Posted in seeker, tagged Jesus on April 23, 2008 | No Comments »
“Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” —Luke 12:57
(The best Christians embrace that teaching. I was reminded of it by a UU minister here.)
Posted in seeker, tagged Christmas, Easter, Jesus on March 23, 2008 | 13 Comments »
Rome killed a threat to its empire on Passover, according to the canonical gospels. But the early Roman church moved Easter so Christians could say, “No, really, we’re loyal Romans, not those darn Jews who won’t settle down and accept Caesar’s rule.”
Easter’s the day that churches assert their power on earth: to a church, what [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged dualism, Jesus on February 27, 2008 | 6 Comments »
I’ve been thinking about the ways angry people separate themselves from others. It may be a natural consequence of dualism: dualities only allow for us and them.
The gospels address this in two ways in four places. Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23 are identical: “He who is not with me is against me.” That’s the Jesus [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged Jesus on March 14, 2007 | 5 Comments »
A friend sent me a link to a pdf: MARY MAGDALENE IS NOW MISSING. It looks at the part of the Jesus tomb story that intrigued me and concludes that the inscription that was interpreted as “Mariemene e Mara” or “Mary the Master” should be interpreted as “Mariemene kai Mara” or “Mary and Martha.” Ossuaries [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged Jesus, leveler on January 9, 2007 | No Comments »
expanding on the second comment to the previous post:
“Don’t be called teachers. One is your master, the Anointed. All of you are kin.”
In that saying, Christos may be Matthew’s interpolation, and Jesus only meant God when he said “one.” Greek does not have quote marks or parentheses to show what a writer has added in [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged Jesus, leveler on January 8, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Jesus saying “call no man master” gave the Roman conquerors and their puppet kings a reason to kill him. His saying “call no man father” gave the Sanhedrin, the Mithraists, the slaveowners, the tribal patriarchs, and every lover of a father’s authority a wish to see him dead. But the most terrifying thing Jesus ever [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged Christianity, Christmas, Jesus, magi, zoroastrianism on January 7, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Anyone who has read this blog for long knows I’m fascinated by the Zoroastrian connections to Christianity. The magi in Matthew’s infancy story are Zoroastrian priests from the Parthian Empire. I had always thought Luke’s infancy story, with its shepherds, had nothing to do with them.
When I was researching no fathers, no slaves, I wondered [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged Jesus, leveler, mithraism on January 6, 2007 | 3 Comments »
If you have any doubt about what Jesus meant by, “Do not be called masters,” you only have to look at the words leading to that simple statement. Here’s Matthew 23:9:
And call no man your father on the earth. For you only have one father, and he is in heaven.
In Jesus’s time, slaves were often [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged Jesus, leveler on January 5, 2007 | 7 Comments »
My favorite Jesus saying is Matthew 23:10. I’ve become fond of early translations that were made before kings, priests, and the rich decided that if they couldn’t ban English translations, they should control them. Here’s Tyndale’s, one of the earliest and possibly the best translation of the Gospels:
Be not called masters for there is but [...]
Posted in seeker, tagged Jesus on November 10, 2006 | 3 Comments »
They think that when a few Jews are recorded in one gospel as saying, “His blood be on us, and on our children”(Matthew 27:25), it means that all Jews are to blame for the death of Jesus, but when Jesus is recorded in many gospels as saying things like, “Woe to the rich!” (Luke 6) [...]
