On Capitalist Jesus. The Evil of Christianity.

[idiom]

As opposed to quoting benjamin franklin and promiting gnosticsm? Shove it. Your hypocricy always is showing.

I have not quoted Benjamin Franklin. Call that out if you want.

The Gnostic Gospels purport to be the words of Jesus too.

 

[BeFranklin]

You should burn your "curious" books

Acts 19

13Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the LORD Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth.

14And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so.

15And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?

16And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.

17And this was known to all the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus; and fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified.

18And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.

19Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.

20So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.

 

[idiom]

And Jesus said which bit?

 

[LATruth]

And Jesus said which bit?

Even if she quoted scripture, stating a passage that Jesus said, it would be considered hearsay. Technically.

 

[PaulaGem]

Book Burning advocated on a Libertarian thread...

Outrageously hypocritical.

 

[Bossobass]

My point is that he believed in the teachings of Yeshua but not necessarly the Roman belief that he was also a god.

By the way - Jesus Christ is a fictional character based on the Jewish Rabbi Yeshua.

The birth, life, ministry and death of Jesus ( or, Yeshua in Hebrew, or Jeshua in the Latinized version of the Hebrew, or Iesous in Greek) is foretold in detail through over 200 prophecies that predate Jesus by hundreds of years.

For those who think that some Roman wank (or any other man or group of men) foiled God's plan by somehow discarding or adding or emending the books of the Bible you need only to look to the Jews whose scribes meticulously copied the Scriptures as a profession and under the death penalty.

There are cases were the zealous nature of the scribes led them to make emendations, but the Masoretes, as the copyists that came centuries after Jesus were called, noted these emendations in the marginal notes, which came to be known as the Masorah.

Those verses have been read aloud every Sabbath in the temple over the generations. They were copied so meticulously that Jesus could be traced back to Adam and Eve through his mother's and his step father's genealogies, by Matthew and Luke.

The published fragments of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls verify no deviation from a modern Bibles version of Isaiah.

Looking to apocryphal books such as the Gospel of Thomas, wherein, for example, Jesus is pretended to have performed miracles as a child, is chasing after the wind. To believe in an all powerful, all knowing Creator, and then to sell out that belief by thinking that men altered His handbook to some perverted version is absurd.

It would be better to believe nothing.

Bosso

 

[TurtleBurger]

Outrageously hypocritical.

Book burning is not anti-libertarian, as long as it's voluntarily done by the books' owners.

 

[PaulaGem]

The birth, life, ministry and death of Jesus ( or, Yeshua in Hebrew, or Jeshua in the Latinized version of the Hebrew, or Iesous in Greek) is foretold in detail through over 200 prophecies that predate Jesus by hundreds of years.

Those prophetic interpretations are pretty thinly supported, most date to misiterpretations of a misinterpreted version of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint.

For those who think that some Roman wank (or any other man or group of men) foiled God's plan by somehow discarding or adding or emending the books of the Bible you need only to look to the Jews whose scribes meticulously copied the Scriptures as a profession and under the death penalty.

1)The Hebrew texts are highly accurate but not without error, the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew) is notoriously bad.

2) The Synoptic gospels contain many contradictions, especially in the biographical details of the life of Yeshua. The only reasonable explaination I have found for this is that they were tacked on to the actual teachings at a later date. That is why the Gospel of Thomas is such an excellent study tool.

3) If God needs a book to get through to people then Christianity and Yeshua lied about the essential nature of God.

4) The Romans destroyed many religious texts similar to the Gospel of Thomas that probably contained a more accurate rendition of his teachings. Many scholars believe that Yeshua taught and believed in reincarnation. Most scholars believe that the passages purporting to represent Yeshua as divine were added to the N.T. by Roman Christologists hundreds of years after his death.

There are cases were the zealous nature of the scribes led them to make emendations, but the Masoretes, as the copyists that came centuries after Jesus were called, noted these emendations in the marginal notes, which came to be known as the Masorah.

Those verses have been read aloud every Sabbath in the temple over the generations. They were copied so meticulously that Jesus could be traced back to Adam and Eve through his mother's and his step father's genealogies, by Matthew and Luke.

Many students of the Bible find those geneologies to be absurd and just more evidence of Roman tampering.

