MYTHICISM REGARDING THE POSSIBLE NON-EXISTENCE OF JESUS IS A SPECTRUM
WAS THERE A JESUS?
Mythicism is the notion that much or all of what is reported of Jesus was reported of an invention. To claim Jesus is an outright lie or myth upsets people. Part of the reason is that supporters seem to be saying that as Jesus was not corroborated by anybody independent and that sounds too much like an argument from silence which seems rather weak.
Yet it is true that the gospels themselves as good as validate mythicism for they have stories that just cannot be true. For example, Jesus riots in the Temple and is still free to roam. The healings look more like a substitute for the fact that Jesus did nothing for anyone. He never gave away his dinner. Magic is a lazy way to help people.
Jesus violates the strict Unitarian solo God theology of the Jews and gets away with it.
JOHN 10:30. “I and the Father are One”. When Jesus said this after promising to
bestow eternal life the Jews tried to kill him by stoning for making himself
God.
When one studies the context it is made plain that their response may not have
been caused by this utterance but by the promise that he would give eternal life
which seemed to make him God. The cited utterance itself is no proof that he
claimed to be divine. A man and his wife are one (Genesis 2:24). It is silly to
argue that they would have lifted the rocks to stone him before he got a chance
to say he was one with the Father if it was the everlasting life promise that
bothered them. Maybe they just wanted to hear what else he had to say and let
him finish before they grabbed the stones?
The cited utterance on its own was inoffensive for it was biblical as Jesus
explained later so what the Jews were disgusted by was his saying that he gives
eternal life and nobody can take it away which seemed to be claiming that God
made him the saviour and the boss but not necessarily God.
Some scholars say the most accurate translation of the text is, “I and the
Father are one essence or nature.” This is because the word for one is hen which
is neuter. If they are right then Jesus said that he and God were of the same
substance to show how intimate they were though they weren't literally the same
substance. Jesus said that a man and his wife were one flesh. He didn’t mean
that literally so why should we take this verse literally? It is most reasonable
not to. Jesus never said that his relationship with God was beyond our
understanding. When a person says something that could be interpreted in a
simple sense or in a paradoxical and incomprehensible sense we should veer
towards the first sense. Even if Jesus said he was one substance with the Father
we have to take him as not meaning one being for we can’t make sense of that.
Jesus asked the Jews what good work they were going to stone him for. In other
words, he had no offensive meaning in what he said so he did not mean he was God
for he could not blame them for wanting to stone him when their creed told them
to stone anybody that said he was God. They said that it was not for good but
for saying he was God. The passage does not say that they were telling the
truth. But John stresses Jesus’ infallibility so good works were the real
reason. Jesus was saying there was nothing in what he said that could justify
the ignorant stoning him. A person who thought Jesus blasphemed would be
entitled to but he is nobody could think that.
Psalm 82 speaks of gods or elohims meaning judges and verse 7 says they will die
so they don't seem to be very divine. This is like Exodus 22:9 where it
mentions human judges. The implication is that they are like God for they
have his sanction to judge. This is a hidden affirmation of the Bible's
ban on gay sex. Jesus then told the Jews that if he claimed to be divine
it was in the sense that the Scriptures called anyone who heard God’s word
divine or gods. He clarified that they could not accuse him of blasphemy when
the Law called them gods. They could if the Law meant it symbolically and he
meant he was literally divine so if the Law was symbolic so was his claim. This
is proof that John’s gospel is not the great book that was written to say that
Jesus was God that many scholars think it is. Jesus is saying that he is as much
God as those who hear God’s word is. There is nothing else he could have meant.
He claimed to be divine but not literally divine. He called himself God as a
symbolic way of saying he was God’s supreme representative.
We must add that as the Psalm complains about the sins of the judges, Jesus is saying, "It calls sinful men godlike judges so why can't I call himself the godlike judge too and indeed the ultimate one?" Jesus denies that he means he is divine in the way God is, he says he has human divinity and even more so than any of those men.
Christians argue that Jesus was being ironic, "If you
call those dying creatures gods why can't you see I am fully God for they don't
compare to me?" But a poetic psalm cannot be used to make that point and
the Jews did not call anybody gods. The logic does not follow. Men
being called gods cannot mean that Jesus is God. In reality as a creature
who was to die, Jesus was putting himself in their own league. He was just
another "god".
Contrary to The First Letter of St John you can love the child and hate the
father. John says that you cannot because if you love God you will love God’s
Son and the other children of God for he who loves the daddy loves the child the
daddy makes (5:1). Some reason that this could only be right if we are all
incarnations of God as much as Jesus was meaning that to hate the persons who
are God is to hate God the Father for they are all one God. That could be taken
in a pantheistic sense. But my view is that John was just manipulating logic to
trick his followers so that they would think they hate the father when they hate
the child.
The Christian idea that Jesus means he was more entitled to be called literally
God than they were to be called symbolically divine makes no sense and is
blatantly incoherent. Everybody and everything is symbolically divine. The
verses that deny that Jesus was God come before the ones that seem to say that
he was because it is more reasonable and respectful to God to deny that he was
God.
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