The Jesus of history proclaimed final judgment on the Israel of his generation, the Christ of faith offers mercy interminably into the future to all generations

 

 That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

-- Matthew 23:35f.

That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; 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 11:50f. 

For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

-- Luke 1:48ff.   

What the Christ of faith can do in every generation

 

 He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth,

And sets the passions on the side of truth;

Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art,

And pours each human virtue in the heart.

-- Alexander Pope 

A priest eschews AI confession for disembodying the Gospel, but misses how priests and sacraments started it all

 

The historical Jesus made forgiveness of sins a horizontal matter in a social relation of equals, and a predicate for divine forgiveness before the imminent end of the world foreclosed the opportunity.

The Christ of faith and early Catholicism turned forgiveness of sins into a vertical matter enclosed in a sacrament requiring elite intermediaries to administer it. 

But with a sacrament of confession to a priest the person actually wronged is simply bypassed and forgotten. Is there a better example of disembodying the Gospel? People who look for the origins of gnosticism and individualism should look here! 

The historical Jesus did not teach to confess one's sin to a priest, but to the person who was actually sinned against! Jesus' teaching everywhere stresses horizontal reconciliation without which there can be no vertical reconciliation.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

 -- Matthew 5:23f. 

... And forgive us [ἄφες] our debts, as we forgive [ἀφίεμεν] our debtors. ... For if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you [ἀφήσει]: But if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive [ἀφήσει] your trespasses.

-- Matthew 6:12, 14f.

So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive [ἀφῆτε] not every one his brother their trespasses.

 -- Matthew 18:35

And when ye stand praying, forgive [ἀφίετε], if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive [ἀφῇ] you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive [ἀφίετε], neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive [ἀφησεὶ] your trespasses.

 -- Mark 11:25f.

Confess your faults one to another . . ..

 -- James 5:16 

Forgiveness [ἄφεσις] is the social imperative of eschatological time, of the fullness of time proclaimed by Jesus the eschatological prophet when the kingdom of God was "at hand".

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance [ἄφεσιν] to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty [ἐν ἀφέσει] them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

-- Luke 4:18f.  

This forgiveness is offered unconditionally, without the "ifs" and conditions for forgiveness of later tradition. And Jesus himself models that meaning of unconditional forgiveness even to the bitter end of his life.

Father forgive [ἄφες] them, for they know not what they do.

-- Luke 23:34

This is why the disciple compelled to walk one mile walks two (Matthew 5:41). This is why the disciple struck on the one cheek offers the other also (Matthew 5:39). This is why the disciple robbed of his coat gives up also his cloke (Matthew 5:40).   

But retaining sins, withholding of forgiveness, would have simply been anathema to the historical Jesus. That just represents the intrusion of business as usual, the mere continuation of profane time, whose time was up. 

  

A Disembodied Gospel

Jim Morin, The Lamp

 

... For Catholics, the ordinary way to receive forgiveness of sins is by individual sacramental confession to a priest. We believe that Christ instituted this sacrament when he said to his apostles, “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” [John 20:23] But what is the reason which stands behind Christ’s decision to make forgiveness dependent on a direct interaction with a priest? One can give psychological motivations: confessing sins to another person promotes self-examination and sharpens awareness of sin; hearing spoken words of mercy gives experiential knowledge of forgiveness. One can also give ecclesiological reasons: reconciliation with God is simultaneously reconciliation with the Church, and besides, confessors are theologically trained to judge repentance, to resolve moral doubts, to answer spiritual questions, and so on. ...        

The irony of the essay is that this priest really does seem to grasp in his conclusion that "we need real human communion rooted in the love of the Incarnate Word". It just never occurs to him that he might be standing in the way of it, just like AI.

How does one read I John and come away concluding that the antichrist there isn't associated with speculation about the end of the world?

I don't know. Maybe by not reading it?

Slouching Toward Silicon Valley? The Antichrist Goes Mainstream

... It is a common mistake, however, to associate the antichrist exclusively with speculation about the end of the world. When this mysterious figure first appears, it is not in the apocalyptic visions contained in the last book of the Bible. Rather, it is mentioned a few pages earlier, in two short letters traditionally attributed, like Revelation, to the apostle John. The author condemns those who “do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh,” explaining that “any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.” ...

Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.

 -- I John 2:18

And he missed it. Oh well!

I don't think the author was too terribly interested in what I John has to say anyway, only in what he has to say, which I did not find terribly compelling. Read it and decide for yourself. 

