You said this before. What exactly is your Jesus agenda? The Church’s goal is to convert people to Jesus, is this what you mean? is this your agenda?
Christianity it would have survived instead of essentially disappearing in the 3rd century. The orthodox arguments and texts stand, and Marcion's works didn't survive, which is not an indication that Marcion was so much better but an indication that he had nothing to say
My guess is you have no idea how power works. Don't take this the wrong way, most people have no idea how power works. So, let me summarize the concept of power. So, you've been brainwashed into thinking certain ideas about who we are. They're not true. The first myth is we humans are driven by material desires. So, why do we want what we want? We want to pass on our genes. We want to marry a lot of beautiful women who are young and so they can give us a lot of babies because we want to pass on our genes. And we want to maintain our status. All we care about is power. Fundamentally we humans are nothing but imagination. And we care about three things. The first is we want to express our religion through art, music and rituals. We want to know where we came from, why we're here, where we're going. That's who we really are. That's the first thing. Second thing is we are diverse and want to differentiate ourselves. We want to stand out. We want to be different. We want to be creative. The third thing is we are curious and want to explore. And that's what explains why we go everywhere. This has been true throughout human history.
Let me give you a concrete example, Islam. So, what is the power of Islam? And I want you to remember this. Islam's power comes from how Islam is able to unite two major intellectual traditions in the world. The first is paganism. Remember the Vikings? The Vikings told stories. They acted out rituals. And therefore, there was an intimacy, concreteness, an interconnectedness to paganism that made us feel happy and good. It made us understand the world. It made us feel as though we could influence the world. That's the power of paganism.
But Islam is doing the same thing by making God concrete. You can feel God. God is everywhere. He knows everything. But what Islam is also doing is it's seeing the simplicity, clarity, and absoluteness of monotheism. Monotheism is nice because with monotheism, everything becomes clear to you. There's one God. Therefore, I just have to follow him. I just have to believe in him. There's like a million gods in paganism. So, it's unclear what you should do or how you should relate to these million gods. But here in monotheism, the relationship between God and you, it's very clear. So, in other words, Islam is a major intellectual revolution in human history. And we have forgotten this because Islam the idea has embedded itself into modernity itself. We forget that Islam really built the basis for modernity. Fulfillment of the law and the prophets is completing the story in the Bible. It's bringing God to the people. You can now touch God. You can now know God. That's the beginning of the idea of Protestantism and create heaven on earth.
So you don't seem to be committed to seek the truth wherever it leads and to accept the facts of history.
On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead. That's why I'm studying Kabbalah and Islam, both at the same time. Why? because God wants us to make the world better. Let me ask you three questions. First question is why did Islam enter its golden age and Christian Europe enter its dark ages? Second question is why did the Islamic golden age end? And third question is how did Christian Europe overtake the Muslim world? IMO, to answer these three questions, all we have to do is compare and contrast these three major religions together. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are both strength and weaknesses to all religions.
For instance Judaism, you could say it's very hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible. And that's why the oral tradition is actually much more important. And so Jews have to go to the synagogue all the time where the rabbi will explain to them the meaning of the Bible because if you read it by yourself, it's almost impossible to understand. Second problem is their God Yahweh is very problematic. He doesn't seem to know what he's doing and he's very, violent. He often commands the Israelites to go kill all their enemies. The third major problem in the tradition is faith versus history. If you believe that you are the chosen people, if you believe that Yahweh is the only true God, then why are you being persecuted all the time? Why were the Romans able to kick you out of Jerusalem and burn down your temple, which is the house of God? Why do you lack a homeland? And this has been going on for thousands of years.
So the Christian faith was created in many ways to try to resolve a lot of the issues within the Jewish tradition. The first major advantage of the Christian faith is it's the purification and perfection of divinity. Remember how we said that Yahweh is problematic? Well, now we have Jesus who we can understand and Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice. Therefore, we know him to be the ultimate good. Second advantage is now that there's a person, we can have him deliver a consistent message of being kind, being merciful, being loving. The third advantage is the idea of progress, of history ending. History is leading to the return of Jesus the second coming. So you may suffer now but don't worry because Jesus is returning and that will end history for us. So these are the advantages of Christianity. But when you do that when you have Jesus personify God you create a lot of issues. The first issue is it's a really confusing story. Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself? That's really, really confusing. Like, I know there's a lot of really good explanations as to why this is the case. Still, if you're just a normal person, you can't understand the story. It makes no sense to you. Second a lot of the ideas in Christianity, it's just counterintuitive. The Holy Trinity must be the strangest idea in religion where God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal. It makes no intuitive sense to anyone. The third is distant divinity. God is out there somewhere. You don't know where. You can't talk to him. You can't see him. You have absolutely no idea where he is. It's a very distant divinity. And so these are the disadvantages of Christianity.
