In thinking that Jesus may possibly have been Gay?

[nativitywreck]

I suggested this in another thread and the effect was like a fart at a funeral; it cleared the room!
It's not so far fetched though. He was 33 when he died, and never married. I would imagine that in the year Dot most people were married by the age of 18, so that is one confirmed bachelor.
And then there is the 'tache'n'beard, the sandals and the twelve guys he hung with..

I find it completely amazing that anyone really does believe that Jesus was the Son of God.
God is enough of a stretch, but that a man born to a woman 2000+ years ago was actually the Son of God??
I can see from this thread that there are people who believe this, but why? What evidence is there that Jesus was divine?
I am not being flippant at all. I genuinely can't believe this is considered Truth by any rational person.

nativity - I think this gets to the heart of whether you believe in historical accuracy, or whether you think there are levels of myth and shadowy attempts at telling a story, which you can still accept as having some form of truth.

I don't think 'evidence' and 'accuracy' have any place in faith. They're two wholly separate orders of reasoning and understadning.

Sure, there are the Catholics and Orthodox Church too. And yes there are differences. This doesn't bother me at all - it's the overall message and the things they have in common which are far more important :)

But LDR, I can't see any reasoning behind the idea of Son of God.
I can see that myths and stories can be allegorical-holding some kind of truth about humanity within them, but to literally beleive one of those stories is, to me, as odd as believing that the tooth fairy exists.
I just wonder how someone who does believe that JC was/is divine explains this to someone who can't get their head around it.

Why is the idea of Son of God more difficult to understand than the idea of God?

Exactly MillyR.
nativitywreck, I don't think this thread will ever be thorough enough to explain faith to you. Faith comes not just from the written word, but experience.

The OT spoke of the coming of the son of God. There were many who claimed to be so and the Jews were in fact expecting a warrior type figure who would lead them, as Moses led the Israelites, away from the Roman empire and into freedom. What they weren't expecting was a carpenter's son who preached about love, humility and forgiveness.

What impresses me most about Jesus is his wisdom. In the NT he has an answer for everything and it is the most profound answer too. He never replies as people expect him to. So when the rich man asks what he needs to do to enter the kingdom of God, he didn't expect Jesus to ask him to give away all his wordly possessions. Then there are the miracles (believe in them or not, it's up to you) and the predictions of his death followed by his resurrection.

If that was all we had to go on then it would be difficult to believe perhaps. But faith is something entirely different that cannot be explained. I have been lucky enough to experience Jesus, it was a personal moment that I shall treasure. That cements my faith for me.

Some people are convinced they have seen ghosts for instance, they will recount how they saw them and touched them, but those listening will come up with many theories such as delusions that would explain that encounter away. So it is with faith. Only the person who has borne witness to it, can believe it.

Yeah, I'm with sircliff on this one ... if you don't get it, you don't get it. It's not something you can explain.

mince - sorry, I am utterly confused then. You think it'd be 'sinful' to be inaccurate but accept discrepancies because they're unimportant?

Exactly, Cliff, but just because someone sees and believes in ghosts does not confirm that ghosts are real. Your faith may seem real to you, but could just as easily be explained away in the same way as ghosts. Just because we can't explain something doesn't mean it is true.

I think the point is that it is true to them and that is sufficient.

I am more interested in why believing in the Son of God is viewed differently from believing in God. I don't see a difference.

snowmaiden, yes and I am aware of that. Many things are explained, in fact most things are and if there isn't an explanation then science is busy working on one.

I am a full sceptic when it comes to ghosts and have stayed in many a haunted place without feeling a damn thing. I have also suffered mental illness and know what it is to be delusional and confused. My faith doesn't fall into either category.

To you, the observer, my faith can be explained away. To me, it presents me with a sometimes uncomfortable truth of the existence of God and Jesus. Uncomfortable because it is far from easy to be a believer, to have your sanity called into question, to be laughed at and have it implied that you are a fool and irrational person. It's also difficult to have to adjust your lifestyle and set time aside for God. It's not the easy path to follow that many people think it is. For instance, if God presented himself to you today - without any doubt, just plonked himself down on your settee and told you that everything you had read about him was true. What would the implications be? You are then left knowing about the afterlife, about the kind of lifestyle you are expected to live. That would be difficult for anyone to deal with.

Yes LRD I would 1) see it as wrong to deliberately alter the Bible to distort its meaning, but 2) accept that human beings are fallible, and that the overall message of the Bible overrides this.

Ok, fair enough.

I have to say, that makes no sense to me as there is no such animal as 'the' Bible, and I think there's a world of difference between deliberately distorting meaning, and saying that anything other than accurate translation is 'sinful'.

For example, the various glosses of the 'camel' don't make a blind bit of difference to the interpretation of the phrase, but cannot all be 'accurate' as they are, on the literal level, mutually contradictory. IMO.

But we're in muddy waters and it's pretty easy to disagree.

Hello, I'm back (after a very nice slice of Co-Op Christmas cheesecake - yum!)

On 'the Bible', I'm kind of between MincePie and LRD - yes there have been lots of 'canons' down the ages, so there is no undisputed 'Bible' that everyone agrees on - but I am happy to accept my church's Bible (I m C of E so the jury is out on the apocrypha for me, although some of my v. High Church friends disagree).

