Aswad
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ORIGINAL: stella40
No other sect leader can ever hope to compete, Jesus was incredibly intelligent, he was a fantastic teacher, he had his head screwed on right, he WAS the example, and he spoke the truth. Now he could have just turned to his disciples and said 'hey guys, why don't we just cut the BS and give it to the people straight?' But he couldn't.
~nod~
Though identifying as a Jew, Albert Einstein was immensely fascinated by "the Nazarene".
Noam Chomsky made an interesting comment along the lines of what you said. I'll use the WP quote, which goes as follows: "Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned."
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or they would have had him much earlier.
You may want to consider the position forwarded in the Gospel of Iudas.
Basically, the notion is one of two options:
- Jesus, seeing that he'd gone as far as the people were able to follow at this point, offered himself as a martyr in order to immortalize his own teachings, and thereby start a movement that the Romans could never extinguish. In this, he had Iudas to help set the Romans up by proclaiming to betray him; pity, the others lost a lot of the gist of things, which did not seem lost on either Iudas, Thomas or the Magdalene, for instance.
- Being a divine being trapped in a physical body, as all souls are, Jesus sought release and a return from this prison to where he belonged. The Gospel of Iudas speaks of how "You will be the one to free me from this body I wear." This is one of the Gnostic positions on the matter.
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And this is why Jesus spoke in Aramic, and also told stories and parables. The message was no longer straightforward, you had to think to get the message.
Kind of like koans, zen riddles and so forth. Some might say Fight Club, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, qualify as the same. Many Objectivists claim that The Sword of Truth is similar in that regard. When the message is cleverly wrapped in a different guise, the mind has to work to unwrap it, and the result is that it is accepted more easily and more profoundly.
I would also say it is one of the defining properties of Art.
Basically, good Art, to me, is something that (a) conveys something that cannot be conveyed directly, and/or (b) captures something fleeting or not often experienced. Its aesthetics are beside the point, an entirely a different axis. "I just call 'em as I see 'em", some people say. And a good Artist, to my mind, does just that: sees something that the vast majority of us do not see, or at least do not fully perceive, and presents it to us in a manner which captures the essence of it.
In that regard, the Bible is Art. To consider it a collection of commandments and prohibitions, along with a bit of history, is absurd in the extreme. I doubt it was ever meant to be any of those things, except to those who lived at the time when it was made and did not have the ears to hear what was truly being said (for whom it would improve things over the status quo then, but not now); instead, I am confident that the Bible is meant to capture the spirit of the faith, much as other Art, and convey this to those that have the ability to discern it.
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And I'm sure he never said, "Husbands pick up Thy floggers and smite Thy wives whenever they show disobedience."
No, but Paul, the guy who essentially founded the mainstream organized religion that came to be the Catholic church, and (later) its derivates, probably did. Repeatedly. A lot of writing establishes him quite clearly as being outright misogynistic, and also as being highly jealous of the Magdalene.
I read a doctoral thesis about the notion that the Magdalene was the infamous Beloved Disciple, and that the Gospel of John had been redacted to obscure this fact. The line of reasoning was fairly persuasive, and it built on well established work. Essentially, there are several breaks in the narrative flow, several inconsistencies that do not appear in the rest of that Gospel, and some breaks in the linguistic flow, mostly around where it deals with the Magdalene and where it deals with the Beloved Disciple. There are, at the time, no legitimate reasons for hiding the identity of the Beloved Disciple, and a lot of good arguments that it would be the Magdalene.
Indeed, if you accept some of the non-canon Gospels as well, like the Gnostics do, then Jesus purportedly said to them that "Where your understanding burns as a candle, hers is like that of the Sun." I can easily picture a misogynistic second-rate disciple as harboring a great deal of jealousy over that, and carrying a grudge.
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There is nothing which states that Jesus was into BDSM or not. Most likely he wasn't, it just didn't float his boat.
You never know 
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Upon death on the cross Jesus Christ became God.
That part is not universally accepted, even among the organized religions. Some say he is distinct, some say he was already consubstantiate with G*d all along, some say other things still.
One thing is for certain, though, and beyond even the unorganized religious aspect of it, and that is that, regardless of any spiritual immortality he may have gained, he certainly did gain a different kind of immortality; that of his teachings, with him as the example to illustrate them, being firmly embedded in the minds of many, and eventually growing to become embedded in the minds of about a billion or so at this point.
Whether he'd be pleased with how some have been going about "honoring" his legacy, though, is rather doubtful. For instance, as a good Jew, I doubt he would approve of people praying to him and to Mary; that's flirting with idolatry at best. To say nothing of what some churches have done in his name. If he really is consubstantiate with G*d, then some of the stuff that's gone on in his name amounts to no less than desecrating / defiling that name, and would be blasphemy, as such.
People who accept the miracles of the stories sometimes try to posit a time for his return.
Personally, if I were him, I'd be a bit disappointed, and would try giving serious thought as to whether a third time around of trying to knock the message into people's heads would work or not, and whether it'd be worth it. Especially given some of the things he purportedly said about what will happen upon his return, which would be rather clearly catastrophic if he doesn't make at least one more "intermediate" return first, and doing that would hardly be likely to cause people (locked in their preconceptions about what he will and will not do) to assume he was actually back. That, and there's this whole thing about "some of us who live now, will be alive when he returns" or somesuch. Bit late for that if the Big Guy hasn't changed his opinion on the 120 years thing and a few budding Metusaleh-like people were in the lot.
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No, the Gospels were written in the form of stories, in the same format as Jesus told them, probably verbatim, and this formed the New Testament.
Err... not quite.
The Gospels were written down at some point, possibly by the people who lived it, quite possibly not; probably in the format Jesus told it. And then there was endless bickering, and fighting. Some texts were lost. Some destroyed. Some were hidden, for instance in the caves at Qumran.
Either way, there is evidence of significant tampering with the texts, even prior to the point where churches sprang up.
Which then brings us to the New Testament. The gist of it is, people sat down and debated which texts should have what status in the New Testament. Several texts were rejected, some banned, some destroyed (again). Some were included as apocrypha. Some were considered Canon(tm). In the end, the dust settled, and we were left with a predigested blending of the original material. Sure, it's probably less confusing that way, but it is taking away the opportunity for each person to hear and decide for themselves, which is essentially what Jesus himself did.
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But what I have given here is MY interpretation, MY perception and MY view.
~nod~
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: For those of a christian bent.... - 
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