And so Islam now makes sense because it's trying to remedy and rectify these failings of Christianity. The first is that it takes the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and makes it part of itself. So it is really the continuation and the perfection of the Jewish Christian tradition. Second is the absoluteness of God. This is now true monotheism where God is everywhere and you can see him. But if God is everywhere then what's amazing is that you can now that God can come inside you through your faith, through your devotion and through your practice. And so what this means is you now know how to behave in the world. There's a clarity of purpose and action. You know that as long as you do those five things, those five pillars of Islam, your life will be good. God is in you and that gives you strength and purpose and power.
What exactly is your Jesus agenda? The Church’s goal is to convert people to Jesus, is this what you mean? is this your agenda?
If there's an agenda, Jesus the person is it. When I interact with people, I have one goal, Jesus's goal. The word "convert" should simply mean "turn", and people being turned to God the Father is a good thing, although if you think it means turning to something else it would be a bad thing. When you say "On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead", you're turned to God the Father.
If your pursuit of truth leads you to Islam, your keen grasp of issues will reveal to you the issues with Islam too, just as their are issues in the practice of (rabbinical) Judaism and Christianity. However, the original covenant, which came to be called both (messianic) Judaism and Christianity, is one, and the people are one, and this includes people outside the known covenant if they still accept its terms in their own culture (e.g. Muslims having visions of Jesus). So, just for accuracy, I'll briefly note there are answers to the issues you see in the covenant.
"Hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible": Not the experience of people who read it in pursuit of truth. The message of the Hebrew Bible is the identity of God, whose name is Lovingkindness. "Yahweh is very problematic": This objection never arose from within the covenant but only in 19th-century Germany; the text explains the core but leaves a few details to be discerned by seekers. "Why are you being persecuted all the time": This is well explained in the later Hebrew Scriptures about the first diaspora and there is no confusion about it in Judaism.
"Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself?" You allude to the "normal person" but you mean the normal American who is thoroughly separated from the culture in which these things were understood. Close reading of the Torah reveals the culture sufficiently to answer. "God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal": I understand your confusion seeing as the church doctrine is that they are not separate. Again, recognizing the original culture, all kinds of things are known to be diverse unities, to be one and to be diverse at the same time and in different senses. If we are too Greek in our logic, we make assumptions from propositions without synthesizing our views with other propositions of equal value. "God is out there somewhere": You know this is not the teaching of Christianity (though it comes closer to Islam). Jesus taught the kingdom of God is within us, and the immanence of God was well-known.
If you want to pursue the works of the five pillars of Islam, you will find that as soon as you fail you are left without access to the God who comes inside "through your practice". The covenant teaches a God who provides access, by love and mercy, to those who have failed in their practice.
When I interact with people, I have one goal, Jesus's goal. The word "convert" should simply mean "turn", and people being turned to God the Father is a good thing
That's what I thought all along. Thanks for confirming.
I'm not saying I agree. To me this is exactly what the empire did not long after Jesus's death. And in the 4th century under Constantine, Church's transformation was complete. A movement that began as Jewish resistance to Rome, became Rome's official religion. A teacher who preached against wealth and power, became the spiritual justification for a hierarchical church that accumulated vast wealth and power. A message about inner transformation, became a message about institutional obedience.
If your pursuit of truth leads you to Islam, your keen grasp of issues will reveal to you the issues with Islam too
The Ebianites who believed Jesus was a human prophet, not divine, who continued to follow Jewish law, and who rejected Paul theology were declared heretics. Same thing happened later to the Marcionites, also declared heretics. Their texts were destroyed. Their communities were suppressed. James the Just who led the Jerusalem community for decades, was written out of the story in the NT. He barely appears. Paul is a hero, James is a footnote. The Ebianites eventually left Jerusalem. Some went to Arabia where their ideas influenced the development of Islam. If you read the Quran carefully, you'll see every slight influence. Jesus is revered as a prophet. He's not divine. He didn't die on a cross. He taught submission to God. The kingdom of God is both spiritual and political. So in a way, the original Jesus movement survived, but not as Christianity. It survived as a threat within Islam.
