Interesting take on Jesus

[CVShooter]

Funny discussion around a decent question -- was Jesus influenced by Buddhism?

Short answer is: Unlikely to the point of being able to dismiss it. There are far simpler possibilities. Jesus of Nazareth was a Palestinian Jew. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and the Babylonian exile of the Jews all happened at about the same time and Judaism was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism. Jesus wouldn't be around for another 600 years after all that mixing of cultures in the east. Bible thumping folks need to brush up on their reading of the minor prophets during the Exilic and Post-exilic periods. Very interesting history. Pretty much all the upper class, royalty and nobility were exiled to live as bureaucrats in Babylon & Persia, then released back by Cyrus of Persia but they didn't leave until Darius sent them off at around 539. It's an interesting political strategy -- setup your own ruling elites in the conquered lands while exiling the conquered elites to live and rule under close watch in the home country. Lots of cultural mixing happened back in those lands. They brought some of that culture back with them. Ever wonder why there is no discussion of an afterlife in the Bible until the second half of Isaiah (a.k.a. Second Isaiah)? Everlasting life in the Hebrew/Canaanite tradition was via your genetic line & story (you have children for many generations and they all tell stories about you until the end of time). It wasn't until after mixing with the Zoroastrians that Jews started talking about ideas about some immortal soul or a magical land where you live after dying.

Jesus was a Jew. Pure and simple. And he was a good Jew. The Golden Rule was a positive restatement of what was already in the Rabbinical literature as negative (don't do to others what you wouldn't have them do to you). It's a good rule of thumb to live by & sticks in the memory. It was probably just good folk wisdom of the day, as it is today.

Jesus's father was a carpenter or, more likely, a stone mason by trade. He worked during a building frenzy by Herod. Think massive public works projects. Lots of work for stone masons in a land where stone is the main construction material. Herod had palaces everywhere. The Romans built cities all over the place (especially on the outskirts of the empire). But that ended during Jesus's more formative years. The result? Economic collapse, poverty, unemployment, desperate times. Now you wonder why Jesus was such a fan of the poor, the downtrodden, hookers and others struggling to make ends meet in the wake of all that public money going away. He saw first hand the suffering they endured. But, as is the case today, they are also the hotbeds of radicalization and are ripe to take their frustrations out on the ruling elites by revolt. Jesus, yet one more Messiah to try his hand at mobilizing a revolt against the Romans, got squashed with the rest of them. So ended his "ministry."

All that to say that recreating a story where he travels to India or Tibet with caravan traders in the desert is a pretty far stretch. Judaism wasn't even the same among the desert tribes. There, sometimes, Yahweh had a consort (wife) and altars were built to both of them. Even if he had traveled with desert caravans, it is more likely that he would pick up THEIR beliefs before those of the places he visited briefly before getting back on the road. Yet none of those beliefs of a male/female godhead made it into Jesus's teachings.

Jesus also grew up in Nazareth, which was not a big trading hub. It was a small, backwater town that is very conservative (even today) and away from the hub of economic and political life on the coast and in Jerusalem. That's not to say that he couldn't walk out of Nazareth & join the circus. But it certainly doesn't make it an easy connection, either.

[RAMCLAP]

No. Jesus is the creator of all Things. He was influenced only by His own Self. In order to understand Who He is one must understand Him by the understanding of 1st century Greeks. http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/s....php?t=1105376

[CVShooter]

Great movie!

[CVShooter]

No. Jesus is the creator of all Things. He was influenced only by His own Self. In order to understand Who He is one must understand Him by the understanding of 1st century Greeks. http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/s....php?t=1105376

Why the Greeks? That could tell us a lot about Paul and his perspective on Jesus since Paul was a Hellenized Jew. But Jesus was Palestinian, neither Greek nor a Hellenized Jew. Looking to the Greeks to understand Jesus is like looking to the UK to understand Yasser Arafat. Yes, they have a role but it's pretty far off the mark. Knowing the Greeks also helps us understand the early church since Paul spread Christianity all over the Hellenistic world. But that's still not Jesus.

Unless, of course, you're talking about the role of Messiahs in the Greco-Roman period. There were a lot of them and, due to Antiochus IV's desecration of the temple, the Greeks got the brunt of a lot of the Palestinian Jews' hatred. But Palestinian Jews and Hellenized Jews were very different from each other. The church accepts Paul as an apostle but he never even met Jesus of Nazareth (unless you count 2 hallucinations of a dead man the same as meeting him in person).

