Matthew 5:5
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Luke 12:49
I came to cast fire upon the earth. How I wish that it was already ablaze!
Discuss.
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So, Mathew was an optimist, who probably felt he had to encourage people to keep going on with their lives no matter how shitty the government was, while Luke was a pessimist who just wanted to see the whole world burn.
Does this mean that Mathew was a Liberal, while Luke was a Conservative?
Seems to me that People like Dick Cheney and his little cabal of government-funded mafiosi are probably more enamored of Luke than Mathew.
“…imposters and liars…”
Thomas Paine
Mathew 11:28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
:29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
:30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Mathew would have been a union man who grew up in the life of the working class. Luke would have been a Republican Neoliberal/Fascist who would have no issue with hiring private security guards to murder people like Mathew to protect his wealth.
“Luke would have been a Republican Neoliberal/Fascist”
Luke is assumed to be a Greek physician from Antioch, a Gentile, who authored both Luke and Acts, which is considered by most Biblical scholars to be one work, referred to as Luke/Acts. It tells the story from John the Baptist all the way through to Paul in Rome.
In a way, Luke presents Jesus as an educated scholar, presumably much like himself, someone at ease unrolling a scroll and reading passages from it.
Just remember . I, the one called “God” have never said that this book is MY word.
@ 4
I’m a pretty solid Atheist. I did the churchy thing with friends when I was a kid, out of respect for them and their families. But one thing I never could understand, is how people could sit so passively and listen to a man who only had one possible concept of what makes the universe tick. It was always pretty much the same. There wasn’t any discussion at all except totally within that very narrow range of the particular belief system. It is utterly confining, and doesn’t lend itself at all to the continued maturation of one’s intelligence.
As I have aged, I have really seen what happens to the die-hard Christians as they age. They don’t change their belief system at all to adjust for new lessons in life. To them, it is an absolute fact that every possible lesson has already been learned thousands of years ago, and the lessons are a totally abstract and remote incidence to their own lives. Every new, personal experience is interpreted within that filter. They remain children. Never escaping that child-like view of the world because everything they know about the universe around them, was learned by rote, and had committed to memory by the time they were in their early teens. Their minds really stopped functioning as an upgradeable machine. It’s like their all still stuck on running Windows 3.1. The basic level operating system was installed and it seems to be all they need to function as human beings. They absolutely do not care about anything else, at all unless it can be interpreted through that filter.
It rings a little of the old, sunk-cost fallacy. Religionists seem to think that everything they needed to learn, they learned in Kindergarten. The hard work of acquiring knowledge was completed by the time they were 14 or so, so there is no point in making any further adjustments.
That being said, I did read through the whole KJV Bible and found it to be a mostly incomprehensible mishmash of conflicting and rather poorly-written and bizarre stories. I’ve read a little of the Torah, and the Q’ran. I realized that when I wanted to read weird shit, it was better for me to read books written by HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Frank Herbert. It’s much more entertaining, and certainly much more in the way of being food for thought.
@6 Yee Haw for Asimov and Herbert. I find your analysis compelling about the true believers. My Epistemology requires that I take all my beliefs together and when one doesn’t fit I throw it out. I have learned a lot from Herbert and Asimov but have just started reading the Bible a few weeks ago. I am almost finished with my first chapter which is Mark. If you could recommend which chapter to read next I would appreciate it. I am reading the King James bible and the copy I have does include good notes and references to other passages.
Jesus was bi-polar, and the NT books reflect that.
You all are missing the message of Matt and Lukey. Both of them foresaw the future, in which a divine power will wipe out you stupid humans with fire and brimstone, and replace you with a species of gentle furry creatures.
@9 Would that creature eat its own feces by chance?
The bible simply is not a set of instructions to set up your computer or stereo like some Christians and other would have us believe. Taken all together you have at least two different Jesus’s to the point you have to be talking about different persons. Some of the problem here is that Matthew to a Jewish audience and whoever wrote Luke and the book of acts was writing to a Christian audience. That does not get us past where the two versions of Jesus would clearly be diametrically opposed like the versus above. Both use Mark as their source which out off all the 4 books of the apostles maybe the most authentic or most closely resembling the life of a man named Jesus. It’s up to you to decide if he’s the son of god.
Like Thomas Jefferson you can decide Christ was a very very good man with a lot of wisdom ect and jettison the rest of it and you can read his bible. Not likely to be seen in a Christian fundamentalist church near you. It’s available on line.
People who want to say the United States is a Christian nation state the Thomas Jefferson intended for the US to be a Christian nation using select statements by him. The man was opposed to the US being a Christian nation. He believed that young people should not go to church and should not even be able to join a church until they are young adults and should not be indoctrinated into a church until they are young adults able to join such a church of their free will, with their full faculties and their wits about them.
It’s much easier to find out that the claim of him wanting the US to be a Christian nation or there should be no separation of church and state to be nothing but lies and gobble gook.