Later we have Medina in Arabia. There is a prophet Muhammad who is promising religious tolerance for all. All can practice their faith in peace. So it makes sense for a lot of these Jews, not all of them but a lot of them to join this early movement. At this point Islam Muslim is not a distinct religion. All these people are called believers because Muhammad himself is the final messenger of God. Abraham was the first. Then you had Moses. Then you have Jesus and now Muhammad is the very last. So all these three different traditions, the Christian tradition, the Jewish tradition and the Islamic tradition in the beginning were all just one religion, one idea which is to bring God to earth and make everyone understand that God is the true God. To create monotheism on earth, that's the origin of this new religion of Islam. And this is the constitution of Medina which is in the Quran and which we know to be historically true.
"God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal": I understand your confusion seeing as the church doctrine is that they are not separate.
I'm not the only one confused by this church doctrine. This is the kind of logical paradox that has caused theological debates for 2,000 years, and we still don't have a clear answer. So, remember before the Council of Nicaea in 325, societies were paganistic or polytheistic. Then with emperor Constantine God became the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is the weirdest idea in human history. The Holy Trinity is this; God is nothing and everything. And what this means is God is both real and not real. God is a symbol and reality itself. And because of this idea, people are now forced to think abstractly about the world. And it gives rise to money, nation state and science. Serves perfectly the imperial interests.
A movement that began as Jewish resistance to Rome
You seem to think of the Zealots, not the Christians.
A message about inner transformation
You seem to think that people turning to God the Father isn't about inner transformation. I didn't say "according to hierarchy", I implied only God the Father can judge.
The Ebianites who believed Jesus was a human prophet, not divine ... were declared heretics
Yeah. Christianity was all about Jesus being divine, they just didn't have a chance to produce an analytical formulation of it all at one time for 300 years. According to the gnostics, Jesus was divine too, and showed us the way to be partakers of divinity (as Peter says). If our goal is to be divine, of course Jesus also was divine in some sense. The student doesn't surpass the teacher, it suffices that the student be like the teacher. That just leaves us to understand what it meant for him to partake of the Spirit beyond measure.
If you read the Quran carefully, you'll see every slight influence. Jesus is revered as a prophet. He's not divine. He didn't die on a cross.
All Christians agreed Jesus died on a cross, as do all historians based on the hostile testimonies to that fact. Muhammad retconned a Jesus who didn't die on the cross, which I doubt the Ebionites ever concieved. He couldn't bear that Jesus was a good guy but that he came to die, so he invented some ahistorical narrative that was good enough Arabic that forced recitation of it carried it through the Dark Ages and across the continent. If you want the original Jesus, you look at all the historical facts, and you don't seize upon a minority report just for being the minority; you weigh everything and infer the best explanation, the one that fits all the facts.
There is a prophet Muhammad who is promising religious tolerance for all.
Not what Muhammad did.
one idea which is to bring God to earth and make everyone understand that God is the true God.
If that were Islam, it wouldn't be objectionable. That's why I said to a different account, I don't think Islam means what you think it means.
we still don't have a clear answer.
You can get any clear answer to any question you ask on the subject. I know because I did. First, don't add things: the term "separate but equal" is not theological but comes from Jefferson. Then, go to the text: Jesus says he and the Father are two witnesses; John says the Spirit is a witness; and Moses says the testimony of three witnesses is one. That's all you need. If you recognize other paradoxes, you will recognize the most central paradox that unity always contains duality and duality always contains unity. You are one and you have many faculties and you see no paradox in this.
But instead you change paradox to contradiction. To say God is unity in one sense and diversity in a different sense is paradox, a good thing that teaches us nuance. To say God is nothing and everything in the same sense is contradiction, a conversation stopper that nobody proposes seriously. Your implication that the one leads to the other is illogical. We can criticize hierarchy and empire just fine without charging them with teaching contradiction when they don't.
