Originally posted by NemesioPlease see my thread, "Was Abe Lincoln President"
I am not going to go through all of them, but the quotations do not lead to the self-evident
conclusion that Jesus thought he was God.
Originally posted by kingdanwa
[b]Giving himself the same status as God the Father
i. Matthew 10:32-33-- 32 “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. 33 But who ...[text shortened]... e Scriptural self-evidence of Jesus's claiming that He was God is spurious indeed.
Nemesio
Originally posted by kingdanwaThe analogy does not hold, not one bit. It is downright silly and lazy to use the 'why
Please see my thread, "Was Abe Lincoln President"
don't we all be skeptical about all things' argument.
During the years before 1860/1, Lincoln, and many, many others, spoke about his wanting
to be President, as per documents in Lincoln's hand and in contemporary, rivaling sources
such as newspapers. By all reports, he went through the various prescribed
requirements in order to become President.
During the years of 1860-65, he issued documents, signed laws, and did the things that
Presidents do. Again, and here is the key, nobody -- not friends, enemies, nor rivaling
factions -- debated the notion that he was President.
After he died, people who know him hailed him as a great President. People wrote private
letters to each other, biographies, studies of the way he handled the war, and so forth.
Again, nobody -- neither Southerners nor Northerners, Republicans nor Democrats -- disagreed
that he was President.
This is the HUGE difference. The early followers of Christ debated about what precisely
he was. Was He a prophet? Was He the Messiah? Was He fully man? Fully God? Was
He God at all? Was He the adopted Son of God? Was Son of God equal status to God? &c &c
&c. This debate is of historical significance. This debate was not just occurring between
believers and non-believers. This debate was going on between different factions of very
fervant believers, people trying to understand what this person Jesus really was.
Your Bible quotations were the subject of all manner of debate 1800 years ago. To pretend that
they are self-evident simply because what we know as Orthodoxy 'won the battle' is foolish. The
Scriptures are demonstrably not conclusive, as I tried, simply to point out and as 200 years
of raging debate amongst early Christians make abundantly clear.
Nemesio
I think the point being demonstrated in the Lincoln thread is not that if one is skeptical of the Gospels, one should be skeptical of all historical records.
I think the point is that even though the Gospels don't tell of Jesus actually proclaiming in clear terms, "I am God," we should not conclude from that that he wasn't, anymore than we should conclude that Lincoln was not president because he never said "I am President."
The analogy appears to be simply a refutation of Christianity critics who say "But Jesus never said he was God." The analogy simply refutes this argument, since the critic would not apply the same disqualifying standard to Lincoln. The analogy doesn't endorse or require skepticism. It speaks only to a lack of historical figures' proclamations about their natures and the conclusions that one should not draw from such lacking.
It's a proof by contradiction that "But Jesus never said he was God" is a meritless refutation of Christianity, since we can accept Lincoln's presidency without him having explicity asserted it.
Originally posted by DoctorScribblesThe analogy still fails.
It's a proof by contradiction that "But Jesus never said he was God" is a meritless refutation of Christianity, since we can accept Lincoln's presidency without him having explicity asserted it.
Consider, Lincoln fulfilled all the requirements for the arbitrary title of 'President.' He won the
necessary votes from the people which gave him the votes of the electoral college. There was a
pre-established standard, the criteria of which he met in full.
By contrast, there were no such standards for a human's claiming that he was God. Indeed,
by the Jewish definition of Messiah, Jesus did not even fulfill this, because the Messiah was
expected to bring the Jewish people back into their homeland from the Diaspora (of course, people
'reinterpret' this literal understanding as bringing people to the metaphorical Israel) which, of
course didn't happen until 1948. It was only when the terms and conditions were defined post
facto about 'what makes a Messiah a true one' and 'what is a Son of God' and the establishment
of the creeds and so forth that people came to accept that Jesus was God 200 years after the fact
(and even still, there was no unanimity).
If we made a claim 'Jesus had green hair,' the burden of proof is on the claimant, right? Sure, the
Gospels don't say He didn't, but so what? We disbelieve this logically on its incredibility. Which is
intrinsically less credible, that person X had green hair or that he was God incarnate? Our standard
for believing in such a claim has to be very, very high. So, when people claim that He was God
and define the terms of it after the fact, well, what does that show? When the terms they
define are not even unequivocably supported by the very documents they use as support, we should
be ever the more skeptical.
No, we need to look at the contents of the biographical reports (in as much as we can consider
them reliable, given their late date and internal inconsistencies) and see if the conclusions draw
themselves.
Obviously, they do not, because, within 100 years of Jesus's death, there was no consensus upon
who (or what) He was. This should be telling to the scholar: that people within two or three
generations of Jesus's death -- people who claimed that Jesus was an important and central person
in their lives -- disagreed about whether He was God, Man, adopted or pre-ordained.
