Silversoul said:

It is taken as an article of faith among mainstream Christians that Jesus suffered and died on the cross for our sins, and that this is the source of salvation. Personally, I think this is mistaking the roadmap for the road. God is beyond time, and salvation was available before Jesus just as it has been since his death on the cross. I submit that his death and resurrection were meant to teach us some of the divine mysteries of God. Did God take human form to take on our sins, or was his death meant to show us how God has always taken on the enormous weight of the world's sins, in order to sustain it? God is too great for any one religion, and salvation was never meant to hinge itself on a historical event. The crucifixion teaches that when we suffer, God is there to suffer with us. Whenever we are in pain, we can turn to God to carry us through it and be our fellow sufferer. Salvation is not something waiting for you after you die. It is here and now, if you seek it.

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Silversoul said:

God is beyond time, and salvation was available before Jesus just as it has been since his death on the cross.

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MarkostheGnostic said:

First read Rev. John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospel: Reading the Bible With Jewish Eyes before we discuss biblical passages. Apparently, you have not considered that the New Testament was written intentionally to create a singular figure who fulfilled many Old Testament 'prophesies' without any actual historicity behind the things attribted to Y'shua ben Miriam.

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MarkostheGnostic said:

Ooh, well, cook us a good Christian recipe for humble pie why doncha. Spong is a great scholar whom you would do well to read since you obvious are not yourself a scholar of biblical hermeneutics. Your paragraph:

"Orthodox Jews have been trying to discredit Jesus from the get go. That is a fact. No one denies that, so I am not shocked at anything they say, nor the Muslims. They do say he was a good teacher. How can someone be a good teacher and proclaim themselves as God in the flesh? It just doesn't work. They can't have it both ways."

Indicates a number of things. Firstly, you cannot yet handle the relative perspectives of Christian, Jew and Muslim with regard to the nature of Jesus. Secondly, you have obvious anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim prejudices. So much for your affection for a Jewish Jesus who was Hellenized into a Greek demigod by the gospel authors. Thirdly, Jesus the Jew, was born and died a Jew if indeed He existed historically, and as a Jew, He Never would have proclaimed Himself "God in the flesh." That was, is and shall always remain a Hellenistic concept derived from classical Greek thought in which Deity impregnates a mortal woman (like Dionysius from Zeus and Semele, or Heracles' from Zeus and Alcmene). THAT is why Jews and later Muslims reject the specifically Johannine theology that Jesus was 'God clothed in flesh.' Each of the four canonical gospels has its own particular agenda and Jesus is mythologized differently in each of them. Astronomical anomalies heralding a divine birth, virgin births, these and other things always accompanied ancient middle eastern religions. The term Son of Man derives from Iranian sources. It figures in Hebrew apocalyptic writings like Daniel. Despite the Christian imperialist assertion that Christianity is unique among religions and holds a monopoly on Truth, "There are no new things under the sun."

Most followers of Y'shua/Issa/Ieosus were Jews, BTW, and what they believed was believed decades before gospels were penned and theologies written down. Jews would have held to what would later be called a Synoptic theology (as in Mark, Matthew and Luke) in which Y'shua was 'a man anointed by God,' like all of the anointed kings of Israel, only with a particularly Great consciousness of God.

"Jesus is not a figment of anyone's imagination." Maybe yes, maybe no. It is clear that if He existed historically, He must continually be demythologized. That task began in the 19th century and is still a work in progress. It is not the historical personage that is responsible for 'salvation' or 'sanctification' in you or me, so the historicity of Jesus is a moot point in this regard. "Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone," says Mark 10:18. But again, Isaiah 45:7 says "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." The metaphysics are prior to the personifications of Jewish midrashic writings. The Coincidentia Oppositorum - Good and Evil, Christ and Satan, Light and Dark, etc. are recurrent themes in the history of religions.

You will have to learn some history yourself. You've swallowed post-Nicean, Irenaeus-constructed theolgy, hook, line and sinker, and you just seem to come across as empowered by ancient tradition. Unfortunately, your tradition is not ancient enough! If it were, I would not be detecting any anti-Jewish sentiments, because at the origin, 'The Way' was a thoroughly Jewish cult and only later did followers of 'The Way' identify themselves as 'Christians' and establish the dogmas that you pontificate. " I am not your average Christian putz." Indeed. Neither do you embody average Christian humility, without which actual Agapic "being in Christ" is impossible.

Tired of adjusting your dogmatic stance based on new knowledge. Too bad for you. You're trying to grasp Truth like it can be frozen into solid doctrine. The only way one can grasp Mercury is to freeze it solid too, but then you really have a very artificially rigidified reality that reveals very little of its true nature relative to human beings. We don't exist at temperatures at which Mercury freezes and dogmas are dead artifacts that can only remind us of a living, present, experiential Reality.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but, respect Truth.

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