The concept of racism didn’t exist in 1st Century Judea. That being said, the parable of the Good Samaritan relies on bigotry.
Despite being superficially a complement, “Good Samaritan” is supposed to be ironic. Samaritan “goodness” must be unexpected for the story to work.
Imagine a parable of “the generous Jew” or “the industrious black man”, and you’ll get the idea.
Mitchel and Webb did a great sketch on this:
The story makes sense (in context) because of animosity between Jews and Samaritans, going back many years. A modern equivalent might be a Trump supporter helping out a democrat, or a Russian helping a Ukrainian.
John 4:9 gives a good illustrates this situation. In that story, a Samaritan woman is surprised that Jesus would talk to her when he is a Jew. It also illustrates that Jesus very much went against the culture of the day in his relations with Samaritans.
So, Jesus’ wasn’t making a statement about whether Samaritans were good or bad - he was explaining that being someone’s neighbour is about how you treat them, not who you are. A modern parallel might be the famous 'today you, tomorrow me’ story on reddit.
The story makes sense (in context) because of animosity between Jews and Samaritans, going back many years.
The story relies on prejudice, that’s my point. Jesus didn’t say “Seminarians were as good as Jews”, he said “Jews are worse than Seminarians”.
There are dozens of examples from the Bible where prejudice and bigotry are explicit. Hell, the whole concept of a “chosen people” implies that some people are better than others. Jesus ordered Saul to genocide the Amalekites. And if you notice, Jesus punished Saul for not killing every single last one, which implies that genocide isn’t just permissible, but a moral duty.
( I know that these stories are from the OT and you’re probably annoyed that I said Jesus instead of God, but according to the sign out on route 519, Jesus is God. Y’all still believe that, right? )
He said being a Jew or Samaritan doesn’t make you good or bad. Neither does your position (Levites and Pharisees were very powerful and respected). Your actions are a reflection of who you are.
The concept of racism didn’t exist in 1st Century Judea
The concept is as old as mankind. Details (replace ‘race’ with ‘guy from next tribe’, same concept) or it’s name maybe not.
That’s called bigotry or jingoism, depending. Racism is a distinct flavor, and much like “Orange didn’t exist as a color before the 15th century,” there lacked the basic concept of a race as determined by skin color vs other identifiers such as language, city-state-affiliation, or religion.
The concept of racism didn’t exist in 1st Century Judea.
Were Jews not already looking down on others as the “chosen people”? They may not have had supremacy, but I would expect that they considered their rulers inferior. Maybe my mind is polluted by what Zionism has become. Also, I recognize that not all Jews are Zionists.
Samaritans are still around by the way. Not a lot of them, but there’s <1000 or so that hold on. Their beliefs are pretty similar to Judaism (they probably separated during Assyrian conquest? But this is very messy history)
Pretty sure he had an AR-15 and lived in a trailer park in east Kentucky, check your facts dude
Poor and homeless? Dude was a carpenter. He wasn’t rich but my understanding is that he made sure his family were looked after before changing careers. He wandered, but he could have gone home at any time.
Not just a carpenter. He made fine cabinets etc.
Woodworking Jesus warned us against the evils of epoxy river tables and lichtenberg figure burning.
I bet he could build the finest of crucifixes
The way I heard it the better translation is day laborer.
I am curious, if the story happened the way it is documented why didn’t your Jesus tell his mom that he was alright? He could clearly appear to people after dying. Not a single word about him visiting his poor old mom and telling her not to be upset about her son being tortured and murdered? If I had some power to offer any comfort to my family after death I would definitely do it.
When I was a kid I got in trouble for telling people at church Jesus was “African-american” my dumb kid mind thought that was the only acceptable way to say “not white.” I don’t think I was ever able to explain what I meant.
The Mormons would have felt you. At least half of it.
Before or after 1978?
I once saw a cartoon with a church with a sign “No homeless people allowed inside” and Jesus stands before the sign and doesn’t enter
We make god in our own image
We love toga parties, beards, and smiting.
Honestly, leftie Jesus is a bit of a whitewashing itself. If you read the Bible the guy is petty AF half the time, especially with people who aren’t entertaining religious solicitors and keep throwing his gang of preaching cultists out of places. I’m cool with calling out the hypocrisy of Christian right-wingers, but let’s not pretend Christianity doesn’t have a ton of built-in garbage along those lines. I mean, understandably, it’s the preachings of some random guy 2000 years ago, so does Plato, but still.
