Well, so much for tact... “Cry Havoc”, eh?
*throws caution to the four winds*
I think the only time you'll get any flack from Christians on that is if you say that we can be fully like Jesus, i.e. God.
Well... *pauses* ...... *takes deep breath* ......
bring on the flack, because that is my contention.
It's name-dropping of the highest order.
I dropped the name, because
A. It’s manifestly obvious to me based on my personal enlightenment experiences and explorations
B. I didn’t feel like taking two hours out of my life to explain the historical basis of the conclusion. Details are a chore—but fortunately, I have them in abundance.
Slithy Toves, you obvious think I am an idiot. ... I am not an idiot.
As for Jesus having been a Buddha. That's one that I've heard from many people over the years, even the current Dalai Lama has said that.
Smart man. Wiser than the both of us. I surmise that there are any number of Jesus’s living today. Perhaps 3000, perhaps 10k? People who can heal the sick with their hands. People who really are one with God. Who can truly foretell the future. And I’ll bet most of them will describe how they are feeling in culturally dependent terms. Whatever the cultural context of their religion, whatever set of vocabulary, set of rituals, set of holybooks, whatever deities, that’s all “cultural specific noise”.
Does the view of Jesus that's used to make that judgement come from the Bible?
I am not going to engage in a theological debate with anyone. I am not going to use the Gospels, and I am not going to use the traditions of the many Christian churches. I am going to use historical facts.
I draw a distinct line between History and Theology, here and now.
Historians deal in facts. “What do we know based on the evidence?”
Theologians deal in faith. “What does our age-old tradition tell us we know?”
Is there a different source of info on Jesus's life to come up with that assertion?
As a matter of fact, yes. It’s called “The Gospel of Thomas”. Unlike the “hearsay” gospels that people study, this one is a collection of direct quotes from Jesus in the tradition of the Confucian Analects, as recorded by Didymos Judas Thomas, one of Jesus’s brothers. It was untouched for 2000 years, in an airtight Egyptian chamber that was exhumed by a group of fertilizer gatherers in the Egyptian desert in 1945, and it stand up to archeological dating. -–please check this out, if only to discredit it. Your faith will demand that you discredit this gospel, so perhaps in the process of doing the research as I have, you will realize the truth about the true nature of Jesus?
This is more reliable than the Gospel by the way. The Gospels were barbarous stuff—barely understandable. Written in infantile Greek, not Hebrew by ignorant, uneducated men, 60+ years after the fact. (This was quite an embarrassment in latter years.) Ignorant, superstitious, sheep-farmers—not exactly the kind of people I’d want to base a faith off of or devote my life to. I am a big fan of the King James version btw, even though I was Catholic—it reads like Shakespeare!!
Here are some quick quotes:
His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?"
"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a person who had a treasure hidden in his field but did not know it.”
"When you make the two into one, you will become children of Adam”
"Those who know all, but are lacking in themselves, are utterly lacking."
“I am the all”
His disciples said to him, "Who are you to say these things to us?"
"You don't understand who I am from what I say to you. Rather, you have become like the Judeans, for they love the tree but hate its fruit, or they love the fruit but hate the tree."
Enlightened men from all creeds say these same bloody things. These are universal expressions of self-transcendence.
And there are Christian mystics too, you know. Zen Christians who want to get back to the original purity of Christ’s teachings, and the Gnostics especially, where God is not something obvious, some... “thing” or “personality”. They believe that God is something you can study and meditate on, that God is essentially an enormous Unity, that you must dissolve specific shapes into this unity. “The Monad”, “The One”, that is beyond all categories, the same as “Tao”. They believe that people could be actual manifestations of the one. And that Jesus was one such person. One of many. And that PERSONALLY advancing along in degrees of absolute knowledge would lead you to the same type of salvation. You can’t get anymore Eastern than that!
The reason I'm asking is that from my view of the life of Jesus from the Bible, the idea of Jesus as a Buddha makes no sense,
What else could he have possibly been?
He was either who He said He was, or He was a complete nutcase.
NO. There is a third possibility. He could have been who he was, but not been who he said he was.
