The Truth About Jesus - Great Article!

No one really knows the truth about just who and what the person humans made a philosophy and religion around. But, millions of people believe he was a direct messenger from the only God that created the universe and our existence. Today, the 25th of Dec. as far back as I can remember it was Christmas day, born in (1952). It combines ancient pagan rituals involving pine trees, and gift giving ( which I am sure was no more than people getting together in the coldest time of year and trading goods that help them survive the coming months). Then there is the narrative that THE SON OF GOD was born on this day some 2000 years ago, and belief in his virgin birth and Messiah of humanity. This article is written about what scholars of Christian history, through access to ancient texts, and the evolution of a fairy tale about Jesus saying he was GOD INCARNATE.

There are three pages but it is important that we wake up about religions that make their beliefs influence (in a malefic ways) human community development.

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200512_jesus?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+Truthdig+Truthdig%253A+Drilling+Beneath+the+Headlines

 

I read it. You can get to know Jesus easily through the 4 Gospels. There is a reason Thomas was not added

 

I would wager that there were many texts not added that would have added value to the overall document, and our current understanding.

 

Didn't felt intrigued enough to click the OP's link.

It's a fact the overall document as we know it got compiled and edited in the 4th century.

 

I haven't done the research, so I wasn't going to make any factual claims

 

This is true. I would say that the overall document was whole and complete in the beginning, but due to superficial editing by the spiritually illiterate Romans in the Council of Constantinople, much of the valuable content was removed and what remains is an unintelligent set of scriptural content, much like a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing.

This unscrupulous editing by the romans did as much damage to Christianity as they did when they crucified Christ and persecuted the later Christians till the Roman emperor Constantine claimed conversion to Christianity in the 4th century A.D, and created tolerance for the religion in the Roman empire.

 

I did some It has become common knowledge though. Every history student over here learns this. It's an important part of how Europe developed.

 

I'm with you that valueable content was removed, but I would argue the part where you say it was whole and complete once. It was always a gathering of texts on roughly the same subjects, it never was one book or document to begin with. The valueable parts removed didn't take away from some big truth or supreme message, it is just that all those old texts had some value on its own. With hindsight it is easy to say they went a bit overboard with the final editing, but they merely distilled a version of it they thought suits the religion best at that time. Some of the stuff that didn't make the vulgate version is still available to us btw!

 

When a jigsaw puzzle's pieces are lost, the remaining pieces will not make sense even if it is assembled correctly.

Similarly with Jesus's message and scriptural content which would have made an intelligible whole in the beginning, but became an unintelligent collection of disparate parts later on with improper editing made by conditioned mindsets.

Just imagine the case if parts of Buddha's Dhammapada was missing. It would have brought in a lot of confusion and consequently a lot of emphasis on blind faith to compensate for the lack of logic and precise rational thought process.

 

Yes, that reason was because it conflicted with the consensus of the Church fathers, led by Bishop Irrenaeus of Lyons, on the Christology they were developing. Specifically, the Gospel of Thomas presented the Gnostic view that Jesus came to Enlighten us instead of to die for our sins--and that we can find God and Jesus ourselves and not only through the Church. In Beyond Belief" The Secret Gospel of Thomas, religious historian Elaine Pagels argues that the Gospel of John was written as a refutation of the Gospel of Thomas. Also, the fact that the Gospel of Thomas is strictly a sayings Gospel (Jesus as talking head), and some of those sayings are pretty freaky.

 

I think it's highly unlikely that there was some lost master document that was corrupted by later editors. The original teachings came down in the form of oral traditions which began to be written down thirty years or more after Jesus' is thought to have died. Mark is thought to have been the first, and Matthew and Luke both used it along with some other common source most scholars call Q and also their own separate material. John seems to have come later, and is quite different. But the origin of Buddhism is not that radically different. The various collections of teachings attributed to the Buddha were passed down by by oral tradition and put into writings some four centuries after he is said to have died.

 

The oral traditions or original teachings in itself, when compiled and edited by the Romans, could have undergone vast changes in order to correspond to Roman sensibilities and traditions while making it the state religion. That which the Romans felt repugnant could have been edited in order to make it more palatable to the sensibilities of the roman people, and much important wisdom and teachings could have been lost in this manner.

Christmas Day , for example, is not the birthday of Christ in an accurate sense . It was originally a Roman fertility festival. The Roman's transplanted Christmas on this date in continuity with the rituals and customs of the earlier roman religion.

This is bound to be so as the Romans had heavily and mercilessly persecuted the Christians till then, and it was with Emperor Constantine's claimed conversion to Christianity that some sort of reluctant tolerance came up for Christianity.

