All christians see Jesus as God

You don't need to reply, but just to round it out:
Yes, Matthew, Luke and John are clear that after the Resurrection Jesus met with His disciples and ascended bodily into heaven before their very eyes. Actually, it isn't clear that Paul believed the Resurrection was physical, but the later gospels are at pains to make clear that it was. Paul talked about a "spiritual body" , & seems to have thought his vision of Jesus was on a par with His appearances to the other disciples.

We might have Nazarenes or Nasorenes. The clergy of the Mandaian sect from Iran who claim to be followers of John the Baptist call their clergy that.(BTE, they regard Jesus as a turncoat who started a rival movement to John's. We also have a Gospel of the Nazarenes Gospel of the Nazarenes - Wikipedia
Gospel Of The Nazirenes
https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Nazirenes-Rick-VanWyhe/dp/0964458411
Gospel of the Nazarenes - Encyclopedia of The Bible - Bible Gateway
They were Jewish Christians who thought that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah who became God's adopted son upon His baptism.
The Islamic notion that Jesus survived His crucifixion comes not from the Nazarenes but from the Gnostic teacher Basilides in the second century. This notion seems to have been circulating in Arabia when Muhammad wrote the Qur'an, and became amplified by
the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam , which procalimed that "lived to teach again, outside Israel." Enjoyed it!

 

I thought that the Gospels of Matthew and John were believed to possibly be independent translations of the same documents from different centers of learning. Luke as I recall may have proposed a different story of the birth of Jesus. There will never be world peace until all of the views originating from Moses come together to sort this all out and writing a separate document for the masses to follow.

 

I apologize for not referencing the subject of the resurrection of Jesus. I am sure that Gene Roddenberry would agree to this for the exodus of Jesus, but I cannot buy into it. The thought of an vision of Jesus , not enhanced by Jimson Weed seeds, would be acceptable to me. Have you read the "Gospels" of Thomas and Magdalen found in the Arabian Desert in the the middle of the last century?

 

Oh, yes. I can see why the church fathers left them out. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of familiar sayings and nonsense, but my favorite passage is saying 113: The Kingdom of the Father is spread out eveywhere upon the earth, but people do not see it. "

 

Hi Tishomingo: Now that we are approaching the Winter Solstice and the Celebration of the life of Jesus. To this end we are in agreement on the meaning of life in this declining civilization. I believe that Jesus was a man guided by god to to make the world a better place. I thing that Paul lead us stray in oder to create a uniform religious society. It is time to embrace Christian faiths derived From the teachings of Jesus and the Jewish and Muslim faiths. In a time of a homicidal maniac, who claims to be a Christian, is trying to enact genocide on innocent people who are in part Jewish and have suffered too much to account for here.

Just an aside. I was raised as an Episcopalian in a family wherein my father came from long line of Methodist-Episcopalians. My mother was raised in a Catholic family and went to catholic school. As I proceeded through college I became aware that the Christian Faith originating from Paul and Rome, leading me to question some of the contemporary beliefs. I served as a medic in the Vietnam War, and saw the extreme suffering by good people on both sides. I then started looking for an answer with the stories of King Arthur, the Holy Grail and the qualities of the Knights of the Round table. I am now learning about alternatives to the doctrines of Pauline Christians. The Templars were questioning the ambitions of the Pope and paid the supreme price for their heresy. John Rogers the Martyr was viscously burned at the stake for having the audacity to get married and have a family. If he had not done that, I would not be here today.

Merry Christmas

 

And a merry Christmas to you, too, and all the best in '23. I think we share an unusual take on Christianity. I think also think it went off the rails with Paul. I think that without Paul it might have become extinct by now, since it had little appeal to most Jews, and circumcision and kosher dietary laws were a big turnoff for Gentiles. But it was Paul who shifted the focus from the teachings of Jesus (peace, love, and understanding) to the quest for eternal life and the importance of belief. The Nicene Christians amplified the latter quality with their emphasis on creed. I think John Rogers would probably have been burned anyway, for denying Christ's real presence in the eucharist and rejecting "popery". Anyhow, I enjoyed our conversation.

