He’s very much not.
I mean, using Jesus to recontextualize the Old Testament God definitely misses the mark. Jesus was here on a mission of mercy to cross the boundary between the sinful ape and the rising angel, and to bring as many people along with him as he could.
But once you’re grafted into the tree of Judaism through Christianity, you still have to abide by the rules of Judaism (with the exception that foods are no longer verbotan or whatever).
Jesus was an incredibly stern man who was very rigid and inflexible on his views because he had the eternal viewpoint.
He refused to perform am exorcism for a Samaritan woman’s daughter who was half Jewish because she wasn’t full Jewish even though she was perfectly faithful until she made such a hue and cry that she publically shamed him into it.
He would snap at his own friends if they said the wrong thing or failed to understand something because he didn’t effectively communicate it to them so that they would understand at the same level he did.
And I don’t hold any of these actions against him, he was on what should be the most important mission in all of human history, right?
But the modern Christianity teachings of Christ where he’s like buddy Jesus and he’s just a happy-go-lucky, I love everyone peace, love, and harmony dude is absolutely not the way he’s actually represented in the Bible by his closest followers.
It was not out of the realm of normalcy for him to do things like beating the fuck out of a temple full of salespeople.
But once again, the sheer stress of his every moment, the fact that if he told a lie, if he felt lust, envy, greed, selfishness, anything that even approximated a sin, it would destroy all of humanity, and himself in the process, must have been so stressful, that in a way, I believe it was a mercy that he died so young.
If Jesus had had to stick it out into his 80s, I don’t know.
Maybe he would have fallen along the way.
bitcrafter@programming.dev 5 months ago
Keep in mind that most likely the historical Jesus was just one of many apocalyptic preachers going around telling people that, within the lifetime of some present, God was going to come down and vanquish evil once and for all, so one had better be prepared and be on God’s good side when this happened. (Incidentally, the Romans probably could not have cared less about this; it was when they got word that he was claiming to be an earthly king–which may have been how Judas actually betrayed him–that they got seriously pissed and executed him because they had a zero tolerance policy for that kind of thing.)
You can see imminent apocalypse theme in the epistles where John writes that there is no real point making big life changes like getting married since the world is going to end any day; amusingly, when this did not happen, they needed to start coming up with alternative policies, and so other letters start to set down rules which thematically contradict the earlier letters, but it turns out that there are other things about these letters that make them different too so I’m many cases they are considered to be forgeries. (Obviously this is an oversimplification of the academic research!)
(Also, it’s also worth noting that John and the apostles had really different notions of what Jesus was all about, and part of the whole point of Acts is to paper over these differences and make it seem like they had all been past of one team all along.)
Finally, it is worth pointing out that there were a lot of texts floating around in the same genre as Revelation, so it was not all that unique and it almost did not make it’s way into the Bible, but the Church Fathers thought incorrectly that the John who wrote it was the same as the author of the Gospel of John; if they had known that these were two different Johns, then the Left Behind series would never have been written (amount other consequences).
So in conclusion, be very wary of trying to read a lot of significance into the New Testament as a whole because it was not a unified document written with single purpose.