Unfortunately in the case of Jesus there isn’t any contemporary documentation about the man. And the Romans were pretty good administrators so yeah there would have been an entry about wood for a crucifixion of one Jesus of Nazurus, but those records are lost as sometimes happens when the local ransack your embassy and you don’t send copies back to Rome.
So at the end of the day we really don’t know who Jesus was and just maybe he’s a composite of two very different fellows. Or it’s different writers and groups making him fit their ends.
As does the Book of Magdalene but that is a horse of a different color and feminist and folks there maybe sex!
If you want to have fun with Christians just tell them Jesus had sex and was married as he would have to be to have been able to teach the way he did to Jews of the First Century. Heck there are tidbits that the man had a homosexual affair if you read between the lines of passages.
So go pick up Tom’s version of the New Testament. (Mark is the first book of the new testament while Genesis is the first book ot the Bible or Torah.)
Now if the Bible were just a set of instructions like Windows well then the Christian Fundamentalists would have it made and everyone would fall asleep reading the instructions, but at least they would be consistent, and you would be fine until you have an error.
SPORK
Hear that? Blessed are the Greek.
GREGORY
The Greek?
SPORK
Well apparently, he’s going to inherit the earth.
GREGORY
Did anyone catch his name?
MRS. BIGNOSE
You’re not going to thump anybody.
BIGNOSE
I’ll thump him if he calls me Bignose again.
CHEEKY
Oh shut up, Bignose.
BIGNOSE
Ah. All right. I warned you. I really will slug you so hard…
–[Meanwhile his wife is talking to another man beside her getting the real story.]
MRS. BIGNOSE
Oh, it’s the Meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh that’s nice, isn’t it.
I’m glad they’re getting something ’cause they have a hell of a time.
I think it’s time to write a new book for the Bible called the book of Love it’s of course inspired by the Lord and it will tell the story of the 2nd coming of Christ which truly happened during the Sexual Revolution. We will finally learn the secret knowledge Christ told Mary Magdalene. About free love, equality, some mind expanding drug use, pot is ok, love one another, feminism (as Christ came back as a woman,,,a very cute woman).
Now Christ is an aging hippi chick up on the Skagit river and we just never noticed.
So anyone want to help write the book? It will take the Christian world by storm and we may have to hide out in China for a decade or two after it comes out and is added to the bible after the book of Revelation.
With regard to the verse in Luke, that just sounds so metal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OBs6S1lW_Q
@ 7
My recommendation?
Put that book up on a high shelf, and never touch it again. Go to a bookstore, and pick up a copy of “The Dosadi Experiment” and then when you finish that, go and read “Dune” again.
@15
“…then when you finish that, go and read “Dune” again.”
Dune? Really, dude?
@ 11 MA:
“Now if the Bible were just a set of instructions like Windows well then the Christian Fundamentalists would have it made and everyone would fall asleep reading the instructions, but at least they would be consistent, and you would be fine until you have an error.”
My point exactly. The “troo believers” believe exactly that. There is no other realm of possible reality to them. They do have the basic instructions, and are completely unwilling to tweak the paradigm to fit their own experiences. It is an absolute, pure totality of knowledge for them, and it is therefore all they ever need to know about anything and everything.
Talk about your rose-colored glasses. The problem with that is, they may be rose-colored, but they are also totally opaque.
It is totally sacrificing one’s own intellect in favor of a certain measure of the illusion of self protection. It just boils down to pure laziness. All that difficult and painful work of learning is done while they are still just children.
“Some of the problem here is that Matthew to a Jewish audience and whoever wrote Luke and the book of acts was writing to a Christian audience.”
The authors of the Gospels were separated by time as well as distance, and one can see that they adapted Jesus to the context of their own circumstances. An example is Jesus railing against the scribes and pharisees, who during the time of Jesus held little power. Their time came after Jesus was gone.
“Dune”. I enjoyed the first book, the second wasn’t too bad. But neither were exactly revelatory for me. The rest of the series were, for me, unreadable. It became boring. I probably got more out of 2001 or Stranger in a Strange Land than I did Dune, but each to his own.
God Emperor of Dune was probably my favorite. Heretics of Dune lost me. Which is surprising, considering how sexually interesting I remember it being.
11, Matthew was definitely not writing to Jews. Jesus did not have to be married to be an itinerant preacher in the 1st century; there were plenty of those roving around the region. And there is documentation that a man taken to be Jesus existed, from Josephus.
@20 Don’t go bringing Josephus into this. There is a great deal of scholarly work that suggests the references to Jesus in the Antiquities were later Christian interpolations. Weird how Jesus never pops up in Josephus’ earlier work, and then suddenly, 20 years later, there’s this convenient reference.
So Josephus doesn’t prove anything.
If the meek are going to inherit the Earth, they better be ready to pay the estate taxes.
As far as wanting to set the world on fire, there is a statewide burn ban on right now.