Arius
Including material from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For Wikipedia hotlinks go online.
Arius (AD 256 - 336) was the founder of the Christian doctrine of Arianism, and born in Africa.
Arius was a priest in Alexandria who contended with his bishop,
Alexander over the identity of Christ. Alexander maintained that
Father and Son were essentially equal, coeternal, etc., but Arius
believed that "there was a time when the Son was not"
(cf
Chidester, Christianity, A Global History 2000 page 100).
Arius appears to have been a man of ascetic character, pure
morals, and decided convictions, and "the Arian message gained a wide
popular following. However most bishops sided with Alexander.
The Arian Controversy reached its height as Constantine came to
the throne. He had unified the Empire, and he wanted a unified
Church. He called the Council of Nicea in order to enforce a measure
of uniformity of belief. The bishops confirmed the deity of Christ
and made it a test of faith (which led to the doctrine of the
Trinity). Arius was declared a heretic.
From that time all orthodox Christians were expected to worship
Christ as God. However that settled things only in the minds of
conventional, authority-dependent people. Individuals continued (and
continue) to question the doctrine.
The trinity smacked too much of polytheism for Mohammed and
influenced him somewhat in his decision to found the movement of
Islam, now as populous a religion as Christianity.
The original Unitarianism in this country came to birth over the
question of the Trinity with the related doctrine of the deity of
Christ. Emerson and the others had a real affinity with Arians.
Authority
The pharisees believed in Moses, the lawgiver, the guide and arbiter of every issue. Now here comes Jesus, saying and doing things that seem to ignore (or directly contravene) Moses. Who gave him the right to do or say this? What is his authority? That's the question they asked him at Matthew 21:23.
What is your authority??? Is it money, or power, or pleasure, or hatred, or God? Or What?
Barnabas had gone from Antioch to get Paul and together they were ordained and commissioned by the church at Antioch to begin their missionary activities. However in Paul's absence Antioch, according to Jerome Murphy O'Connor (Paul, A Critical Life, pages 193ff), had reverted to a legalistic form of Christianity, requiring converts to be circumcised and to adopt other Jewish requirements.
Barnabas was a frequent companion of Paul on his missionary journeys: in fact he introduced Paul to missions, going to Tarsus to get him for the first missionary journey.
We first hear of Barnabas in Acts 4:36, when he is reported to have sold a piece of property and brought it and laid it at the disciples' feet. (In those days the disciples had all things in common.
Barnabas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For hot links go online.
Barnabas was an early Christian mentioned in the New Testament. The name means son of consolation. His actions and events are described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles
His name stands first on the list of prophets and teachers of the church at Antioch (Acts 13:1). Luke speaks of him as a "good man" (11:24). He was born of Jewish parents of the tribe of Levi. He was a native of Cyprus, where he had a possession of land (Acts 4:36, 37), which he sold. His personal appearance is supposed to have been dignified and commanding (Acts 14:11, 12). When Paul returned to Jerusalem after his conversion, Barnabas took him and introduced him to the apostles (9:27). They had probably been companions as students in the school of Gamaliel.
The prosperity of the church at Antioch led the apostles and brethren at Jerusalem to send Barnabas there to superintend the movement. He found the work so extensive and weighty that he went to Tarsus in search of Paul to assist him. Paul returned with him to Antioch and laboured with him for a whole year (Acts 11:25, 26). The two were at the end of this period sent up to Jerusalem with the contributions the church at Antioch had made for the poorer brethren there (11:28-30).
Shortly after they returned, bringing John Mark with them, they were appointed as missionaries to Asia Minor, and in this capacity visited Cyprus and some of the principal cities of Asia Minor (Acts 13:14). Returning from this first missionary journey to Antioch, they were again sent up to Jerusalem to consult with the church there regarding the relation of Gentiles to the church (Acts 15:2: Gal. 2:1). This matter having been settled, they returned again to Antioch, bringing the decree of the council as the rule by which Gentiles were to be admitted into the church.
When about to set forth on a second missionary journey, a dispute arose between Paul and Barnabas as to the propriety of taking John Mark with them again. The dispute ended by Paul and Barnabas taking separate routes. Paul took Silas as his companion, and journeyed through Syria and Cilicia; while Barnabas took his nephew John Mark, and visited Cyprus (Acts 15:36-41). Barnabas is not again mentioned by Luke in the Acts.
Feast day: June 11.
Initial text from Easton's Bible Dictionary, 1897 -- Please update as needed
Text to integrate from Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religion:
Barnabas was the companion of the Apostle Paul, himself called an apostle in Acts xiv, 4, 14. According to Acts iv, 36, he was a Levite born in Cyprus, his original name was Joses, and he was surnamed by the apostles (in Aramaic) Barnebhuah, which is explained by the Greek huios parakleseos ("son of exhortation," not " of consolation," cf. Acts xi, 23) and denotes a prophet in the primitive Christian sense of the word (cf. Acts xiii, 1; xv, 32). Like his aunt, the mother of John Mark (Col. iv, 10), Barnabas seems to have been living in Jerusalem, and he sold his property, after having joined the Christian congregation in the first year of its foundation, for the benefit of needy coreligionists (Acts iv, 37; xii, 12). He soon occupied a leading place in the community.
New Testament History
Of his activity the Book of Acts records that he introduced the still distrusted Saul to the Jerusalem church after his return from Damascus (ix, 27). When the news of the spread of Christianity to Antioch came to Jerusalem Barnabas was sent to the former city (xi, 22-24). From Antioch he went to Tarsus to meet Paul and with him worked for an entire year in the Antioch church (xi, 23-26). Both were sent to Jerusalem with a contribution for the Christians of Judea (44 A.D.) and returned to Antioch with John Mark (xi, 27-30; xii, 25). The three were sent on a missionary journey to Cyprus, Pamphylia, Pisidia, and Lycaonia (xiii, 1 sqq.). In the narrative of this journey Paul occupies the first place from the point where the name " Paul " is substituted for " Saul " (xiii, 9). Instead of " Barnabas and Saul " as heretofore (xi, 30; xii, 25; xiii, 2, 7) " Paul and Barnabas " is now read (xiii, 43, 46, 50; xiv, 20; xv, 2, 22, 35); only in xiv, 14 and xv, 12, 25 does Barnabas again occupy the first place, in the first passage with recollection of xiv, 12, in the last two, because Barnabas stood in closer relation to the Jerusalem church than Paul. Paul appears as the preaching missionary (xiii, 16; xiv, 8-9, 19-20), whence the Lystrans regarded him as Hermes, Barnabas as Zeus (xiv, 12). After this journey follows a long stay in Antioch (xiv, 26-28) until they became involved in a controversy with the Judaizers and were sent to the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem, where the matter was settled (xv, 1-29; Gal. ii, 1-10; see APOSTOLIC COUNCIL AT JERUSALEM). According to Gal. ii, 9-10 Barnabas was included with Paul in the agreement made between them, on the one hand, and James, Peter, and John, on the other, that the two former should in the future preach to the heathen, not forgetting the poor at Jerusalem. Having returned to Antioch and spent some time there (xv, 35), Paul asked Barnabas to accompany him on another journey (xv, 36). Barnabas wished to take John Mark along, but Paul did not, as he had left them on the former journey (xv, 37-38). An unhappy dissension separated the two apostles; Barnabas went with Mark to Cyprus (xv, 39) and is not again mentioned in the Acts; but from Gal. ii, 13 a little more is learned about him, and his weakness under the taunts of the Judaizers is evident; and from I Cor. ix, 6 it may be gathered that he continued to labor as missionary.
