As the thread is dying, I’d like to make some parting comments. First, thank you for your questions. Wittingly or not you have engaged the Socratic method. However, during your questions, you entered two premises that are in error. I left them unchallenged because I was interested in the course of the arguments that resulted.
First, you began the controversy by introducing what you identified as a third option. Your third option is merely a subset of “Jesus was crazy”. As a politician, the methods chosen by Jesus were invariably the worse possible choices and the worst possible arguments if he were intending to amass political power.
Second, your construct that Christianity made no sense because Hebrews were expecting a Kingdom to be established. The statement is true but it is only a subset of the entire biblical record in the old testament.
The bible does not start with Moses and Mt Sinai. The current age biblical history begins with Noah followed by Abraham.The first covenant was made by God with Noah in that God promises extended to all life on earth. The covenant with Abraham was a promise for the whole world and describes God’s intentions:
Gen 12:3 and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
Again in Exodus, God proclaims His mission to the Hebrews:
Exodus 19:5 Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine:
The God of Abraham and Moses has shown that he cares for the whole world, not just the Hebrews.
I teach my kids that the hardest thing about good arguments is that you need to be aware of your biases and your own personal methods for making conclusions. We all have biases some that we are aware of and some that we are not. We all have a method for gathering information, processing that information and using it to make a conclusion. It is impossible for any of us to avoid having our biases affect our establishing our premises and very difficult to see the flaws in our processing toward a conclusion.
You make the same error in arriving at your premise twice in your thinking. You find a subset of something to be your premise without considering that your have narrowed your premise to exclude other possibilities. Or you think you have discovered a new population but it is merely a subset.
The second error in your thinking is a process one. You have stated your premise and your logic that by definition excludes any evidence that contradicts. You accept parts of the NT as true but exclude parts that you believe are false. If we are working with a premise that documents have been significantly altered we are done with them as a source. If we establish that someone is lying, their testimony has no value or worse it is misleading. Regarding the OT, you accept your interpretation of the OT but exclude from evidence anything that departs from it.
Outstanding post.
No, no, not at all. Those were dangerous times, and he probably loved his country and believed that if he could just unite the Jews and stop them squabbling amongst themselves, he could create a force that would throw off foreign rule. In any time, in any place, this is dangerous. Revolutionaries get killed pretty regularly. It doesn't mean they're all crazy. I don't think our Founding Fathers were crazy, but I know what happened to many who signed that Declaration.
Second, your construct that Christianity made no sense because Hebrews were expecting a Kingdom to be established. The statement is true but it is only a subset of the entire biblical record in the old testament.
In your modern-day interpretation, the Old Testament has many references that you can now see as parallels to the New Testament. But that the time, to the Jews, most of those verses would not have been taken that way. I'm trying to isolate what a Jew living in Jerusalem under Roman rule just before Jesus appeared would think of the prophecy.
The bible does not start with Moses and Mt Sinai. The current age biblical history begins with Noah followed by Abraham.The first covenant was made by God with Noah in that God promises extended to all life on earth. The covenant with Abraham was a promise for the whole world and describes God’s intentions: Gen 12:3 and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
Right. And again, you are looking at that with hindsight. But what would a Jew of that time have thought? He'd have thought that the entire world would eventually know God as the Jews did (i.e., be Jewish.)
You make the same error in arriving at your premise twice in your thinking. You find a subset of something to be your premise without considering that your have narrowed your premise to exclude other possibilities. Or you think you have discovered a new population but it is merely a subset.
No, I'm simply a one-thing-at-a-time debater. When I talk with others, I want us to establish a mutual starting point. We have to find something we both interpret the same way or there is no starting point. Right now I'm trying to see if anyone here can meet me at a very simple, very defined starting point.
The second error in your thinking is a process one. You have stated your premise and your logic that by definition excludes any evidence that contradicts. You accept parts of the NT as true but exclude parts that you believe are false. If we are working with a premise that documents have been significantly altered we are done with them as a source. If we establish that someone is lying, their testimony has no value or worse it is misleading. Regarding the OT, you accept your interpretation of the OT but exclude from evidence anything that departs from it.
Not exactly. I don't accept ANY part of the NT as unquestionably true. I accept that who ever wrote those things wrote them for certain reasons. It was written much later, so it's rather like the movie Titanic as to the real event: there is probably a lot of truth, but there's also drama and fiction, and my goal is to figure out what is most likely fairly accurate and what isn't. Do you understand?