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From: loren@sunlight.llnl.gov (Loren Petrich)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: God revealing himself
Message-ID: <48034@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 10 Feb 90 04:17:38 GMT
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In article <14903@cs.yale.edu> bitting-douglas@CS.YALE.EDU (Douglas Bitting) writes:
>
>You know, I kinda think that he already has (revealed himself).  No, I
>am not talking about the wonderful sunsets that you see everyday (at
>least occasionally), I am referring to an event that took place about
>2000 years ago.
>
>Yes, I know that that was Jesus, not "God" per se; however, according
>to the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), it's pretty much
>the same thing.  Why is that harder for people to believe than it is
>for them to believe that there was ever a guy named Caesar?
>
>Comments?

        Tell that to someone who follows some religion other than
Christianity. Jews believe Jesus Christ's claim to be the Messiah to
be in error, and that he was a heretic -- one of Judaism's "lost
sheep". Orthodox Jews certainly have not accepted his laxness
regarding the Sabbath. Muslims believe him to be a prophet, like
Abraham, Moses, and Alexander the Great(!), but that his revelation
was superseded by that to Mohammed. Muslims also believe that the
editions of the Bible available at the present day are corrupted, and
not the "true" revelations. I get the impression that Bahais also
believe him to be one of several prophets. I wonder what other
religions say about him.

        For my part, I think the Gospels are difficult to take
seriously as history. Just check out Randel Helms's book _Gospel
Fictions_, available from Prometheus Books. Though much that Randel
Helms discusses is probably old hat to some of you net.people, he
provides a good synthesis of modern scholarship on the writing of the
Gospels.

        An example: the Virgin Birth. There are no virgin births in
the Old Testament; and the only OT support cited turns out to be a
mistranslation of a word for "young woman". The Virgin Birth is
featured in detail only in the Gospel of Luke; it is hinted at in the
Gospel of Matthew, and it is not mentioned in the Gospels of Mark and
John. I wonder how it fares in the non-canonical Gospels. Furthermore,
an old manuscript of Matthew states that Joseph was the actual father
of Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke contain genealogies of Jesus Christ's
father; genealogies which are suspiciously numerological and which
contradict each other. There is the amusing discrepancy of an
elaborate genealogy of Joseph, after which we learn that he is not the
"real" father.

        Greco-Roman mythology, however, is riddled with virgin births.
There are a host of heroes who were reputed to be children of gods and
mortal women, and even some historical figures. Pythagoras and Plato
were reputed to be sons of Apollo, and Alexander the Great a son of
Zeus. I'm a bit puzzled that those who readily believe in the divine
parentage of Jesus Christ are so unwilling to believe in the divine
parentage of Alexander the Great, for instance. The evidence is at
least as strong.

        Indeed, the early theologian Justin Martyr complained that some
of his co-religionists don't find the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of
Jesus Christ very convincing; they compared it to Zeus making Leda
pregnant.

        My favorite interpretation of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth
is that God "knew" Mary (in the Biblical sense of the word), thus
making her pregnant. Maybe that is the true meaning of the infamous
music video "Like a Prayer" made by the one quoted in my signature.

                                                        ^
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"Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them" -- Madonna