Nemesio
Originally posted by OmnislashIndeed Omni.
Well, if Jesus was not God then a lot of people are in a lot of trouble, as this eliminates any notion of salvation by grace.
Which is the very reason discussions like this rage so.
Working so hard to deny that Jesus ever existed, or that the historical account of what He said and did is somehow illegitimate is only important to those trying to avoid His claims.
The tricky thing here is that if we could be convinced that the whole 'Jesus thing' was just made up to control the masses, as some have ridiculously claimed, then of course none of it matters and we're all off scot-free. But failing to prove such a claim beyond a doubt, coming to admit that maybe the record is accurate, that Jesus was the Son of God (synonymous with being God, by the way), sent by God because we do actually need to be saved from our sin; well in that case there is nothing more important to grasp correctly!
Originally posted by Omnislash1. Only looking at it from within the Christian paradigm would this necessarily hold. That is, there is nothing logically prohibiting a non-Christian theist from relying on God’s grace, without any belief in the salvific nature of Jesus as the Christ—whatever the source or foundation for their beliefs.
Well, if Jesus was not God then a lot of people are in a lot of trouble, as this eliminates any notion of salvation by grace.
2. You are assuming the need for salvation, in the Christian sense, a priori, I think. If people just die—and whatever “happens” after that, happens—without any eternal reward/punishment, whatever—then salvation is not even an issue, whether by grace or works or some combination thereof. People would only be “in trouble,” as you put it, if (a) there is a need for salvation, and (b) the means of that salvation is withheld. If you don’t assume (a) to begin with, then (b) becomes meaningless.
Originally posted by NemesioThe analogy accomplishes its goal in a valid way.
The analogy still fails.
The claim under study, which the analogy is designed to refute, is the Christian critic's claim:
Jesus' failure to proclaim himself to be God is sufficient evidence to conclude that he wasn't God, or at least sufficient cause to doubt that he was God.
This can be formally abstracted to:
A person's failure to proclaim a certain nature for himself is sufficient evidence to conclude that that person does not have that nature, or at least sufficient cause to doubt that he has that nature.
The initiator of this thread makes that claim, albeit with less precision.
I believe that the extent of kingdanwa's effort is to show that this claim is false. Nothing more. He's not making claims about the credibility of the stories of Lincoln or Jesus. He's not saying that they should be analyzed in the same way. He is saying only that there is one way in which neither should be analyzed - namely, on the basis of the lack of self-proclamations.
To show that a claim of the form "A is sufficient for B" is false, one must simply show that there exists one instance of A without B. Here, one must show the existence of a person who has failed to proclaim his alleged nature, along with the absence of people who have sufficient cause to doubt that nature. (The fact that there is extra evidence to alleviate the doubt is irrelevant to demonstrating that the claim under study is false. That's what sufficiency is all about. Additionally, the fact that one sort of nature is well-defined and can be deduced from rules, while another sort of nature cannot does not affect the truth of the claim under study, and thus the analogy need not consider it.)
The analogy shows that belief in Lincoln's presidency satisfies this A,B pair, and thus it is a formal counterexample to the critic's claim. The conclusion of the argument by analogy is nothing more than that the claim under study is false. The conclusion asserts nothing about other factors pertaining to the credibility of either character's history. The analogy asserts no other similarities between the two cases. The analogy depends on no other similarities between the two cases.
If the claim that kingdwa is making were instead "You should believe that Jesus is God for the same reasons that you believe that Lincoln was President," then the analogy would fail to demonstrate that. In that scenario, your objections about other factors affecting the credibility of each story would be relevant. But I don't think that's his claim.
Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
If the claim that kingdwa is making were instead "You should believe that Jesus is God for the same reasons that you believe that Lincoln was President," then the analogy would fail to demonstrate that. In that scenario, your objections about other factors affecting the credibility of each story would be relevant. But I don't think that's his claim.
Gotcha. If I misunderstood what his analogy tried to demonstrate,
I am sorry. However, this thread, ostensibly, is about the claim 'Jesus
= God,' so let me address the concerns a person ought to have for
that.
Let's take a 'Weak' approach to it. Given that God Incarnate is an
extraordinary claim coming from anyone, we should approach such
claims with skepticism.
Thus, when Christians make the claim that Jesus = God, we should,
by nature, be skeptical of such a claim. We should ask, 'Why should
we believe such a thing?'
This is when we should turn to primary sources and ask, 'What do they
say?' However, we have no primary sources: nothing in Jesus's hand
(or even attributed to him). So we need to turn to secondary sources
and ask, 'What do they say?' The secondary sources are inconclusive:
there is no direct affirmation of the extraordinary claim. There are
passages which can be taken a multiplicity of ways, reaching a variety
of conclusions. Then we have to ask, 'How reliable are these
secondary sources?' We have to discern whether they are edited,
whether they are complete, how accurately they reflect the events they
purport, and whether the authors are biased.
