Posted on 01/06/2015 2:57:33 AM PST by Faith Presses On
For believing Christians, the identity of Jesus was announced at the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451): Jesus was always divine and human simultaneously. How did this work? Very simply, “it’s a mystery.”
But a fuller explanation of how a peasant became God is the subject of Bart Ehrman’s latest book, “How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee,” and the subject of contentious debate among scholars. Several colleagues published a response titled “How God Became Jesus.”
Mr. Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is a popular speaker on the evolution of Christian theology (“Misquoting Jesus,” “Lost Scriptures: Books That Didn’t Make It Into the Bible”).
Dismissing his earlier training in Evangelical Christianity, he also dismisses most of the stories in the Gospels. He explains the rules of modern historical criticism, focusing on what we cannot know about Jesus because of the absence of evidence.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
So many heresies. So little time.
73
Other than historically, what of value was lost?
Theologically, nothing. nOT OF VALUE.
“He explains the rules of modern historical criticism, focusing on what we cannot know about Jesus because of the absence of evidence.”
Thus, his conclusions are predetermined by his choice of methodology. He only desires a God that will prove Himself to Mr. Ehrman on Mr. Ehrman’s terms, he doesn’t want to know God on God’s terms.
“Heretics used to be burned at the stake. Too bad that practice was discontinued.”
So if someone doesn’t accept Christ, you think that Christ would want us to burn them for that?
Jesus did not become God....God gave: “John 3:16”
The Word of God and inspired in Scripture is JESUS, because his truth is our salvation, the fact that he became the sacrificial Passover lamb to fulfill the NT....
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen...”
Mr. Ehrman has a problem.
“Where is your documentation?”
You’re the one who made the original claim, where is your documentation for that?
Bingo.
An interesting historical perspective if only an aside: many converts to Christianity at the time did not get baptized until they were near death (a risky proposition to be sure) because it was believed (as it is believed today at least in the Catholic Church) that Baptism remits all sins and washes the soul clean of all sin and effects of sin. So such souls go directly to heaven if they die soon after Baptism.
So the fact that Constantine didn’t get Baptised until his death doesn’t necessarily prove he had a death bed conversion.
Christianity was faced with a major predicament. The very essence of Judaism is monotheism: one God, and only one God. God had no image, no idol, and was a ‘singularity’, that is, comparable to nothing: no form, size, shape, color, odor, weight, etc. Thus if you even *tried* to assign God with any characteristic, you were committing a profane act. This is a concept way beyond most people.
At the same time, everybody else was pantheistic, everything from having a whole slew of gods, to having regional gods that predominated in their areas. And a lot of these pagan gods were really revolting, steeped in anthropomorphism, the attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being. And the characteristics the pagans assigned to their gods were not nice ones. In fact, they chose the worst aspects of people as the dominant features of their gods.
In any event, Christianity had to justify Jesus as God, but with a human form, and one that could be depicted, though sort of properly not Jesus Himself, but the symbol of a fish or a cross, the means of his execution, the most vital thing he accomplished, according to Christianity.
And the process to do this was agonizing. Many rejected the idea of the Trinity as pantheistic, some wanted a female God, one way or another, either alone or as part of the Trinity, others wanted an angelic hierarchy that in effect were “lesser gods”, subordinate to God. And even then there were those who wanted God, et al., regarded as a regional god, perhaps one to take over the territories of other gods. There were also a lot of efforts to declare pagan gods to be fallen angels or devils, or for God to take over their “powers”, etc.
Confusing, complex, bizarre, and argumentative. But they had to clarify things, no small task.
Importantly, these men were very well read, accomplished scholars, so were not just armchair opinionaters. They were working from the best references and resources available. So they not only had to define what Christianity was, but immediately defend it against comparisons to other religions that had at least some similarities.
Jesus and the early Christians used the Old Testament.
I’ve always thought that a God that you could put in a test tube and watch him turn litmus paper blue wouln’t be a God worth worshipping.
Nah. He’ll do it Himself. At the proper time.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
. . . Sinner becomes a Christian - not news.
. . . Christian becomes heretic - news.
Pathetic.
One of my grandfathers was baptized like that, not quite on his deathbed, but just a few years from the grave.
I’m not sure if he was just waiting until that late to get a cleaner slate, or if it just took my grandmother decades to talk him into it :)
I always wondered which of the trinity Ezekial saw in Chapter 1. It seemed so unlike all the other visions mentioned in the Bible.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.