 

When I used the reference to Gene Roddeberry, I was thinking of Star Trek and the the ability to transport the soul and body of an individual from one place to another. If the appearance of Jesus (in body and soul) to the deciples after the crucifixion, it seems less plausible than the resurrection of a vision of Jesus and his soul.

 

Some skeptics think that because the New Testament was written by Christians, we can't gain any trustworthy information from it. I think that if we read it critically with historical context in mind, we can learn a lot about how Christian thinking about Jesus developed that can serve as a basis for making judgments about what to believe or not. The resurrection accounts were written twenty to sixty years after the events they purport to sixty -five years after the event by people who were not themselves eyewitnesses but were going on the basis of tales handed down from oral tradition. Paul was the first to write about resurrection. His encounter with Jesus was as a vision, and he treats it as though it was on a par with the appearances to the eleven and the 500. He talks about resurrection for the rest of us to come in being in "spiritual bodies", whatever those are. As Bishop Spong comments,“There is no sense at all in Paul of a physical resurrection of Jesus back into the life of this world. God did not, for this apostle, raise Jesus from the grave back to life on this earth. Rather, for Paul, God raised Jesus from death into God’s presence, from the grave to God’s right hand…"https://considerthegospel.org/tag/bishop-spong-and-the-resurrection/#:~:text=Spong tells us: “There is no sense at,presence, from the grave to God’s right hand… Then we have Mark, twenty years later, in which Jesus' resurrection was conveyed by an empty tomb and a man in white telling the women Jesus had risen and gone elsewhere. Bart Ehrman detects progressive embellishments in the resurrection accounts: Spong tells us: “There is no sense at all in Paul of a physical resurrection of Jesus back into the life of this world. God did not, for this apostle, raise Jesus from the grave back to life on this earth. Rather, for Paul, God raised Jesus from death into God’s presence, from the grave to God’s right hand… “Our earliest account of Jesus’ resurrection [i.e. Paul’s letters] discusses the appearances without mentioning an empty tomb, while our earliest Gospel, Mark, narrates the discovery of the empty tomb without discussing any of the appearances (Mark 16:1-8)” That statement might seem confusing, cuz don't we have Mark saying "Later He appeared to the eleven as they sat at the table; and He rebuked their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they did not believe those who had seen Him after He had risen. (Mark 16:14) Yes, but as Ehrman points out, Mark 16:9-20 is in later manuscripts. The earliest manuscript we have of Mark ends at 16:8, which has the women leaving the tomb and telling no one because they were afraid. Christian apologists counter that the earliest manuscript ends there because the scribe just didn't finish it.Maybe he got tired, had a heart attack, whatever. As usual, it's up to us to draw our own conclusions. (Personally, I tend to go with Ehrman, cuz I think extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence. Rising from the dead qualifies as extraordinary, and the evidence, such as it is, seems weak and contradictory. After Mark, comes Matthew., about a decade later, who reports that the stone was rolled away by an angel right before the eyes of the women at the tomb. And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped Him." Luke does Matthew one better by having two angels roll away the stone, an appearance before two of His disciples on the way to Emaus, and an appearance to the eleven in Jerusalem, where He ate fish to prove he wasn't an apparition. Finally, in John's gospel, the last of the four, in the nineties He invites Doubting Thomas to put his fingers in His wounds and said "Blessed are those who have not seen and have yet believed." John 20:24–29 There does seem to be a clear progression in the accounts, and an increasingly physical Jesus.

So what is going on here. It seems to me to be plausible that Jesus' disciples thought they had had encounters with Jesus after His death. Bereavement hallucinations are not uncommon

Feeling a Presence After a Loss: Hallucination or Vision of Grief?
Bereavement hallucinations after the loss of a spouse: Associations with psychopathological measures, personality and coping style - PubMed
It is also possible for these to take the form of mass hallucinations or mass hysteria, by processes of suggestion and,pareidola. Mass hallucination
Mass Hallucination, Hysteria & Miracles : THE PROCESS IS…
Bleeding and weeping statues might be examples of these phenomena.
Nor does it seem unusual that these accounts would become more tangible during their oral transmission by anonymous sources over the decades. On the other hand, it could all be true and a genuine miracle. It's a judgment call.

