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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!duke!mcnc!ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist)
From: ka@hou3c.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: query: God=Father & Christ=Son
Message-ID: <160@hou3c.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Dec-83 22:56:43 EST
Article-I.D.: hou3c.160
Posted: Wed Dec 28 22:56:43 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Dec-83 00:40:42 EST
References: <484@sdcsla.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 50

I'll probably regret this, but here goes...

1) So why wasn't Christ mentioned earlier in the Bible?

The later sections of the Bible include references which may not
be very clear but which were believed to prophesy the coming of a
christ.  The terms "messiah" and "anointed one" are synonymous
with "christ", and "the Son of Man" is a code phrase referring to
the predicted messiah.

2) What was he doing before coming to earth?

If he was the Christ then he wasn't doing anything because he
hadn't been born yet.  Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, is quite
plain that Jesus was believed to be, and believed himself to be,
the Christ.  It gives little support to the notion that he
believed himself to be a deity.  Indeed, Judaism is a
monotheistic religion, which means that worshiping any deity
besides the god of the Hebrews is prohibited.  Had Jesus claimed
to be the literal son of God, he would have been guilty of the
crudest sort of heresy and could not have gained the following he
did.

7) Given the existence of God/Christ, is it unlikely that the
Father/Son relationship is a convenient fiction [like `good' and
`evil'] used to convey the closeness of Jesus to God?

You have hit the nail on the head.  That is the way the phrase
would have been interpreted by the Jews at the time of Christ.
Indeed, even today a person might refer to "our heavenly father"
without believing that they are literally a son of God.

4) Are God and Christ two separate individuals or two facets of
the same being?

Presumably the (non-Jewish) believers in Christianity elevated
Jesus to the stature of godhood; they were people who were
accustomed to polytheistic religions.  Zeus, for example, had
children all over the place with mortal women.  By the time the
last Gospel (John) was written, an attempt had been made to
harmonize the belief in the divinity of Jesus with the monotheism
of the Old Testament, and we are told:
        In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
        and the Word was God.
So there you have it:  "was with God" implies two distinct
beings, and "was God" states that Jesus and God are the same.  In
addition, Jesus is also the "Word".  (Anybody want to provide a
decent translation of the term?) If that doesn't satisfy all
factions, you can't blame the author for not trying!
                                Kenneth Almquist