But I do think that although yes there there was a long period of editing, adding to, taking away from bits of the biblical books, the book of Revelation is deliberately put at the end of the NT canon, and it ends with a stern warning not to add anything or take anything away from the writings - I take this to refer to the whole Bible as it was formulated at the time that this verse was added (which may well have been after the visionary experiences / writings) - so for me, this represents a point in Christian history at which 'the bible' became, for orthodoxy at least, unalterable, something to be true to and to pass on, not to change. So in that sense MincePie is right IMO, in that the Bible itself warns against distorting its message. That's how I see it anyway....lots more I could say!

Well, I have to admit my position is mostly based on the fact that I get hugely confused about what's in the Bible and what isn't, as I am C of E but DH is Russian Orthodox, and I spend most of my time thinking about late-medieval English religion. So I like to think that it's worth being open to all sorts of different and even contradictory ideas, without worrying too much about who's 'right' in the end.

If the Bible has a message, I am sure I'm not bright enough to understand it.

Wow LRD! what a fabulous mix! (envious: my dh is boring old C of E too - no glamorous exotic Russian Orthodoxes in this family - sigh!)

And late mediaeval English religion sounds fab too. Is this for study or for your own interests?

As for the 'message' of the Bible, Jesus summed it up pretty well: 'love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.' It's not that it's hard to understand - it's that it's hard to do, for any length of time!

Hmm, I've never seen 'Russian' and 'glamorous' in such close proximity before!

It is dead useful though, since in lots of ways modern-day Orthodoxy is quite close to medieval Catholicism (dead languages, etc.). He's been getting bits of this thread read out to him the last couple of days.

To me, the problem with the 'message' of the Bible is that if you'd asked different Christians at different times, they wouldn't all agree ... I love the idea that what you quote is the central message (and I hope it is), but it feels a bit arrogant to assume we know better than people in the past who felt differently, if that makes sense?

The late medieval is both my interest and for study. I'm very lucky.

Milly-
I think its because " God" seems like a sort of totally magical being, (who I don't actually beleive in, but I can imagine as a sort of collection of mystical sparkly gases), but when you are supposed to believe that this magical being had a baby with a human woman, it becomes even weirder.

I suppose it's because having kids is such a prosaic, earthly thing.

Also Son of God sounds like the a movie sequel. I'm sorry, it just does.

I'm not sure you have to believe in that literally though, nativity?

I think there's a long history of people being fairly happy with the idea that the Bible is true, but not in a literal sense all the time. Eg., there's a text I'm working on which was written in the early fifteenth century - ie., when people could be executed as heretics, so pretty serious about religion and about 'correct' translations of the Bible - and yet it's perfectly acceptable for the author to tell his readers to imagine two different, mutually incompatible versions of the events of the crucifixion, and just to choose whichever one helped them to pray best.

I think a lot ofthe point of Christianity is accepting you're reassured that you don't have to understand everything, that lots of things are mysterious. Maybe some of the stories are made so far-fetched to reassure us about other mysteries? I think that could be profoundly comforting in a world where all sorts of everyday tragedies were impossible to rationalize - still is comforting, too.

NW, I find the opposite. The human being with a divine spark bit makes sense to me, but the nature of the divine is difficult.

YABVU- why don't you actually study the scriptures and the theological texts in the ancient Aramaic and Greek before postulating your ignorant theories?

Matthew 19
3 The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?"
4 And He answered and said to them, "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,
5 "and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?
6 "So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate."

There you go in plain English. Does he sound gay to you now???

My advice: Steer clear of your armchair, made-up theology and engage with the real thing. Otherwise, you just sound ridiculous and ill-informed.

Sorry to be harsh with you OP. I see from other posts that you are genuinely trying to get your head around faith. (You did rather launch at it with your own personal scud missile though.)

As I suggested before (albeit sarcastically!) you really need to read up on it all if you have genuine, heart-felt questions to ask. There are many rational and intellectual people who believe in this narrative. Ask yourself why? If they are university professors etc, how can it be that they have a brain by-pass when it comes to faith issues? Of course, they don't.

I recommend Lee Strobels books on Amazon if you really want to engage with rational thinkers who believe.

Sorry for being annoyed and arsey before. Just get used to people taking the piss, which you weren't. I get that now.

I believe that you mean Biblical or post-Achaemenid Aramaic, not ancient Aramaic, Thruaglas?

Do try to get these things correct - otherwise you just sound ridiculous and ill-informed?

Sorry, LRD. Before I was married I had a boyfriend who was Assyrian and he spoke classical and modern aramaic. He taught me that classical aramaic was that used in the Bible. I meant that instead of ancient of course.
Is that your only point anyway?

He was some sort of officiate in the Orthodox church. (But very gorgeous, lol.) I have dated some WELL geeky guys in my life!

Nah, TBH I was trying to gently show you what it feels like to be on the receiving end of those rather uncharitable comments. But I've just seen your other post which is much nicer, so I can admit that now!

I wish I understood Aramaic - did it take you a long time to learn? And did you find it made you understand the Bible or the culture in a very different way?