 

A Russian journalist named Nicolas Notovich stated that Jesus lived in India based on some documents he found in a buddhist monastery in ladakh while nursing an injured leg. Holger Kersten is a German writer who had similarly written a book named 'Jesus lived in India' describing similarities between Christ's and Dharmic teachings. Nicholas Roerich is an another western scholar and archaeologist who had stated the same after his travels in Ladakh, India. This is all I know about western sources stating about Jesus's speculated life in India.

In India , the Ahmediya sect of Islam states that Jesus had lived in India. The Zoroastrian enlightened master Meher Baba as well as the likes of Paramahamsa Yogananda, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Sai Baba had also stated the same.

Of course, there are no tangible historical records or evidence for the same to prove it at present without any doubts whatsoever.

I would say that it is logistically feasible for Jesus to arrive in India by hitch-hiking the numerous merchant wagons that criss-crossed the roads that made up the Silk Route which connected the Middle East and India. His expertise and services as a carpenter could have helped him in this regard as well to pay for his trip expenses.

Silk Road - Wikipedia

India at that time included Afghanistan too which was Buddhist earlier, as shown by the giant Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan.

However, I would say that Jesus lived in India or not does not matter much. What matters is whether you can be a Christ yourself and provide light in a darkening world.

Imho, Christ was a spiritual genius who did not conform to the obsolete systems of his time and created a fresh system of his own which elevated the religious, moral and cultural standards of the world.

There is a marked difference between the original Christianity taught by Christ and Churchianity used as a conditioning mechanism by religious politicians. Obviously one must use one's discretion and intelligence to distinguish between the same.

Imho, Christianity can make a lion out of oneself as opposed to a conditioned sheep that comes out of the conveyor belt of churchianity.

 

It's possible, but I think unlikely. Because there's such a gap between the birth narratives and Jesus' brief adult narratives, there's certainly a demand for stories that fill in the story. There generally seem to be two variants of these: one has Jesus visit India before his ministry in Palestine,as related by the other has Him go there after surviving His crucifixion and dying there.
The earliest of these accounts seems to be that of the Punjabi founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, Ghualam Ahmad, who draws on the Muslim idea, based on the writings of Basilides, that Jesus survived the crucifixion (Mor accurately, that the man who died on the cross had been substituted for Jesus. Scholars who have investigated this think he arrived at his theory of Jesus in India by intuition an confusion of Jesus with stories of the Buhha.
His Issa Yuz Asaf (Jesus Son of Joseph) visited East Asia and died in Kashmir. Gunther Grönbold (Jesus in India, 1985), Norbert Klatt,1988, and Mark Bothe, 2009, 2013) have pretty well debunked this claim, and shown that Ahmad was actually confusing Issa with legends of the Buddha.

The story was picked up by the Russian Nicholas Notovitch in the 1890s. Notovitch It has generally been discredited by scholars who have studied his work, but still makes the rounds in New Age circles.
https://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-life-of-st-issa-hoax.htm
Nicolas Notovitch and the Jesus-in-India myth – D.M. Murdock
Articles on the Notovitch hoax from "The Nineteenth Century" magazine
Professor Max Mueller wrote a particularly harsh assessment:: "Although I was convinced that the story told by M. Notovitch in this Vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ 3 was pure fiction, I thought it fair, when writing my article in the October number of this Review, 1894, to give him the benefit of a doubt, and to suggest that he might possibly have been hoaxed by Buddhist priests from whom he professed to have gathered his information about Issa, i.e. Jesus. (Isa is the name for Jesus used by Mohammedans.) Such things have happened before. Inquisitive travellers have been supplied with the exact information which they wanted by Mahàtmas and other religious authorities, whether in Tibet or India, or even among Zulus and Red Indians. It seemed a long cry to Leh in Ladakh, and in throwing out in an English review this hint that M. Notovitch might have been hoaxed, I did not think that the Buddhist priests in the Monastery of Himis, in Little Tibet, might be offended by my remarks. After having read, however, the foregoing article by Professor Douglas, I feel bound most humbly to apologise to the excellent Lamas of that monastery for having thought them capable of such frivolity. After the complete refutation, or, I should rather say, annihilation, of M. Notovitch by Professor A. Douglas, there does not seem to be any further necessity----nay, any excuse----for trying to spare the feelings of that venturesome Russian traveller. He was not hoaxed, but he tried to hoax us. Mr. Douglas has sent me the original papers, containing the depositions of the Chief Priest of the Monastery of Him is and of his interpreter, and I gladly testify that they entirely agree with the extracts given in the article, and are-signed and sealed by the Chief Lama and by Mr. Joldan, formerly Postmaster of Ladakh, who acted as interpreter between the priests and Professor A. Douglas. The papers are dated Himis Monastery, Little Tibet, June 3, 1894."Articles on the Notovitch hoax from "The Nineteenth Century" magazine