Other History
According to other sources, Barnabas was later brought to Rome and Alexandria. The " Clementine Recognitions " (i, 7) make him preach in Rome during Christ's lifetime, and Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, ii, 20) makes him one of the seventy disciples. Not older than the third century is the tradition of the later activity and martyrdom of Barnabas in Cyprus, where his remains are said to have been discovered under the emperor Zeno (474-491). The Cypriot church claimed Barnabas as its founder in order to rid itself of the supremacy of the Antiochian bishop, just as did the Milan church afterward, to become more independent of Rome. In this connection, the question whether Barnabas was an apostle became important, and was often treated during the Middle Ages (cf. C. J. Hefele, Das Sendschreiben des Apostels Barnabas, Tubingen, 1840; O. Braunsberger, Der Apostel Barnabas, Mainz, 1876). The statements as to the year of Barnabas's death are discrepant and untrustworthy.
Alleged Writings
Tertullian and other Western writers regard Barnabas as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. This may have been the Roman tradition-- which Tertullian usually follows-- and in Rome the epistle may have had its first readers. But the tradition has weighty considerations against it. According to Photius (Quaest. in Amphil., 123), Barnabas wrote the Book of Acts, and a gospel is ascribed to him (cf. T. Zahn, Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons, ii, 292, Leipsic, 1890).
Of more interest is the tradition which makes Barnabas author of an epistle in twenty-one chapters, contained complete in the Codex Sinaiticus at the end of the New Testament. This epistle is commonly referred to as the Epistle of Barnabas. A complete Greek manuscript was discovered by Bryennios at Constantinople, and Hilgenfeld used it for his edition in 1877. Besides this there is a very old Latin version (now in the imperial library at St. Petersburg), in which, however, chaps. xviii-xxi are wanting. Toward the end of the second century the epistle was in great esteem in Alexandria, as the citations of Clement of Alexandria prove. It is also appealed to by Origen. Eusebius, however, objected to it and ultimately the epistle disappeared from the appendix to the New Testament, or rather the appendix disappeared with the epistle. In the West the epistle never enjoyed canonical authority (though it stands beside the epistle of James in the Latin manuscripts). The first editor of the epistle, Menardus (1645) advocated its genuineness, but the opinion to-day is, that Barnabas was not the author. It was probably written in Alexandria in 130-131, and addressed to Christian Gentiles. The author, who formerly labored in the congregation to which he writes, intends to impart to his readers the perfect gnosis that they may perceive that the Christians are the only true covenant people, and that the Jewish people had never been in a covenant with God. His polemics are, above all, directed against Judaizing Christians. In no other writing of that early time is the separation of the Gentile Christians from the patriotic Jews so clearly brought out. The Old Testament, he maintains, belongs only to the Christians. Circumcision and the whole Old Testament sacrificial and ceremonial institution are the devil's work. According to the author's conception, the Old Testament, rightly understood, contains no such injunctions. He is a thorough anti-Judaist, but by no means an antinomist. The main idea is Pauline, and the apostle's doctrine of atonement is more faithfully reproduced in this epistle than in any other postapostolic writing. The author no doubt had read Paul's epistles; he has a good knowledge of gospel-history but which of the gospels, if any, he had read, can not be asserted. He quotes IV Esdras (xii, 1) and Enoch (iv, 3; xvi, 5). The closing section (chaps. xviii-xxi), which contains a series of moral injunctions, is only loosely connected with the body of the epistle, and its true relation to the latter has given rise to much discussion.
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The word belief appears in one form or another 11
times in the little book of 1st John. In the gospels Jesus
constantly harped on the necessity to believe; the word is
closely related to the idea of trust. For Jesus it was a
matter of believing the gospel and trusting your life to the
Way that he taught. But by the 4th century the emerging
othodox Christians had come to identify the object of belief
as those particular doctrines they chose to put forward,
particularly the deity (or divinity) of Christ.
As the church evolved, essentially two parties struggled
for dominance: the orthodox equated belief with conformity
to a particular set of theological propositions, while the
gnostics
believed in the primacy of the individual relationship to
God.
Capernaum, a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, had its own synagogue, in which Jesus often taught (Peloubet) .
The notion that an inerrant Bible contains all truth.
The cherubims have a long history and tradition in
the Bible, beginning at
Genesis 3:24.
When Solomon built the Temple, he erected
two monstrous cherubims. Like the Genesis cherubims
with the flaming sword the Temple ones were meant to guard
the inner sanctum from the profane. (Today people commonly
place similar guards, such as a pair of lions, beside the
entrance to their abode- or public building.)
The writer of Chronicles does not describe the shape of
the cherubims, but from Egypt and Mesopotamia we learn of a
"composite creature-form of which the man, lion, ox, and
eagles are the elements"
(Peloubet page 116). In
Revelations 4:6ff
we find the living creatures evocative of the O.T. cherubims.
Re Genesis 3:24: The Cherubims and the flaming sword are
perhaps the
most extravagantly mythopoeic figures of this
story. It's a way of
saying, you can't go back.
But Blake had a different idea in the
Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, Plate 14: "the cherub with his flaming
sword is hereby
commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life,
and when
he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear
infinite. and holy whereas it now appears finite and
corrupt.
Over a century before Blake George Fox had
experienced this return past the cherumbims to the
"Paradise of God"; he wrote in Chapter Two of his
Autobiography: Now I was come up in spirit through
the flaming sword, into the paradise of God."
Revelation 2:7 bears some of this out.
Christology
In fact God meant entirely different things to them than he does to us. For example Jesus himself reportedly said to his hearers, quoting Psalm 82:6, "ye are gods" (John 10:34). And we are told in 1st John 3:2 that "we are the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be."
High Christology
Two currents of thought led to the modern idea and dogma that Jesus is God (which is what we mean by high christology):
1) Over many centuries the concept of God developed into a single entity rather than a generic term embracing many different entities, such as "he [God] judges among the gods" (capitals and lower case letters were not invented until long after the Bible was written).
2) The idea that belief and salvation result from assent to a particular body of doctrine replaced the earlier primitive teaching of Jesus that trust in his Father and obedience to his words, namely loving God and neighbor, was the Way of Salvation. At the Council of Nicea the bishops decided that the Trinity was a necessary doctrine that must be believed for salvation; this of course included the Deity of Christ.
In contrast in the N.T. a low
christology, reflecting an evaluation of Jesus as something less or
other than God is often evident, although the true believer may deny
this heatedly.
Kunkel, on page
145, interpreting Matthew 11:1-14, had
this to say
about the kingdom of heaven.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Corinth is
a Greek city, on the isthmus which joins the Peloponnesus to
the mainland of Greece. It is about 48 miles west of Athens. The isthmus, which was in ancient times traversed by hauling ships over the rocky ridge on sledges, is now cut by a canal.
The ancient city rivalled Athens and Thebes in wealth, based especially on the isthmian traffic and trade. Until the mid-6th century Corinth was a major exporter of black figure pottery to cities around the Greek world; Athenian potters came to dominate the market later. Corinth's great temple on its acropolis was dedicated to Aphrodite.
Covenant is a very significant concept in both Jewish
and Christian faith. It implies an agreement between God
and man.
In the Bible, when Paul first visited the city (A.D.
51 or 52), Gallio, the brother of Seneca, was proconsul. Here
Paul resided for eighteen months (18:1-18). Here he first became
aquainted with Aquila and Priscilla, and soon after his
departure Apollos came to it from Ephesus. After an interval he
visited it a second time, and remained for three months (20:3).
During this second visit his Epistle to the Romans was written
(probably A.D. 55).
Running through the second half of the O.T., perhaps the
most pungent and graphic description occurs in the little
book of Zephaniah.
Jesus developed the figure with his parable of The Last Judgment,
and it reached its biblical climax with John in Revelations.
Isaiah in chapter 54 referred to Noah, strongly
intimating that the travail of his people, the
Captivity and Destruction of Jerusalem was a type of
the Flood (on pages 50-52 of The Quaker Bible Reader . Anthony Prete describes this relationship.
