Paprika wrote:
Just because a single verse can be found doesn't mean it's legit.
What a brilliant methodology to determine 'What Jesus Really Preached'. Just decide on what you want him to have said, and rule out all the inconvenient verses not 'legit'.
Martin Luther King walked up to a podium and said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" He smiled, and continued, "And after I have died for this dream, I will rise!" The crowd murmured amongst themselves what this could mean.
Okay, now let's apply your logic here. Are you going to pick and choose what parts you want to believe, or is it all or nothing? We all know he said the first quote, so now you have to believe the second quote, right? The all or nothing mentality is not a very good means of determining truth. The only difference here is that we only have the Bible quoting Jesus and nothing else to compare to whereas with MLK there is a lot more info out there you can parse through. But by all means not ALL of it is true about MLK any more than we can assume it is all correct about Jesus. It also doesn't mean that all we can go by to determine what Jesus really said and didn't say is simply what suits our fancy. You could do that, of course, such as feeling it within one's fancy to just accept it all without any rigorous study, but again that is not very honest. If we want truth we must search for it. We can use the meat between our ears to understand the original religion of the Pharisees, the accounts of the stories, the early Christian writings, etc, etc, to make a better picture and make some deductions. Even within the Bible itself it claims that people were corrupting the message and Jesus is quoted as predicting the message would indeed become corrupt. Thus, it does not seem a good idea to me to simply presume the Bible is 100% accurate and depicts everything Jesus said as truth. I am not simply picking what suits my fancy, I have actually studies this in great depth (hence the book I wrote about it).
Back to the disciples confusion, however, if this is a true statement that Jesus said this, what part about it is confusing? Were the disciples that dense? And if this were the crux of Jesus' message as it is of the Christian message, then why did he teach so many other things instead of this? If it were so important, why did they still not understand even at the end of his 3-year stint? Was Jesus that poor of a teacher? Or did he simply focus on other things? Or if he did focus on this point for the 3 years and the disciples remained dumbfounded for 3 years, why the heck would they follow him? This is the kind of reasoning we can use to determine if Jesus truly said these things. To me, it doesn't add up and it seems quite fishy. Especially with the warnings to beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the comments that the dog returns to its vomit and the pig to its mud. It makes sense when realizing that God claimed he never wanted sacrifice. The Pharisees' leavened doctrine was sacrifice and they added it back in to Jesus' message.
. So first of all, I would like to pose that Jesus did not preach sacrifice and atonement. At the time of the last supper, after 3 years of preaching, the disciples didn't even realize he'd be dying. Clearly he was preaching something other than, "I'm going to die for the atonement of your sins." So what was it and why the heck do Christians focus on bloody atonement instead?
