Will the real Jesus please stand up?

He was a fictional character that was based on the sun of a rabbi.

Now as you will never find out the truth and will deny mine let me advice you to spend your time wisely and do not ponder on little things that are not important AT ALL.

Go in peace my friend.

gospels of thomas & mary

i am the real jesus yes im the real jesus all you other jesus' are just a bunch of fetus' so wont the real jesus please stand up.. please stand up.. please stand up

First some semantics are in order...

You refer to Christ as a person when it is more a title an adjective and a function.

I can also imagine a Being who serves God by becoming and showing us our highest potential so that we might pursue it. A straight beam of Perfect accord right from the heart of God you yours, showing the way.

Christ is title, meaning anointed, meaning joined with the will of God, by God, because you "did good"

This is what happened to Jesus on the river Jordan. The dove/holy spirit descended unto him and God boomed out from the clouds saying "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased" (Mt 17:5).

It was the christening moment.

Good starts!

Gospel of Thomas saying 22, bold added

(22) Jesus saw some little ones nursing. He said to his disciples, "These little ones who are nursing resemble is those who enter the kingdom." They said to him, "So shall we enter the kingdom by being little ones?" Jesus said to them, "When you (plur.) make the two one and make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below, and that you might make the male and the female be one and the same, so that the male might not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye and a hand in place of a hand and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image - then you will enter [the kingdom]."

Thanks for everyone who has replied so far. I will eventually get back to you...having laptop trouble. I also want to start this thread in a particular way, so stay tuned.

Now, regarding other related topics:

If enough people show an interest in other related topics, perhaps we will address them later in this thread or maybe even in a new thread.

For now, we will have to get into the historicity of Jesus and the reliability of the Bible.

Christ had no beginning according to John 17;5, and God was, in the beginning. In the beginning, God
Jeus is God.

God declared that His Son is God.

Christ is sovereign....He rules over all. Evil can only reign for a limited time. He places a limit on it.

Yes, the Son of God is God and the Son of Man is Man, Jesus was both and showed the way to claim our greater birthright.

Romans 8:19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.

Last Edited by Xisuthros Rex on 09/19/2011 04:09 PM

30) Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature. Then there arises a disturbance in its whole body.

31) That is why I said to you, Be of good courage, and if you are discouraged be encouraged in the presence of the different forms of nature.

32) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Also before we start, I should let you know that I've asked a couple of GLP friends to help me with this topic. The deity of Christ is such a huge subject that I thought it would be best for more than one person to host. My friends are named Troubled Waters and Life and Love.

Why is this such a huge topic? Millions of people across the globe have trusted in Christ as their savior. Millions of others are aware of this. In the end, when it comes to Jesus, it's important to consider who he is, and who he is not.

By the way, I think that we are all grown up enough to realize that we don't believe something just because someone taught us about it when we were kids. Even so,I've seen this argument over and over on GLP. Let's try to get deeper than that.

I think that is why XR wanted to be clear on titles: Jesus refers to the man that was born in Galilee around 2000 years ago.

The "Christ" refers to the eternal spirit that always was, is and shall be.

It was apparently a belief of at least some part of the early Jesus Movement that Jesus was God. The prologue to the gospel of John (John 1: 1-5) was apparently a hymn of the early church, and was used by the gospel writer to open his gospel and clearly convey his theology.

It's also important to note that John's gospel stands apart from the other three: for Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus was a righteous man who devoted his life - and conformed his will - to the will of God.

For John, Jesus was always God - he came to earth "from above," while in the other gospels he came "from below" - and ordinary man that revealed the will and "the way" of God.

Last Edited by miri on 09/19/2011 04:17 PM

My Deity? I am happy to discuss being God, but I prefer sitting down in a corporeal, mortal sense.

Should any who read this response consider My Position untenable or unstable, I urge the Reader to consider that I am the Reader who Reads this line. Thus, I know Myself.

I one version, it is very very good news that a man can conform his will to Gods to the point of full spiritual adoption. Thats the best freaking news I've ever heard out of any religion.

In the other version we are hopeless sinners who must beg for our miserable lives from and enimatic Christ and an even more frightening and hostle God.


Guess which version gets promoted....

Last Edited by Xisuthros Rex on 09/19/2011 04:25 PM

Jesus seemed to prefer son of MAN

Jesus said he could Do NOTHING APART FROM THE FATHER

That is because I am the Father.

Yep.

Our elder brother.

His whole effort was for us to receive our inheritance as he had.