Josephus (see wikipedia).
In
the N.T. faith is not a matter of believing in a set of
theological
propositions such as the creeds, but rather a
matter of trust,
basically in one proposition; namely that
God loves us. The rest of
our needs follow in due course.
In the 1st century the Greek influence was pervasive. Jesus lived
in Nazareth, a town in Galilee.
Burton Mack in Who Wrote the
N.T. (1995) page 39 tells us that "during the time of Jesus there were
12 Greek cities within a 25 mile radius of Nazareth.
According to a popular writer Nazareth was a citadel of Judaism in
the midst of a sea of Hellenism. Jesus must have been exposed to the
pervasive Greek currents of thought, although traditionally scholars
have focused on his Jewishness, but "the Jewish world in which Jesus
lived was awash with hellenism"
(Shorto page 68).
Gleaning: The Israelites customarily
allowed the poor to
glean their fields after their workers had
harvested
the crop, part of their enlightened economic policy. The
law
of Moses prescribed this, but avaricious Hebrews often
failed to
observe it.
Throughout history we have known gnostics only
through
the writing of the orthodox who despised them, but around
1950 many early manuscripts were discovered, some of which
cast light
upon this (extremely varied) ideology.
In the first century gnostic Christianity and what later became
orthodox Christianity existed widely throughout the Roman world. In
the 2nd and 3rd centuries the two struggled for dominance. One of the
most prominent and eloquent Christian gnostics, Valentinus, in the
middle of the 2nd century came within a hair of being elected bishop
of Rome.
The second thing to consider is
that the Christian's way to God is the
Way of Jesus Christ. The way as I
understand it is to recognize your Heavenly Father, love him and
consequently love everyone.
Jesus got credit for being
fairly tribalistic,
but the story in Luke and later the
Great Commission indicate his awareness of God's
universal availabilty.
The God of Heaven, is a
title for God! In the earlier works of the Bible it is
found only in
Genesis 24:7.
It occurs otherwise in
NeoPlatonism was a mystical and religious form of Platonism that began
with Plotinus (205-70) and died about the 6th Century. In common with
some Gnostic currents it postulated creation of a fallen world by a
demiurge, which condemned men to live a material existence from which
they hopefully may arise. "Strive to bring back the god in yourselves
to the God in the All": these 'last words' of Plotinus point us toward
salvation as he understood it.
The word idol occurs in both testaments and is
pregnant with meanings both literal and metaphoical.
Josiah was king of the nation of Judah (640-609).
For another conventional portrait see:
Like Peter Judas is an archetypal figure. No doubt, if you've read
scripture carefully, you have identified with one or more Bible
characters. A really sensitive, spiritually conscious person is
likely to be aware of the fact that he has played the part of Judas on
occasion.
This seems to me the ultimate wedding between Plato and
Christ. Origen, like Meister Eckhart, was too big and too real to be
condemned by the Church, but both have been largely neglected in favor
of the Aristotelian philosophy espoused by St. Augustine. My own
leaning is much in favor of Origen, although he did have some foolish
ideas, such as castrating himself for the kingdom of God.
Crossan, (page 146 of In
Search of Paul), pointed out that Augustus, the son of
Caesar, had been declared Son of God, and this concept
underlay the Roman culture in the 1st century. The
declaration of Jesus as Son of God could thus be seen
as a direct confrontation of the Golden (Augustan) Age
by the Kingdom of God.
Simon Peter was the first one of the Lord's disciples named
in Matthew and the one about which most is written in the
gospels. His original name was Simon, but he was renamed
Peter by Jesus when he declared that Jesus was the son of
the Living God (in
Matthew 16:18).
The Pharisees as a group were the primary religious
authorities in 1st century Judaism. (The Sadducees were the
civil authorities, who collaborated with Rome.) Paul was a
Pharisee prior to his Damascus Road experience. The gospels seem to
indicate that the
Pharisees in general were repelled by everything Jesus
represented; however
Karen Armstrong (81)
points out that their values
closely resembled those expressed by Jesus.
"Q" is a hypothetical document containing those portions of Matthew
and Luke held in common, but not present in the other gospels.
Modern scholars consider it to be the earliest source of the gospel.
Burton Mack wrote a
small but valuable book setting forth the details of Q and
of its relationship to Matthew and the other gospels.
(It would be a valuable study to go through Matthew
and/or the other gospels and select and designate the Q
sayings One might put a Q marker at the end of each verse
thought by scholars to come from the Q source.)
The word remnant has a very special place in the
bible; it designates the few who remain faithful to God in
the midst of temptations to idolatry (lapsing back into the
tribalistic patterns of their neighbors), adversity,
persecution. The Jews have suffered all these things for
centuries (before and after the coming of Christ), and there
were always a few who remained faithful, no matter what the
cost. That was the basic shape of Hebrew culture, and the
concept of course was incorporated into the Christian
tradition. Jesus expressed it succinctly at
Matthew 22:14.
The Resurrection, described in Matthew, Luke, and John, is one of the
critical questions that separates the faithful literalist from the
modern critical interpreter. The word means something different to
the two groups:
The concept of salvation is much broader than what many
Christians have assigned to it. The conventional
traditional concept is a moment of decision leading to a
change of one's eternal condition.
In a Baptist seminary at least three teachers taught
their students that:
Many if not most conventional preachers put forth the idea that
salvation stems from intellectual assent to a given body of doctrines,
preeminently, according to the most numerous evangelical denomination,
"accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as one's personal Saviour". Millions
have contented themselves with this simplistic formula.
Samuel, the last of the judges, was said to be born ca 1114 BC. He
judged the Hebrews for many years, but they insisted on having a king,
so, following God's instructions he named Saul. When Saul didn't work
out, David was chosen and became the primary Hebrew of the Israelites
down to the present day.
Shechem lies in a beautiful valley 32 miles north of
Jerusalem and 5 miles southeast of Samaria. It has an
illustrious biblical history:
Shiloh was more or less the headquarters of the Israelites
from their conquest of the Promised Land until David made
Jerusalem the capital. It lay within the tribe of Ephraim 8
miles north of Bethel, which is 12 miles north of Jerusalem.
Paul was born in
Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, and a
city of great learning. Strabo, the geographer, said of it
"The people at Tarsus have devoted themselves so eagerly,
not only to philosophy, but also to the whole round of
education in general, that they have surpassed Athens,
Alexandria, or any other place that can be named where there
have been schools and lectures of philosophers."
Tirzah is located 15 miles northeast of Shechem at the head
of a steep hollow descending to the Jordan valley. It became
the capital of Israel, replacing Shechem, until Omri moved
the capital to Samaria
Dever).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Titus, meaning honourable, was a historical
person in the Bible New Testament.
He was with Paul
and Barnabas at Antioch, and
accompanied them to the council at Jerusalem (Gal. 2:1-3; Acts
15:2), although his name nowhere occurs in the
Acts of the Apostles.
He appears to have been a Gentile, and to have been
chiefly engaged in ministering to Gentiles; for Paul sternly
refused to have him circumcised, inasmuch as in his case the
cause of gospel liberty was at stake.
We find him, at a later
period, with Paul and Timothy at Ephesus, whence he was sent by
Paul to Corinth, Greece for the purpose of getting the contributions of
the church there in behalf of the poor saints at Jerusalem sent
forward (2 Cor. 8:6; 12:18).
He rejoined the apostle when he was
in Macedonia, and cheered him with the tidings he brought from
Corinth (7:6-15). After this his name is not mentioned till
after Paul's first imprisonment, when we find him engaged in the
organization of the church in Crete, where the apostle had left
him for this purpose (Titus 1:5).
