You forgot my favorite parable, The Cleansing of the Temple:
And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise. John 2:15-16
Jesus whipping money lenders will always make me chuckle.
Right here folks. Jesus hates capitalists. Be like Jesus.
Glad to know table flipping is timeless.
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Money changers. Not money lenders.
It wasn’t about money changers, it was about the people selling animal sacrifices. The money changers just enabled them.
This is more explicitly laid out in Mark where it prohibits carrying anything through the temple.
That gets conveniently left out in Matthew where he copies from it as there’s a bit of a theological paradox if it’s Jesus’s death that makes animal sacrifices pointless and he’s telling people to stop killing animals to cleanse their sins while still alive.
It gets even more juicy if you learn the context at the time. It was about loans. Jesus wiped the debt records. Jesus;DROP TABLE HIGH_INTEREST_LOANS
It wasn’t about loans. It was about animal sacrifices.
There is discussion of forgiving debts elsewhere, particularly in apocrypha, but the temple episode was about the sacrifices.
Mr Robot is Jesus 2.0 confirmed
The concept of racism didn’t exist in 1st Century Judea. That being said, the parable of the Good Samaritan relies on bigotry.
Despite being superficially a complement, “Good Samaritan” is supposed to be ironic. Samaritan “goodness” must be unexpected for the story to work.
Imagine a parable of “the generous Jew” or “the industrious black man”, and you’ll get the idea.
Mitchel and Webb did a great sketch on this:
The story makes sense (in context) because of animosity between Jews and Samaritans, going back many years. A modern equivalent might be a Trump supporter helping out a democrat, or a Russian helping a Ukrainian.
John 4:9 gives a good illustrates this situation. In that story, a Samaritan woman is surprised that Jesus would talk to her when he is a Jew. It also illustrates that Jesus very much went against the culture of the day in his relations with Samaritans.
So, Jesus’ wasn’t making a statement about whether Samaritans were good or bad - he was explaining that being someone’s neighbour is about how you treat them, not who you are. A modern parallel might be the famous 'today you, tomorrow me’ story on reddit.
The story makes sense (in context) because of animosity between Jews and Samaritans, going back many years.
The story relies on prejudice, that’s my point. Jesus didn’t say “Seminarians were as good as Jews”, he said “Jews are worse than Seminarians”.
There are dozens of examples from the Bible where prejudice and bigotry are explicit. Hell, the whole concept of a “chosen people” implies that some people are better than others. Jesus ordered Saul to genocide the Amalekites. And if you notice, Jesus punished Saul for not killing every single last one, which implies that genocide isn’t just permissible, but a moral duty.
( I know that these stories are from the OT and you’re probably annoyed that I said Jesus instead of God, but according to the sign out on route 519, Jesus is God. Y’all still believe that, right? )
He said being a Jew or Samaritan doesn’t make you good or bad. Neither does your position (Levites and Pharisees were very powerful and respected). Your actions are a reflection of who you are.
The concept of racism didn’t exist in 1st Century Judea
The concept is as old as mankind. Details (replace ‘race’ with ‘guy from next tribe’, same concept) or it’s name maybe not.
That’s called bigotry or jingoism, depending. Racism is a distinct flavor, and much like “Orange didn’t exist as a color before the 15th century,” there lacked the basic concept of a race as determined by skin color vs other identifiers such as language, city-state-affiliation, or religion.
The concept of racism didn’t exist in 1st Century Judea.
Were Jews not already looking down on others as the “chosen people”? They may not have had supremacy, but I would expect that they considered their rulers inferior. Maybe my mind is polluted by what Zionism has become. Also, I recognize that not all Jews are Zionists.
Samaritans are still around by the way. Not a lot of them, but there’s <1000 or so that hold on. Their beliefs are pretty similar to Judaism (they probably separated during Assyrian conquest? But this is very messy history)
That’s what I dont get. White Nationalists hate the Jewish but worship Jesus, who is also Jewish?
They love their made up Jesus.
Their made up jesus loves Guns, Racism, Money, and hates brown people and kindness.
Which is fitting for people who have never bothered to read the bible outside of some mistranslated quotes their greedy, money grubbing and hate mongering preachers repeat ad nauseam.