No. That's not correct. The Gnostics were in agreement with the “proto-orthodox” Christians of their time about many things concerning Jesus. They saw him as an extension of God that had existed before the world was made, and who came to earth on a divine mission to bring salvation to humankind. But the Gnostics and the proto-orthodox disagreed with each other on several points including the nature of his being. And here we could also include the degree to which Jesus was a unique being rather than a model for others to follow. The Gnostics believe the whole purpose of Christ’s coming to earth had been to impart gnosis to people by awakening them to their true, divine nature, which had been covered over by the material world and forgotten. There is support for these views even in the canonical gospel of Luke, "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." - Luk 17:20-21
We discovered at Nag Hammadi 13 leather-bound papyrus codices, over 50 texts, the voice of Jesus that had been silenced for over a millennium. What these texts reveal is simple, dangerously simple. The divine is not located somewhere else. And that includes Jesus himself. The divine is accessible where you are. There is a piece of the source expressing through you. The Gnostics called it the divine spark. A fragment of the original light not trapped in your body like a prisoner but radiating through your body like light through a window. The window is not the light. But without the window, the light does not enter the room. The church cannot teach you this because if you know how to access the divine directly, you do not need a building to find it. You do not need an ordained intermediary. You do not need to pay, confess, or beg anyone for permission to connect with what was always accessible.
All Christians agreed Jesus died on a cross, as do all historians
Not all. For instance Bart Ehrman disagrees. According to him "We don't know. we don't have any eyewitness accounts of Jesus dying on the cross. We have records that are from probably 40 to 60 years later. Our first author who mentions Jesus is the Apostle Paul and he's writing in the 50s. Jesus died around the year 30. So, the first time we have Jesus mentioned in any source is about 20 years after his death.". Ehrman also mentions the first depiction of Jesus, a drawing: Donkey-Headed Jesus in Ancient Roman Graffiti, is from late second or early third century. He continues by saying "And it's a much debated thing. People say they know what it is, but in fact, it's debated among experts what it actually represent. It's clearly Jesus on the cross with a donkey's head, and a a graffiti next to it. But no, it's much later. So the first reference to Jesus at all would our our first Christian writing is the book of first Thessalonians and it's usually dated to the year 49 or 50. Jesus died around the year 30. So it's about 20 years later.".
So we're told that the Romans crucified Jesus. We don't know why. We are told that the Romans killed Jesus. And crucifixion is when the Romans nail you onto a wooden cross. And it's an awful way to die because how you're dying is actually not through the bleeding. You got nails hammered to the cross. You're dying because you have no energy. So your head hangs low, which means you're suffocating slowly. And it takes about 3 days for you to suffocate to death. And so this is like one of the worst punishments that the Romans could ever inflict on you. And really there's only two sets of people that the Romans will use crucifixion as punishment. The first type are thieves and bandits. These are considered like the lowest type of people. The second type of people are rebels. People who are trying to overthrow the Roman state. So Jesus, in other words, was probably a rebel or the Romans considered him a rebel. But, neither is correct. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor couldn't find any fault in Jesus and didn't want to even kill him. Let alone agree to his crucifixion. So, I beg to disagree.
You said this before. What exactly is your Jesus agenda? The Church’s goal is to convert people to Jesus, is this what you mean? is this your agenda?
My guess is you have no idea how power works. Don't take this the wrong way, most people have no idea how power works. So, let me summarize the concept of power. So, you've been brainwashed into thinking certain ideas about who we are. They're not true. The first myth is we humans are driven by material desires. So, why do we want what we want? We want to pass on our genes. We want to marry a lot of beautiful women who are young and so they can give us a lot of babies because we want to pass on our genes. And we want to maintain our status. All we care about is power. Fundamentally we humans are nothing but imagination. And we care about three things. The first is we want to express our religion through art, music and rituals. We want to know where we came from, why we're here, where we're going. That's who we really are. That's the first thing. Second thing is we are diverse and want to differentiate ourselves. We want to stand out. We want to be different. We want to be creative. The third thing is we are curious and want to explore. And that's what explains why we go everywhere. This has been true throughout human history.
Let me give you a concrete example, Islam. So, what is the power of Islam? And I want you to remember this. Islam's power comes from how Islam is able to unite two major intellectual traditions in the world. The first is paganism. Remember the Vikings? The Vikings told stories. They acted out rituals. And therefore, there was an intimacy, concreteness, an interconnectedness to paganism that made us feel happy and good. It made us understand the world. It made us feel as though we could influence the world. That's the power of paganism.
