Andrew has a fine post up on the Jesus g…
Andrew has a fine post up on the Jesus godhead.
Sully’s reader–
I’m interested in your posts on divinity. I very much enjoyed the article in the New Yorker that you linked to last week. I think it gets to the nub of the issue — that the Orthodox conception of Jesus holds up as long as you don’t think too much or learn too much about it.
I was fairly Orthodox (albeit liberal) christian for most of my nearly five decades, but after reading a host of scholarly literature, including Bart Ehrman and James Tabor, it’s hard to maintain that faith. The fact is that once you delve into the details, you will discover that the widely taught idea that “we believe what has been handed down from the first Christians” is plainly false. One has to seriously twist the meaning of the gospel writers in order to assert that they were teaching Jesus’ divinity. Clearly phrases such as “Son of God,” which we are taught refers to divinity, did not have the same meaning to the authors. Clearly, doctrines such as Jesus’ divinity and the resurrection immediately upon death were developed over long periods of time.
How does that change one’s beliefs? Well, in order to study history and maintain one’s beliefs, you either have to: 1) deny the facts; 2) develop some system of progressive revelation that encompasses God’s guiding hand over history; or 3) revert into some type of mysticism. None of those options are appealing to me.
I think that the divinity of Issa was a memetic selective advantage for xianity, like electing to become chosen. The original chosen people, the Jews, didnt proselytize and one had to be born jewish pretty much. So electing to become a christian automatically made one “chosen”.
Then christianity one-upped Judaism and said their messiah had already come, AND he was a god, and xianity was the ONE TRUE FAITH.
shams, 
Alex Cachinero-Gorman, 
null, and 3 others are discussing.
mirelle 1:50 pm on May 23, 2010 Permalink
I think the development of Christianity is a far more complex affair. I believe that the first two generations of Christians in Palestine were probably still fairly strict monotheists who thought of Jesus as a prophet or final prophet but not as the Son of God. They considered themselves Jews. However, there was intense conflict among the early believers when Paul began converting Gentiles without making them Jews or requiring his proselytes to follow Jewish laws. I also suspect that Paul also held a “higher” view of Jesus than the Jerusalem believers in the sense that he was well on his way to making Jesus a demigod or a type of intercessor. The final disaster for the Jerusalem Jesus believers was the Jewish War. While pockets of non-divine Jesus followers remained into the next century, the followers of Paul elaborated on his idea of Jesus as intercessor to the point where he was deified and made equal to God.
This is a process well beyond the scope of a comment, but the reason I go into it here is that I went through the reverse procedure, originally firmly and absolutely believing that Jesus was the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity, all the way down to where I now see him as a prophet and teacher. It was not an easy process.
Muffy 3:31 pm on May 23, 2010 Permalink
Just out of curiosity, when you say “suspect,” are you basing this on a “hunch” or do you have evidence for these views? I wouldn’t exaggerate Paul’s influence on Christology per se. His tension with Jewish Christians seem to be over the practice of Jewish laws of gentile converts, but I’m not aware of any evidence to suggest that they argued over the nature of Jesus. Neither Paul’s letters nor Acts of the Apostles suggest this was much of an issue.
Really, the New Testament writings themselves, including Paul’s letters, are rather vague when it comes to the concept of Jesus’ divinity. The Gospel of John’s Jesus is the most “Divine” but I don’t think it’s obvious even from that text that Jesus= God in the Nicean sense of the idea. The mere fact that there was so much vicious fighting over the idea for so long, even after the books of the New Testament were written and widely distributed, probably just goes to show how vague our earliest sources were on the topic of Jesus’ nature.
