dreamer_easy | tehological insight

I thought it was because the Romans gave Jesus this really nice cross as a gift and he did not say thank you.

Jesus pissed off the Romans. People who pissed off the Romans were crucified. Not sure God had much of a say-so there. (Please don't hit me with sticks for saying that!)

Jesus pissed off the Romans.

Did he? Seems the Romans were more than willing to turn him loose. He never really advocated overthrowing Roman rule (much to the annoyance of many of his own people, who thought that their messiah should do exactly that). He preached that it was perfectly okay to "render unto Caesar". He even hung out with tax collectors, and healed the daughter of one of the officials of the Roman occupation government. I think the Romans agreed to have him killed even though they knew (or their officials knew) that he wasn't really their enemy.

My (admittedly poor) understanding of the situation is that they did it to placate the high muckity-mucks in the Jewish community, whom Jesus *did* piss off (all those accusations of hypocrisy must have hurt). Said muckity-mucks didn't have the authority to have him killed, so they convinced the occupying government to do it for them, claiming that this "King of the Jews" was a threat to Roman rule as well as a blasphemer of the Jewish faith.

Well, I just checked with my dad to see what the "scholars take" was on why Jesus was crucified. His exact words were (and I kid you not) "Jesus pissed off the Romans." I had to laugh.

The current thinking now, in Biblical scholarship, is that all that rigamaroll with Pilate et al probably didn't really happen. It was probably just a Centurion leader who had Jesus arrested for messing up things in the Temple during Passover (my best remembrance of what dad just said on the phone).

It'll be interesting when a "Scholars Edition" of the Bible is finally published. Assuming they can agree whether to put in the noncanonical books or not. ;-)

(For more information on the research being done by Biblical scholars today, check out the Westar Institute (http://www.westarinstitute.org) AKA the Jesus Seminar.)

Now I have stopped laffing at your excellent ikon, I can comment that Jesus Christ Superstar doesn't count as a historical text. :-)

Jesus Christ Superstar doesn't count as a historical text. :-)

No?!?! Now that I think about it, my long-ago Catholic school religion classes probably don't count either... and they didn't have that happenin' music. I sure missed out. Oh well.

Our parish was so q00l we sang that pop music version the Our Father. And "Happy Birthday" at Christmas.

Some possible answers:
1. This presupposes a degree of continuity (of genre, authorial intention etc) in the Bible which really isn't there.
2. Taking the story on its own terms, and assuming that it has internal consistency, you could argue that God's covenant with Noah limited His[*] later options -- but He was happy enough to use disaster afterwards as a punishment against specific groups, as at Babel, Sodom, Gomorrah etc. Nothing about the covenant commits Him to a later show of mercy as such.
3. I'd make a distinction between the Atonement -- which I tend to see as residing in the Incarnation -- and the Crucifixion, which (like

trinalin) I tend to think of as an historical accident.

I'll admit that none of those answers comes from a terribly orthodox theological perspective, though.

[*] I'm not normally comfortable with calling God "he", but this is specifically the character in the Old Testament whom we're discussing...

the Atonement

Uh-oh, my ignorance is showing. What's that?

If you mean precisely what is it, you'll need to ask a theologian (and I doubt you'll get a straight answer when you do). In general terms, the Atonement is the healing of the rift between God and humanity which results (if you believe in that sort of thing) from the Fall.

My take on this is that the person of Jesus united God and humanity in a literal "At-one-ment". ("Atonement" is a word with such a spectacularly transparent etymology that most people think it's a contrived and tacky pun made up by preachers.) Traditional evangelical theology talks about "penal substitutionary atonement", whereby the sins of humanity required punishment according to God's laws, and this could only be avoided by God substituting God's self in humanity's place. As you'll have gathered, I'm not keen on that interpretation.

(Sorry about the delay in replying. My employers have LiveJournal blocked on the grounds that all our students would spend their days arsing around on LiveJournal and never getting any work done, with the result that we librarians can't either.)

Belated ta for this. It's extremely interesting!

Why does your ikon show a piano molesting a skull?

Er, no particular reason, I just like the picture. Well, actually I like the title.

It's Salvador Dali's Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano.

Ah - I had the participants' roles reversed.

Well, I'd have to repeat Infinitarian's criteria (assuming the Bible with internal consistency, and taking it on its own merits rather than externals etc, etc), but also...

It seems in the Flood story that God thinks everyone but Noah & Co is a total write-off, and so sends the Flood to kill them. (This is very strange to write after playing Halo, by the way!)