Buddhism had not suffered this kind of persecution in India , and the teachings were more or less compiled accurately and transmitted to written texts, with the patronage of the kings and wealthy people.

 

The oral traditions did, I'm sure, undergo vast changes as the information passed from one teller to another. I'm sure the material was adapted to the sensibilities of a Greek-speaking audience. Matthew was writing to Jews, Luke to Greeks. John, with its emphasis on the Logos, obviously influenced by Greeks or by Hellenized Jews like Philo. All of the gospels were complete and in circulation long before Christianity became a state religion. But I suspect you're right that the material may have been modified to get it past the Romans. Paul's letter to the Romans included an admonition for Christians to submit to the Roman authorities, and some writers suspect that the original Christian community may have been more militant and subversive than the gospels and Acts made it out to be. As for Christmas, the Bible says nothing about the date when Jesus was born. December 25 was chosen as the Roman winter solstice, when worsipers of Sol Invictus and other solar deities had been celebrating theirs, and it was a deliberate effort to get in on the act. An early depiction of Jesus shows him as a Helios-like figure, traveling the heavens in his chariot. Buddhism, of course, benefited greatly from the patronage of Ashoka in the 4rd century B.C., just as Christianity benefited from the patronage of Constantine. But Buddhism began as a Hindu heresy challenging the gods, the supernatural, and the brahmins. Like most ancient teachers, he left no writings and there is a gap of a centruy and a half between his spoken words and the first writings. By the time the first texts made their appearance, adherents were divided into partisan schools, some minimizing the break with Hiduism, others maximizing it. That was a couple of centruies before Ashoka. And of course today there are substantial differences among Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Zen, Pure Land, Nichiren, and other variants.

 

Two things strike me about this discussion: first, is there any major religion where we know with absolute certainty that we're getting the words of the founder(s) exactly as they spoke them? I used to think Islam had the most plausible claim on that level of authenticity, but I watched a documentary about a year ago where scholars are saying that some parts of the Koran were probably complied during the first couple of centuries after the death of the prophet. With Buddha, nothing at all was written down until centuries after his death. The editing of the Bible is well known, and with Hindu scriptures the myth of their creation is almost certainly not historically accurate.

Secondly,I think we have to go with what has come down to us. In the case of Christianity, a lot of previously suppressed material is now widely available and can be read by anyone with an interest. There is nothing I can see (except a narrow and ideologically driven approach) that would prevent a modern Christian reading the gnostic texts or other suppressed books and incorporating anything they find of value there into their belief system.

There's a certain type of religious mentality that is very much tied to scriptures. I consider that to be problematic. What is important is our own spiritual experience or practice. Scriptures may be like road maps, and like maps only present a kind of description. The actuality of spirituality goes beyond any formulation.
Not saying formulations aren't useful as far as they go, but in the end it's just words in a book. Probably they are useful in that they give a framework, a kind of anchor. At the least, a set of ethical ideals to which people can try to aspire. I find that does come through from the New Testament despite editing. If historically people have fallen far short of such ideals, that's a different question.

The thing is that one has to assume that enough has been preserved and transmitted through the ages for a person to get the basic ideas of a given religion. And if religions are what they claim and put people in touch with the divine source of scriptures and everything else, what was lost or rejected could certainly be recovered.

The Roman editors of the Bible were out to create a mass religion that would have a certain consistency. The gnostic approach was too personal, and like forms of popular mysticism that emerged later on, couldn't be easily controlled by a central church. It all seems to smack a little bit of authoritarianism.
But that has to be balanced with our own historical reality. Those editors didn't know that their empire, and along with it, most of western European civilization was to collapse a few years later. As it turned out, in Christianity, they created a system that would provide the underlying basis on which European civilization was to be rebuilt. Could that have happened under a loose coalition of gnostics who were sectarian and disagreed over many points? I have to say I doubt it.

It's a huge historical 'what if' to imagine a world where the Romans had never converted. Just about a mile away from my location stands a Norman 'Romanesque' abbey church, nearly 1, 000 years old. It all became so much a part of the fabric of European life that it's virtually impossible to imagine how things might have been different.

 

My point, exactly.

Organized Buddhism benefitted from Ashoka who helped in its propagation all over the world in the third century B.C. But till then it never suffered persecution in the way the Romans persecuted the Christians by throwing them to the lions in the Colloseum and other barbaric practices. Obviously it was a very hard time for them and much of the authentic Christian culture and wisdom may have suffered major losses in the process. And this could be the reason why Christianity emerged more of a mysterious puzzle infuriating western philosophers like Nietzche.

The oral traditions were put into writings, and the sectarianism that came into being was due to emphasis on certain scriptures over others.