The published fragments of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls verify no deviation from a modern Bibles version of Isaiah.

And how does that address the fraud in the N.T. by the Roman Church? By the way, they concurr with Hebrew texts, but diverge from the Septuagint. The Vulgate and the dogmas concerning the prophecy that supports the Roman deification of the mythological Jesus are based on the Septuagint.

From the Encyclopedia of Judaism: Dead Sea Scrolls

The first finds occurred in 1947, when Bedouin chanced upon a Judean Desert cave containing a batch of seven scrolls wrapped in rags. These all eventually found their way to Jerusalem. Subsequent searches in the Judean Desert, including the specific area of Qumran along the Dead Sea shore, produced thousands of scroll remnants, in varying states of decipherability. Similar scrolls were discovered at Masada. These have all been connected with a sect living in Qumran in the last period of the Second Temple. The Damascus Covenant (or Zadokite) documents found at the end of the 19th century in the Cairo Genizah are now also assumed to have been the literary productions of the same sect. Pottery remains have assisted in dating both the documents and the community which produced many of them to the first century BCE-first century CE.

The Qumran community is identified by many scholars with the Essenes (or a group of them). Their origins in the area date to 140-130 BCE, and according to some even prior to the Maccabean uprising in 167 BCE. The founder of the sect, generally known by a title translated "Teacher of Righteousness" or "The Rightful Teacher" (the title is disputed), was apparently a priest.
.........
A striking aspect of the Qumran sectaries was their belief in their special election as members of a "New Covenant." Other themes basic to their belief were the reality of Divine grace and individual salvation. Their lives centered around Divine worship (although there does appear to have been at least one offshoot whose members worked to earn their daily bread), with prayers held twice daily, at dawn and dusk. Unlike the rest of mainstream Jewry, the sect celebrated the traditional biblical festivals according to the 52-week solar calendar consisting of four 13-week seasons. The drastic consequence of this break with the traditional Jewish luni-solar calendar was that the Jewish festivals were celebrated by the sect on fixed days of the week and thus at times which, for the mass of Jewry, were ordinary working days.

A striking divergence from the predominant national Pharisee-oriented outlook may be found in the sect's belief in Predestination, despite the apparently contradictory opinion expressed in some of their writings that men would be judged by their deeds.

The sacred communal meals of the sect constituted one of its unique features, and may well have been intended as a substitute for the sacrificial meals at the Temple in Jerusalem. Here the Qumran sect struck out on perhaps its most divergent path in that it considered the Jerusalem Temple a place of abomination and pollution, although the biblically ordained Temple and service as such were held in deepest reverence by the Qumran community. According to the War Rule, the sacrificial cult would be properly resumed in the seventh year of the Great War before the onset of the messianic era, this war to be waged by the members of the Qumran sect---the Sons of Light---against the other nonsectaries---the Sons of Darkness. Ritual purity was another extremely important tenet of belief and practice.

........

Apocryphal compositions such as Enoch, Tobit, and Jubilees, seem to have been embraced by the sect. A type of apocryphal literature apparently originating with the Qumran community is to be found in such compositions as the Genesis Apocryphon, the Samuel Apocryphon, psalms not found in Jewish Scripture, and other writings of a similar nature. Of special interest in this respect are the minute scraps from the Hebrew Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) scroll. These, together with the fragmentary portions of two chapters found at Masada, and the substantial sections discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost a century ago, account for about two-thirds of the previously unknown original Hebrew text of this important non-canonical work.

A scroll category of prime interest is the numerous copies of the books of the Bible (with the sole exception of the Book of Esther), including the complete Book of Isaiah, and many fragments of the Hebrew Scriptures. Viewed in their entirety, the Qumran Bible fragments strongly resemble the traditional (Masoretic) Bible text. Nevertheless, careful scrutiny shows divergences, often indicating a strong affinity with the Samaritan Bible and the Septuagint. The greater part of the Judean Desert sect's library is written in the literary Hebrew of the Second Temple era, the remainder in Aramaic, with an insignificant portion of small remnants comprising Greek translations of Scripture.

http://www.answers.com/topic/dead-sea-scrolls

The above supports my personal belief that Yeshua was an Essene, Essenes were also gnostics. The communal supper of the Essenes and early Christians evolved into the Roman ritual of communion. There is a great difference in the Mosiach anticipated by the Jews that would overthrow Rome and restore Israel politically and the many Mosiach (annointed of God) that were recognized by the O.T. and the Jewish people. Yeshua did NOT fulfill the prophecies believed to refer to the political Mosiach.