But Islam is doing the same thing by making God concrete. You can feel God. God is everywhere. He knows everything. But what Islam is also doing is it's seeing the simplicity, clarity, and absoluteness of monotheism. Monotheism is nice because with monotheism, everything becomes clear to you. There's one God. Therefore, I just have to follow him. I just have to believe in him. There's like a million gods in paganism. So, it's unclear what you should do or how you should relate to these million gods. But here in monotheism, the relationship between God and you, it's very clear. So, in other words, Islam is a major intellectual revolution in human history. And we have forgotten this because Islam the idea has embedded itself into modernity itself. We forget that Islam really built the basis for modernity. Fulfillment of the law and the prophets is completing the story in the Bible. It's bringing God to the people. You can now touch God. You can now know God. That's the beginning of the idea of Protestantism and create heaven on earth.
On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead. That's why I'm studying Kabbalah and Islam, both at the same time. Why? because God wants us to make the world better. Let me ask you three questions. First question is why did Islam enter its golden age and Christian Europe enter its dark ages? Second question is why did the Islamic golden age end? And third question is how did Christian Europe overtake the Muslim world? IMO, to answer these three questions, all we have to do is compare and contrast these three major religions together. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are both strength and weaknesses to all religions.
For instance Judaism, you could say it's very hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible. And that's why the oral tradition is actually much more important. And so Jews have to go to the synagogue all the time where the rabbi will explain to them the meaning of the Bible because if you read it by yourself, it's almost impossible to understand. Second problem is their God Yahweh is very problematic. He doesn't seem to know what he's doing and he's very, violent. He often commands the Israelites to go kill all their enemies. The third major problem in the tradition is faith versus history. If you believe that you are the chosen people, if you believe that Yahweh is the only true God, then why are you being persecuted all the time? Why were the Romans able to kick you out of Jerusalem and burn down your temple, which is the house of God? Why do you lack a homeland? And this has been going on for thousands of years.
So the Christian faith was created in many ways to try to resolve a lot of the issues within the Jewish tradition. The first major advantage of the Christian faith is it's the purification and perfection of divinity. Remember how we said that Yahweh is problematic? Well, now we have Jesus who we can understand and Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice. Therefore, we know him to be the ultimate good. Second advantage is now that there's a person, we can have him deliver a consistent message of being kind, being merciful, being loving. The third advantage is the idea of progress, of history ending. History is leading to the return of Jesus the second coming. So you may suffer now but don't worry because Jesus is returning and that will end history for us. So these are the advantages of Christianity. But when you do that when you have Jesus personify God you create a lot of issues. The first issue is it's a really confusing story. Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself? That's really, really confusing. Like, I know there's a lot of really good explanations as to why this is the case. Still, if you're just a normal person, you can't understand the story. It makes no sense to you. Second a lot of the ideas in Christianity, it's just counterintuitive. The Holy Trinity must be the strangest idea in religion where God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal. It makes no intuitive sense to anyone. The third is distant divinity. God is out there somewhere. You don't know where. You can't talk to him. You can't see him. You have absolutely no idea where he is. It's a very distant divinity. And so these are the disadvantages of Christianity.
And so Islam now makes sense because it's trying to remedy and rectify these failings of Christianity. The first is that it takes the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and makes it part of itself. So it is really the continuation and the perfection of the Jewish Christian tradition. Second is the absoluteness of God. This is now true monotheism where God is everywhere and you can see him. But if God is everywhere then what's amazing is that you can now that God can come inside you through your faith, through your devotion and through your practice. And so what this means is you now know how to behave in the world. There's a clarity of purpose and action. You know that as long as you do those five things, those five pillars of Islam, your life will be good. God is in you and that gives you strength and purpose and power.
If there's an agenda, Jesus the person is it. When I interact with people, I have one goal, Jesus's goal. The word "convert" should simply mean "turn", and people being turned to God the Father is a good thing, although if you think it means turning to something else it would be a bad thing. When you say "On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead", you're turned to God the Father.
If your pursuit of truth leads you to Islam, your keen grasp of issues will reveal to you the issues with Islam too, just as their are issues in the practice of (rabbinical) Judaism and Christianity. However, the original covenant, which came to be called both (messianic) Judaism and Christianity, is one, and the people are one, and this includes people outside the known covenant if they still accept its terms in their own culture (e.g. Muslims having visions of Jesus). So, just for accuracy, I'll briefly note there are answers to the issues you see in the covenant.
"Hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible": Not the experience of people who read it in pursuit of truth. The message of the Hebrew Bible is the identity of God, whose name is Lovingkindness. "Yahweh is very problematic": This objection never arose from within the covenant but only in 19th-century Germany; the text explains the core but leaves a few details to be discerned by seekers. "Why are you being persecuted all the time": This is well explained in the later Hebrew Scriptures about the first diaspora and there is no confusion about it in Judaism.
"Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself?" You allude to the "normal person" but you mean the normal American who is thoroughly separated from the culture in which these things were understood. Close reading of the Torah reveals the culture sufficiently to answer. "God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal": I understand your confusion seeing as the church doctrine is that they are not separate. Again, recognizing the original culture, all kinds of things are known to be diverse unities, to be one and to be diverse at the same time and in different senses. If we are too Greek in our logic, we make assumptions from propositions without synthesizing our views with other propositions of equal value. "God is out there somewhere": You know this is not the teaching of Christianity (though it comes closer to Islam). Jesus taught the kingdom of God is within us, and the immanence of God was well-known.
If you want to pursue the works of the five pillars of Islam, you will find that as soon as you fail you are left without access to the God who comes inside "through your practice". The covenant teaches a God who provides access, by love and mercy, to those who have failed in their practice.
That's what I thought all along. Thanks for confirming.
I'm not saying I agree. To me this is exactly what the empire did not long after Jesus's death. And in the 4th century under Constantine, Church's transformation was complete. A movement that began as Jewish resistance to Rome, became Rome's official religion. A teacher who preached against wealth and power, became the spiritual justification for a hierarchical church that accumulated vast wealth and power. A message about inner transformation, became a message about institutional obedience.
The Ebianites who believed Jesus was a human prophet, not divine, who continued to follow Jewish law, and who rejected Paul theology were declared heretics. Same thing happened later to the Marcionites, also declared heretics. Their texts were destroyed. Their communities were suppressed. James the Just who led the Jerusalem community for decades, was written out of the story in the NT. He barely appears. Paul is a hero, James is a footnote. The Ebianites eventually left Jerusalem. Some went to Arabia where their ideas influenced the development of Islam. If you read the Quran carefully, you'll see every slight influence. Jesus is revered as a prophet. He's not divine. He didn't die on a cross. He taught submission to God. The kingdom of God is both spiritual and political. So in a way, the original Jesus movement survived, but not as Christianity. It survived as a threat within Islam.
Later we have Medina in Arabia. There is a prophet Muhammad who is promising religious tolerance for all. All can practice their faith in peace. So it makes sense for a lot of these Jews, not all of them but a lot of them to join this early movement. At this point Islam Muslim is not a distinct religion. All these people are called believers because Muhammad himself is the final messenger of God. Abraham was the first. Then you had Moses. Then you have Jesus and now Muhammad is the very last. So all these three different traditions, the Christian tradition, the Jewish tradition and the Islamic tradition in the beginning were all just one religion, one idea which is to bring God to earth and make everyone understand that God is the true God. To create monotheism on earth, that's the origin of this new religion of Islam. And this is the constitution of Medina which is in the Quran and which we know to be historically true.
I'm not the only one confused by this church doctrine. This is the kind of logical paradox that has caused theological debates for 2,000 years, and we still don't have a clear answer. So, remember before the Council of Nicaea in 325, societies were paganistic or polytheistic. Then with emperor Constantine God became the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is the weirdest idea in human history. The Holy Trinity is this; God is nothing and everything. And what this means is God is both real and not real. God is a symbol and reality itself. And because of this idea, people are now forced to think abstractly about the world. And it gives rise to money, nation state and science. Serves perfectly the imperial interests.
You seem to think of the Zealots, not the Christians.
You seem to think that people turning to God the Father isn't about inner transformation. I didn't say "according to hierarchy", I implied only God the Father can judge.
Yeah. Christianity was all about Jesus being divine, they just didn't have a chance to produce an analytical formulation of it all at one time for 300 years. According to the gnostics, Jesus was divine too, and showed us the way to be partakers of divinity (as Peter says). If our goal is to be divine, of course Jesus also was divine in some sense. The student doesn't surpass the teacher, it suffices that the student be like the teacher. That just leaves us to understand what it meant for him to partake of the Spirit beyond measure.
