New Testament scholar and Christian atheist Bart Ehrman amusingly boils down authentic Christianity to selling everything and giving it to the poor

This isn't amusing because it's wrong. 

The evidence for it is all over the place in the New Testament and early Christianity, and we talk a lot about the primacy of that evidence in this blog.

Some notable texts include Luke 14:33, Luke 12:33, and the narratives about the rich man inquiring how to have eternal life in Luke 18:18ff, Matthew 19:16ff., and Mark 10:17ff., over which so many interpreters in rich, Western civilization stumble generation after generation. 

It is amusing because Ehrman imagines that a good follower of Jesus today would sell everything and give it to the poor. He thinks of this as an ethical ideal when it was the primary example of Jesus' negation of ethics. Jesus' eschatological imperative to repent to escape imminent judgment meant abandoning all social conventions, at the heart of which is economic life.

The implications of Jesus' message for the economy of Judea were devastating, and his opponents grasped them better than any of his followers since. He was crucified because if everyone followed him tribute to Caesar would dry up (Luke 23:2) and the Jewish elites would lose their place of preferment (John 11:48). His death was beneficial for the maintenance of the status quo. Whether it was really necessary is another question, given the difficulty of following Jesus quite apart from what might have happened when his predictions failed to materialize. Hope in what he predicted ironically was kept alive by his speedy demise. 

Schweitzer long ago taught us that Jesus' eschatology theologically meant the negation of ethics. In keeping with this Jesus' imperatives take a negative form involving renunciation of the world and all its ways. The world is passing away, and threatens to take you with it.

Therefore Jesus' imperatives are not a description of the way to lead a Christian life, because there is no such thing as a Christian life. The end of the world is coming so quickly that there won't be time to lead such a life, not even time enough, for example, properly to bury one's dead, or properly bid farewell to one's family. Jesus' "ethics" are if anything negative ethics. They are instruction in how to lose one's life, the life of this world, not save it.

The imminent eschaton makes the very idea of the Christian life beside the point, same as it does the resurrection. We must remember, as Ehrman helpfully does in the podcast, that Acts 1 tells us that the resurrected Jesus hangs around with the now-styled apostles for forty days but all they can seem to think about is not the astounding wonder of this resurrected man in their midst, but whether he will "at this time restore the kingdom to Israel". The coming of the kingdom is what the historical Jesus had drilled into their heads, not the Pharisees' (and Paul's) doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

The eschatological theology of Jesus was proven wrong by history twice, once by Jesus' death and the failure of the kingdom to come, and a second time by the Jerusalem community when it mistakenly adopted the eschatological imperatives as a way of life, in particular when they had all things in common (Acts 2:44; 4:32).

Not long after the death of Jesus the Jerusalem community was plunged into such abject hunger and poverty by the famine of 44-48 AD that it had to compromise with Paul and accept his law free gospel to the Gentiles and ask him to remember their poor on his travels among them (Galatians 2:10), which inspired Paul's collection for the saints in Jerusalem (Romans 15:25f., 31). Much of earliest Christianity revolves around this collection as a remedy to the failure of so-called eschatological ethics.

You could say that the eschatology certainly failed also a third time in early Christianity, when its reinterpretation as the apocalyptic theology of the Parousia, the second coming, in Matthew 24 and in Paul, went unrealized before the death of the last of The Twelve (Mark 9:1). The kingdom did not come before they all died either, with power or otherwise, nor after the death of Paul.

All that eschatological energy then petered-out, so to speak, as the decades rolled on and Christianity reinvented itself on The Rock in compromise with the world, in compromise not so much because the Church wanted that but because reality is intractable.

 Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate. A ‘Christian Atheist’ joins Ross Douthat.

The podcast runs 1:24:23.

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.  

Paul's private experience of resurrection faith lead him to an excess of presumption and of despair

 

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

-- I Corinthians 15:17ff.

Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one--I am talking like a madman--with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death.

-- II Corinthians 11:23

 

Are not all or most evangelical virtues and graces in danger of extremes? As there is, God knows, too often a defect on the one side, so there may be an excess on the other: may not hope in God, or godly sorrow, be perverted into presumption or despair?

-- Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) 

How do you cleanse the land of the blood of the innocent Jesus when it is God himself who defiled it?

 

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

-- Numbers 35:33

 

New Testament "theology" is pretty clear that it is the Jewish god who is ultimately responsible for shedding Jesus' blood:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ...

-- John 3:16

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all ...

-- Romans 8:32 

God sent his Son to be our sin offering ...

-- I John 4:10

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-- Romans 5:8. 

The penalty for Jesus' murder is death according to the Law of Moses, but who could possibly kill God, the murderer, except God himself?

 

The Christian atheist Thomas J. J. Altizer, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wrote in 1966 that the transcendent God of the Bible had truly died when he immanentized himself and entered human history through the Incarnation and was crucified. As a leading representative of The God Is Dead movement, the highly animated Altizer instantly became a pariah in America, which at the time literally wanted to kill him over it, as his obituary remembered:

 He even went on the “Merv Griffin Show,” a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theater, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

But logically one should really go a step farther than Altizer and say that the Jewish god actually committed suicide according to this God Is Dead "theology" because God did all this on purpose.

After all, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified according to the wide evidence of the gospels and the New Testament, which insists that Jesus went to the slaughter like a sheep and opened not his mouth (Acts 8:32). This is exactly what one should have expected of a truly Divine Man bent on death.

This problem again illustrates the limits of "theology", Aquinas' queen of the sciences.

Her rational talk about God goes only so far, which Tertullian recognized when he said that the resurrection is certain because it is impossible (certum est, quia impossibile).

There are more things than the resurrection which are impossible.

 

 

Well, Mr. Pope, sir, the ladies aren't going to shut up about that Mary co-redeemer of the world stuff lol

 

Mary Helped Jesus Save the World

Monica Miller, Crisis 

 

Monica Miller must have had this essay in her desk drawer ready to go, just waiting for this moment to arrive. She begins right out of the gate reminding the pope, an Augustinian, that none other than St. Augustine had said

Two parents have generated us for death; two parents have generated us for life. 

The observation is as true as the comparison is false. Adam and Eve were husband and wife. Mary and the Holy Ghost were not.

Yes, St. Augustine's mother was also named Monica.

Later in her essay our Monica reminds the pope that Mary instigated her son's mission at the Wedding at Cana, dontchaknow.

She is the New Eve, the true and effective helpmate of the New Adam. 

Apart from how this is creepy connubial Christ talk, our Monica apparently sees herself in a similar light, trying to move her son the pope along in the right direction.

But kinda more like the old Eve than St. Monica, to be perfectly frank, our Monica finds her "hath God said" opening:

The [pope's] Note doesn’t say that the Co-redemptrix title for Mary is heretical but, rather, “inappropriate” and is discouraging its use for the reasons indicated. It is important to note that the document certainly acknowledges that Mary is “the first and foremost collaborator in the work of Redemption and grace.”

Doesn't say?

This is absolutely comic.

But wait! There's more:

My purpose here is to clarify and highlight that while, thus far, the Vatican has rejected the Marian title “Co-redemptrix,” nonetheless, Mary was and is God’s chief co-worker in the salvific mission of her Son.       

Thus far?

Monica is nothing if not hopeful about the future for Mary, Co-Redemptrix. And subversive:

And while the Church, for now, will not honor Mary formally under the title of Co-redemptrix, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the faithful cannot, in our private devotions, honor her in this way. 

For now?

You see what I mean. 

But our Monica rightly has every reason to be hopeful, because she understands the logic of her position, a logic which was born when the early followers of Jesus decided that their crucified master wasn't dead but was a resurrected god.

Once you introduce that first novelty, however, you have to explain where this god came from, hence the virgin birth idea, which is totally absent from Mark's Gospel, and under attack in John's. From there the novelties just multiplied.

It took a long time for that logic to do its work to elevate Jesus' mother, although our Monica highlights it already acting upon the imaginations of early Christian luminaries like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and others.