Looking to apocryphal books such as the Gospel of Thomas, wherein, for example, Jesus is pretended to have performed miracles as a child, is chasing after the wind. To believe in an all powerful, all knowing Creator, and then to sell out that belief by thinking that men altered His handbook to some perverted version is absurd.

It would be better to believe nothing.

Bosso

Perhaps you should read the G.O.T. before you critique it. The G.O.T. is not biographical, you have another apocryphal book confused with this "sayings gospel" which parallels very closely with the teachings in the synoptics. It is obvious to an objective student of the Bible that the biographical anecdotes of the canonical N.T. are later additions so they carry no more merit than these other purported biographical books, by the way.

It is established history that the N.T. is historically inaccurate and that the books chosen for the orthodox canon excluded non-Roman "Christologies" which were merely theories about what Christianity was supposed to be.

Before the Roman Church started destroying them, it is believed there were over 80 gospels. Some of them were undoubtably similar to the Gospel of Thomas and would have given us additional teachings of the master.

What we were left with are three redundant books based on the same teaching source with contradictory biographical and chronological detail - Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

What was destroyed may have included actual first hand accounts. They certainally did include accounts that were closer to the original teachings and the oral form that was used in the early church to preserve those teachings. The Gospel of Thomas was spared by Divine grace to show us this.

 

[TurtleBurger]

It is established history that the N.T. is historically inaccurate...

"Established history" is a presumptiously confident phrase, especially since a large percentage of historians are convinced of its accuracy. It's pretty hard to buy all these assertions you are making without any evidence to back them up. Have you read the Septuagint in its original Greek to be so convinced that it's full of errors, or are you quoting someone else's work? If so it's good form to let us know whose work you are quoting.

 

[PaulaGem]

"Established history" is a presumptiously confident phrase, especially since a large percentage of historians are convinced of its accuracy. It's pretty hard to buy all these assertions you are making without any evidence to back them up. Have you read the Septuagint in its original Greek to be so convinced that it's full of errors, or are you quoting someone else's work? If so it's good form to let us know whose work you are quoting.

I did an exhaustive study and a reorientation of my own beliefs as a Christian several years ago. I do not read Greek, Aramaic, or Latin. I attended primarily to scholars who were independent of Christian funded universities because I expected (and found) them to be more objective.

I am summarizing my own studies and I enourage those with serious questions to do their own study as the sources are too many to list here. I found that non-Christian affiliated scholars almost unanimously did not value the "prophecies" and found them to be ex post facto. I was shocked by some things I found, including solid evidence of intentional tampering with N.T. documents by the Roman Church in order to support their views.

A warning - you can approach this problem with an open mind, or you can approach it in an attempt to disprove or prove the Bible. Your approach will pretty much determine the outcome so unless you can be objective on the subject, don't waste your time.

A reminder - Yeshua said that you have to be willing to give up everything to follow him. That includes your religious dogma if Truth is your goal.

 

[Dieseler]

That's whats so great about faith.
I don't even care who she is quoting.

 

[TurtleBurger]

I did an exhaustive study and a reorientation of my own beliefs as a Christian several years ago. I do not read Greek, Aramaic, or Latin. I attended primarily to scholars who were independent of Christian funded universities because I expected (and found) them to be more objective.

I am summarizing my own studies and I enourage those with serious questions to do their own study as the sources are too many to list here. I found that non-Christian affiliated scholars almost unanimously did not value the "prophecies" and found them to be ex post facto. I was shocked by some things I found, including solid evidence of intentional tampering with N.T. documents by the Roman Church in order to support their views.

A warning - you can approach this problem with an open mind, or you can approach it in an attempt to disprove or prove the Bible. Your approach will pretty much determine the outcome so unless you can be objective on the subject, don't waste your time.

A reminder - Yeshua said that you have to be willing to give up everything to follow him. That includes your religious dogma if Truth is your goal.

OK if you don't have evidence, could you at least give some examples of passages of the New Testament that were tampered with, and what the "correct" text was supposed to say?