I still think of this if they were to meet the “real” Jeebus
Also remember that today’s Bible was retold by a game of telephone before being written down. It was then written in a tongue the average person on the street could not read, this was so that they could not translate it themselves and were at the mercy of a preacher to tell them what it said. It was illegal to translate and/or distribute a copy of the texts.
This is all to say that had any of it been real, it is more than likely to have been reshaped over the years, before white nationalists have now added their own spin.
I sometimes wonder if any of it was a game of telephone. If you take out all the parts that are borrowed from Greco-Roman and traditional Jewish writings you are left with so little. Enough that it could have been made up by the authors. We don’t have direct evidence of the oral tradition or even someone remotely natural hinting it existed.
Everyone reimagines the story in their own image. Whatever you want him to be be is what he is. That’s the great thing about fiction. Why Vampires glitter now.
I laughed too hard at this.
You just made me remember Twilight, thanks I hate it
Time to rewatch the intro to hellsing ultimate abridged
“Who is it?”
“Oh you know, * BLAM * a real fucking vampire.”
I’ve been told, unironically, that Jesus was the first Christian.
So I guess he worshiped himself?
I mean Christians have always had a history of hating Jews. Absolutely not defensible obviously, but not a recent outlier either.
Most particularly anti-semetic people aren’t very Christian.
Pretty sure he had an AR-15 and lived in a trailer park in east Kentucky, check your facts dude
I once saw a cartoon with a church with a sign “No homeless people allowed inside” and Jesus stands before the sign and doesn’t enter
When I was a kid I got in trouble for telling people at church Jesus was “African-american” my dumb kid mind thought that was the only acceptable way to say “not white.” I don’t think I was ever able to explain what I meant.
The Mormons would have felt you. At least half of it.
Before or after 1978?
Honestly, leftie Jesus is a bit of a whitewashing itself. If you read the Bible the guy is petty AF half the time, especially with people who aren’t entertaining religious solicitors and keep throwing his gang of preaching cultists out of places. I’m cool with calling out the hypocrisy of Christian right-wingers, but let’s not pretend Christianity doesn’t have a ton of built-in garbage along those lines. I mean, understandably, it’s the preachings of some random guy 2000 years ago, so does Plato, but still.
Yeah I think biblical Jesus is really strongly anti divorce, for example. Some of the Christian right are also hardcore on that stance, but a lot aren’t. Probably because that’s hard for them personally.
Matthew 19
19 When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”
11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
–
That’s probably where people infer a lot of anti-gay stuff, too.
I don’t think jesus’ take there is very good, but I don’t identify as a Christian n
Let’s not get started on the thrice married and looking for a 3rd, morality police too…
Thankfully most people don’t live their lives by what’s laid out in the bible, which is a book of fiction. Of course men wanted to control women and sought to make “laws” to make it difficult for women to leave abusive situations, which is why you find this kind of unsympathetic tripe in the bible.
He killed a tree because it didn’t produce fruit as if the tree was deliberately holding out on him. Like you’re literally God who literally created all living organisms, surely you understand how trees work and how they will turn off fruit production if conditions aren’t right (namely if they don’t have enough nutrients for it), and that it’s an automatic response which the tree has no conscious control over because you didn’t even design them to have a nervous system.
I mean, also the “I love you unconditionally, on the condition that you worship me otherwise I will personally throw you in hell” thing.
We make god in our own image
We love toga parties, beards, and smiting.
Try that in a small town woke brown Jesus.
I legit almost got into a fist fight at work for telling someone Jesus died a Jewish person…
don’t do it its never worth it
deleted by creator
I think you a verb
Medicaded
Don’t forget that Jesus has such a bad temper that he cursed a fig tree so it would never bare fruit again.
The reason? It didn’t have any figs because it was the wrong season, and he had a temper tantrum. 🤡
Add too the left “Hates figs” and on the right “Hates (slur)”
He also thought the world was flat 🤡
And didn’t bother to tell people to wash their hands because of germs, which could have easily saved hundreds of millions of lives before science discovered it. 🤡
If he believed in his own teachings, he wasn’t Jewish.