Of course, there's only so much we can gain from learning about Jesus from his followers. Might as well try to learn about Bin Laden by only reading his followers. Yes, you'll learn a lot but you're getting a pretty biased opinion. Historians of the day (Tacitus, for example) barely give him a footnote. Seems about right to me.

[WASR10]

Why the Greeks?

I don't want to put words in RAMCLAP's keyboard, but I believe what he means is to have an understanding of the Greek language and contemporary semantics; how that may be profitable in studying what some of the writings of the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John, contain in reference to Jesus.

[RAMCLAP]

If you'd have read what I wrote you'd have known that Israel was part of the Greek empire and all spoke Greek

[billvau]

Jesus and His Jewish contemporaries most likely spoke Aramaic. However, the NT is written almost entirely in Koine Greek with just a tad of Aramaic in the Gospels.

There's more Aramaic in the OT (e.g. Daniel).

But the language alone doesn't tell you about Jesus and what He was like. The only way to learn that is through the revelation of His life in the Gospels and expanded teaching in the Epistles. Jesus was very unlike any of His contemporaries - even the Jews of His time.

Shalom.

[RAMCLAP]

Again. Just click this http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/s....php?t=1105376 and much will be cleared up. It's not long.

[OHOD]

Funny discussion around a decent question -- was Jesus influenced by Buddhism?

Short answer is: Unlikely to the point of being able to dismiss it. There are far simpler possibilities. Jesus of Nazareth was a Palestinian Jew. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and the Babylonian exile of the Jews all happened at about the same time and Judaism was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism. Jesus wouldn't be around for another 600 years after all that mixing of cultures in the east. Bible thumping folks need to brush up on their reading of the minor prophets during the Exilic and Post-exilic periods. Very interesting history. Pretty much all the upper class, royalty and nobility were exiled to live as bureaucrats in Babylon & Persia, then released back by Cyrus of Persia but they didn't leave until Darius sent them off at around 539. It's an interesting political strategy -- setup your own ruling elites in the conquered lands while exiling the conquered elites to live and rule under close watch in the home country. Lots of cultural mixing happened back in those lands. They brought some of that culture back with them. Ever wonder why there is no discussion of an afterlife in the Bible until the second half of Isaiah (a.k.a. Second Isaiah)? Everlasting life in the Hebrew/Canaanite tradition was via your genetic line & story (you have children for many generations and they all tell stories about you until the end of time). It wasn't until after mixing with the Zoroastrians that Jews started talking about ideas about some immortal soul or a magical land where you live after dying.

Jesus was a Jew. Pure and simple. And he was a good Jew. The Golden Rule was a positive restatement of what was already in the Rabbinical literature as negative (don't do to others what you wouldn't have them do to you). It's a good rule of thumb to live by & sticks in the memory. It was probably just good folk wisdom of the day, as it is today.

Jesus's father was a carpenter or, more likely, a stone mason by trade. He worked during a building frenzy by Herod. Think massive public works projects. Lots of work for stone masons in a land where stone is the main construction material. Herod had palaces everywhere. The Romans built cities all over the place (especially on the outskirts of the empire). But that ended during Jesus's more formative years. The result? Economic collapse, poverty, unemployment, desperate times. Now you wonder why Jesus was such a fan of the poor, the downtrodden, hookers and others struggling to make ends meet in the wake of all that public money going away. He saw first hand the suffering they endured. But, as is the case today, they are also the hotbeds of radicalization and are ripe to take their frustrations out on the ruling elites by revolt. Jesus, yet one more Messiah to try his hand at mobilizing a revolt against the Romans, got squashed with the rest of them. So ended his "ministry."

All that to say that recreating a story where he travels to India or Tibet with caravan traders in the desert is a pretty far stretch. Judaism wasn't even the same among the desert tribes. There, sometimes, Yahweh had a consort (wife) and altars were built to both of them. Even if he had traveled with desert caravans, it is more likely that he would pick up THEIR beliefs before those of the places he visited briefly before getting back on the road. Yet none of those beliefs of a male/female godhead made it into Jesus's teachings.

Jesus also grew up in Nazareth, which was not a big trading hub. It was a small, backwater town that is very conservative (even today) and away from the hub of economic and political life on the coast and in Jerusalem. That's not to say that he couldn't walk out of Nazareth & join the circus. But it certainly doesn't make it an easy connection, either.

Excellent outline of what it was like back then, esp harod.

[CVShooter]

Again. Just click this http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/s....php?t=1105376 and much will be cleared up. It's not long.