 

[PaulaGem]

A nice way to study the prallels between the five gospels.

http://www.utoronto.ca/religion/synopsis/

Note that John is about as far removed from Matthew, Mark and Luke as is the Gospel of Thomas.

 

[PaulaGem]

OK if you don't have evidence, could you at least give some examples of passages of the New Testament that were tampered with, and what the "correct" text was supposed to say?

I have done so - I have no doubt that the biographical details, including crucifixion and resurrection were not eye witness accounts but Roman tradition and mythology added to the teachings of Yeshua.

The evidence is all over the place if you care to look. It's not that I don't have it, it's that it is a process of study, not a pseudo argument like the "Case for Christ".

 

[TurtleBurger]

I have done so - I have no doubt that the biographical details, including crucifixion and resurrection were not eye witness accounts but Roman tradition and mythology added to the teachings of Yeshua.

The evidence is all over the place if you care to look. It's not that I don't have it, it's that it is a process of study, not a pseudo argument like the "Case for Christ".

I agree with you that an argument based on sound bites isn't all that useful. On the other hand, there should be some hard simple evidence available that at least proves you have a legitimate argument.
Just as a ballpark estimate, what year do you think the crucifixion and resurrection were added to the gospel accounts, and by whom?

 

[PaulaGem]

Proof of the power of Myth...

Most of the beliefs of current church going Christians concerning Satan, the Devil, and Angels and Heaven are not Blbilical.

They are not taught (in some cases there are marginal references to their apocryphal source, but no real teaching) in the Bible, N.T. or Old.

The Devil, Heaven and Hell, fallen angel stuff is Zoroastrian, grafted onto Judaism during the exile in Babylon. They are apocryphal to the O.T.

These teachings were originally included in the doctrines of the Roman Church, they were popularized in Dante's Inferno, and they are still perpetuated by contemporary fundamentalist churches, not because they are "scriptural" because they are not. They help build a climate of fear and assist in the domination of the masses by the illuminati.

 

[PaulaGem]

I agree with you that an argument based on sound bites isn't all that useful. On the other hand, there should be some hard simple evidence available that at least proves you have a legitimate argument.
Just as a ballpark estimate, what year do you think the crucifixion and resurrection were added to the gospel accounts, and by whom?

Gospels were developed all over the known world. In the tradition of religious literature the teachings of Yeshua were combined with localized gods and religious teachings. This is how Yeshua became Jesus and then a Roman god. The resurrection and virgin birth myths are repeated in many ancient religious traditions, including the Roman religions.

Because of the political power of the Romans, their version was made official and even posessing another version was punishable by death. The competing gospels were destroyed and among them I believe there were also non-redacted more truthful accounts of the ministry and teachings of Yeshua.

There is a theory that desctruction of these documents was the real reason the the great Library of Alexandria was destroyed.

We can't say when the synoptics were originally written because there are no early copies. Would these earliesr copies give us more evidence of Roman tampering? I believe so.

 

[Bossobass]

Getting back on topic:

A Christian is allegedly a 'Christ-like' person who looks to the Jesus of history as a mentor and who claims to believe in his teachings as ‘the word of God.’

Consider that the historical Jesus appears to have been a person who fits the following description.

Tenets of the Historical Jesus.

1: Anti-Monetarism / Anti-Capitalism

He did not believe in any form of monetarism (do not carry money.... do not receive money, only food); he was a homeless (he had nowhere to lay his head), unemployed ( he called upon those with him to give up their professions), anti-propertyist who propagated not monetarism but proto-Communism (Fr. Communare: to share. Communism: to share all property in common)

a) Nowhere does the Bible quote Jesus as saying he didn't believe in any form of monetarism. Jesus was a carpenter by trade. One would assume that he was quite good at his learned trade. Carpenters had many uses the in economy of Jesus' day and were well paid for their services.

Gold is the first and most often mentioned metal in the Bible. David, for one example, set aside 100,000 talents of gold to build Solomon's temple, estimated to be worth billions at today's prices in dollars.

From Job to Jesus, the unbalanced love for gold is equated with materialism, which is to be avoided, but in Revelation, gold is used to describe the holy city New Jerusalem, and is used symbolically in many places to describe various ideals as exemplary because of its valuable properties and beauty.

