Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “setback,” came with the note, “It’s a tough one to spin.” Once again the Crucifixion story comes up, and once again I’m still baffled by it. At least Jesus admits it’s a post facto confabulation, but the whole story, even after explanations from the readers here, doesn’t make sense to me. If God wanted to separated the sheep from the lambs, isn’t there an easier way to do it? How about looking into people’s hearts, which presumably He can do?
Since God is reckoned to be omniscient, and so has a “bird’s eye view” of the entire timeline and all future events, the only doctrine that makes sense is the strict Calvinist view that God made some people with full knowledge that they would end up burning in hell for eternity, and that he went straight ahead and made them like that, fully aware of that outcome.
The tricky bit is then reconciling that with God’s supposed benevolence.
But if god is omniscient she is unable to change the timeline and can only be an impotent observer which puts the boots to the omnipotence thing.
Of course theologians get around this by claiming that god is only maximally great where maximally is defined as only great enough to skitter around any of the paradoxes introduced by godly attributes.
I still think the only possible* explanation for the Jesus resurrection story is that Jesus was actually a Time Lord (chosen Time Lord name: The Savior), who used a chameleon arch to make himself into a human fetus implanted into Mary, perhaps to hide from the other Time Lords, or The Accuser, or maybe even from the Family of Blood. He was raised as a human, not knowing otherwise what he was, but recognizing that he must be SOMETHING special, given the whole apparent parthenogenesis thing. But his faithful companion, John (who ended up being called The Baptist, though he was just human) used The Savior’s Tardis to go about thirty years in the future, with the fob watch containing The Savior’s Time Lord identity, and when he managed to get Jesus to come be baptized, as he had been told to do, he opened the watch and returned Jesus to his Time Lord self…this was when the “Holy Spirit” came to him. The Savior wandered off into the desert, confused by all the things he’d gone through as a human and his abrupt return to his original self, was confronted by his old frenemy Time Lord (The Accuser), who always thought that The Savior was really a megalomaniac would-be world conqueror, but one who wanted to be loved even as he ruled over others. The Accuser told him he should just be open about it, but Jesus couldn’t accept that interpretation of himself, and told The Accuser just to get behind him and watch if he thinks he’s such a megalomaniac. Then he started his preaching, trying to spread a hodgepodge of good (and not-so-good) ideas he’d gleaned form alien and future civilizations, possibly some from Gallifrey, and even some from things he knew people would attribute to him in the future. His miracles are all easily attributed to Time Lord technology (“This is science beyond magic”). Eventually, of course, he was betrayed and hounded and decided his attempt to bring peace or philosophy or whatever to humanity (under his guidance) was doomed, or not worth the effort, and he let himself be crucified…and since “Time Lords take forever to die”, he was still not dead when he was sealed in the cave, and there he regenerated into his next form. This is why his followers didn’t recognize him when they encountered him afterward at first, though he gave them hints that they later caught onto…sort of. And his ascent to “Heaven” was just him flying away in his Tardis, leaving a mess in his wake that he didn’t bother cleaning up, as Time Lords often seem to do.
It’s just so OBVIOUS.
*Using that term in the loosest of senses.
This does seem to be the most likely explanation.
Ooh! A fifth Gospel! I like it!
Ah, fan fiction! (Judaism is fan fiction of Babylonian mythology + Zoroastrianism; Christianity is fan fiction of Judaism; Islam is fan fiction of Judaism + Christianity; Mormonism is fan fiction of Judaism + Christianity + Islam.)
Too right!
crucifixion = animal sacrifice in a different form. it comes from many ancient religions.
Agree one hundred percent. (Yet, some little voice in the semi-conscious regions of my distracted mind wants to say,”Mormonism is fan fiction of Judaism+Christianity+Islam+Robber-Barronism.)
Brilliant, thanks Robert!
Religion is endlessly syncretic and it never, ever cites it’s sources.
I gladly join with the others in lauding this tale. This honestly would make a good movie, although they would shy away from placing it in the Dr. Who universe.
It would be fun to watch, though, wouldn’t it?
The earliest Christian writings – the half-dozen ‘genuine’ epistles of ‘Paul’ – have virtually nothing to say about the life, ministry or teaching of Jesus. They seem to envisage him as a purely spiritual being, killed by the evil spirits that actually rule the earth, and spiritually resurrected by G-d in order to defeat those evil spirits and save our immortal souls (no, I’m not sure how that bit works, either).
When the Gospel writers, starting with ‘Mark’, decided to transfer this narrative to the earthly sphere, they naturally chose an earthly means of killing Jesus. What could be more natural, in the late first century, than crucifixion, which the Romans had used widely against the Jewish insurgents after the war of 66-70? To be followed, naturally, by an earthly resurrection.
Well, it’s at least as good a hypothesis as any of those that take the Biblical accounts at face value.
Yeah, Biblical accounts at face value?.
‘Gospel truth’ means, if taken literally, actually ‘false’.
Which brings us to the pleonasm of ‘false prophets’, a round circle, is there a circle that is not round?
Somebody once told me it’s symbolic. It turns out I misheard them. What they actually said is it’s “some bollocks”.
I used to be a Christian but I can’t remember how I used to resolve the obvious nonsense of Jesus paying the price for our sins (not very high once you divide his punishment amongst several billion people) and yet not paying the price by virtue of coming alive again. It’s so obvious, I don’t understand how I ever believed it to be true.
More like a hundred billion (10^11) people. But the actual number varies considerably depending on your chosen model of demographic history – how fast you have populations growing between pandemics/ famines and possibly climate crises (the “Little Ice Age”, for example) knocking the population back.