You seem pretty clear on the early Christians' philosophy as it relates to its Greek influences. But delving into what those influences are is critical to understanding what these folks were talking about. John's use of the term "Logos" comes from Plato originally but was heavily enhanced by the Gnostics. The Gnostics were a very broad philosophical movement in the Greco-Roman empire that influenced nearly all religious beliefs at the time. It was later branded a heresy in the Christian tradition but a few Gnostic gospels were written to retell the story as they saw it.

The Gnostic reinterpretation of Christianity had its own cosmology and the Logos was about third down the line in the various emanations of the divine. Generally speaking, Gnostics thought anything tangible was corrupt. So the idea of God in the flesh was about as abhorrent as it got for them. John adopted a lot of the Gnostic duality (light/dark, good/evil, God/Satan) but stated very clearly that, indeed, the Logos became flesh and lived among us. In other words, the Logos wasn't God, per se, but Jesus, the Son (or later emanation) of God. It sounds trivial to us but it mattered a lot back then. John is, by far, among the most Gnostic of the gospel writers but probably more dualist than Gnostic. Interestingly, his narrative of the apocryphal battle between Jesus and Satan is almost a perfect Christian retelling of an older story between Ba'al and Yam (the son of God vs the dragon from the deep in both stories).

All that to say that we shouldn't view the Gnostic cosmology as the way things ACTUALLY are. Rather, this was how they saw the world according to that philosophical tradition. That tradition influenced Chrstianity but there were plain ol' Gnostics, Gnostic Jews, Gnostic Christians, Gnostic Pagans, etc. Maybe that's the world according to John. But it isn't necessarily the world as it is or even the world as all the apostles would have seen it at the time.

[Doheny]

It's all Greek to me.

[WASR10]

Its a fair assumption that there is a specific audience in mind with each Gospel. Compare Matthew to Luke and you see a primary audience of eastern heritage and western heritage, or jew and gentile. John most likely tailored his message with the western disposition in mind; relating what he believed to be the complete truth while making the claims to be relatable to a certain group of people.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[CVShooter]

I'm not sure Jesus travelled to India. There is evidence the Buddhist message travelled as far as Palestine and Greece. Google "Greco Buddhism." A friend of mine is into Stoicism. There are a lot of similarities between what the Greek Stoics taught and Buddhism. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case.

An author I like describes Stoics as Buddhists with attitude. Or, more to the point, "a Stoic is a Buddhist who says 'F*** You!' to fate."

[KahrMan]

Here is interesting little tidbit...

Buddha taught:
"Consider others as yourself"

Jesus taught:
Treat others the same way you want them to treat you. Luk 6:31
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Mark 12:31

Keep in mind that the Buddha lived about 250 years prior to Jesus. I think it is not that unusual for the Buddha to come up with his teaching. Both Jesus and Buddha could have certainly come up with the same teaching without being taught themselves.

I think you want your hypothesis to be true and grasp onto anything which aligns with it. Conversely you might tend to discount or completely ignore that which disagrees with your point of view.

What would Buddah have said about such an attitude?

Mind you, I do not identify as primarily a Christian. I follow different ways as long as they direct me to a higher plane.

[mossy]

I think you want your hypothesis to be true and grasp onto anything which aligns with it. Conversely you might tend to discount or completely ignore that which disagrees with your point of view.

What would Buddah have said about such an attitude?

Mind you, I do not identify as primarily a Christian. I follow different ways as long as they direct me to a higher plane.

verse 273-276 of the Dhammapada, the Buddha was clear about following false paths and lesser teachings. the eightfold path is the way, following it will lead one out of samsara through ones own effort. Buddhas (and nobody else) can not give you salvation they can only show you the way.
following the many other false paths will keep one in the dark and trapped in samsara.
there are many different schools of Buddhism, we all follow the same eightfold path for a reason.

Verse 273: Of paths, the Path of Eight Constituents is the noblest; of truths, the Four Noble Truths are the noblest; of the dhammas, the absence of craving is the noblest; of the two-legged beings, the All-Seeing Buddha is the noblest.

Verse 274: This is the only Path, and there is none other for the purity of vision. Follow this Path; it will bewilder Mara.

Verse 275: Following this Path, you will make an end of dukkha. Having myself known the Path which can lead to the removal of the thorns of moral defilements, I have shown you the Path.

Verse 276: You yourselves should make the effort; the Tathagatas (Buddhas) only can show the way. Those who practise the Tranquillity and Insight Meditation are freed from the bond of Mara.