Zen for example focusses mainly on the Tathagatagarbha sutras, while Tibetan Buddhism focusses on the Vajrayana teachings of the 8th century A.D , and Nichiren focusses on the Lotus Sutra.

Other than that , the differences are superficial.

And Ashoka came two centuries later in the third century B.C , and ensured the transmission of the teachings worldwide.

 

"Superficial" is in the eye of the beholder, but to me it isn't superficial to emphasize personal enlightenment, as in Theravada, as opposed to reliance on Bodhisattvas, as in the case of Mahayana; or to emphasize chanting and a personal relationship with Amida, as in Pure Land; or to embrace hierarchy and tantric rituals, as in Vajrayana.

 

I think the answer is clearly no. In fact the die-hard skeptics doubt that any of the founders actually existed (that including Muhammad; see the writings of virulent Islamaphobe Robert Spencer). I think there's probable cause to believe most of them existed, but even with Muhammad, there's reason to doubt that what we have is the actual original. He himself was illiterate and he dictated the words to his Companions who acted as scribes, writing the words down on whatever happened to be on hand (parchment, bark, stones, etc.) Several hundred of the scribes died in the battle of Yamama in 642. After his death, his successor Caliph Abu Bakr ordered people who had writings to turn them in , and they were gathered together and compiled under the direction of the scribe Zayd bin Thabit, who was one of those companions. By the time Uthman became Caliph, discrepancies were noticed in the existing versions, so Uthman ordered his chief scribe to supervise a new official codex. Other existing versions were ordered to be burned. By some miracle, the Uthman codex may be identical to the words received by the Prophet, but I doubt it.

 

All these paths are different ways on the path of enlightenment.

Theravada emphasizes meditation , Mahayana emphasizes devotion to enlightened masters . Chanting too , through the focus of single-mindedness and increase of prana, enables one to achieve a meditative state. .

The tantric rituals too in Vajrayana is considered as a legitimate path to enlightenment.

Hence you can see that these are all but different paths to the same destination of enlightenment, with certain methods preferred over others.

This is similar to HInduism where Jnana Yoga(yoga of the intellect ), Bhakti Yoga ( yoga of devotion ), karma yoga ( yoga of action and service ) and raja yoga (yoga of mysticism) are considered as different paths to enlightenment, and designed for the corresponding temperamental tastes of human beings.

 

And at that level, so are the different denominations of Christianity.

 

Yes, but the point I am making over here is the tampering of the Christian teachings by the spiritually illiterate Romans in the council of constantinople prior to making it a state religion.

You certainly don't expect the romans after three centuries of brutal hostility, to be completely dedicated and devoted to the Christian spirituality and religion all of a sudden.

They had presented the Christian scriptures after editing, to the public, implanting their own conditioning and sensibilities in it. All that which did not conform to the Roman sensibilities were deleted, and the loss of details is bound to affect the whole or make it unintelligent in a sense. Just as a jigsaw puzzle with a few parts lost becomes more of a puzzle seeking a lot of analysis, deduction and hypothetizing finally to the conclusion that a few parts have been lost due to the lack of apparent logic or wholesomeness.

This is what i am pointing out to here.

The romans were well-versed in the sciences of war, administration and political science.

They probably were wary of the rebellious christians, and probably edited the christian scriptures in a way that would condition the christians , present and future, to be more passive, law-abiding and obedient to the hierarchy of the Church with no individuality of their own.

This could be the reason why the likes of Origen and Nestorius were regarded as heretics for giving reasonable interpretations of Christianity themselves, or why the likes of Giordano Bruno or Botulf Botulfsson and others were burnt at the stake for differing with the established christian traditions, violating Jesus's teachings of non-violence.

This could also be the reason why Joan and many other women who were branded as witches burnt at the stake , violating Jesus's teachings of non-violence. Their sin was that they challenged the Roman establishment law, rules and regulations. You can see a list of people burnt at the stake by the church here. Similarly the inquisitions which is contrary to the teachings of Christ in spirit and letter.


This is quite similar to government propaganda in recent times trying to condition the individual to be a mere efficient, obedient citizen subservient to the interests of the State,and a mere cog in the machine. The Nazis and Fascists used propaganda effectively to enforce their ideology on their citizens.

And the early Romans were understandably fascists in a sense totally subservient to the organised state that was the Roman Empire. And when you expect such people to edit religious scriptures, what do you think they would do!

In brief, the Romans impressed their fascist temperamental charecterestics in the compiled Christian scriptures called the Bible and also in the Catholic church.

Understanding this will enable one to have a more intelligent perspective on how and why christianity shaped up after its creation by Christ to its present form.