It's amazing the backflips people will do to acknowledge Jesus while downplaying what He really said.
THAT WAS MY ORIGINAL POINT before you set me off. Who cares what he said? He was born and raised in the Jewish tradition. That was his cultural context. We cannot blame him for being born in a culture—he articulated his experience from his own cultural milieu. The words aren’t important. They never are. The experience of life is all.
New-agers
I prefer, “Enlightenment Scientist”.
New-agers wear pink and play with aunks.
Religious people and philosophers wear robes and play with books and tongues.
I wear combat fatigues and play with technology.
It may be a stimulating intellectual exercise to equate Jesus with Buddha or any other spiritual leaders, but it can only be done by people who hear what Jesus said second-hand.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!! This is the funniest thing I’ve heard all year. THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS WRITTEN 100 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE NICENE CREED WAS AGREED UPON IN 325!!!!!!!!! Ahhhhhhh... that’s a good one, mate, heh.
Mark was the earliest, around 70 A.D., two generations after Jesus’s death. And Matthew and Luke used Mark as their PRIMARY SOURCE!!! Their second round of gospels FIRST MENTIONED the virgin birth. Guess what? Mark didn’t mention it! QED the virgin birth is a fabrication, an EMBELLISHMENT of Matthew and Luke. And then John gave his “contribution” to the mouth of Jesus in 100 A.D. which was NOT a narrative, it was a THESIS. That Jesus was the pre-existing word of god—Logos, which took form as Jesus.
Oh, and by the way, Herod died in 6 B.C., so he couldn’t have been around to kill the babies.
Also, Mark changed Jesus’s name (“Jesus is greek, not Hebrew) from Joshua (Hebrew version) in order to separate him from the great commonness of “Joshua”.
And not only that, Jesus had brothers and sisters. It’s true. (You learn these things when you are a history major!) Read Eusebius’s “The History of the Church” chapter 23, check it out! He describes Jesus’s brother, James, who took over his brother’s work after Jesus died.
Eusebius was the pre-eminent early historian of Christianity. If not for his work, we would know nothing of the haphazard origins of the Christian church. This guy is solid.
One thing that IS clear from all of the gospels, Thomas or traditional, is that the people around Jesus hadn’t the faintest clue what he was talking about. The Jesus faction was galvanized after his death though. They came to an agreement on just what Jesus had been trying to get through to them. This is when they came up with the external “Kingdom of God”. Ridiculous! The Kingdom of God is WITHIN you. It’s an experience of life, Jesus-style. Not some floating palace in the clouds.
(All this was taught to me by a Yale classical civilizations professor, specializing in the Near-Eastern religions—this is his life, he knows what he’s talking about, i.e., the four gospels are not his ONLY source…. (And here I was thinking, “when am I ever going to use this”!!))
If you take the time to study the New Testament and what Jesus actually had to say, you will find that He left no middle ground.
You say this as if Jesus wrote the gospels in his free time!! Jesus and everyone who knew him were DEAD by the time of the first gospel. How can you get direct quotes from dead people? Easy, make them up. The bible is historical fiction. Its figures are given dialogue just as Steven Ambrose gives his his real-life American historical characters fictional dialogue. Ambrose writes what they would probably say, but ... how in the hell does he know what it’s what Lincoln or Jefferson really said or that it’s even close? He doesn’t. And half of the episodes in books of historical fiction are ... fiction.
THE GOSPELS ARE ORAL HISTORY. An ORAL history. Do you know what that is? When you were in grade school, did you ever play the game where 30 of you get in a line and the first person whispers a sentence to the second person. Then the second person whispers what he *thought* he heard into the third person’s ear? Well... by the time you get to the 30th person, you’ll find the original sentence is quite mangled, misshapen, misinterpreted, corrupted, and probably bearing little resemblance to what was originally said. The Gospel of Thomas is direct, sealed in an airtight chamber for 2000 years. I would trust it 1000 times more than what the Gospels say or any subsequent church doctrine.
Not only that, but do you think, maybe, the writers of the Gospel were a little biased? These people had a message to convey. These are not objective historical scholars!! Hardly dispassionate.