The last notice of him is in 2
Tim. 4:10, where we find him with Paul at Rome during his second
imprisonment. From Rome he was sent into Dalmatia, no doubt on
some important missionary errand. The New Testament does not record his
death.
According to church tradition, Paul ordained Titus Bishop of Crete. He died in 107 A.D. at about 95 years of age.
Trinitarianism developed some centuries after the time of
Jesus. It did not appear in the Bible although a
trinitarian
phrase was introduced into 1st John 5:7 in the 15th
Century and found its way into the King James Version.
(It does not appear in later translations of the Bible.)
The French skeptic, Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778),
known for his famous phrase, "ecrasez l'infame", by which he
apparently meant 'down with persecuting and privileged orthodoxy'.
In the Bible wisdom has many meanings, and some are very special;
In Proverbs 8 wisdom is
personified and assumes many of the characteristics of Christ, so much
so that in several cases N.T. writers used Proverbs as a
pre-figurement of Christ.
see words.htm
b
Those who zealously uphold the
doctrine can point out to various proof texts which may be interpreted
as evidence, for example Thomas is reported to have said to Jesus, "My
Lord and my God". (Cf
John 20:28). But this
verse may be interpreted in many ways.
This whole area is extremely
sensitive because it touches on the bed rock faith of many people
that Jesus is God. If your faith has a somewhat different focus, you
may question the matter, and arouse terrible feelings of threat in the
minds of fundamentally inclined believers. If you find yourself
debating the matter with someone who has the strongest feelings about
the identity of Jesus, you might best simply desist from further
discussion because it is unlikely to yield any fruitful return.
Low Christology
It does not appear to me, from
studying the gospels,
that Jesus thought of himself or wanted to be
thought of as
God. The nearest approach of such a thing comes,
perhaps in
John 20:28. But
Thomas, and everyone else of his generation used the term
god much more loosely than we do. The emperor was
generally understood to be god, and certainly all of the
heroes of the classic Greek literature, such as
Achilles. (Many of them in fact were said to be born of a
virgin and a god and to have ascended into heaven.) I don't
believe that Jesus perceived himself in quite that category,
but it seems that Thomas may have.
In a clarifying instance Jesus, addressed as "good
Master", responds,
"why call ye me good; there is none good,
but God".
Here I believe Jesus was using the word more or less as we
use it.
For low christology the most impressive and perhaps determinate
statement we have re the identity of Christ we look to
Romans 8:29,
where Christ is referred to as "the first born among many brethren".
And then of course there's the dictum of William Blake, who, when
asked if he believed Christ was the son of God, replied, "yes he is
and some am I and so are you." Thus if Christ is God, he shares his
godliness with us to the degree that we live in him. (Quakers say
there is that of God in everyone.)
In the past two centuries a guiding light re low christology came from
the pen of Thomas Jefferson:
"To the corruptions of
Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of
Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wanted
anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all
others, and ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing
he never claimed any other"
(quoted by
Mitchell in The
Gospel According to Jesus, page 5).
Jefferson was not a professional
religionist or theologian, but a simple believer who expressed his
faith in that way. We have to judge it as we will.
Marcus Borg, in
his The God We Never Knew provided an excellent introduction
to the subject of the identity of Jesus. He dealt with
the problem of the two contrasting visions by separating the
material into what he called the pre-Easter Jesus and the
post-Easter Jesus. The pre-Easter Jesus was a man; the
post-Easter Jesus through the experience of Christians
became something more.
Wikipedia provides additional data on Christology. Or look at
Professor Felix Just's list of things Jesus was called.
The name Cyrus occurs 13 times in Ezra, 3 times
in Daniel, twice in Isaiah, and twice in II Chronicles.
Perhaps the most significant are in Isaiah 44:28 and
45:1. Isaiah specifically refers to Cyrus as The Lord's
Anointed.
Constantine occupies a unique place in the history of
Christianity. With Constantine's Edict of Milan (313) Christians
became a privileged minority; their persecution ended, at least for a
time. Beyond that they became the Empire religion, and it wasn't long
before they were persecuting pagans and
heretics.
Constantine had ordained that every Christian must believe the same
thing- in every theological particular, which put the Church in a
strait jacket and tended to make Christians into lemmings.
After the 4th century subjects of
every political entity were expected to belong to the same religious
category as their rulers. (Cf Hutchinson, Chapter IX: The Great Divide)
Corinth, Greece
For hotlinks, go online.
The ancient city was destroyed by the Romans (B.C. 146), and that
mentioned in the New Testament was quite a new city, having been
rebuilt about a century afterwards and peopled by a colony of
freedmen from Rome. It became under the Romans the seat of
government for Southern Greece or Achaia (Acts 18:12-16). It was
noted for its wealth, and for the luxurious and immoral and
vicious habits of the people. It had a large mixed population of
Romans, Greeks, and Jews.
God made a covenant with Noah that he would never
send another flood like the one Noah survived.
The abrahamic covenant represents the birth of judaism.
Although frequently used in a tribalistic sense, it promises
spiritual wealth to all people: "in thee shall all families
of the earth be blessed"
(Genesis 12:3).
God made similar covenants with Isaac and Jacob
(Israel). He made a covenant with Moses on behalf of the
Israelites, but it was conditional on their remaining
faithful to him: when they obeyed it, they prospered, and
when they disobeyed it, they met calamity. (That was the
dictum of the writers of their history and translated in our
time to the positive thinking of
Norman Vincent
Peale.)
The Davidic Covenant
(2nd Samuel 7:16) was unconditional (the covenant of
Moses and of many others was generally conditional on the
people's good behaviour, but not this one.) However by 587
the promise had failed, and there was a davidic king no
longer. This failure was one of the influences leading to
the Jewish idea of the Messiah, a son of David who would
restore the kingdom. By the time of Jesus it had become a
great expectation .
The word covenant is related to testament,
and on that basis the early Christians called the
pre-Christian scriptures the Old Testament and the Christian
ones the New Testament. However Jeremiah had spoken of and
named the
New Covenant some 500 years before the advent of
Jesus.
Corinthian colonies
Initial text from Easton's Bible Dictionary, 1897 -- Please update as needed
Day of the Lord
Death
The Diaspora
1. When Assyria conquered the Northern Kingdom in 722,
the "ten lost tribes" were carried away and distributed
throughout the Assyrian Empire. According to common
understanding the entire population of Israel was lost in
this debacle. Actually an elite minority was carried away
while the lower 80% remained. In a sense the ten tribes
were indeed lost; that is, their identity disappeared; what
remained was a large mass of people without any definite
identity, most of whom propably lapsed into the Canaanite
forms of paganism, while others maintained a sort of off
brand judaism.
2. In 587 the Babylonians carried off the Judean elite
as slaves; 35 years later Cyrus liberated these people
and allowed them to return to Jerusalem, but only a few of
them did. We learn from
Charlotte Allen
(page 12) that six centuries later "more than 3 million
Jews" were in Mesopotamia, including an enormous population
in Babylon.
3. About the time of the Babylonian Captivity other Hebrews sought
refuge in Egypt, among them Jeremiah. By the first century these
people had become just as numerous as the ones who had stayed in
Babylon.
All of the dispersals above, and no doubt others, led to an extremely
large population of 1st century Jews in the rest of the Greek world.
Among this group we notice Paul of Tarsus.
After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. hardly any Jews remained
in Israel; the great majority were scattered out over the face of the
world. Israel ceased to be a nation; it had become primarily a
religion whose forms had become at least as diverse as any other world
religion.
The earliest followers of Jesus had largely fled from Jerusalem before
70, as recorded in Acts. They scattered over the earth and proceeded
to make Christians wherever they went. (Thomas reportedly went to
India and founded the Indian Church there. The
Ethiopean Enuch was thought to have founded
the Ethiopean Church.)
