> At 12:24am -0400 6/13/98, John K Clark wrote:
> >Christ was a nut, nutty as a fruit cake, or to put it in more politically
> >correct language, he had a mental illness that produced delusions of
> >granger. I don't think it was an act, I think he really thought he was
> >God.
> >
> >Christ was a martinet. His words "You serpents, you generation of vipers,
> >how can you escape the damnation of hell" sounds more like a typical
> >flame you can find anywhere on the net then it does the wisdom of a great
> >sage.
<clip>
> I am not one for defending Christianity
me neither
> but my reading of the New
> Testament seems to indicate that Jesus kept denying his divinity and kept
> telling his followers to stop treating him any differently than any other
> human. I believe that his followers are the ones who diefied him, as with
> many great men. The legend took on a life of its own, and has little
> relation to the actual history.
Let me add to this that we have the distortions of one Saul of Tarsus, who was
not only a woman-hater but also a self-aggrandizing Jesus-hater; who was
called to account by Jesus' appointed apostles on at least two separate
occasions during his lifetime -- *after* his alleged conversion -- for
misrepresenting the teachings of Jesus, and is suspected on credible evidence
of having attempted to murder the titular head of the Jesusite sect, Jesus'
brother James, on one of these occasions.
And that the New Testament we have today can be neatly divided into two parts:
(1) the words of Saul and his followers, and
(2) one Gospel -- Mark if I remember correctly, but don't quote me -- and the
book of Acts.
Further, there was a synod during the reign of a Justinian in the eastern empire,
a rather embarrassing thing in that a grand total of six bishops attended who
weren't *politically* dependent on Justinian, and most votes ended up with six
bishops on one side and the rest on the other. Prior to this synod, a certain
early Christian theologian by the name of Origen was very highly regarded by
most priests and bishops, including quite a few who were later named saints;
afterward, his teachings and his very name were blasphemy, and anything
resembling them was to be stricken from the church's teachings -- and through
various machinations these teachings were quite thoroughly stricken, including
when re-copying the writings of the various founders (none of which had the
status of "Holy Scripture" at that time or for another couple hundred years).
This synod, incidentally, was part of the beginning of the schism between the
Roman church and the Orthodox church -- but both sides accepted its edicts.
(What I learned about the history of the Christian faith got me expelled from a
church before I was a teenager - and later persuaded me that a person who
truly and honestly followed the teachings of Jesus would find no spiritual home
in that religion, with the multiply-debatable exception of the Unitarians. And
this was before I turned away from strict monotheism...)
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