As for I John, it is obviously mistaken that it was the end of the world, no less than Jesus was mistaken about the end of the world, so these antichrists in I John weren't actually a sign of that, but I John unequivocally took antichrists for signs of the end of the world, and himself believed it was the end of the world.

I John notably has not just one antichrist but many, analogous to the false christs and false prophets predicted at the end of the world in the little apocalypses of the gospels (Matthew 24, Mark 13). And I John 4:1 explicitly states that "many false prophets are gone out into the world."

Both of these things are evidence that in I John's mind the antichrist is connected conceptually to those gospel narratives about the end of the world. That they are also false christs in his mind is proved by the fact that he says that they are docetists who deny, to borrow the Fourth Gospel's language, that the word was made flesh in the incarnation. 

So I John is nothing if not speculation about the end of the world, and you'd have to not read it to miss it. 

It is also notable that I John does not explicitly use the typical word for sign, let alone any word for sign, that we might expect him to use if in fact he is the same author as the author of the Fourth Gospel, who uses the language of signs like water. This is a little puzzling, but it does not detract from the main point that I John knows from the presence of antichrists that it is the last hour.

Be that as it may, Jesus after the flesh unequivocally repudiated such signs, but the new theology's Christ of faith which sprang up after him didn't just embrace signs.

For it, Jesus was the sign. 

And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him. And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ. ... And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against;

-- Luke 2:25f., 34

Oddly enough this Jesus grew up to say otherwise:

No sign shall be given to this generation (Mark 8:12).

Sign-seeking and sign-performing were the unequivocal evil business of the devil, this Jesus insisted (Matthew 4:1ff.; 16:1; Mark 1:13; 8:11; Luke 4:1ff.; 11:16).

But the empty tomb swamped that narrative.  It only exists side by side in the text which has come down to us in tension with the new narrative which now dominates it in which:

The resurrection became the ultimate sign, the sign of the prophet Jonah (Matthew 12:39; 16:4; Luke 11:29), justifying elaborate timetables for a second coming foretold by signs (Matthew 24:3; Mark 13:4; Luke 21:7); Jesus' miracles in the Fourth Gospel themselves become positively described as signs; Wonder-working becomes the sign of an apostle.

Truly the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds.

-- II Corinthians 12:12 

The message of Jesus in the flesh by contrast was like a bright flash, exposing the world's utter corruption and proclaiming its imminent transformation. But it came suddenly without signs to be observed (Luke 17:20f.), and especially not an antichrist.

The kingdom of God was already there among them, he said, and . . . they missed it.  

On the incoherence of Matthew's Gospel on forgiveness by the Son of Man

The triple tradition contains the healing of the paralytic at Capernaum at Matthew 9:1ff. (Mark 2:1ff., Luke 5:17ff.).

And at Matthew 9:6 we have 

But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power ["authority"] on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

Jesus performs the healing, it is said, to demonstrate his authority to forgive sins in answer to the charge of blasphemy, since only God can forgive sins it is believed. But this explanation of blasphemy is unstated in Matthew, unlike Mark 2:7 and Luke 5:21.

Matthew, or his editor, has trimmed the content just this little bit, doubtlessly because he feels the difficulty involved because of what he has Jesus say on the subject just previously in the Sermon on the Mount. This "solution" is clumsy and incomplete, and still hands us here a Jesus with authority to forgive sins, as if forgiveness were only God's prerogative.

But Matthew's Jesus doesn't really believe that. He believes it is every man's prerogative, nay, obligation. Matthew's Jesus believes forgiveness is the sine qua non of discipleship. And if the obligation, then it must be effectual.

After this manner therefore pray ye ... forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. ...
For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

-- Matthew 6:9ff.  

One need hardly mention here how this is consistent with the keys of the kingdom duties of the "church" in Matthew 16 and 18 in binding and loosing sins and trespasses, on which see on those passages.

Clearly the triple tradition introduces a foreign conception at this point in Matthew. It is concerned with the Christ of faith, not with the Jesus of history, with the divine Jesus who was a sacrifice for sins, not with the eschatological prophet of repentance. Hence the introduction of miracles to validate the new narrative.

As such the triple tradition's understanding of Son of Man is also suspect, suffering as it is from reinterpretation in conformity with the post-resurrection rationalization of Jesus' death. The title has already lost touch with what its owner meant by it and is starting to signify something else. The Son of Man in Jesus' mind is a military figure who is suddenly coming with the divine armies of God for judgment, at which time it will be too late for forgiveness. Hence the urgency of forgiveness now. One cannot wait for someone else to win it and bestow it. The disciple must bestow it himself, or be lost with the many following the broad path to destruction.