Domination System
The story of Noah appears of course in Genesis 6-9; he
and his family were the only ones saved from the flood
that encompassed the earth. The text tells us
that Noah "had found grace in the eyes of the Lord",
that he was a just man, and "walked with God". So God
picked him out as the 'survivor'; he became an
archetype of the remnant.
Egypt
In the book by Samuel Kurinsky
(
"The Eighth Day, The Hidden History of the Jewish Contribution to
Civilization," (1994)) we find a new and interesting history of
the development of the Hebrew race. He asserts that for two centuries
the Jews controlled Egypt and implies that their race was culturally
much superior to that of the Egyptians.
Enoch
Enoch was the son of
Methusaleh.
In Exodus 33:20 God told
Moses that "there shall no man see me, and live"And from
Genesis 5:24
we learn that Enoch "walked with God" but didn't die, sharing that
distinction with Elijah. This led to his destiny as a
legendary
figure and the subject of this and many other
books, some considered
scripture at various times. Jude
mentioned the
book in his
little letter.
During the lifetime of Jesus an Enoch book
circulated:
it contained parables similar to those of Jesus and spoke
of
the
Son of Man, a term
frequently used by Jesus who was
coming to be the messiah who would
deliver his people
out of oppression (cf
Allen, page 34).
The Essenes were a Jewish sect for about a century before and after
the birth of Christ.
Shorto (page 59ff) has
pointed out that many of the ideas of the Essenes were propagated by
Jesus; for example they referred to themselves as poor in spirit. They
were also fanatically
apocalyptic.
(Some believe that Jesus may have been an Essene.)
Ellegard, page 82,
reported that there were 4000 Essenes in Palestine as compared with
6000 Pharisees and they settled "in large numbers in every town...as for
their theology
Josephus draws attention above all to their belief in the
immortality of the soul" (page 85).
Easter
Matthew
Mark
luke
John
According the Harvey Cox
(2 page 274f) the resurrection of Jesus was not exactly a new idea
for the Bible: look at
Daniel 12:1-2 and
Ezekiel 37:1-14.
Evangelism
The best definition of
evangelism came from the lips of
Jesus in
Matthew 5:16.
And George Fox, the father of Quakers
(who believe there is
that of God in everyone) gave a comparably
succinct
definition when he said "walk cheerfully over the earth
answering that of God in everone".
Evangelism as I know and
love it has very little to do
with collaring people to ask them if
"they know the Lord
Jesus Christ as their personal saviour". That is
a
catchword, about which the least that one might say
is that it is
not biblical.
We may need to evangelize our closest loved ones,
but
that does not mean beating them over the head with the Bible
or
with our preacher's words; it means rather to shower them
with God's
love, which is never spent in vain.
Jesus is given
many names in the Bible
Father
Jesus introduced to Hebrew religion the
idea that God is our
Father, not Abraham. He redefined God in the
spiritual
consciousness of the Hebrews, and the emphasis he placed
on
"our loving Heavenly Father" was the crux of that
redefinition.
The O.T. taught us to
fear God
and keep his
commandments.
Jesus taught us to love God,
knowing that we
would then then want to keep his commandments, just
as every
child (with few exceptions) wants to please a loving
parent. Once again this is the crux of the difference
between the
two testaments. (At the age of 30 I came to
believe that God is my
loving Heavenly Father, and the shape
of my life changed radically.)
On a preconscious, emotional level a fair number of
people may
be expected to stumble at the word father
, that is to say
everyone who had a cruel father.
Unfortunately a high proportion of
children, especially
boys, at some time in their development decide
their father
is cruel. There may come a great falling away of their
faith. Call this the adolescent rebellion. Happy are they
if they
can find a way back early in their career.
On the woman's side
a male God may be resented as a
slight of their gender: they may
prefer the Motherhood of
God. That's okay for someone who was not
adequately
nurtured by the traditional revelation. (Some women
unfortunately have resented masculinity entirely.)
In the Bible fear did not have the primary
meaning it has
for us today. It had a very special meaning,
especially the
fear of the Lord. All the leaders of Israel
endeavoured to
inculcate the fear of the Lord in the people. (Look
at
Acts 9:31.) It
meant
respect, obedience, faith-- a commitment to the Way of
God.
When Jesus was tempted by Satan he quoted
Deuteronomy 6:13
, only in
place of fear he put worship
(Matthew 4:10).
Galilee
Apparently
Ruth hoped to find a
non-avaricious owner.
What we knew about gnosticism before recent archeological discoveries
came almost exclusively from proto-orthodox apologists in their
denunciations of heresies. Gnostics were heretics, they thought, and
they described in much detail various grotesque ideas and doctrines
attributed to the Gnostics.
The one thing we do know about Gnostics is that the authority they
looked to came from their personal relationship with God, which made
them nonconformists to say the least.
Gnosticism was an important ideology
common
during two centuries before and after the days of Jesus--
some of it Hebrew, some Christian, and some probably
neither.
The best thumbnail description of Gnosticism that
I've
found came from the pen of
Bart D. Ehrman
(Jesus, pages 73-5):
"Most of
these groups stressed knowledge (gnosis) as a
way of salvation from
this evil world, which was not created
by the one true God" (page
74).
He went on to cite 7 peculiar characteristics of the
"views of most gnostics", some of which were:
The world, as a material realm, is evil in contrast to
spirit,
which is good. (Although Paul and other
N.T. writers refer to "this
world" as a citadel of evil,
Jesus did not declare the world evil nor
did the writer of
Genesis
1.)
God is completely spirit and has nothing to do with the
material.
However he generated aeons (the heavenly
creatures), one of whom,
Sophia, became "separated from the
rest" . Sophia generated the
demiurge (the maker), who
created this fallen realm. (Thus we have a
gnostic
alternative to the biblical story of creation.)
Human
beings are material creatures, but some of them
may have a divine
spark and may escape from the material
world if they receive
"liberating knowledge (gnosis)" from
Christ (for Christian gnostics).
"These are the elect."
Gnostics urged an ascetic life in the belief that the
human body
was evil.
Actually gnosticism is a much more general category than what
Erhman has described here, just as christian is a more general
category than the denomination named Christian, one of many
denominations. In this work I use gnostics to refer to people who
depend primarily on their own personal relationship with God as their
highest authority and power, an extemely broad class making up perhaps
a high proportion of our present American population.
However the writers of the four gospels came down largely on the
side of the "orthodox", particularly with their emphasis on the bodily
resurrection of the Lord, and in the early centuries of the Christian
era the established authorities squelched Gnosticism as
heresy, but through the centuries various elements of
it have
erupted throughout the Church. At the present time
there is a
formally Gnostic church in California, and
probably some other
places.
Traces of gnostic ideas may be seen in the New Testament.
Paul especially had mystical experiences. His vision of Jesus was not
as a physical body, and he spoke of ecstatic experience in the third
heaven (2nd Corinthians
12).
After 312 the Church organized by Emperor Constantine pronounced
all forms of gnosticism (and/or individual experience outside the
conventional framework) heretical with the exception of the statements
by Paul, the Gospel of John and a few other stray ideas that had crept
into the canon. From then on periodic eruptions of various forms of
individual Christian experience were generally condemned by
ecclesiastical authorities until quite recent times, although many
mystics managed to maintain their relationship with the Church.
God
Monotheism
The Universal God
The Spirit
The God of Nelson-Pallmeyer
The first thing to consider is that god is a three letter word. It
means a thousand different things to a thousand people. When people
speak of God, they really mean their
vision of God.
In present day Christianity
(actually in all days) there are two basic ways that people perceive,
understand, and follow the Way:
The orthodox, with an inerrant Bible, consider Jesus to be God in the
same sense that the Heavenly Father is. This way tends toward a
materialistic outlook. The other way sees Jesus in a more human and
spiritual sense as the one who pointed us to the way to God, namely
accepting and giving love in relation to God and humankind.
