They need to think bigger at Big Think lol

 

 Why historians can only give Jesus a one-sentence biography

 ... In the ancient world, gods, heroes, and even Caesars were resurrected with fair regularity. ...

Right, right, that's why the Athenians laughed out loud at the idea.

And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked . . ..

-- Acts 17:32 

 

Humorless Jesus, the Jewish God's punchline

In Does Jesus Have a Sense of Humor? Austin Ruse (nyuk nyuk) tries but can't quite come up with any really good examples of Red Letter Jesus being funny.

Well, maybe because there aren't any?

And that's not because Ruse is, sorry to say, yet another example of a Catholic who is broadly unfamiliar with his Bible. He in fact oddly ridicules Biblical familiarity, calling G. K. Chesterton's negative opinion on the matter of humorless Jesus, for example, too Protestant, too sola scriptura.

Perhaps Ruse's best case is made with this though:

Consider also that Jesus is Jewish, and consider the Jews have always been funny. ... One final argument for His sense of humor which is ongoing. Here’s the proof: He chose us. That is hilarious. He chose you and me to do His work on earth. And we are so lame and even laughable.  

This is indeed amusing. But again, Ruse might have found it in St. Paul, if only he had read him:

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; 

-- I Corinthians 1:27.

The joke was, moreover, as laughable to Athenians as it was to Jews like Paul:

And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter. 

-- Acts 17:32.

Ruse finds some good material in the Old Testament for Jewish humor, which happens to emphasize the superiority theory of humor, where God laughs at the wicked and his prophet laughs at the impotent priests of Baal, but he glaringly leaves out perhaps the most famous example of the incongruity theory of humor in the OT, where God defies norms and acts contrary to expectations:

And [the Lord] said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? 

-- Genesis 18:10ff.

The main problem involved with all this is that there doesn't seem to be one unified theory of humor. It is a profound, perennial, and interesting problem of definition.

It shouldn't surprise us, for example, that we are hard-pressed to find examples of the relief theory of humor in the sayings of Jesus. The gospel writers aren't interested in portraying a Jesus who laughs to release pent up negative emotions. Instead they portray him sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. And Jesus is not interested in superiority. He is the servant of all, as his followers must be.

Let there be no filthiness, nor silly talk, nor levity, which are not fitting; but instead let there be thanksgiving.

-- Ephesians 5:4.

There is much to be said instead for the incongruity theory, and to some extent the superiority theory, persisting in the New Testament, where reversal of expectations and fortunes both give to God the last laugh, with his elevation of the inferior, the lowly, the meek as the dominant theme.

But the comedy, it would seem, if there is any, is all from God's point of view. We are but the actors on the stage. We perform. He laughs.

And perhaps the biggest joke of all is that the star of this show is a bastard, born of fornication (John 8:41, 44). But Jesus, playing true to his part, couldn't possibly entertain this joke. He must be, like us, an actor.

His script, about the imminent end of the world, about only few finding eternal life, has nothing funny about it.

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.

We try, though:

Forget stereotyping and paradox, Scripture affirms the immortality of . . . Zeus, whose children we are, and in whom we live and move and have our being

Even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete, has said about them, “The people of Crete are all liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons.”

 This is true.

-- Titus 1:12f.

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one, The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies! But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever, For in thee we live and move and have our being.

-- Epimenides, Cretica

 

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.   

 

-- Acts 17:28  

Pick your poison.

John Dryden was no Athenian

 A multitude of scribblers, who daily pester the world with their insufferable stuff, should be discouraged from writing anymore.

-- John Dryden

For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.

-- Acts 17:21

Jesus' encounter with the Sadducees is pro-Pauline propaganda, not history

God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

-- Matthew 22:32

He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.

-- Mark 12:27

For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.

-- Luke 20:38

The idea that Jesus got into a dust-up with the Sadducees over the intermediate state and resurrection and basically ended up taking the position of the Pharisees for himself is absurd. This is evidence of the later Pauline consensus contaminating the tradition, at the expense of the eschatology of the historical Jesus.

Talk of an intermediate state, for example, between death and final judgment where the dead go to be with the Lord interjects a fatal pause to the present time, which for Jesus is pregnant with eschatological expectation. That pause necessarily would have undercut the present sense of urgency which informed the call to repent and escape what is surely coming.

With an intermediate state awaiting at death instead of judgment imminently confronting, one rationalizes away the extraordinary current moment in favor of the continuation of human history as it has always continued.

 

The need to leave all and follow Jesus evaporates (Matthew 4; Mark 10; Luke 5; Luke 18), replaced by less consequential belief.

 

The establishment of a settled life and therefore a church is made possible, which accomodates itself to time instead of revolting against it.