On the other hand, lots later in the New Testament, God sees a whole bunch of evil and sin in the system again. This time, however, He (again, like the Infinitarian, I don't think of God as 'He', but we're talking about the OT) thinks that humankind might be worth saving, and sends Jesus down to do it.

So I don't think He's got caught out on his 'no more floods' thing. More that He sees more potential this time round, and acts accordingly.

assuming the Bible with internal consistency, and taking it on its own merits rather than externals etc, etc

Ah! fanwanking the old rusty canon...

Interesting thought, Kate -- check out 1 Peter 3:18-22 (http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=1+Peter+3%3A18-22&version=NIV) for a New Testament flood/Christ parallel.

In response to

infinitarian, nobody in the Bible, including King David (Psalm 22) and the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 53), thought of the Crucifixion as an accident.

As Peter said in the book of Acts, it may have been done by the hands of evil men, but it was God's will and purpose that Christ should suffer and die for the sins of the world.

Also, without the Crucifixion there could be no Resurrection, and it's the Resurrection most of all that was the beginning and is the great hope of the Christian faith. As Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins..." and according to him Christians are "more to be pitied than all men" for clinging to a dead leader and a dead faith.

Not wishing to start a theological flame war on Kate's LJ, but theories of the Atonement are diverse and contentious. There's a significant school of thought that sees the Incarnation of God as a human being, and the return of that human being to God after death, as bridging the gap between the two and making them "at one".

For that, any death would do -- and, since being mortal is a part of being human, Jesus' death in some form was inevitable. (I heard a very interesting talk which pointed out that, if he truly partook of the human condition of those around him, he stood a very substantial chance of being miscarried or dying in infancy.)

The way I see it, the lesson of the Crucifixion relates to human nature, not to God's.

Yes, I know there are all kinds of theories and speculations about the Atonement. But I do think the NT emphasis on the Resurrection (rather than the Crucifixion or the Incarnation) as the keystone of the Christian faith and the basis of the Christian's hope of salvation is pretty huge.

Yes, I wouldn't particularly argue with that -- just with the contention that "without the Crucifixion there could be no Resurrection". I think the only necessary precondition for the Resurrection was the Incarnation, and Jesus's subsequent death (under whatever circumstances). The Resurrection is the beginning of the "return to God" which I was mentioning above.

Well, that's what I meant -- if Christ hadn't died (in some way) then He couldn't have been resurrected.

But I also do think that the prophecies of the Tanakh indicate that crucifixion specifically was the planned method by which Christ would die. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up," etc.

And the NT also appears to emphasize that a good deal more (and more important) things happened on the cross than just a man dying in the inevitable way that all men die. "No man takes my life from Me... I lay it down of My own accord."

I'm fascinated by this - at one stage (showing my Pagan bias) I was thinking "The open tomb ought to be the symbol, not the cross", but then discovered I hadn't really understood the whole blood and sin thing. What's the significance of the Resurrection - is it miraculous proof of Christ's divinity, or is there more to it, tehologically speaking? :-)

Paul expounds on the importance of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:12-26 (http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&passage=1+Corinthians+15%3A12-26&version=NIV). Part of the rationale ties back to Genesis, so it's even topical for your reading. :)

Basically, the Resurrection signified a number of things:
a) That Christ was sinless and divine, and therefore death could have no hold on him;
b) That Christ had completely finished the work of atonement for sin;
c) That God was completely satisfied with Christ's finished work;
d) That because Christ was raised from the dead, those who put their trust in Him and identify themselves with Him can also be confident that they too will be raised (which is the gist of the passage I linked above).

Does that make things any more clear?

Yes indeed - it's the full stop at the end of the sentence! The work is finished for all time. It was sin that introduced death into the world; if there was any sin left over after the Resurrection, Christ wouldn't have been able to return, but he's destroyed the lot. It's also a promise; see, it's possible to rise above all this. (Erm, possibly that last bit is a bit mystical.)

1 Peter 3:18-22

I think I get it - a symbolic, individual washing clean, rather than a literal, catastrophic one. (I'd never thought of the Flood as *washing* before. Obvious thing to miss.)

I figured that humanity had once more built up a critical mass of sin, and God decided, "Right, let's sort this out once and for all!" As He'd promised not to kill us, He was the only other sacrificial option.

God hates reruns too?!

Subject Line typos lead to wonderful things... like planets named "Teso Peope" ;)

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