Really interesting topic actually but most early ‘Christians’ didn’t really think of themselves as converts but rather just Jews who understood Jesus to represent the ‘completion’ of Jewish script and prophecy.
Best example is Paul who most definitely continues to view himself as a Jew.
Anyone interested should check out a book like ‘Did Jesus Exist?’ by Bart Erhman or a Marginal Jew (huge read). There’s a better book by him on the topic but blanking on the title
I’ve been binging Ehrman’s podcast and videos and really appreciate how thoughtful and intellectually honest he is and his skill at explaining things for the layperson.
You can also tell from his choice of words that he is careful to separate fact from his own opinion. When someone asks him a question, I’ve heard him many times start an answer off by saying what other scholars believe, and then he explains why he disagrees, but he always is open to being wrong.
In a YouTube video I listened to just this morning, someone asked him a question (when did they start capitalizing the pronouns He and Him in the Bible translations?) and he just honestly said he didn’t know, then he asked the audience if anybody knew.
He’s very good. Only interacted with his books, but they share a similar vibe with him being very clear about where he deviates from the mainstream and why.
He was culturally Jewish at the very least.
Ah, a pharisee in 2024. Nice.
The Romans would have disagreed.
He was also Socialist by definition.
But TBF the whole white jesus concept came from Christianity’s spread from Rome and Northern Europe, not from Republicans in the USA.
People probably overestimate how “non-white” Jesus would be at the time. The whole skin color thing is a very colonial concept. I don’t know that in a world centered in the Mediterranean people would have thought of Italians as “white” and Northern Africans or Middle Easterns as “non-white”.
So in a way maybe yeah, “white Jesus” is a very American invention, just not necessarily in the way Americans parse it. US racial categories don’t work anywhere else even today, anyway.
No, it’s much older than the US. It’s a European invention, just as the US is fundamentally a product of European colonialism.
Sure. Point is, it’s a product of colonialism and full-on anachronistic. Americans in particular keep trying to apply their modern categorizations, which both leftists and conservatives have fully internalized, to all places and times and it really doesn’t work.
He advocated for the social ownership of the means of production?
Yeah it’s in Numbers 3:17
“To the carpenter, his hammer. To the mason, his chisel. To the worker, his labor.”
I almost believed it but you picked Numbers which is in the Old Testament, before Jesus.
My atheism and ignorance of the Bible foil me again!
Damn I wish this were true
Roundheads (who later settled Massachusetts as Puritans) believed that Jesus would return to the center of the world (aka London, obs) speaking English to establish the New Jerusalem.
This Anglo-Jesus idea then got brought here.
Don’t forget the mormons. “Actually, Jesus visited America before he ascended to Heaven! A stone in a hat told me so!”
Only argument I have with this is that he was definitely christian, the dude strongly believed in himself, I mean you don’t go around saying you’re the son of God willy nilly
He literally couldn’t have been, Christianity didn’t exist while he was alive (if he actually lived). He was definitely Jewish, that’s why he went to Jewish temples and quoted Jewish scripture. He claimed to fulfill Jewish prophecy and called himself the King of the Jews. You could maybe argue his zombie corpse was Christian after it got up and walked around for a few days and issued the Great Commission, but can a corpse really believe in anything?
and quoted Jewish scripture
A sub-set of Jewish Scripture. He only talks about the stuff that was translated into Greek and widely distributed. Because that makes perfect sense for an Aramaic illiterate person to do. Check for yourself, he never once quotes from the Book of Esther for example.
Amazing isn’t it? It would be like a book claiming to be the diary of George Washington only referenced Japanese textbooks about him that were popular in Japan 30 years later and has him speak in Japanese.
A good con-man always believes in his own con.
Jesus as a historical figure wasn’t a conman tho. He was a man fighting the corrupt institution that religion had already become during his time. A bit culty, yes, but his intentions were to spread compassion and the love of others
Jesus was very likely a historical fiction. Evidence for his existence that should be there is missing and what evidence we have is inconsistent. There is nothing you can say about the man that isn’t contradicted by some other writer. No historical figure exists this way, however fabeled ones do.