Interestingly, already by the time the Johannine epistles were being written (probably the very late 1st century), it appears that docetism (i.e. the idea that Jesus was only a spirit being and had no human form) was emerging as a threat to orthodoxy. When discussing early unorthodox branches of Christianity, we should not overlook the fact that many took an even more extreme view of Jesus’ divinity by denying his humanity entirely. The emerging Orthodox church did not just play a proactive role in emphasising Jesus’ divinity, but also his humanity. In fact, the development of the New Testament canon was probably more sparked by the Marcionite heresy than anything else, which likely took a rather docetic view of Jesus.
shams 4:28 pm on May 23, 2010 Permalink
In talking to a born-again friend of mine, she said the aramaic translation of Jesus declaring himself “the son of man” really meant he was the son of god.
she said that several times, it seems to be some sort of consensus belief.
Then I puckishly asked her why there had to be a second coming of the messiah, and pointed out that jews and muslims are still waiting for our messiahs.
she got very flustered and was unable to answer the question.
She was adamant that God and Allah are not the same entity.
shams 4:41 pm on May 23, 2010 Permalink
im very curious about when the doctrine of original sin emerged in christianity.
i wonder if original sin was synchronous with the jesus godhead.
Is any TI reader an expert?
mirelle 7:09 pm on May 23, 2010 Permalink
Muffy: I think it comes from reading New Testament scholars as well as my own close reading of the New Testament. When I compare the generally-accepted as Paul’s epistles with the epistle of James, I come away with the very distinct feeling that these two guys would have (at best) talked past each other if they’d met. Paul was very interested in establishing Jesus’ position vis-a-vis God, while James showed more interest in ethical concerns.
shams: It’s not Jewish and Jesus wouldn’t have known anything about it. Original sin is an outgrowth of the fight against gnosticism in the early Christian church. Augustine of Hippo was the first well-known proponent of the idea, which, he theorized, was spread by the sex act even in legal marriages. What a way to mess things up, IMHO.
shams 4:40 pm on May 23, 2010 Permalink
well….i was raised catholic and went to catholic school.
my family is so religious they keep an Infant of Prague under a glass bell in the foyer. i remember changing its cunning little liturgical vestements to match the Monseigneurs’ when the liturgical seasons changed.
but the …dreadful injustice of catholicism turned me into an atheist.
the whole concept of orignal sin….ick.
and then they tried to censor my reading in the third grade….i have burned with resentment ever since.
Starting to learn arabic put my feet on the path.
Allah told me to say the shahada….how could i refuse?
Becoming a muslim was the easiest thing i have ever done…i felt like i had been treading water my whole life….i was so tired.
I just let go and sank, and the Real bore me up.
i dont mean to sound arrogant….that Allah picked me somehow…i think He Who Pastures the Stars is always whispering say the shahada….just most people have too much signal attenuation and too low of a SNR to hear.
shams 4:45 pm on May 23, 2010 Permalink
i am not proselytizing, lawl, my nafs. i will never experience faana.
i am recounting my catholic to muslim experience for mirelle.
yours is better for you, mine is better for me.
Hanfi 1:21 am on May 24, 2010 Permalink
I just let go and sank, and the Real bore me up.
Hold me, I’m sinking!
shams 3:51 am on May 24, 2010 Permalink
in your dreams, lol.
null 1:25 am on May 24, 2010 Permalink
I don’t often agree with you shams, but that is quite beautiful. God bless you.
Alex Cachinero-Gorman 12:01 pm on May 27, 2010 Permalink
i would throw Badiou’s St Paul (http://www.amazon.com/Saint-Paul-Foundation-Universalism-Cultural/dp/0804744718) into the mix, as I think it bypasses a lot of the problems of facticity/veracity in crafting a faith that is not full of, shall we say, ‘cognitive failures’ (as spivak would say), but instead bears the weight of that acknowledgment, that cognitive failure is inevitable and the true power of faith lies elsewhere…
shams 1:45 pm on May 27, 2010 Permalink
Alex cher, the problem, as i have pointed out, not christian faith in the divinity of jesus.
The problem is christian insistance that the rest of us must believe in the jesus godhead too.