Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) bashed former President Trump online and said Christians who support him “don’t understand” their religion.
“I’m going to go out on a NOT limb here: this man is not a Christian,” Kinzinger said on X, formerly known as Twitter, responding to Trump’s Christmas post. “If you are a Christian who supports him you don’t understand your own religion.”
Kinzinger, one of Trump’s fiercest critics in the GOP, said in his post that “Trump is weak, meager, smelly, victim-ey, belly-achey, but he ain’t a Christian and he’s not ‘God’s man.’”
Good points. We agree, they’re good literature, and like any literature, there are themes and messages you can take home from it. I suppose you’re right though that you can interpret the gospels to fit whatever your existing ideology is. I have interpret most of the passages you present differently – but, I agree your viewpoint is valid and has merit.
I very much prefer discussing this academically vs religiously. It’s rather fascinating how it’s written to be acceptable to almost all viewpoints.
Well the thing is these stories didn’t happen. They were the picked by the authors from various other literature works. The total lack of a unified voice means that you can slap archetypes on rapidly. Part of the reason you will see that people who believe in the historical Jesus will insist that they alone have culled through the layers to find the actual man.
It is like the Joker. Over his near century run the Joker has become every possible villain. From a gutter junkie, to an urban terrorist, to a Mafia kingpin, to a harmless trickster, to a gimmick serial killer, to a literal evil godlike being, to an immortal force, to a very mortal criminal, to a fourth wall breaking super genius, to a rent a terrorist, to a gang leader, to a victim pushed too far, to a chemist and failed comedian, to a former special ops rogue, to emo BDSM, to gay for Batman wearing makeup dandy…
Since Jesus never existed he could be whatever people needed him to be and since the Roman-Greek/Jewish world was highly prolific at store writing it was possible for writers to dip into the rich traditions and pull out stories that everyone had some familiarity with. The NT is derivative and the older the chapter the more obvious the derivative.
Yeah, and then you’ve got things like the virgin birth which features in a lot of religions. Plus as it grew more popular, it took over some pagan traditions as well.
I’m not sure what the latest scholarly consensus is on if he even existed or not, but if he did, he wasn’t born around Christmas. The date was chosen to match a pagan holiday.
Scholary consensus is that he did exist however scholary consensus is that the resurrection was a true event and a man named Mark wrote the first gospel. So yeah turns out the majority of people who make a living studying the Bible believe in accuracy of the Bible, big surprise.
I prefer to look at evidence and see where it goes.
I guess it would come down to what historians in general think. Although part of that also requires us to know the historians religions.