He may very well be historical fiction, I don’t deny that. But I disagree with the rest. When I say historical figure, I’m talking about him in the same way one might talk about Homer. It’s a character that has a presence in both contemporary work and ancient ones, no matter if he was real or not he is a historical figure in that sense. And we do have texts dated from the first century (the Pauline epistles) that talk about Jesus, so even if he didn’t exist per se, we at least know for certain the myth is old. There are plenty of theologians and historians that believe jesus existed as person (obviously not as the son of a god, but as a regular human whose actions made an impact in the society he live). There are also those who believe a person existed in which the myth of Jesus was built around. In regards to your last point, yes, a lot of fabled people have contradictory history surrounding them, that’s a quirk of the way we keep track of things and something historiography studies. (Historiography is the science that studies the way we retell history)
Sure we have the Pauline Epistles. Where he admits that he never saw Jesus and that what he was saying about him was from visions not from eyewitnesses or historical record. “I did not get these revelations from man”.
Meanwhile every writer that came after him is just using his letters and other writings in wide circulation through the empire.
You are arguing with me that he for sure didn’t exist. We’re not arguing the same point, and I already said he very well might be historical fiction. The myth of Jesus, however, exists. And the fact we have letters from the first century that specifically talk about him makes him an historical figure. Also, and this is my opinion, it’s not that far fetched that a person lived in the middle east 2 thousand years ago, started a cult of personality and the regurgitated stories about him passed from generation to generation. We also can’t deny that by the 3rd century the Roman empire was full of his followers (Catholicism was made the official religion in 381, so the spread has to have started earlier), and as with everything in our planet, the jesus fandom has to have started somewhere sometime. Using Occam’s razor, the most simple solution is a man in the middle east gets popular doing populist things, he gains followers doing this and after becoming ubiquitous, his followings get institutionalized by one of the most influencial empires in human history and now he’s become universal. You can make a religion out of this.
Right so your argument is you need a charismatic leader with a lot of energy and brains. Have you heard of St. Paul? The guy who was exactly that.
James was running a mystery cult. The province was full of them. Paul encountered them and saw potential. The rest is history.
This is why he doesn’t seem to know anything about the ministry, there was no ministry.
Your historical Jesus seems to be a very upstanding individual. Where can I go to find out more about him? The Jesus that I know about split up families and perpetrated lies about an imaginary afterlife to recruit people to continue his fantasy that has been a detriment to the growth of society.
As far as I’m aware Jesus didn’t split up any families. There are plenty of papers that study the concept of Jesus and what he would have looked like, but if you are interested in just a simple overview you can just simply read the evangelions. I’m not able to recommend a particular translation, and I know the one used in english is a bit fishy, but it will be enough to get a rough understanding. But in any case, I’m not talking about Jesus as a religious leader, I’m discussing the character and the impact it had in cultures at the time, the same way one might talk about Homer, who most likely didn’t exist either. But if you want to get into theology, Jesus himself was against the structure and corruption present in the church at the time, and would likely be against the institutionalization of the modern day catholic church as well. So he would definitely repude a lot of the attitudes of the north American evangelical church if that’s what you mean
Luke 14:26 “If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life!”
And James was supposedly his brother.
Mark: ignore the James community, Paul is where it is at.
Matthew: ok Paul is still where it is at, but you know James was pretty cool as well. Please Jews that the Romans didn’t kill, like all five of you, come join us.
Luke: you know what? Paul and James are basically equals.
John: James is amazing but have you heard of my man the beloved disciple?
Early Church: the beloved disciple is fine, but I am on Team Mary
2nd Century Church: Mary? Sure she was there, but the Holy Ghost was the one doing the job.
It is like Kanye West microphone stealing.
Luke was copying Matthew in that passage and the important thing for Matthew was to salvage the damage Mark had done to the reputation of the James community. So he makes Jesus disdain the family. Meaning James gets the job based on merit/faith not based on nepotism.
Even if there was a historical Jesus he is very unlikely to have said anything like that. No one is that much of a narcissist and even if they were it wouldn’t work among the strong tribe-family loyalty of that time and place.
Once you get that the entire NT is propaganda it makes sense.
Jesus as a historical figure
As historical as Harry Potter or Superman.