These two ways are best described in terms of
high and
low Christologies.
The Universal God
However we find intimations of the final outcome from
the earliest days. God told Abraham that
"in thee all nations shall
be blessed".
Then Solomon in his
dedication of the Temple prays for
God to remember the stranger and to treat him like an
Israelite.
God told Isaiah that he would provide
"a light to the Gentiles".
Monotheism
According to
Professor Riley
all references to God until the Persian conquest implied
that Jehovah was one of a multiplicity of gods (always the
best of course and the only one for the Hebrews), and it was
not until "Second Isaiah" (under the influence of Persian
Zoroastranism) that the claim is made that the Israelite God
is the only one, that He is the universal God.
Daniel 2
; in fact the term is used by Cyrus in
2nd Chronicles
36:23 (and throughout Ezra and Nehemiah). We also find
it in Psalms 136:26 and in Jonah and Revelations.
All of these books, with the exception of Genesis, occur
(or were written) outside the time frame of the Hebrew
tribal God, after God had come to be understood as a universal
God- of the entire world.
The evolution of polytheism to monothesism reached its
climax in the
Book of Daniel.
The Spirit
Jesus was among the more modern. Jerusalem was located
in a mountainous cultural backwater, but Galilee was on a
main line of commerce and travel between Europe and Asia
(cf
Riley)
Jesus had undoubtedly absorbed much of the Greek thought of
his day, and the religion he founded was based on a
spiritual rather than a material God.
For Jews the citadel of the material God was in
Jerusalem. There the high priest led a
thriving commerce in the sale of meat for sacrifice to their
(material) God. The corruption of this practice and its
exploitation of the ignorant poor infuriated Jesus, who
understood that
God is Spirit; he
drove out the moneychangers from the Temple, and for that he
was crucified-- those hardnosed capitalists, much like
modern day pharmaceutical tycoons, could not allow any such
tampering with their profits.
But in the course of time Christianity triumphed,
although the struggle between a material and a spiritual God
still goes on; many if not most of us even today still don't
quite "get it" as far as a spiritual God is concerned.
See also
Christology.
See also
Smith's Bible Dictionary.
The God of Nelson-Pallmeyer
The Almighty God has had worshippers through the millenia, the
God who will in his own time zap all evil and evil doers with
unparalleled violence. These people have frequently resorted to
violence in promoting Christ and invariably associate themselves with
the "worldly powers". Here is Nelson's succinct and pointed definition
of the God of Jesus Christ, most often ignored by the Church as an
institution:
The God revealed by Jesus is
incapable of violence. God is infinitely loving, giving, gracious,
hospitable and compassionate. God is not violent. God's power in
invitational rather than coercive.
If this seems like a distorted
vision of God, we might point out the extenuating circumstances, that
the man has related himself to the powerless and oppressed,
particularly in those parts of the world where the ecclesiastical
authorities have associated themselves with violent, greedy and
oppressive political powers-- and in fact frequently served them as an
adjunct. Horrible things have been (and are still being) done in the
name of the Christian God.
The Gospels
Burton L. Mack
describes authoritatively the way in which the
gospels came to life, focusing on what scholars call "Q" and
consider the earliest strata of the synoptic gospels (Mark,
Mark and Luke).
Hell
Materially perceived hell is the grim place of eternal torment
reserved for those who don't qualify for the kingdom of Heaven.
Spiritually perceived hell is the "world of torment that humans
create for themselves and for one another out of their own greed,
hatred, and ignorance. It is not a physical place; it is a
psychological metaphor".
(Stephen Mitchell,
page 68). See also
Wikpedia and
another article.
The heretics were the losers of the various theological and
other ecclesiastical conflicts that arose throughout the history of
the church.
Holy Spirit
However in the most prominent place where it occurs, it is called the
Holy Ghost, at least in
the King James Version.
In the beautiful
8th Chapter of Romans Paul
used the word, spirit, 18 times, always implying God's action upon
us. He often refers to it as the Spirit of Christ with a
substantially identical connotation.
In the Bible the spirit of God, spirit of Christ, Holy Spirit, spirit
has many connotations; we look here at three of them.
In the most general sense the Holy Spirit gives us breath; every other
human activity stems from the spirit. Without the spirit we are only
clods of clay.
In a more particular sense the spirit leads us into the
Way of Christ.
In a yet more particular sense the spirit (in Acts 2 called the Holy
Ghost) conveys a special blessing and power, sometimes called the
second blessing. Among other gifts it may enable us to speak in the
language of anyone we're called to address. (This is sometimes called
the unknown tongue).
The
day of Pentecost describes how this originally came about.
Literalists have supposed that one may actually speak German,
Japanese, or whatever under appropriate circumstances. A more liberal
understanding suggests that under the Spirit of God we may be enabled
to understand the mind and hence "speak to the condition" (a Quaker
concept) of whomever we have occasion to address.
In the course of time orthodox Christians, by the 4th century had come
to include the Holy Spirit as one of the three persons of God,
and this has come down to the present as a creedal truth for many if
not most who call themselves Christians.
Christians of all stripes may agree that whatever good you or I do is
done under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
For a more exhaustive treatment of Holy Spirit see the
Wikipedia article.
Hyperbolic Language
Jesus frequently used hyperbolic language:
"Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle...."
You can say to this mountain "be removed into the sea"....
These are hyperbolic statements. Middle easterners in Jesus' day,
and even today, are very given to hyperbolic language. In some
American cultures in contrast people are most given to understatement:
"I don't like him", the gangster said as he blew the man's brains out.
People in general tend to prefer one form of speech or the other.
To understand Jesus you have to recognize hyperbolic language when
he used it and understand his real (matter of fact) intention.
Nazareth
Ellegard, using linguistic analysis, concluded that rather than
coming from Nazareth, Jesus was a
nazarite, as were the
Essenes. In fact he concluded
that Jesus was an Essene.
Paganism
The Israelites in the Promised Land frequently lapsed
into the pagan customs of their "Canaanite" neighbors. For
many years Bible interpreters referred to this as idol
worship, but in recent years these 'idols' came to be
seen as icons of the immaterial gods they worshipped. Thus
'paganism' better describes their religion than 'idol
worship'.
For centuries the inveterate tendency of the Israelites
to marry into and meld into the 'Canaanite' people in the
land was perceived by the nation's religious leaders as the
primary sin of the Israelites leading again and again to
every conceivable kind of misfortune, but generally speaking
more to the nation than the individual; that is one of the
attributes of tribalism.
In the early history of the Hebrews, mixing with the
natives of Palestine and other peoples around the area, they
requently resorted to the household figurines supposed to
represent various pagan gods. The prophets made an
inveterate and violent witness against this practice and
felt that God often punished the Israelite nation on that
account.
The early Christians were exposed to the same sorts of
temptation, and Luke and Paul often spoke against it. But
the most eloquent reference to idols occurs in
1st John.
Immortality
However Isaiah prophesied that in time the
Lord would swallow up
Death, and Paul used this
passage as a source for his great chapter on Resurrection..
Daniel, thought to be written in the 2nd century B.C.,
provides the definitive statement of Resurrection and
Immortality at
Daniel 12, which
appears to be a prime source of the statement attributed to
Jesus in
Matthew 25.
Akenson, pages 24-9,
in a fascinating description of the book, 4 Maccabees (ca 167 BCE),
gives us another significant precursor of the immortality of the
individual soul.
(See also
Riley, Chapter 6 of
The River of God.)
Israel
Jacob, the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, had his
named changed to Israel at a certain point; hence his
millions of descendants went by the name of Israelites. With
the conquest of the Promised Land its name became Israel.
