njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Apocalypso
quote:
ORIGINAL: Moonhead
Right, so those beautitudes and the sermon on the mount were somebody else impersonating our Lord and Saviour, then? He didn't speak out against usury and kick the pharisees out of the temple? He didn't advise the rich man to sell his property and use the money to do good works, after making a comment about camels and the eye of a needle? The only person he actually promises Heaven to in the whole of the New Testament isn't one of the thieves that he's crucified with?
Because given all of that freeloading lefty business, his conduct really doesn't say "reactionary" to me.
My describing of him as an "apocalyptic preacher" doesn't really say "reactionary" either, no? While the current end times crowd are mostly reactionaries, that's something of a historical anomaly. Generally, millennialism has lead to radicalism. (The English Revolution is a pretty good case study of that). That applies to Jesus in my view. When he was talking about the meek inheriting the earth, I'd conclude that he was seeing that as something that was going to happen soon, not in thousands of years.
However, that doesn't make him a liberal in any meaningful sense. He equally wasn't a conservative to be clear. Trying to map modern political ideologies onto historical figures is always problematic.
Some of what you're using to paint him as a liberal comes under the heading of "justification by works". That isn't necessarily a liberal position. It's the position of the Catholic Church, who are hardly known for having a historical tradition of social liberalism. (Even if their economic leanings are generally more left wing then modern conservative parties).
I think the best way to describe Christ was radical, because what he was proposing was a radical shift from the temple based Judaism of his day. When he overturns the table the money lenders are using, he isn't doing as some claim, that the money lenders shouldn't have been there, rather, he was overturning what had been Jewish tradition for a long time, lending money to buy animals for sacrifice was a part of the world of the temple, it wasn't something that happened by corruption. The Temple based Judaism said that only people 'pure' enough could go into the temple, it excluded women and children and allowed only those favored by the priests, Christ made clear all were welcome, he 'took in' women, children, and those like tax collectors and prostitutes shunned. He makes clear that the prejudices of the priests and society (as in the case of the Good Samaritan), are meaningless, that the Samaritans (a Jewish sect), are good because of the actions they do.
Paul was a lot different then Jesus, and it is hard to really understand him (Jack Spong wrote a lot about him in "The Sins of Scripture" and argues that Paul was a troubled soul, potentially because he was gay, and as a result goes the other way...). In one part of his writings, he tells a church that it is okay for women to preach, as long as they wear a cloth covering their head, yet in I believe Timothy he goes off on this rant about women that not only denies they should preach, but that women are these inferior beings. Orthodox Christians, especially use this to say women cannot be priests, yet the reality is Paul contradicts himself. It could be as many Scholars believe Timothy is pseudo Pauline, written by a disciple of his later, but the fact remains Paul is a mystery. The one section of Paul that claims to be about homosexuality is actually a rant against deviant sexual practices of all kinds, and whether homosexuality is part of that is strictly interpretation, the greeks had no word for being gay, homosexuality itself is a late 19th century term.
Paul's most radical difference with Christ was that Christ from what anyone can tell was not trying to create a new faith, Christ saw himself as Jewish, his disciples were Jewish, and he states he is not there to overturn Jewish teachings, but rather to look at it in a different way. Christ never says that followers didn't have to convert to Judaism, that was Paul,and it can be argued that Christ was another form of the rabbinic judaism that was starting to flourish....
Paul bringing in Gentiles very much was a game changer, and apparently, he and Peter had quite a rift over the course of the faith, Peter was dead set against bringing in non Jews (that later on must have changed). When it spread to gentiles, Jesus teachings would take on a new life, as would the gospels once written, because a lot of what he was teaching was in the context of Jewish tradition, and when read by gentiles without that context, takes on a whole new meaning, one that would radically change it (Spong's book on looking at the NT with Jewish eyes makes a great case for this)......Jewish understanding of things in many ways is different then Christian, and when you read the Hebrew Scripture if you don;'t understand Jewish religious law and context, it is very very easy to misinterpret it (as Christians do with the leviticine pronouncement, supposedly against homosexuality). The trinitarian idea of Christ came out of the Greek influx into the new faith and represents very much a neo platonian idea of what Christ was ; the ascetism attributed to Christ,the who suffering thing, the idea of renouncing material things, was very much a spawn of the stoic tradition. Paul's was the vision of a universal church, a 'catholic' one, Peter and the disciples and Christ probably did not see it as such.
In the end, the Paulists won out, that led to creation of the Christian church, with the theology of the trinity and the idea of a central church with Bishops and so forth, that took roughly 4 centuries to happen. If one of the other visions, like the Ebionites or the North African or Marcionites had won out, it would be very, very different a faith. And if some of the gnostic traditions had won out, even more different...
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