Yeah I think biblical Jesus is really strongly anti divorce, for example. Some of the Christian right are also hardcore on that stance, but a lot aren’t. Probably because that’s hard for them personally.
Matthew 19
19 When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”
11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
–
That’s probably where people infer a lot of anti-gay stuff, too.
I don’t think jesus’ take there is very good, but I don’t identify as a Christian n
Let’s not get started on the thrice married and looking for a 3rd, morality police too…
Thankfully most people don’t live their lives by what’s laid out in the bible, which is a book of fiction. Of course men wanted to control women and sought to make “laws” to make it difficult for women to leave abusive situations, which is why you find this kind of unsympathetic tripe in the bible.
He killed a tree because it didn’t produce fruit as if the tree was deliberately holding out on him. Like you’re literally God who literally created all living organisms, surely you understand how trees work and how they will turn off fruit production if conditions aren’t right (namely if they don’t have enough nutrients for it), and that it’s an automatic response which the tree has no conscious control over because you didn’t even design them to have a nervous system.
I mean, also the “I love you unconditionally, on the condition that you worship me otherwise I will personally throw you in hell” thing.
Don’t forget that Jesus has such a bad temper that he cursed a fig tree so it would never bare fruit again.
The reason? It didn’t have any figs because it was the wrong season, and he had a temper tantrum. 🤡
Add too the left “Hates figs” and on the right “Hates (slur)”
He also thought the world was flat 🤡
And didn’t bother to tell people to wash their hands because of germs, which could have easily saved hundreds of millions of lives before science discovered it. 🤡
Try that in a small town woke brown Jesus.
I legit almost got into a fist fight at work for telling someone Jesus died a Jewish person…
don’t do it its never worth it
deleted by creator
I think you a verb
Medicaded
Roundheads (who later settled Massachusetts as Puritans) believed that Jesus would return to the center of the world (aka London, obs) speaking English to establish the New Jerusalem.
This Anglo-Jesus idea then got brought here.
Don’t forget the mormons. “Actually, Jesus visited America before he ascended to Heaven! A stone in a hat told me so!”
If he believed in his own teachings, he wasn’t Jewish.
Really interesting topic actually but most early ‘Christians’ didn’t really think of themselves as converts but rather just Jews who understood Jesus to represent the ‘completion’ of Jewish script and prophecy.
Best example is Paul who most definitely continues to view himself as a Jew.
Anyone interested should check out a book like ‘Did Jesus Exist?’ by Bart Erhman or a Marginal Jew (huge read). There’s a better book by him on the topic but blanking on the title
I’ve been binging Ehrman’s podcast and videos and really appreciate how thoughtful and intellectually honest he is and his skill at explaining things for the layperson.
You can also tell from his choice of words that he is careful to separate fact from his own opinion. When someone asks him a question, I’ve heard him many times start an answer off by saying what other scholars believe, and then he explains why he disagrees, but he always is open to being wrong.
In a YouTube video I listened to just this morning, someone asked him a question (when did they start capitalizing the pronouns He and Him in the Bible translations?) and he just honestly said he didn’t know, then he asked the audience if anybody knew.
He’s very good. Only interacted with his books, but they share a similar vibe with him being very clear about where he deviates from the mainstream and why.
He was culturally Jewish at the very least.
Ah, a pharisee in 2024. Nice.
The Romans would have disagreed.
He was also Socialist by definition.
But TBF the whole white jesus concept came from Christianity’s spread from Rome and Northern Europe, not from Republicans in the USA.
People probably overestimate how “non-white” Jesus would be at the time. The whole skin color thing is a very colonial concept. I don’t know that in a world centered in the Mediterranean people would have thought of Italians as “white” and Northern Africans or Middle Easterns as “non-white”.
So in a way maybe yeah, “white Jesus” is a very American invention, just not necessarily in the way Americans parse it. US racial categories don’t work anywhere else even today, anyway.
No, it’s much older than the US. It’s a European invention, just as the US is fundamentally a product of European colonialism.
Sure. Point is, it’s a product of colonialism and full-on anachronistic. Americans in particular keep trying to apply their modern categorizations, which both leftists and conservatives have fully internalized, to all places and times and it really doesn’t work.
He advocated for the social ownership of the means of production?
Yeah it’s in Numbers 3:17
“To the carpenter, his hammer. To the mason, his chisel. To the worker, his labor.”
