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Date Posted: 09:09:38 02/25/03 Tue
Author: Omega
Subject: A brief response
In reply to: mvd 's message, "Omega, a serious religious question" on 14:51:13 02/22/03 Sat

Your question has many different possible answers that can be given -- and I think it is not just one factor but many that led the direction of Christian theology and its interpetations of Christ's teachings.

It must be understood that there is a live debate as to what Jesus really taught. Many (like the Jesus Seminar) think Jesus mostly to have been a wandering teacher, who mostly used parables, often to counter the social opinion of his day. They point to a lot of peasant level wisdom and humor -- like what is it that defiles us- it's not what goes in but what comes out being a reference of exremental humor.

It would seem that a lot of the Eastern elements were floating about at the time of Jesus and afterwards; those who tried to understand the man then took to what they understood, and put into Jesus their own take of his life.

The Jesus Seminar would point out, as a person following Hebrew Wisdom tradition, one was supposed to take what is said, try it out, if one finds it works come up with a new way of expressing the same point, but if one finds it does not, come up with something else. Thus, when Jesus is seen as the teacher of wisdom in the Jewish sense, it was understood that what he said was modifiable according to lived experience -- and some of the more theologically adept were influenced by the thoughts of the East, esp from Persia.

Now you asked:


What social, economic, or cutural differences led to the misinterpretation of these thoughts? For instance, how did the thought "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," come to be misunderstood and this kingdom placed in some metaphorical "sky" or "promised land in the stars"?

My answer is: there are again many aspects to this. I will go the simple route and explain the simplest part, but there really is much more that went on. First and foremost, the time we see the Apostles were writing, you saw the deification of emperors and such, and it was seen that they literally went into the sky or heavens. It was the kingdom of the promised of the blessed. The Christian authors made fun of this, and did political humor, with the ascension of Jesus into the heavens - it can be seen as showing a peasant nobody, killed as a nobody, was equal to the great rulers of the Empire. From here, it became more and more focused with the heavenly as indeed the realm of the blessed, especially as Christian thought and Roman thought merged.

I hope that helps a bit?

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