He said He was the son of God, not an enlightened man. He said He was the Messiah, not a buddha.
The Zealots wanted a militant political leader. They wanted a Mithridates of Pontus, an Osama bin Laden-type. A terrorist mastermind, essentially, like Judas Machabeaus had been. A warrior that would throw off the yoke of Roman occupation.
Likewise, the idea of “Christ” as emperor did not come around until Constantine and his lackey bishops remade his image. I have seen a statue of Jesus from before 325 AD. Do you know what he looked like? He looked barely 15 years old. No beard. No robes. A quite “beautiful” young boy. A Classical youth. His image after 325? Christ as Roman Emperor, which is the image that has stuck to this day.
Do you know what an “Eireenicon” is? It’s greek. It means, “something we all agree to agree on so we can stop arguing”.
Constantine was a go-getting CEO-type. He adopted Christianity so he could unite the empire, so he could leverage the control the religion would allot him over Rome.
He didn’t have time for these petty theological squabbles. So he did what any good CEO would do. He held a committee meeting! The First Ecumenical Council. Their task was to settle the dispute inside the church as to the nature of Jesus.
Arius, a prominent monk, was the primary supporter of the “Jesus was an Enlightened Man” viewpoint. He said that Jesus was subordinate to god, a human. Why? Because you can’t say Jesus was God if he died!! God’s aren’t supposed to die like humans—at least not in Roman times.
Whereas, the opposition to Arius believed that Jesus was actually God incarnate. So the two camps argued, eventually voting to condemn Arius to death for heresy and also to have all magic banned—all flavors of Christian mystical experience were relegated to “witchhood” for the first time. This is why Christians have been throwing this “Occult” word around for 1600 years and are afraid of it. Because 325 ensured that anything remotely mystical was wiped from clean from early Catholicism.
Do you see? This imperial tradition of Christ as Emperor is a fabrication. A VERY LATE fabrication. Constantine re-invented Jesus as a Roman emperor to replace the cult of Sol Invictus, which was the age-old cult of emperor-worship that Augustus had begun. The Emperor operated in direct succession of Jesus on earth. The Roman Empire became Christ’s Kingdom “on Earth”. The living tradition of Christ and Heaven—on earth. To disobey the emperor was to go against God--the ultimate control. Constantine was a brilliant, scheming, crafty entrepreneur.
The real Jesus is NOT the emperor of an ethereal kingdom as determined by Constantine and the Nicene bishops. Nor is he the son of god as ignorant Judean shepherds claim in the gospels. He was a man. Just a man. Like you and me. Perhaps the most misunderstood man in the history of histories.
He said He was the son of God, not an enlightened man. He said He was the Messiah, not a buddha. He said that He was the ONLY path to God, not just another option on the path to nirvana.
How in God’s name could he have said these things? He had no knowledge OF ANY OTHER spiritual discipline, other than perhaps Zoroasterism, Mithraism, Roman religion, or any number of garden variety polytheistic religions. He had a Jewish background. He was a Jew. How could he express himself in any other way? He was a carpenter’s son, was he not? Not exactly university educated with a degree in Comparative Religion!!!
Should we model Him? Sure. Can we achieve what He did? Not a chance.
This is the greatest of all limiting beliefs.
Yes, the #1 limiting belief of all time.
Have you heard of Alan Watts? A protestant minister, formerly. Discovered Zen. Discovered meditation. Became the greatest scholar of Comparative Religion (east/west) of all time. A friend of his asked him, “Alan, you’ve studied and practiced every religion under the human sun. In all your explorations, do you suppose that there is an underlying commonality?” He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he took his calligraphic brush and drew an empty circle. He then drew arrows all around the circle, pointing toward it. The arrows are the cultural specific paths the Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Zoroasterians, Taoists, Confucians take. Oneness with God. The empty circle is the Oneness which is common to the highest achievers of each of these spiritual disciplines.
It is the same experience.
It is the same experience. Only the words differ.
It would seem, with your belief, there is a brick wall in front of your arrow.
[This message has been edited by Brian649 (edited March 18, 2002).]