 

A Gentile mission, specifically ruled out by Jesus (Matthew 10), becomes possible in Athens where "in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28) has more currency than "the kingdom of God is at hand" in Jerusalem (Mark 1:15). The kingdom focused on Jerusalem recedes from view, as does the God who is coming there soon to judge this generation's guilt for the blood of all the prophets!

The problem for historians is that there was never a sound proponent of Jesus' eschatology who followed him who could match the thoroughgoing Pauline theology. And why should have such a person arisen if his followers "after the flesh" had truly understood Jesus as they must have? Their expectation also would have continued to be for an imminent end, even despite the death and resurrection of their master: "Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6). There was no impetus to document anything for posterity, since posterity would never come to exist. This means that the gospels must be viewed with great suspicion everywhere, for they are the products of the subsequent, already compromised, period. They are not of the Urzeit. Only out of respect for Jesus do they preserve any of the conflicting evidence from his teaching.

Consider that if an intermediate state is put forward in the mouth of Jesus, all sense of urgency about the imminent coming judgment he predicted would necessarily melt away with authority. Belief in the restyled message of atonement could more easily become the message, relieving everyone of the onerous original obligations of discipleship. The obvious failure of the kingdom's coming meant Paul's rationalizations were ready made for the occasion, and came as a relief. In he stepped and supplied the solution to the ongoing disappointment caused by the delay of the parousia, and the death of the disciples' generation simply made all this a fait accompli.

Jesus did not view himself as Paul viewed him. "Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more" (2 Corinthians 5:16). Jesus viewed himself as the people viewed him, as a prophet. Thinking himself destined for death as so many of the prophets before him were, Jesus is unique because he thought of himself as the final prophet. Even as he's about to die he can say that history as we know it is about to end, too:

"[Y]e shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven."

-- Mark 14:62

"From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation."

-- Luke 11:51

This is where Muhammad got his idea to style himself as the final prophet, but armed with a sword, centuries later! More than most New Testament critics of modern times, Muhammad long before sensed the inadequacy of the gospels' handling of Jesus' eschatological message. And if Paul of Tarsus could receive direct revelations from God and refound a movement, so much more the better. So could he!

There is no dying and rising as a sacrifice for sins in Jesus' mind, only prophets perishing unjustly in Jerusalem. The rising is added under the influence of hysterical women, and an unstable Pharisee, Paul.

The fanatical Benjaminite had recourse to the resurrected Jesus to make sense of his own personal conversion experience, which was really a mental breakdown if one is to be perfectly frank about it. After all, after a surprising, brief period of activity as a Jesus advocate instead of as the well known and feared Jesus persecutor he had recently been, Paul disappears for a period of ten years, if the chronology and the account are to be believed. This is hardly the behavior of a settled individual convinced by his experiences one way or another, but of a still-troubled person. It was during this time that Paul must have developed his ideas of Jesus' sacrificial death and resurrection under the influence of the direct, supernatural visions and revelations he claimed were the sole basis of his gospel: "For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12). What these really were is anyone's guess, but in his own time people already were calling him crazy. To be sure they are at the same time productive of ingenious solutions, as his letters testify. These solutions eventually supplied Paul with a ready escape from the offense of his own Jewish particularity, which he experienced as a Roman citizen in his Asian backwater, and at the same time validated the Pharisaic impulse, which he imbibed as a youth and to which he remained committed, to democratize Temple holiness by making proselytes and founding synagogues. His possession of the Roman franchise reinforced his ideas of human equality under God and their legitimacy.

The body of Jesus temporarily and hastily buried was missing on Easter morn because it was moved. The disciples to a man did not believe Jesus rose from the dead, only the women in their hysteria at discovering this did. (If one is looking for the incipient enthusiasm later displayed by early Christianity described in Acts, it is here). The gospels' portrayal of the general dim pall of ignorance of a predicted rising on the third day which hung over the movement despite all the supposed evidence to the contrary makes no sense if Jesus were in fact a resurrection preacher and intermediate state believer first and foremost. That "evidence" became part of the narrative ex post facto. The idea otherwise should not have been rejected so out of hand by his very own disciples as it was. The plainest explanation for their unbelief on the third day is that they had no prior knowledge of the idea of resurrection on the third day, and that because Jesus had never preached it.

Paul the Apostle is the true founder of Christianity. He co-opted the sectarian Jewish eschatological religion preached by Jesus. An enthusiast for Pharisaism to the end, Paul's personal ambition was to make Judaism safe as a universal religion, relegating present Jerusalem to the discarded past: "She is in slavery with her children" (Galatians 4:25). By turning Jesus into a Pharisee, he succeeded.

Nevertheless I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!

-- Luke 13:33f.

