beeline wrote:OK, but that's still enough time for myth building, I mean, just look at Fox News, they retrofit history more frequently than Winston Smith. It's like they don't even pretend to remember what happened the day before yesterday, or what they said, or that they are directly contradicting it. Not that the gospel writers are sinister like Fox, but fervent believers tend to stretch the truth a bit. That's as true with Jesus Christ as it is with Babe Ruth, Ruth famously pointing to the seats where he would hit his next home run--it never happened, but it's in the collective consciousness, the myth.
And FWIW, I have no problem with Christ's message--love one another, love your enemy etc.--but I do not believe in any of the miracles or that he rose from the dead or any of the other supernatural events attributed to him.
Actually, Ruth did do pretty much that. Except it might've been more like pointing at the pitcher and telling him he was going to jam the next pitch down his fucking throat. Which, he did. Figuratively.
Yes, of course the Gospel writers stretched the truth. Unless one actually thinks Jesus walked on water. (But hey, maybe there was a sandbar, or maybe it was astral projection, etc. There are mundane explanations, there are even bizarre paranormal non-supernatural explanations that would be mundane to this board.)
It's the analogies and parables that reek of an actual dude, maybe a really bright semi-schizo manic-depressive, most of whose thoughts flew over the heads of most listeners, even as they marveled at his audacity and eloquence and sheer nuttiness and kindness, whose religious ideas weirded out and then enraged the local church, but who struck a chord with a tight loyal crew of people who knew him (who panicked at first and tried to hide him away) and the occasional straggler and beggar. I wager more than a few people here might know how that goes, know that feeling. Imagine there's no internet, and it's up to that crew to basically store what you said in their heads and on post-it notes, and 30 years later somebody finally puts it all down in a decent format, embellishing the truth here and there to varying degrees. Imagined it? Cool, lol, you now more or less know what it was probably like to be Jesus.
(Imagine that as a halo.)
p.s. The board went down just as I hit submit, and I had that feeling we all probably have in that moment, "Fuck, I hope the text doesn't disappear, because how in the fuck am I going to remember all that I just wrote, how I wrote it, what I said, that one turn-of-phrase that was just spot-on and I was so self-smitten with...now I have to try to conjure up that same mental groove, remember exact phrases, remember what my fucking point was...fuck!" And that's just for something you yourself just typed five minutes ago. Know that feeling? Cool, now you probably know a fraction of what it must have been like for Jesus's crew trying to do all that for an entirety of the dude's spoken words, 30 or more years after the fact.