I would say this, Who Jesus was (is) and who people have claimed him to be and also what he taught and believed (Knew) is something different altogether in MANY ways than what was ALLOWED into the Bible! Yet I think too many have thrown the baby out with the bath water and that is the shame of it all.

Exactly. So I study the synoptics for all they have to teach me, and approach John as his own personal meditation on the meaning of Christ's life . . .

And now that anthropologists are contributing to our understanding of Jesus, it has transformed my picture of him.

Stay with the the "best freaking news" you've ever heard, XR. An ordinary man that can become a child of God.

Peace

Wow, I am difficult, aren't I?

I try to carry re-introduce Myself to Myself and remind Myself of who and what I am, but I prefer maintaining what it is I think I know about Myself.

Well, guess that's why no one listened to Me the first time.

Watching Myself write back and forth reminds Me of what a stubborn God I am.

I find that since I cannot control Myself — and I refuse to accept who and what I am — I use this Archimedean point to watch and love All that I am and all that I do from now until the Apocalypse.

Imagine his happiness in seeing us fully light up with the Truth of Being and stand beside him as siblings....

The faithful man, Abraham, takes his favored son, (personality/ego) before the altar of God, saying "I will kill this if it be thy will"

But we need not be destroyed, only pliant to greater wisdom and powers.

Yes . . . and then you have been created in the image of God.

Re-born, as it were, with a new understanding, a new orientation, a new "compass" to guide your actions and behaviours.

From that place, compassion can flow, and a determination to see that all life can flourish. You take the commandments to "love God" and to "love your neighbour" and turn them into action, everyday in your life, in ways big or small.

That's what it is for "the word to become flesh and live amongst us." We each become a word of God. And thus his child.

That's recreation I ache for, to be of full service and functionality to my fellows.

To make the time....to have my wrestling with God, to be wounded and not give up until blessed, so that i may bless others.

I have gathered enough.

I will compress like a star, the good fuel will nuclearize and the dross will be blown away, and for the first time, I will see clearly on my own.

Faith will have done it's work unto fruition.

And them i can finally get things done of lasting meaningful value!

Okay, I'm using this unfamiliar laptop instead of my usual tablet, and I keep losing my posts. Uggh.

Anyway, I wanted to let you inow that I asked Troubled Waters and Life and Love to help host this thread. This is such a huge topic, especially considering that many of us have and will depend on Jesus for salvation, and I thought their input would be helpful.

I am actually going to start with my testimony so you know where I've been on my spiritual journey.

From ages five through nine I attended an independent church with my parents. I went to Sunday school while they attended the adult service. Through that program, I came to trust Jesus as my savior and believe that he is God. The interesting thing is that I never heard another person say that Jesus is God until high school.

The Sunday school "teachers" didn't teach. We were expected to sit and either play a quiet game, color, or work on a craft while a recording of the Bible was played. It was not a paraphrase or a juvenile version. What we listened to was the Bible with sound effects in the background.

It became pretty clear that salvation was available through Jesus, so I prayed for forgiveness based on his work on the cross and pledged to God that I would never deny Jesus and would always follow him. I eventually came to believe that Jesus is God.

The scripture that got to me was time Jesus told Peter he would deny him three times before a cock crows. Peter, in his loud mouth way told Jesus he would never do such a thing. Well, as many here know, Peter did pretend three different times that he did not know Jesus. I will never forget hearing "caw, caw, caw" after his denials. That was the day I made my decision.

We moved to another state then and did not join a church. My father never taught me anything about God, and my mother
other only taught me the "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer. God was never a topic in our house.

Without a church or a body of believers I was on my own.
For years I relied on my recollection of the recorded scriptures and prayer. It was all very real.

I attended a Catholic high school for two years for reasons that had nothing to do with God (my parents were never Catholic). While I never became Catholic, the school gave me the greatest thing imaginable: my own Bible.

To be continued.

What? My name is...
Huh? My name is
Who? My name is..

Wiki wiki

Yehushua ben Joseph?

Are you saying he never existed or that what people have said about him is fictional? My first goal is to discuss the historicity of Jesus.

There are many on this forum that believe there was never a person named Jesus who was crucified. It would be pointless for these people to consider the claims of Jesus if they are convinced he never existed.

Last Edited by Jenann on 09/19/2011 05:16 PM

If it is important to enough people we can talk about the canon and why certain writings were excluded, but as I commented to someone else, I want to get down to the historicity of Jesus right away.