We did not get, formally, the Immaculate Conception of Mary until 1854, and the Assumption of Mary until 1950. These are modern age developments! Papal infallibility dates to 1870, Daily Reception of Holy Communion to 1905.

Mary The Co-Redeemer in 2052 anyone?

The Reformation tried, not entirely successfully, to rescue the church from this line of thinking through its rediscovery of Paul, whose thinking was nowhere Marian but Christ-centered.

The first Adam, completely counter trend, was the only man not born of woman until the last Adam. Of course Paul was not thinking this through when he said that Jesus was "born of a woman" in Galatians 4:4.

Well how did Jesus escape original sin then?

We are not told, only that as Paul's theology developed Paul plainly said that Jesus "knew no sin" (II Corinthians 5:21), and was made of different stuff:

Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.

-- Romans 5:14

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. ...

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. ...

The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.

-- I Corinthians 15: 22, 45, 47.

The answer of Matthew 1:18, 20 and Luke 1:35 is that that different stuff was "of the Holy Ghost". And that pretty much explains how the fourth and fifth centuries came to be spent, not on Marian concerns, but Christological.

The Marianists major in the minors. 

Survey of 3,000+ American adults indicates people have remarkably strong theological beliefs, many of which contradict each other and the Bible

71% say they believe in the One Trinitarian God of Three Persons. But 57% say the Holy Ghost is not a person. And 49% say Jesus is not God.

65% say God accepts the worship of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and of every other religion. 83% say God loves everybody the same. 66% say most people are good by nature. 74% say people are born innocent of sin.

52% say sex outside of marriage is a sin. 65% say God created marriage to be between one man and one woman. 49% believe abortion is a sin. 54% disagree that gender identity can be chosen. 

62% believe Jesus will come back to judge the living and the dead. 57% say hell is a real place of eternal punishment. 60% strongly deny that even the smallest of sins deserves eternal punishment.

49% think 100% of what the Bible teaches is accurate. 48% think the Bible contains myths which are not literally true. 36% say science disproves the Bible.  Half believe in the authority of the Bible. 46% believe the Bible's condemnation of homosexual behavior still applies today. 65% believe the Bible's accounts of the resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate.

Read all about it here.

Meanwhile, just 13% have actually read the whole Bible.

Same as it ever was.

 

 

 

A Jungian psychologist decides that the Gospel of Mark ends without resurrection, on purpose, but apparently he has never read the damn thing lol

 The Transcendent Absence: Mark's Unresurrected Christ and the Creative Imperative

... Mark's unresurrected Christ ... The absence of resurrection in Mark's Gospel . . ..                                                                                                                                                                                                    

There's just one little problem with these statements: They are falsehoods. The text says Jesus rose.

Everyone agrees that Mark's "narrative rupture" occurs at the close of 16:8.

But the resurrection occurs before that:

And entering into the sepulchre, [the women] saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. 

And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. 

But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you [in Mark 14:28]. 

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid. 

-- Mark 16:5-8

The endings after this are obviously supplied based on internal evidence of language and style which differ from Mark's. And their variety is a sign that something was felt to be wanting from a very early time. External evidence shows the gospel ending at 16:8 in two famous codices from the fourth century: Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. And Matthew and Luke and John in their turn each supply their own fuller accounts, some of the elements of which resemble the endings supplied to Mark. 

The twice promised resurrection appearance in Galilee in Mark is perhaps the most wanting thing. Simply on that basis it strains credulity to think Mark intended the ending to be 16:8. The composition is unfinished, or was early on damaged. 

But the resurrection is not missing from this abruptly ending gospel. One cannot speak of an unresurrected Christ in Mark. One cannot say there is no resurrection in Mark. It's right there in verse six.

Meanwhile we are told that "the sacred emerges through collective human action rather than through divine intervention", and that "the kingdom of God exists only insofar as we create it through revolutionary praxis within history's unfolding".

Unfortunately for the author, Brian Nuckols, Mark's Jesus doesn't believe any of that hooey.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

-- Mark 1:15

And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power. 

-- Mark 9:1