However in the year after Solomon's death the name came
to connote the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom, also
sometimes called Ephraim and once or twice Samaria.
When the leading Israelites were carried away by the
Assyrians, and in the following centuries Israel may have
been used at times for the Southern Kingdom, also called
Judah and Judea.
The stories of Jacob may be more like 'everyman' than any other
character in the O.T. For a thumbnail biography go to the
Wikipedia Portrait. It also carries the biblical transition from
various legendary people to the establishment of the nation of Israel:
Jacob had various checkered adventures, like
tricking his brother Esau out of the family inheritance,
passing himself off as Esau to receive their father's blessing.
In his turn Jacob was tricked by his uncle Laban after working
seven years to get
Rachel for his wife.
Coming home from the far land where he had procured his two wives
Jacob had
a strange experience of God.
Jacob wrestled with a strange figure who turned out to be God. Jacob
asked for God's name, but instead of that he received a new name; his
name was changed from Jacob to Israel (the name is said to mean
wrestler with God).
According to Armstrong
page 4: Wrestling with God can be seen as a figure for our
relationship with God and with the Bible. It does not yield what we
expect to find. We suppose something is good, do it, and then find it
was not the good we thought. In these kind of activities our
knowledge of God grows, but the true character of God is always beyond
our understanding.
Malachi tells us that God "loved"
Jacob after Jacob had said "I have seen God face to face, and my life
is preserved" (Genesis 32:30
).
As was suggested earlier Jacob was Everyman. For example he
sometimes bargained with God, of which many of us have probably been
guilty from time to time, a crude but real form of relationship to
God.
James: There are three men named James found in the Bible.
1. The one found at the initial naming of the disciples
(Matthew 4) was the son of Zebedee and brother of John. He
was killed by Herod very early in the life of the Church
(see Acts 12:2).
2. James, the son of Alphaeus, was another of the twelve.
3. Jesus is thought to have had several brothers: Judas and
James among them. This James became the primary leader of
the early Church.
Religious Portrait
In particular he enforced the release of debts after
seven years returning the land to many of the poor who had
lost their inheritance to land (loan) sharks. And he
destroyed all of the idols and high places scattered about
the land.
Josiah died in a battle against Pharaoh Necho at Megiddo.
Secular Portrait
In the same way he destroyed all the idols in order to
concentrate religious power in Jerusalem under his thumb
(much like Constantine!).
Wikipedia's Portrait
At the Conquest of the Promised Land real
estate had been parcelled out, some for every family in the nation.
In the laws of Moses every 50 years, that is to say, every 7 periods
of 7 years landed property was to revert to its original owner and all
Israelites who had become slaves were to be freed. This was meant "to
be a remedy for those evils which accompany human society and human
govenment.....the jubilee tended to abolish poverty". (Peloubet).
Judaism
Ancient Israelite Religion runs down to 587 BCE ending with the
Babylonian Captivity.
Judaism After the Babylonian Exile ca. 538 BCE-70 CE runs to the
destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem by the Romans.
The Kingdom of God
The good news of Jesus was primarily about the kingdom
of God, and most of the synoptic gospels attempt to
explicate his meaning.
The term is very ambiguous and is used in
the gospels with diverse meanings:
The kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21).
The kingdom of God is at hand (Mark 1:15).
The kingdom of God is like a multitude of things Jesus
describes primarily in his parables.
In general there are two basic ways of looking at the
kingdom of God: as something that will come to pass at a
historical moment in time (Jesus would not say exactly when)
or as a spiritual event in the life of people and
communities when people become spiritually rather
than materially oriented. Jesus emphasized both of these
aspects in his teaching.
Generally speaking today the materially minded tend
to stress the historical interpretation, while others
may lean toward the spiritual. The two viewpoints converge in the
Eternal when (where?) the kingdom is fully actualized and becomes
tangible, real, and perhaps even material. That is colloquially
referred to as Heaven.
In an interesting discussion of the kingdom
Chilton quoted
Thomas, Saying 83, as follows:
Whoever is near me is near the fire,
and whoever is far from me is far from the kingdom.
The Messiah
The Old Testament (and Greek and Roman) saviors were the rulers
who brought peace and prosperity to their people, and the people of
Jesus' day, including his disciples expected this of a Messiah. (Many
Jews still do.)
In the N.T. the word is translated Christ. Jesus
of course had an entirely different concept of the meaning
of the term: he did not come to reinstate the worldly power
of David, but to call people to come into the Kingdom of
God; it had nothing to do with worldly power, but a
spiritual existence in the Eternal (which begins now if
you're ready for it).
Origen
The Passover commemorates the moment in
Exodus
when the angel of the Lord passed over the houses of the Hebrews and
slaughtered the first born of the Egyptians.
That night, following the Lord's instructions, they had eaten the
flesh of a lamb and spread its blood on the door posts of their
houses.
This became the primary celebration of the Israelites. On this
occasion Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover in the Upper
Room, and it became a primary sacrament of the Christian Church.
Jesus thus served as the Passover Lamb and was named as such by John
the Baptist in
John 1:29.
As a poetic metaphor this is fine and beautiful; but
Nelson severely criticized
it as one of many examples upholding the bloodthirsty Old Testament
God. He felt that Christian theologians from the very beginning had
used such references to the Old Testament, which had the (perhaps
unintended) effect of taking the place of the God
of Love taught by Jesus. (Nelson apparently did not appreciate
poetry or metaphoric language. To each his own.)
Paul, also named Saul, as a writer probably made the most significant
contribution to the picture of Jesus Christ that came down to the present
day. His letters antedate the gospels. Many people believe
that Paul raised the identity of Jesus from religious teacher to a
divinity (cf
Akenson, Chapter One).
Paul's letters contain very little
detail about the life of Jesus; the things that he says about Christ
are metaphorical and worshipful rather than factual.
Some 'low christologists' feel that
Paul was largely guilty of the deification of Jesus that led to the
pronouncements at Nicea in 325. On the contrary the present writer
sees little evidence in Paul's letters that he thought of Jesus as
God. He repeatedly referred to Christ as the Son of God. (Note again
that these capital letters are inventions that came along some
centuries after the Bible was written.)
From the passage in Matthew about Peter's declaration
and the Lord's response the othodox church decided that
Peter had been the founder of the Church of Rome.
The gospels have much more to say about Peter, and two
of the short epistles near the end of the O.T. were
attributed to him.
The Pharisee might be considered the second most important character
in the gospels. In all four of the canonical gospels we read of
repeated encounters between Jesus and the Pharisees. This is
sometimes amicable (Jesus had a long personal conversation with a
Pharisee named Nicodemus,
which became one of the centerpieces of the gospel of John.)
But it general we get the picture of a combative relationship between
Jesus and the Pharisees. Armstrong believed that the writer of
Matthew lived in a community where Christians (Jews) and other Jews
had an especially hostile relationship. She points to his
chapter 23, an excoriating
denunciation of the Pharisees, which he put in Jesus' mouth.
(Inerrantists believe Jesus said it.)
Matthew used the word Pharisee to designate
the people most antagonistic to Jesus who eventually
conspired to bring about his crucifixion. (In contrast John
used the word Jews for a similar purpose, and this of course
incited the terrible anti-semitism that has cursed the world
from that day to this.)
Q appears to emphasize the sayings reported of Jesus and
to minimize the statements about Jesus that abound in the
gospels.
In recent years Q has often been compared with the
Gospel of Thomas since both of
them appear to be made up entirely of 'sayings' of Jesus rather than
statements about Jesus.
When this became clear to Bible scholars, they understood that the
two 'documents' were examples of a form of discourse popular in
Greek culture in that era. The two of them together suggested that
the 'historical Jesus' might well (or best) be described as a wisdom
teacher.