Are the Secondary Sources edited: Absolutely. We have no
originals or these sources, only a series of fragments between the
2nd and 4th centuries. These fragments unequivocably demonstrate
that there was an editorial process. This process could be as textually
insignificant as correcting or making scribographical errors or as
significant as non-original additions to the substance (e.g., the woman
caught in adultery stuffed in St John's Gospel). They greater the
editorial content, the less we can rely that they reflect what happened
and the more we can assume they reflect what the editor(s) believed.
Are these sources complete? Quite possibly not. Consider the
biographical omissions that any one Gospel has with any of the others.
If we accept that every detail happened (despite the intercontradictions),
then we have to admit that every single Gospel is incomplete; the
Synoptics omited lots of stuff from St John and vice versa, and Sts
Luke and Matthew omited lots of stuff from each other (confer with the
Nativity accounts).
Their incompleteness suggests that we should hold the content of their
sources with a degree of literary concern. How does one determine
whether or not a source is reporting things accurately or completely?
Text criticism and redactive techniques. This, ultimately leads to the
conclusion that St Mark's Gospel is the oldest of the four (for it or a
version of it was used by the authors of Sts Matthew's and Luke's
Gospels). It also leads to a lost source ('Q'😉 containing essential
sayings of Jesus, which we can date as a penned source tentatively
around 50 CE. That such a source is credible is attested to by St
Thomas's Gospel which is a sayings Gospel with elements in it
believed to be from the same period (though, certainly, not all of it!).
Are the Secondary Sources biased? Of course they are! The writers
of these Gospels had a vested interest in projecting a Jesus amenable
to them. This is why the attitude of St Matthew's Jesus is vastly
different than that of St John's Jesus (for example). Does this bias
necessarily entail falsity? No, of course not. However, given that the
authors were biased in favor of Jesus, and given that no explicit
mention of Jesus's divinity is mentioned is suggestive (though not
fully conclusive).
So, given all of this, the support for the claim 'Jesus = God' rests upon
shaky literary grounds.
Now we can turn to our tertiary sources: What did the believers -- the
people who loved Jesus and His teachings dearly -- claim? In the first
200 years after Jesus, there is no consensus. All of these early
Christians had leaders in their communities, leaders who were familiar
with the contents of the various canonical (and extra-canonical) writings.
There was vehement argument about what precisely Jesus was: was He
God? Was He Man? Was He both? Was He before all? Was He the
first creation? Was He adopted?
This diversity of opinion -- all of which has very intriguing and exciting
theological support -- testifies to the notion that the Gospels are
inconclusive.
So, it comes down to a matter of faith, which is the point. Whether a
person believes that Jesus is God is just a matter of judgement, just
like the 3rd-century Christians make. It is not supported (nor denied)
by any of the secondary or tertiary sources -- sources that ought to
make such an important point clear. One cannot draw a conclusion
about the matter without suspending reason -- ignoring the results
of great study of the secondary sources from modern theologians as
well as the self-evident bickering about the point from 2nd/3rd-century
believers. If people want to believe it, I am totally comfortable with it,
but to assert that such a belief is the necessary -- or even most
reasonable -- conclusion from a study of the Christian Scriptures, is
downright disingenuous.
Nemesio
Nemesio: "One cannot draw a conclusion about the matter without suspending reason "
Nemesio: "If people want to believe it, I am totally comfortable with it, but to assert that such a belief is the necessary -- or even most
reasonable -- conclusion from a study of the Christian Scriptures, is
downright disingenuous."
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm
Cathechism of the Roman Catholic Church.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART ONE
THE PROFESSION OF FAITH
SECTION TWO
THE PROFESSION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
CHAPTER TWO
I BELIEVE IN JESUS CHRIST, THE ONLY SON OF GOD
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ARTICLE 2
"AND IN JESUS CHRIST, HIS ONLY SON, OUR LORD"
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p1s2c2a2.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
III. TRUE GOD AND TRUE MAN
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p122a3p1.htm#III
Originally posted by ivanhoeI have my own, can you cite the #s for me rather than webpages?
Nemesio: "If people want to believe it, I am totally comfortable with it, but to assert that such a belief is the necessary -- or even most
reasonable -- conclusion from a study of the Christian Scriptures, is
downright disingenuous."
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm
Cathechism of the Roman Catholic Church.
------------ ...[text shortened]... --
III. TRUE GOD AND TRUE MAN
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p122a3p1.htm#III
Nemesio
Originally posted by NemesioOverall, an excellent post. Gets my rec.
Originally posted by DoctorScribbles
[b]If the claim that kingdwa is making were instead "You should believe that Jesus is God for the same reasons that you believe that Lincoln was President," then the analogy would fail to demo ...[text shortened]... Christian Scriptures, is
downright disingenuous.
