Jesus says....

[Flint]

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

It doesn't seem odd to ya'll that every generation remakes Jesus in their own image, deciding which of his words they think he "really said" based on the socially acceptable values of the time? To get the nice warm and cuddly eastern philosopher Jesus, you have to leave out huge swaths of the written record of his words. The same thing if you want to end up with the Republican Jesus.

It's much more complex, and I think compelling, to deal with the whole thing, rather than performing literary surgery to arrive at a Jesus in our own image. What could be more useless, really, than a spiritual teacher who already agrees with us?

Ouch. That's brutal.

Here's my take on "what Jesus really said" ...

#1 He didn't write anything, so we have no direct records of his teachings.

Therefore #2 we have his message filtered through the minds of the authors of the texts we do have.

So #3 to arrive at what his message actually might have been, we have to strip away the artifact of the interpreters, based on our knowledge of what their "spin" might have been, based on the culture they were a product of.

Just as you say, we shouldn't apply our own cultural filter, we also should not apply the cultural filter of the times at which these texts were written. Also, take into account he was/was claimed to have been fulfilling a prophecy, so some of what he said/was claimed to have said was hard-coded.

As a measuring tool, one can also apply an average of the many different messages he was claimed to have had by the many different authors. Weigh that against the average of all of history's other spiritual teachers, to get a feel for what a responsible "enlightened" person is likely to say, and further weed out the cultural artifacts of homophobic goat-herders.

Somewhere in this process, once you realize that simply reading the text verbatim is of questionable value (by the way, which texts are we reading, is the Gospel of Thomas in or out?) you realize that about all Jesus is good for is a frontman for some amalgam of various belief systems.

We don't know what he said, we don't know what he meant, and all we can do is make educated guesses. And when we do that, he invariably will reflect our biases. This is the danger of religion, that it can stand for stupid and dangerous things.