I almost believed it but you picked Numbers which is in the Old Testament, before Jesus.
My atheism and ignorance of the Bible foil me again!
Damn I wish this were true
The historical Jesus was not a child refugee. He was from Nazareth, period. The stories of the family traveling to Bethlehem are not in the oldest gospel (Mark) and almost certainly got added in to explain why the messiah was not from Bethlehem when prophecy said he would be, the same home town as King David.
This is actually one of the best arguments for the existence of a historical Jesus I’ve heard - from the late Christopher Hitchens, actually. The only plausible reason someone would feel the need to invent the story of the family traveling to Bethlehem (the imperial decree is most probably completely made up and there are plenty of other plot holes) is because people already knew about a figure known as “Jesus from Nazareth” that needed to somehow be connected to Bethlehem in order to fulfil the messianic prophecies.
If Jesus was a completely made up figure (an idea that is implausible for other reasons) the writers of the gospels could just have made him come from Bethlehem and be done with it. But, since Jesus the Nazarene was already a known figure among their audience, they couldn’t do that.
The first generation of Christians were Jews and thus wouldn’t have had a Messiah coming from Bethlehem prophecy. The King David line was about 6 centuries old at that point, everyone could claim to be from it.
By casting him in Nazareth all evidence of him would be removed. Nazareth was nothing in the first century. Didn’t even appear on maps of the area. A total blackhole. No one was from there and no one had ever been there. James could say whatever bullshit he wanted and no one could investigate it.
Now your last argument that the Gospel writers could have just changed the text doesn’t work either. Since Paul mentions it.
Um, I don’t think fundamentalists will want to talk to you after you tell them a part of their Bible was made up.
My Bible knowledge is rusty, but didn’t the whole family flee to Egypt for a couple of years because Herodes Kind of wanted to murder that kid that was prophecized to displace him?
Weirdly that happens in Matthew and not in Luke, and neither Mark nor John have a birth story.
It happens in Matthew because the author wanted to reimagined Moses as Jesus.
In Matthew, in Luke it was for the census. They can’t keep their story straight. Kinda how Starbuck was a man in the first BSG and a woman in next one.
We know nothing about ‘the historical Jesus’ if there even was such a person because there was nothing written about him contemporary with his life. The earliest gospels were written down decades after the events described. Any of it or all of it could be a fiction.
What we have is plenty to say there was a historical Jesus (named Yeshua but whatever). There was nothing written contemporaneously about any of the illiterate builders and fishermen in the region, one became important enough that non-illiterate people started writing about him pretty soon after.
Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians was probably written in the year 48, only 15ish years after Jesus died. Paul never met Jesus but it proves there were people talking about him pretty early. And he talks about meeting James the brother of Jesus in a later letter, and James’ execution was mentioned by Josephus in the year 94, Josephus being a non-Christian corroboration 30ish years after the fact.
People can make the case, but people can make the case that Constantine didn’t exist too. We only have so much corroboration possible so far back in history.
As for PARTS being fictional, haha yeah. Jesus only says he’s God in John, the last gospel. Pretty big thing to forget to mention for the earlier 3. Plus many stories between gospels that conflict or at least get changed which is a weird thing to happen if both stories are literally true. And that’s not to mention the conflicting Genesis stories etc.
Haha you actually believe the things written in any of those books are real?
Yeah I believe they are not entirely fabricated. There was a historical Jesus who had a following. A lot of the listed details are up for debate but the core of it is too hard to fabricate well enough to fool modern biblical scholars.
The Book of Daniel is from the 2nd century BC but it claims to be from the 6th century BC predicting events through to the 2nd century BC and beyond. One reason we can tell is the language usage and how the predictions are spookily accurate until the 2nd century BC and then they get way off. It was good enough to trick the people deciding the biblical canon so they included it even though it was written way later than all the other books, but not good enough to trick us in the 21st century AD.
There was a historical Jesus who had a following. A lot of the listed details are up for debate but the core of it is too hard to fabricate well enough to fool modern biblical scholars.
Prove it.
Go read some actual scholarship on it, I can mention a non-Christian account of Jesus and his brother in Josephus and the historical letters from the historical Paul and the value of the gospel (and non-Biblical Christian writings from the same time period) as history sources in their own right (they are still extremely old written sources, there is value even if you’re not saying they are 100% accurate). But I’m just some guy on Lemmy there’s no reason to listen to me.