In both documents the apocalyptic dimension and the theological
dimension which supported the Trinity-- the divine birth, death and
resurrection-- were notably absent.
The "Reformers"
The ministries of some of these "reformers" remained
within the bosom of the Church (for example St. Francis and
Meister Eckhart) while that of others incurred the virulent
enmity of the Church (eg Hus, Luther, etc.) What they all
had in common was a direct personal relationship with God
that had, at least to some degree, primacy over conventional
religious thought.
In that respect these people also show a close
correspondence with the O.T. prophets (and with Jesus).
Unfortunately throughout the history of the church acting
like Jesus too often was considered blasphemous.
In the interest of continuity we might begin our list
with Job, who emphatically and fundamentally questioned the
conventional faith of his day, and perhaps effectuated a
spiritual revolution.
Valentinus
Origen
Arius
Valentinus
For the literalist, with a fully materialistic viewpoint, Jesus
came back in flesh and bones, showed himself to his disciples, and
then ascended into Heaven.
Critical modernists perceive something other than a bodily
materialistic return. The earliest written account of the
resurrection comes in Paul's letters and seems to be basically
determined by his own experience of the Risen Christ on the Damascus
Road. He describes a blinding light and a voice identifying itself as
Jesus.
Later the gospel writers described the resurrection in apparent
material terms, except for Mark, the earliest, who omitted it.
Salvation
We have been saved.
We are being saved.
We will be saved.
In the gospels Jesus certainly stressed the necessity of belief,
and especially in John we read over and over that one must "believe on
him". My personal opinion is that Jesus meant to teach us that
salvation comes from believing the words of Jesus to the point of
acting on them; as
James 2:19 put it so succinctly, "the devils also believe, and
tremble".
For more on Samuel look at the
Wikipedia Biography.
Satan
Evil came into the world in the earliest biblical story in
the form of the serpent. The word Satan means simply
the adversary. The devil of the O.T. had no spiritual power,
but only power over outward circumstances as shown in Job.
But the Persian devil exerted an active and malignant
spiritual force with a power second only to that of the
Lord; this was the shape of Zoroastranism and also the
shape of N.T. Christianity, especially true among
the elite, but much less common among ordinary people.
in the sixth century B.C. Persian philosophy and
religion came into Palestine with the advent of
Cyrus. Zoroastranism, which had existed for centuries before
that time, taught a God "opposed by a nearly equal and
opposite Devil"
(The River of God, page
196)
, and life became a struggle between these
two forces.
In the N.T Satan and the devil are perhaps best known
for the stories of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness,
but the definitive description of Satan occurs in Revelation 12:9
where the great dragon, the
serpent, the Devil and Satan are all equated.
(For a more detailed article about Satan look at
the Wikipedia article.)
It was the first spot where Abraham camped in Palestine,
received the promise of the land and built an altar (See
Genesis 12:6).
Jacob bought a plot here, coming back from his marriage
journey and dug his well.(See Genesis 33).
It lay within the tribal boundaries of Ephraim and
became a city of refuge (See Joshua 21).
At Shechem the division between the northern and
southern kingdoms occurred (See 1st Kings chapter 12), and
Shechem became the capital of Israel until it was replaced
by Tirzah and then Samaria.
After the conquest of Canaan the ark of the covenant was
kept there until the days of Samuel. At Shiloh the Promised
Land was divided among the 12 tribes.
Sin
Nevertheless anyone interested in the Bible must come to
terms with the word, ubiquitous from Genesis to Revelation.
The first sin happened to Adam and Eve in the Fall in
Genesis 3. Catholic theologians referred to it as the
"happy sin" because the Fall must eventually lead to a
recovery and/or rise. The Fall-Rise myth repeats itself
throughout the Bible. One of the most transparent instances
occurs in the story of
The Prodigal Son.
We learn from virtually everyone of the prophets that
Throughout the
history of the Hebrews, they sinned, God
punished them, they
repented, he forgave them. In contrast Jesus' story
simply shows
God in a kinder light: the father took no
punitive action against
the erring son, and he welcomed the
boy back with open arms when he
returned.
Like many other words important to
the Bible the meaning
of sin changed through the centuries. In the early books it
always represented a falling away from the pure faith in God
by Israel. Jeremiah made the point that each person is
responsible for his own actions. By the N.T. sin had come
to mean anything less than perfection, the
fullness of the stature of Christ.
One of the most distinctive attributes of Christ is the
forgiveness of sin: in a world (and all the individuals in
it) fallen from the high calling of God Christ comes into a
life to erase the load of guilt and make us new. And he
does this eternally:
"Throughout Eternity I forgive you, you forgive me"
(an excerpt from
William Blake.)
Solomon (970-928 BCE), the child of David and Bathsheba, succeeded
David as ruler of the kingdom. He was a master geo-politician,
marrying the daughters of all the neighboring kingdoms he could and
thus ensuring a peaceful reign. But power corrupts: he built lavishly
and to do this enslaved his people, in effect imitating the activities
of the Egyptian pharaoh. Actually the first of many of his wives was
the daughter of pharaoh.
The biblical account in lst Kings indicates that Solomon's descent
into polytheism led directly to the dissolution of his kingdom after
his death.
Son of Man
[
Armstrong (82):
believed "the phrase simply stressed the weakness and mortality
of the human condition" and that "Jesus seems to have gone out of his
way to emphasize that he was a frail human being who would one day
suffer and die."]
Spirit
Spirit subsumes Matter
The Bible lends itself to a literal (primarily
materialistic) or a spiritual interpretation. We believe
that the Bible is about spiritual reality although the
nature of spirit is such that it can only be described with
material metaphors. John 4:24 says "God is a Spirit" in
the KJV, but the RSV and most other translations say "God is
Spirit".
A common understanding suggests that the spiritual is
good and the material less than good (an idea emphasized by
Gnosticism and neoPlatonism).
However Jesus understood that spirits, some good, some evil
existed throughout the world. Paul spoke of spiritual wickedness in
high places.
It thus became necessary to learn to
try the spirits. Spiritual
consciousness per se is morally neutral; like television or the
automobile it may be used for good or ill.
See also Holy Spirit.
Theology
The precise meaning of theology is the study of God.
Christian theologians since the days of Jesus has occupied
themselves to an enormous degree with questions about the
extent to which statements made in the Bible are literally
true. This contention has gone on without pause from the
very beginning. Late in the 2nd century A.D. a man named
Celsus wrote "famous diatribe against Christianity". He
anticipated most of the arguments against the "truth"
(factuality, literal sense) of Christianity that have been
raised by biblical skeptics for the past 2000 years
(Charlotte Allen,
page 54).
Titus
For hotlinks go online.
Initial text from Easton's Bible Dictionary, 1897 -- Please update as needed
Voltaire was probably the most luminous father of the
Enlightenment. His sunniest time was a
visit to England, where he met John Locke and Isaac Newton and studied
England's constitutional monarch and religious tolerance. He also
visited the Society of Friends and expressed much admiration for
Quakers.
Universalism is the theological idea or doctrine that all men will be
eventually saved.
For a survey of 'biblical universalism' look at
this website.
The Way
Jesus said
"I am the Way, the
Truth and the Life." In the early days of the Church
people did not call themselves Christians, but followers of
the Way. That meant that they were commited to the gospel
of Jesus Christ and intended to live their lives
accordingly.
This Way is known and loved by many people who never
heard of Jesus. Regardless of any poetic statements he may
have made he never claimed a corner on it. He wanted people
to recognize their Heavenly Father, love him and
consequently love everyone; that was the gospel. To make a
materialistic vow of allegiance to his name was not his
objective although it became such in the 4th century with
the supposed need to make everybody's faith uniform.
The Prologue to John seems
to closely identify the Word with the Wisdom of Proverbs (cf.
Ellegard page 18).