Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (17164)	4/20/2004 10:57:01 AM
From: Greg or e	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

16. Jesus was a complicated person. Ankerberg: Okay, we’re going to come back to this thing of, there are so many different Jesuses that are being written about. You’ve got the Spirit Jesus, the Exorcist Jesus; you’ve got the Revolutionary Jesus; the Peasant Jesus. You know? What’s going on here in terms of methodology? How do you get to these different Jesuses and what’s also wrong with just coming out with the specific kind of Jesus: the Peasant Jesus, the Spirit Jesus, etc.? Evans: Well, part of the problem is, there’s a grain of truth in all of it. Jesus was called Rabbi. So to refer to Him as "Rabbi" I think is legitimate. He refers to Himself as a prophet and is regarded by others, we are told, as a prophet. So I think that’s true, too. He is a healer and He is a man of the Spirit, and so a lot of these categories are, to some extent, accurate. The least accurate, in my view, is that Jesus is to be regarded as a philosopher. And what is terribly inaccurate is to compare Him to a cynic. And so I think what happens with scholars is they get hold of a particular facet, they find it fascinating, and they pursue it. And sometimes to the expense of other legitimate categories. The truth of the matter is, Jesus was a complicated person. He was an unusual individual and incorporated many, many of these dimensions within His own person and in His ministry. Now, part of the problem with the "cynic" for hypothesis–if I may pursue that one–is the archaeology does not support it. A number of years ago, archaeology at Sepphoris, a town which is just four miles away from Nazareth, so Jesus grew up, you might say, in shadow of Sepphoris, a city on a hill nearby. And it’s a city that was very urbanized and scholars thought, "Hey! This is a Greco-Roman city and Greco-Roman cities have cynics in them. So perhaps Jesus was influenced by a cynic." The problem is that now that they’ve pretty well completed their work, it turns out that Sepphoris was a very Jewish city prior to the year 70. How do they know that? There’s no pig bones in the dump. It’s interesting how archaeology can do these things. After 70, it then becomes a heavily Gentilized city. There’s a Greco-Roman presence. And we find pig bones in the dump. In fact, one third of the bones are from pork and swine and so on. And so we realize, Hey, this was a Jewish city. There weren’t any cynics in this city. There weren’t any cynics there in Sepphoris to influence Jesus in nearby Nazareth.