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Annie3000's avatar

Paul/Acts says Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Jesus blinded him for three days and then sent people to meet him and minister to him. You say Paul never met Jesus in his lifetime.

So to ignore all the supernatural elements of the Bible and yet quibble about whether the Bible says Jesus is God with specificity doesn’t seem very objective or genuine.

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Salty Drank's avatar

I think that you overstate the apocalyptic belief in inverting the social hierarchy. This is an anachronistic projection of modern proletarianism onto early Christianity. It wouldnt be appropriate to call the prophesied extermination of 99% of the earth's population a social inversion considering that slaves outnumbered the elite social classes by a huge factor. The apocalyptic use of the lost sheep metaphor speaks more to the virtuous few being lost among the many sinners. Judaism is very comfortable with the collective punishment of the entire strata of society from Kings to children. Think the flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the destruction of Israel by Babylon (portrayed in terms as the scourge of God), and Revelations. Very few people are chosen to escape these Biblical apocalypses. While the archetype of the humble shepherd is idealized, this is more of a callback to Israel's nomadic origins rather than a broad idealization of the masses. To view a laborer of the land as honest and virtuous is not unique to Judaism, hence why Jesus also speaks very unfavorably of cities and the people and why his ministry is focused on finding the lost sheep among the decadent: the shepherds worshipped him from the moment of his birth while the urban mob condemns him. Furthermore, Jesus uses metaphors which reinforce the authority of father over son, master over slave, shepherd over sheep, harvester over soil. Jesus is portrayed as the personification of a dispossessed king who's authority has been usurped and betrayed by his earthly vicars. He is not, as some claim, a proto Marxist, although he is deeply life denying, but that, of course, is not the same thing, even though it quite trendy to say as much on ifunny. Early Christians hated the contemporary religous and political authorities because they thought they were traitors and heretics. In principle, they upheld traditional hierarchies such as the preeminence of Abrahamic (tribalism and racialism) and Davidic blood (nobility and monarchy), patriarchy, and priestly authority.

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