Ralph C. Wood of Baylor tries to enlist St. Paul in his nincompoopery

Here:

It is safe to say that, prior to Descartes, human reason seated itself either in the natural order or else in divine revelation. In the medieval tradition, reason brought these two thought-originating sources into harmony. Thus were mind, soul, and body regarded as having an inseparable relation: they were wondrously intertwined. So also, in this bi-millennial way of construing the world, was the created order seen as having multiple causes—first and final, no less than efficient and material causes. This meant that creation was not a thing that stood over against us, but as the realm in which we participate—living and moving and having our being there, as both ancient Stoics and St. Paul insisted. The physical creation was understood as God’s great book of metaphors and analogies for grasping his will for the world.

So, in the creation we live and move and have our being, huh? Firm grasp of the obvious there Ralph, except that's not at all what Paul said.

The language only vaguely familiar to Wood comes from Paul's Areopagus Speech in The Book of Acts, but Wood has it turned completely around. Paul insists that we live and move and have our being "in him", in the transcendent Creator God, not in creation, whether God's or our own:

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; . . . For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. -- Acts 17:24, 28f.

Far from being a great book "for grasping God's will", the world is a woefully deficient book in desperate need of an editor (as is Wood):

For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! -- Romans 10:12ff.

Whatever may be said of Descartes as a dividing line between the modern and the pre-modern, he has nothing on Paul, or Jesus, neither of whom imagined the long future which unfolded and we call Christendom. They were apocalyptic thinkers for whom the end of the world and final judgment were nigh. The separation between us and them is far deeper than anything wrought by Descartes, real or imagined. 

Joel Osteen and the irony of a typo

Joel Osteen, quoted here:

“I think in general the scripture talks abut how there’s earthquakes and famines and wars and you know you’re close to the end times. Well, we see a lot of that happening today. Does that mean a hundred years, a thousand years, or ten thousand years? Well, I don’t know. My thing is let’s make the most of this day. God’s given us this day and it’s a gift and we may not have tomorrow, but let’s be our best today and be a blessing to someone else and live it in vain.”

"Live it in vain"? Surely that must be a typo, leaving out the "not" before the "live" (the reporter also left out the "o" in "about").

Ah, but the irony of that omission.

The $56 million preacher who reportedly says Mormons also are Christians can't be accused of looking into things too deeply. The kindest way to say it is he isn't overly familiar with how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, nor with how he flirts with the "wisdom" of a hedonism which was warned against by both Paul and Isaiah:

"Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die"(1 Cor.15:32/Isaiah 22:13).

Well before the career of Christ, who preached the end of the age, the prosaic idea of the priority of now was reported for ubiquitous wisdom among non-Jews.

So Strabo (Geographica, 14.5.9f.):

'Then to Zephyrium, which bears the same name as the place near Calycadnus. Then, a little above the sea, to Anchiale, which, according to Aristobulus, was founded by Sardanapallus. Here, he says, is the tomb of Sardanapallus, and a stone figure which represents the fingers of the right hand as snapping together, and the following inscription in Assyrian letters: 

"Sardanapallus, the son of Anacyndaraxes, built Anchiale and Tarsus in one day. Eat, drink, be merry, because all things else are not worth this,"

meaning the snapping of the fingers. Choerilus also mentions this inscription; and indeed the following verses are everywhere known:

"[Well aware that thou art by nature mortal, magnify the desires of they heart, delighting thyself in merriments; there is no enjoyment for thee after death. For I too am dust, though I have reigned over great Ninus.] Mine are all [the food] that I have eaten, [and my loose indulgences,] and the delights of love that I have enjoyed; but those numerous blessings have been left behind. [This to mortal men is wise advice on how to live.]"'

Osteen's megachurch is the largest in the country. 43,500 attend weekly to hear the spermologos.

More Than Half Of All Christians Have Their Wafer Worship, But 1.57 Billion Muslims Worship A Rock 5x/day

And must visit it and circumambulate it 7x at least once in their lifetimes.

Idolatry is a global phenomenon.

"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything."

-- Acts 17:24f.

Luke The Historian Preserves Jesus' Apocalyptic Expectation As Paul's Own

Eduard Meyer

 

 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

-- Acts 17:30f.

Say what you will about Luke's accuracy in other matters, or about his identity, he preserves an eschatolgical expectation which comes from the core of Jesus' teaching, transcending the decades and faithfully adhered to by Paul, however anachronistic that expectation may have become with the failure of the parousia.

Louie Giglio: 15 Minutes of Fame for a Spermologos

Louie Giglio, a Paul Tillich and an Al Sharpton all wrapped up into a fabulist, here:

"[M]y aim has been to call people to ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ."

Yes. Overcome we much.