Holger Kersten's theory that Jesus was actually in India relies heavily on Notovitch as well as his own impressions of similarities between Jesus' ideas and those of the Buddha. Nicholas Roerich (aka,Nikolai Rerikh) was a Russian theosophist deeply into occult mysticism and a frequent traveler to the Himalayas, He probably picked up his ideas from the Ahmadiyyas , as well as Notovitch.We might add to the roster Levi H. Dowling's Aquarian Gospel in 1908, which recounts Jesus' visit to India, based largely on Dowling's visions. .

Amen, brother!

Amen, again! The gospels are consistent that Jesus began his ministry after baptism by John the Baptist. John's existence is confirmed by the Jewish historian Josephus. Since this event would be somewhat embarrassing to Christians, suggesting that Jesus might have been somewhat subordinate to John, I think it is plausible. John seems to have been an apocalyptic preacher of end times, much like Jesus became, and Jesus is reported to have recruited some of his followers from John's movement. But Jesus differed from John in not being an ascetic purist. He hung out with the dregs of Jewish society--tax collectors, prostitutes, the poor, the diseased, etc., and seemed to go out of his way to challenge the "purity code" that treated such people as outcasts. And he challenged the Temple priesthood---which is probably what got him nailed. That's the Jesus I follow, historical or not!

Let's hope so!

 

There are some who believe that the occupation of Joseph, Father of Jesus, was not that of a Carpenter. Judea at the time of Jesus was a country of trades or Guilds. Stone Masons was an example that was recognized at the time and lived on to current time. There was no Aramaic word for a carpenter in a region with no wood to speak of . Wood was not in common usage because it had to be shipped from Africa and was too expensive for practical usage. I read somewhere that the misconception is the mistranslation for the word for trade. This could be the occupation that Joseph was engaged in, based in Gaza and took his caravans to India for raw Materials. Jesus and one of his other brothers may have traveled to Britain and India in his early life doing business for his father. This would explain Jesus being born in Bethlehem, because Joseph and his family were traveling from Gaza to Jerusalem to be counted in the Roman Census. The Britain connection was to obtain raw materials such as copper and tin to convert to Bronze. India was a source for spices and other personal products. When Jesus was in India, he may have studied the teachings of Buddha along with spiritual healing that he used in his ministry. It may also explain how he got the funds to fund his ministry and disciples. I recently read a post that Judas was falsely accused of being a traitor, because Jesus gave him the ministry funds for safe keeping before Jesus was arrested. After the crucifixion he kept the money to the dismay of the other disciples.

 

The only two references in scripture are Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3. Both use the term τέκτονος (tektonos)--not Aramaic, but Koine Greek in which the New Testament was writtten. The term can mean carpenter or any other craftsman or skilled laborer, including stone mason. There is no evidence that any of your speculations about Joseph's international commercial activites, India, etc., are true, but you're certainly entitled to fantasize.

 

loving the lamp is not loving the light. and gods owe nothing to what humans tell each other to pretend about them. and no, nothing human has ever been closer to a god then to have been chosen by one to channel (manifest) it. jesus was a human, whatever his physical father may or may not have done for a living. oh and by the way, to smite meant to kill, and money changers was a local at the time pejorative for the roman occupation.