It has been proven to the extent these things can be. If you are declaring the method wrong and everything faked you are being as ahistoric as the people declaring the miracles proven fact. Maybe you’re right, but that is not what the large majority of logical people come to while viewing a preponderance of the evidence.
Oh let’s do this.
Paul never saw anything he admits as much. He claims to have met James who claims to be in the brotherhood of Christ, from the Greek word christus or annoited ones.
Josphius has two passages of interest. The first one is a known forgery. It has him expressing Trinity ideas that didn’t exist at the time, it doesn’t fit in the context of the page, is not in his writing style, and doesn’t get mentioned to almost 3 centuries after publication. The second mention is also a very likely a forgery. If you read the entire section you can see that Josphius was talking about two different people one happened to be named James and the other happened to be named Jesus. It doesn’t fit the chronology (James would be like 70 years old) and it doesnt fit the culture since it would require James to be an orthodox pharisse. Meanwhile the same exact words used to describe him are the same used by Matthew.
The Gospels are even worse. John copied from Luke, Luke from Matthew, and Matthew from Mark, and Mark from Paul. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Each writer pushing their own agenda and willing to lie get it. There is maybe 4 or so sentences in Mark alone that can’t be traced back to the OT, Paul, and popular Greek literature of the time. The supposed oral tradition could fit on a single page. Even that is questionable since ~99% of Greek writings are lost to us we don’t know if the supposed oral tradition was part of that.
Nice attempt to sneak in an argument from authority with an argument ad populism. Now if you got any good evidence let me know. The simplest explaination of the data we have is that James was running a mystery cult and Paul took it seriously. Jesus is as historical as Batman.
The historical Jesus did not exist. The whole spin on Isaiah 53 didn’t happen until later, in time for Matthew. Just as well Mark wouldn’t have known what to do with that “fact” since it was important that Jesus became the son of god instead of being born the son of god.
Here’s the thing, though: Jesus is no more than a stolen symbol to these types. It’s just like saying, “I am a good person,” there is no validation, certification, or standards for it. Anyone can claim they are Christian, anyone can claim they follow Jesus, They just picked up a name tag off the street and wear it. That’s it. It’s really down to a simplified “I am good, they are bad.” So using logic, reason, and even proof in the bible is pointless. There’s zero consequences to claiming you’re doing what you want, even despicable acts, “because it’s the Christian thing to do.” Look at the Crusades. The papacy. It’s not a new thing. It’s the same old bullshit.
Even pedophiles can quote scripture.
If the various churches cared ANYTHING about their tenants, they’d have a vetting process. They’d check on their flock’s behavior. They’d work on making the world a better place through helping others. They’d kick out any member of their group who violated their rules. But most of them don’t, or if they do, it’s a social moray fueled by their own hatred and ignorance. They just want the numbers, they just want the POWER, and it’s no more valid than a gang of thugs or the Mafia.
And I see memes like this, and it’s preaching to the choir. We KNOW they don’t follow anything jesus said, claim that they do, and in the end of the day they are the same hypocrites that wear red hats to make America “Great” again. It’s not adding anything to the narrative but creating a snobbish divide. “Well, look how smart we are to point out the obvious using technicalities that do nothing but insult them. Ha ha, they so dumb.” Mentally, these people are children. You see toddlers interact? There’s all kinds of wisdom into human culture right there. Only toddlers can’t hide it yet. There’s hitting, crying, illogical bullshit. But we, as adults, teach them to behave and are supposed to set an example. But they learn the hypocrisy from us, too, whether we know it or not.
So, you know, memes like this also do the same thing to these people who think Jesus is a white dude that they can wear on a tee short while calling the homeless discussing illegals or whatever. They hate us because we look down on THEM. We have to treat these people like children, and not “dismissively like stupid kids,” but like, “Hey, buddy. I see you’re having trouble processing your hate and fear. Let’s go over here and calm down for a second.” Or something. Raise 'em right.
The difference is that children want to learn, or at least society is built to typecast them into the roll of students - it’s the opposite for adults; if you try to teach a kid something, they’ll usually at least listen to you, even if they might not internalize what you told them, but if you do the same to a fellow adult, more often than not they’ll get offended and dig even harder into their incorrect ideals. I’ve met very few adults who where honestly willing to change their opinion based on a conversation with someone who’s not specifically in a leadership-style role like a boss, professor, pastor, etc.