Nemesio[/b]
Two points I disagree on, however:
The secondary sources are inconclusive:
there is no direct affirmation of the extraordinary claim. There are
passages which can be taken a multiplicity of ways, reaching a variety
of conclusions.
Since the discussion seems to be limited to the Gospels, we are not considering such direct verses as Phil 2:6. Granted that many verses (e.g. Jn 10:30 - repeated in Jn 14 as well) do admit of multiple interpretations, though I think the "plainest" meaning is the divinity of Christ; verses like Jn 20:28 are unambiguous enough that it would take a stretch to interpret it in a manner that does not confirm the divinity of Christ.
Nevertheless, since we are treating the Gospels as literary documents, it makes sense to ask how the intended audience interpreted the matter. Nearly all the major Church Fathers I can think of (Ignatius, Iranaeus, Clement) - not to mention Paul - were very direct in their affirmation of the divinity of Christ.
http://www.catholic.com/library/Divinity_of_Chirst.asp
What did the believers -- the
people who loved Jesus and His teachings dearly -- claim? In the first
200 years after Jesus, there is no consensus. All of these early
Christians had leaders in their communities, leaders who were familiar
with the contents of the various canonical (and extra-canonical) writings.
There was vehement argument about what precisely Jesus was: was He
God? Was He Man? Was He both? Was He before all? Was He the
first creation? Was He adopted?
Actually, the first real [Christian] personality to contend the divinity of Christ was Paul of Samasota (3rd cent.). Arius and Arianism won't be around for another century. The Monophysites and Monothelites - even longer. So, unless you can produce evidence to the contrary, I would have to say that the assertion that there was no consensus on the matter of Christ's divinity (at the very least, on the matter that he was divine) in the first two centuries is false.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01707c.htm
Note: Of course, both my sources have a Catholic bias. Nevertheless, unless you're arguing that the sources have falsified data and quotations, they will have to be treated as reliable. I am open to counter-citations.
Originally posted by kingdanwaOk, I have read all of the post's and the responses are interesting. I have seen and heard all the common verses that "Trinitarians" use to defend the Trinity...however, they are based on tradition and error in understanding the scriptures.
[b]Giving himself the same status as God the Father
i. Matthew 10:32-33-- 32 “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.”
etc,etc..
Rather than go over each verse mentioned, I would like to offer a website that delves into each one of the verses you mentioned and then some. It would be too lengthy to post here.....the website is as follows..
http://www.biblicalunitarian.com/
With that said, I would like to say, first of all, that I am a Christian. Jesus Christ is Lord of my life and I believe his father is God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. Jesus Christ is my Redeemer, my substiute for my sins...I say this to show that I am not a Jehovah Witness, Mormon, etc.
The aforementioned website is very good at explaining the terminology, that is, the written Word of God....I would, for this forum, rather challenge the logic and common sense of the Trinity. Or should I say the illogic of it.
There are so many areas that don't fit with the bible, that I don't know where to start.
First, I would say that if God died on the cross, who raised Him up?
Romans 10:9
Who was Jesus praying to in the garden?Himself? If so, was he really dead?
If Jesus was and is God, did he feel the pain in the lashes he received?
How can I identify with a Godman?
In the book of Revelation, God is shown as ruling, Jesus is shown as ruling, but the Holy Spirit is not mentioned? I thought that the doctrine of the Trinity made them"co-equal"? Why did Jesus say
John 14:28
If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said, 'I am going to the Father,' for My Father is greater than I.
(NKJ)
How can the Father be greater if he is the father?...
This verse has to be troubling for Trinitarians...
1 Cor 15:25-27
25 For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet.
26 The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.
27 For "He has put all things under His feet." But when He says "all things are put under Him," it is evident that He who put all things under Him is excepted.
(NKJ)
Did you catch that?
"it is evident that He who put all things under Him is excepted."
That's talking about God...He is excepted..
Getting back to the Holy Spirit...has anyone ever noticed the beginning of the epistles? Most of then begin with greetings from Jesus Christ and the Father, but the Holy Spirit isn't mentioned. Dosent the HS greet us?
There are so many more questions and this is getting long...so think on these for now...
Originally posted by vistesdAgreed. As a non-christian theist, I certainly rely on God's grace without feeling the need of salvation in the Christian sense.
1. Only looking at it from within the Christian paradigm would this necessarily hold. That is, there is nothing logically prohibiting a non-Christian theist from relying on God’s grace, without any belief in the salvific nature of Jesus as the Christ—whatever the source or foundation for their beliefs.
2. You are assuming the need for salvation, ...[text shortened]... t salvation is withheld. If you don’t assume (a) to begin with, then (b) becomes meaningless.