Comments on: Passionate Christ?

By: channelclemente

channelclemente — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 02:28:40 +0000

It's also quite interesting the way Islam views the life of Jesus, among other things no cross. It's one of the major disagreement between Sunni and the Sufic Muslims as well. We are seeing that last conflict play out in Egypt now.

By: channelclemente

channelclemente — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 02:19:58 +0000

The Labors of the Excommunicated.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/21/mormons-want-to-excommunicate-romney-critic.html

By: dcpetterson

dcpetterson — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 02:00:38 +0000

fopplssiegeparty, Given the prevalence of the technique of pseudepigrapha, I'm surprised there has never been a Gospel According to Jesus. But then again, the various collections of the Sayings of Jesus probably filled that need.

mclever, I've also noted the apparent absence of reporters who know anything about the topic. This doesn't happen only in religious history, however. It seems a common problem. Perhaps reporters imagine they can be more objective if they have no previous knowledge of the topic they're writing about, since fact tends to have a bias?

By: fopplssiegeparty

fopplssiegeparty — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 01:35:27 +0000

So, Jesus was illiterate? Why didn't he write this stuff down himself?

By: mclever

mclever — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 01:20:36 +0000

I've had a difficult time figuring out why the notion that Jesus may have been married (to Mary Magdeline) is news. I thought this was well-known among scholars and theologians since before I was born! I'm not surprised that many Christians were unaware of the history of this, but I would have thought at least one newscast would mention that this wasn't a new idea, even if the precise words on the scrap of Papyrus were new.

By: channelclemente

channelclemente — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 22:58:06 +0000

A tidbit of ill positioned minutia...I've had a hard time reconciling Harry Reids comments with Romney's tax claims. Then as I was looking at the returns I noticed, Romney is paying/covering the return on the investments of his son's $100MM trust himself, as opposed to deflecting that to the estate itself. That is a sizable amount of income. Before anyone says he just being generous, remember he pockets the carried interest on those investments as income himself.

By: dcpetterson

dcpetterson — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:47:01 +0000

Thanks for that discovery CC. Fascinating stuff.

By: channelclemente

channelclemente — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:31:11 +0000

Interesting thoughts about how the LDS approaches a historical and modern perspective on the middle east from BYU. It's surprisingly candid, and at variance with the current GOP's candidates views on the subject. I'd read it quick, before the author is punished and the post taken down. Why do I say that, the last serious academic who privately voiced a contrary opinion to Romney's utterances on a blog, was excommunicated.

https://byustudies.byu.edu/showtitle.aspx?title=6233

By: dcpetterson

dcpetterson — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 18:54:49 +0000

CC, you're right about life and politics.

And on foreskins -- yes indeed, the first century or so of Christianity included quite the controversy about whether one had to be a Jew before one could be a Christian. That is, was Christianity a Jewish sect, like the Pharisees or the Sadducees or the Essenes? -- or was it instead a breakaway sect? A great deal of that had to do with the requirement that if you had to be a Jew before you could be a Christian, that meant, at the least, males had to get circumcised. Oddly enough, many Greek males didn't care much for this idea.

Saul had the flash of insight that perhaps one could be a Christian without being a Jew. Never having met Jesus, he never had the chance to ask directly. But he took it upon himself to prove his point, by changing his name to the Greek Paul and started baptizing uncircumcised men, though he couldn't find a way to regrow his own foreskin.

This was just one of the many tensions that existed between the Paulines and the followers of Peter and John. Most of their differences were eventually resolved (though a process called "compromise", which seems foreign and rather objectionable to fundamentalists today). But remembering these controversies helps to drive home the diversity of early Christianity.

By: channelclemente

channelclemente — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 18:37:17 +0000

DC,

it just proves, life and politics are never far apart.
The most amusing story I've read was about the early 1st and 2nd century Christians at the time of Paul, particularly, was the circumcision controversy. Remembering Paul was a Jew and not yet a Christian, he was trying to sell the mysticism of a nascent Christianity, which is attractive, to an audience of Greeks and Turks conditioned by centuries of Roman rule, followed by the punchline, your ante to the game is your foreskin. Those had to be interesting 'rally's'.