Nobody's ever seen a Big Bang.) How it copes with them varies from scientist to scientist, but an intelligent scientist, imho, is one who has learned not to reject them out-of-hand. For example, it used to be the universal opinion of scientists that stones do not fall from the sky (because, they explained, there _are_ no stones in the sky), and eyewitnesses to meteorite landings were dismissed out-of-hand as liars or madmen. Eventually, they had to admit they were wrong, of course. An intelligent scientist will take the lesson of this: because something is very rare, and not to be reproduced on demand under laboratory conditions, does not mean it never happens. Now, more functionally, I agree that these "beliefs" -- more properly, hypotheses -- are not scientific, but not because they don't fit into the ideologically correct views of Science. They are not scientific because they don't fit the definition of a scientific hypothesis, which is one for which an experiment can be designed which will de-verify it. Of course, the hypothesis of meteorite landings is not scientific in this sense, either; you can only set up a lot of observers and wait until a meteorite lands near one. If one does, you've verified the phenomenon, but if none does, you haven't de-verified it. Hypotheses like the Resurrection hypothesis (which I believe) and the the-world- was-created-in-4004-BC-as-if-it-had-always-been-here hypothesis (which I don't) are unscientific not because they are counter to science, but because they and science are irrelevant to each other. Science can't verify them; neither can it deverify them. Since both are defined as unique events, the laws concerning continuous events (like those of QM and thermodynamics) aren't applicable to them. Of course, they aren't applicable to the Big Bang, at which time these laws were set up, either. In summary: the Resurrection isn't scientific. But since nobody claims it _is_... SO WHAT? >I suspect that the NT authors had mistaken beliefs and that they didn't >accept the modern notion of the importance of literal truth. "I suspect." Either defend this "suspicion," or retract it; as a rhetorical tool, it's on a level with "I have in this envelope..." Welcome to 1984! Are you ready for the Third World War? You too will meet the Secret Police -- We'll draft you and jail your niece, so come quietly to Boot Camp. We'll shoot you dead, make you a man, but don't worry, it's for a _cause_... --Dead Kennedys "We've Got A Bigger Problem Now" The Roach