rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) (11/06/84)
>>Good Grief!!!!! Don't you people ever READ your gospel? I John, Jesus says >>"He who has seen me has seen the Father." How can that not be a claim to >>divinity? And in front of the Sanhedrin (I'm not sure whether in John or >>Matthew), when they ask him if he is the son of God, he says, "I am." >>Charley Wingate > Charley is correct, of course, about what I John says. However, I > don't think that it can be relied upon to the same degree that the > synoptic gospels can as a source of Jesus' actual words, particularly > in view of the fact that John was written, among other things, to "prove" > the divinity of Jesus. When someone has an axe to grind, as John did, > one is entitled to view what he says with skepticism. [BILL JEFFERYS] I just thought that this piece merited reiteration. It was my understanding that many Christian scholars do believe that if Jesus existed he may not have made his own claims to divinity, that those claims were made by those who followed in an effort to promote the religion that had formulated. With this in mind, is it reasonable to consider any of these accounts as infallible evidence? (I know: it's not, but you do anyway... ) -- Now I've lost my train of thought. I'll have to catch the bus of thought. Rich Rosen pyuxd!rlr
mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) (11/09/84)
In article <243@pyuxd.UUCP> rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) writes: >I just thought that this piece merited reiteration. It was my understanding >that many Christian scholars do believe that if Jesus existed he may not have >made his own claims to divinity, that those claims were made by those who >followed in an effort to promote the religion that had formulated. With this >in mind, is it reasonable to consider any of these accounts as infallible >evidence? (I know: it's not, but you do anyway... ) There is no infallible evidence. [There, got that out of my system.] As to the speculation that Jesus did not ever make any claims to divinity; this is an old and hotly disputed question. On the one hand, in much of the Gospels he appears to back away from such a claim. On the other, there are too many places where the claim is quite obvious and explicit. The evidence ends there; speculations such as "as a first century jew, he would never have thought of such a thing" are just that. The gospels are all that we have, and taken on face value, they do contain claims to divinity. Charley Wingate umcp-cs!mangoe Ubi caritas et amor, deus ibi est.