All Christians agreed Jesus died on a cross, as do all historians based on the hostile testimonies to that fact. Muhammad retconned a Jesus who didn't die on the cross, which I doubt the Ebionites ever concieved. He couldn't bear that Jesus was a good guy but that he came to die, so he invented some ahistorical narrative that was good enough Arabic that forced recitation of it carried it through the Dark Ages and across the continent. If you want the original Jesus, you look at all the historical facts, and you don't seize upon a minority report just for being the minority; you weigh everything and infer the best explanation, the one that fits all the facts.
Not what Muhammad did.
If that were Islam, it wouldn't be objectionable. That's why I said to a different account, I don't think Islam means what you think it means.
You can get any clear answer to any question you ask on the subject. I know because I did. First, don't add things: the term "separate but equal" is not theological but comes from Jefferson. Then, go to the text: Jesus says he and the Father are two witnesses; John says the Spirit is a witness; and Moses says the testimony of three witnesses is one. That's all you need. If you recognize other paradoxes, you will recognize the most central paradox that unity always contains duality and duality always contains unity. You are one and you have many faculties and you see no paradox in this.
But instead you change paradox to contradiction. To say God is unity in one sense and diversity in a different sense is paradox, a good thing that teaches us nuance. To say God is nothing and everything in the same sense is contradiction, a conversation stopper that nobody proposes seriously. Your implication that the one leads to the other is illogical. We can criticize hierarchy and empire just fine without charging them with teaching contradiction when they don't.
No. That's not correct. The Gnostics were in agreement with the “proto-orthodox” Christians of their time about many things concerning Jesus. They saw him as an extension of God that had existed before the world was made, and who came to earth on a divine mission to bring salvation to humankind. But the Gnostics and the proto-orthodox disagreed with each other on several points including the nature of his being. And here we could also include the degree to which Jesus was a unique being rather than a model for others to follow. The Gnostics believe the whole purpose of Christ’s coming to earth had been to impart gnosis to people by awakening them to their true, divine nature, which had been covered over by the material world and forgotten. There is support for these views even in the canonical gospel of Luke, "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." - Luk 17:20-21
We discovered at Nag Hammadi 13 leather-bound papyrus codices, over 50 texts, the voice of Jesus that had been silenced for over a millennium. What these texts reveal is simple, dangerously simple. The divine is not located somewhere else. And that includes Jesus himself. The divine is accessible where you are. There is a piece of the source expressing through you. The Gnostics called it the divine spark. A fragment of the original light not trapped in your body like a prisoner but radiating through your body like light through a window. The window is not the light. But without the window, the light does not enter the room. The church cannot teach you this because if you know how to access the divine directly, you do not need a building to find it. You do not need an ordained intermediary. You do not need to pay, confess, or beg anyone for permission to connect with what was always accessible.
Not all. For instance Bart Ehrman disagrees. According to him "We don't know. we don't have any eyewitness accounts of Jesus dying on the cross. We have records that are from probably 40 to 60 years later. Our first author who mentions Jesus is the Apostle Paul and he's writing in the 50s. Jesus died around the year 30. So, the first time we have Jesus mentioned in any source is about 20 years after his death.". Ehrman also mentions the first depiction of Jesus, a drawing: Donkey-Headed Jesus in Ancient Roman Graffiti, is from late second or early third century. He continues by saying "And it's a much debated thing. People say they know what it is, but in fact, it's debated among experts what it actually represent. It's clearly Jesus on the cross with a donkey's head, and a a graffiti next to it. But no, it's much later. So the first reference to Jesus at all would our our first Christian writing is the book of first Thessalonians and it's usually dated to the year 49 or 50. Jesus died around the year 30. So it's about 20 years later.".
So we're told that the Romans crucified Jesus. We don't know why. We are told that the Romans killed Jesus. And crucifixion is when the Romans nail you onto a wooden cross. And it's an awful way to die because how you're dying is actually not through the bleeding. You got nails hammered to the cross. You're dying because you have no energy. So your head hangs low, which means you're suffocating slowly. And it takes about 3 days for you to suffocate to death. And so this is like one of the worst punishments that the Romans could ever inflict on you. And really there's only two sets of people that the Romans will use crucifixion as punishment. The first type are thieves and bandits. These are considered like the lowest type of people. The second type of people are rebels. People who are trying to overthrow the Roman state. So Jesus, in other words, was probably a rebel or the Romans considered him a rebel. But, neither is correct. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor couldn't find any fault in Jesus and didn't want to even kill him. Let alone agree to his crucifixion. So, I beg to disagree.