In the Gospels the system of weights and measures is mentioned. The system of weights and measures for gold and silver used by the Jews dates all the way back to Abraham. Virtually all of the Greek and Roman copper, bronze, gold and silver coins of the day are mentioned in the Gospels.

Jesus commended the widow's contribution as a good thing, but condemned the money changers abuse of money as a bad thing. He advocated paying the taxes that were due to both the Jews and the Romans.

And the question needs to raised as to how a person who carries no money could pay taxes; one of the alleged reasons for his arrest.

This one is simply typical of the thought process of a man who believes he arose from the cosmic soup, or the impregnation of an ape by aliens.

We're talking about the only begotten Son of God during his ministry and that would lead to his death, the sole purpose for his life here on earth, during which time, he had full use of his Father's Holy Spirit to acommodate his every need.

Jesus could have saved the lion's share of his life earnings as a carpenter and carried that money around with him instead, but how absurd would his claims have been if he used money instead. Claiming that one doesn't need to fret over sustenance while tossing around gold coins from a big sack full of them would be pointless.

"Sell everything you own and give the money to the poor..." is not Communism. 'The poor' wasn't everyone and charity isn't Communist, or any other political ideology. In his parables, he spoke of just wages for a days work, the going price of a sparrow, settling out of court to avoid the cost of debtor's prison, sweeping your house to find a lost coin of value, a stater for the head tax, a denarius to pay Caesar's tax, etc.

Nowhere did he say not to do those things or that they were sinful actions. So, where would one imagine he assumed people would get the coins to pay the taxes and one's living if he advocated zero monetarism?

b) Jesus was not homeless. nor was he unemployed. He was was traveling in his retirement, which he knew was only to be 3 1/2 years from the prophecies regarding the subject. One didn't drag his house with him in his travels, nor was (or is) living with your parents considered being homeless.

Again, it's absurd to believe that Jesus didn't have the option to take a wife, have children and become extremely successful in worldly terms. In fact, Satan had offered him 'all the Kingdoms of the world' if he would just bow before him.

He, instead, chose to follow his Father's wishes to the letter while using parables ("... indeed, were it not for parables, he would not speak to them at all.") to teach the true meaning of "Law and the Prophets", and to fulfill the prophecies about his life on earth as part of the plan for the Kingdom of God, which would make him a Theocrat, not a Communist, or any other man made concept of governance.

Do not worship mammon (Aramaic: Material possessions / clothing / money). Consider Solomon in all his glory?

How does this admonition to not 'worship' money and/or the things it can buy get twisted into the thought that Jesus advocated having no money or possessions?

As I pointed out in an earlier post, Jesus' clothing was the best money could buy, to the point of the Roman soldiers casting of lots over his inner garment rather than cutting it into pieces.

The 'worship' or 'love' of money and possessions is wrong. It always has been, it always will be. But, keeping the proper place for money and possessions in one's life is not sinful in and of itself, regardless of the amount, as seen in Job's and Solomon's examples.

2: No Swearing of Oaths.

..and of course without the swearing of oaths and contracts, Capitalism would cease to exist, and ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag…’ would be a violation of the words and edicts of Jesus, as would American Presidents swearing on stacks of Bibles, and Christians swearing oaths in courts or military oaths to fight the enemies of Capitalism.

True. Never swear an oath before God for fear that you don't uphold that oath. Pledging allegiance to a flag that represents "all the kingdoms of the earth", which Satan has control over (otherwise, what sense would it have made to offer them to Jesus), is a no-brainer.

What good has come from men swearing an oath on a Bible? Does he mean like Bush did? And what penalty did Bush receive for violating that oath? Legal contracts are just another grandiose contrivance of man. They are broken and result in legal action every second in every country on the planet.

If a Christian swears an oath to a man, he or she will honor that oath, regardless of some paper with carefully arranged words of some language known to modern man. Again, this is a no-brainer. OTOH, an unscrupulous man will betray that oath all day long and care not what the carefully worded paper may say.

Presenting oaths and laws and contracts as the savior on mankind is as absurd as the rest of the claims in this threads OP.

3: He cried out against the rich and the religious hypocrites.

Woe to you brood of vipers… hypocrites…serpents.. in the name of the prophets you would have stoned the prophets, etc., etc.
Today it is the Christian state terrorists who have a long history of torturing and murdering Communists, particularly in the post war history of Latin America with their Palace revolutions and miltary coups

.

I have no idea what this means. As I've shown, Jesus cried out against no one for simply being rich. Using a term like "Christian terrorist" (or, Christian Militia, a favorite of mine) to describe a true Christian (of whom Jesus said there would be relatively very few vs the unrighteous worldly masses), is just using an example of worldly criminals by any other name.

4: He did not sell salvation for Capitalist coin.

He did not ask for tithes or offerings; he fed the poor and freely cared for the sick.

Jesus was the long awaited and prophesied Messiah. He preached 'the good news of the Kingdom". As King and High Priest in this Kingdom of God, he would have to demonstrate that he indeed would have the power to solve all of man's problems and be righteous in carrying out those duties.

He proved his power over the ultimate enemy, death, by raising Lazarus from the dead, as well as others. Again, how absurd would it have been to hand Lazarus a bill as soon as he emerged from his burial tomb and explain to the crowd that it's gonna cost ya?

I guess if Jesus was, just as most Jews have explained to me over the years when I asked them if they denied he ever existed, replied, "Oh no, we definitely lived back then and rumor has it he was a pretty good carpenter.", or, as the atheists believe, he was just an evolved monkey, one would have expected him to charge a hefty fee for his charity and make no other point in his travels or examples.

But, that's irrelevant to the topic, isn't it?

5: He told the rich to devote their wealth to the poor.

No, he didn't.

6: No Priesthood.

He was clearly ‘against' the priesthood of his age, and indeed against any form of priesthood.

Correct. As Paul later verified, "The Law is a shadow of the reality." Jesus fulfilled the Law and his death did away with the Law. He is King and High Priest of his Father's Kingdom.

Unfortunately for the casual observer, like the OP quotes author, the further details of this subject are the main theme of the Bible and are pieced together from a careful study of all of its 66 books. No casual reply is available, but the information is there for anyone who sincerely wishes to know it.

Understanding and rejecting the greatest story ever told is something I respect a lot more than these out of context and weak attacks.

7: Anti-Capitalist Martyrdom and Rebellion

This is the true meaning of 'take up your cross;' this was a common punishment for anti-Roman terrorists.

He was tortured and executed for his rebellion against the religious establishment, at their request, and allegedly as a political criminal; he did not support the corrupt government and the Solomonic priesthood (the Sadducees).

Again, since every government since the flood belongs to Satan (just check the histories of the successive world powers: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greek, Roman and Anglo-American to see the blueprint that has never changed from day one.), as evidenced by his offering them all to Jesus, It would be stupid to imagine him pledging any allegiance to any of them.

He was tortured and killed at the insistence of the ruling class of the Jews because they rejected him as their Messiah, and to fulfill prophecy. As his accusers were asked by jesus on numerous occasions, "... for which of these deeds which you've seen and heard are you prosecuting me?"

Jesus said when he was apprehended: "...or do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father to supply me at once with 12 legions of angels?" Then he goes on to say, "In that case, how would the Scriptures be fulfilled that it must take place this way?"

Read the 19th chapter of John. Pilate repeatedly said he found no fault in Jesus. He even instructed the Jews to impale him themselves because "I find no fault in him." I Matthew's account, Pilate's wife warns him to have nothing to do with this mob action, and in the end, Pilate publicly washes his hands of the affair.

When Pilate again interrogated Jesus, he asked him; "Do you not know that I have authority to release you and I have authority to impale you?", Jesus told him, "You would have no authority against me if it were not granted to you from above."

Jesus did not die on a cross. This is such elementary information that I'll just leave it to anyone who is actually interested in the subject to search for his or her self. Therefore, "Take up your cross" has no meaning to true Christians.

8: Non-Idolatry

He was not an idolater, he never referred to himself as the Creator; he may have invoked the Messianic prophecies but he clearly was not so arrogant as to consider himself to be the Creator; indeed he cried out to the Creator at times and referred constantly to the Creator in the Third person. Christians today worship him as an object of idolatry and propagate the Captialist anti-thesis of his teachings.

This is correct.

9: No Public Praying. No Praying in Temples.

He told his followers, 'Do not pray in public in the streets and the Temples.'

In other words, a true Christ-like person would never pray in public or in a church, nor would they construct any form of Temple.

Please. Paul uttered the shortest verse in the Bible: "Pray incessantly." Jesus was instructing people not to be as the Jews ruling religious class were. This example is well enough for a 5 year old to get the point. You gotta be joking with this one.

10: The revolutionary militant (terrorist) Jesus: Armed Revolution.

Consider that at one point he asks his followers to sell their robes if they have to and buy swords. There are two interpretations of the answer, one being 'we have two swords,' and another being 'we have two swords each.' The Judean siccari (Swordsmen or 'terrorists’ to the Romans) commonly carried two swords, as opposed to the sword and shield of the Romans.

'Cohort' (L. a tenth of a Legion).

It clearly states that a cohort (L. a 10th of a legion) of Romans arrested Jesus. A legion was a minimum of 5000 men plus cavalry. Thus a minimum of 500 armed soldiers (plus the Temple guard, who were also armed) arrested Jesus in Gethsemane where an armed fight broke out; outnumbered his followers fled. This begs the question of why 500 armed soldiers would attempt to arrest a group of unarmed pacifists. It simply does not make sense.

Now compare this man to modern day Christians in general. Are they really Christ-like? Do they really believe in all of the above?

Indeed today it is only the Communists who represent his legacy; the Christian Capitalists represent all that he despised.

True Christians are Christ-like, and always have been throughout history. What anyone else does to twist the term to mislead the masses is irrelevant. The fact that, as Jesus pointed out, they are a relatively small percentage of all of the people who have ever lived on earth is also irrelevant to the topic.

To repeat a comment I made earlier in this thread, to see anyone attempt to pin a label on Jesus of some man made political ideology is to witness the devolution of the general knowledge of the subject.

Bosso

 

[TurtleBurger]

When Pilate again interrogated Jesus, he asked him; "Do you not know that I have authority to release you and I have authority to impale you?", Jesus told him, "You would have no authority against me if it were not granted to you from above."

Jesus did not die on a cross. This is such elementary information that I'll just leave it to anyone who is actually interested in the subject to search for his or her self. Therefore, "Take up your cross" has no meaning to true Christians.

Pontius Pilate = Vlad Dracula

Wow, the conspiracy theories are flying fast and wild in this thread this morning!

 

[Bossobass]

Those prophetic interpretations are pretty thinly supported, most date to misiterpretations of a misinterpreted version of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint.



1)The Hebrew texts are highly accurate but not without error, the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew) is notoriously bad.

2) The Synoptic gospels contain many contradictions, especially in the biographical details of the life of Yeshua. The only reasonable explaination I have found for this is that they were tacked on to the actual teachings at a later date. That is why the Gospel of Thomas is such an excellent study tool.

3) If God needs a book to get through to people then Christianity and Yeshua lied about the essential nature of God.

4) The Romans destroyed many religious texts similar to the Gospel of Thomas that probably contained a more accurate rendition of his teachings. Many scholars believe that Yeshua taught and believed in reincarnation. Most scholars believe that the passages purporting to represent Yeshua as divine were added to the N.T. by Roman Christologists hundreds of years after his death.

God doesn't need a book. We do. Nor does he need anyone to tell his story in any other form. As Jesus said God could "cause the stones to cry out" or put it instantaneously and perfectly into every mind at once, if that were his choice.

One might conclude that He has reasons for doing it the way it was done.

God's word contains His message in complete form for its use throughout the time allotted to by Him to His enemies. Arguments that it is missing vital information or contains wrong information or that something is lost to a bad translation or that Jesus was just some really smart and good guy, or whatever the latest claim may be, are just that and show nothing more than a lack of faith or a pursuit of yet another philosophy of man.

The Essenes is a great subject, but off topic. My comment was regarding the book of Isaiah, not apocryphal writings.

They do not negate the Scripture that tells us the "All Scripture is inspired of God..."

The whole 'more-better and accurate' version theory is something I can't argue with anyone. It's a personal choice, which you are free to pursue. To imagine that God's word really isn't God's word because the Romans destroyed the real version (or whatever) tells me all I need to know.

Bosso