Must Jesus always be right?
Rufus T Firefly
Shipmate
in Purgatory
(I have tried three times to start this thread. Each time, after I have written a couple of lines, I have been dragged off to do something else. So instead of an opening essay(!), I am simply asking a couple of questions in order to kick this off)
Arising from The Fall: History, Theology and Palaeobiology I want to ask these (related) questions:
Arising from The Fall: History, Theology and Palaeobiology I want to ask these (related) questions:
- In order for us to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, it is necessary that everything he is recorded as saying in the gospels be correct?
- If we find that Jesus is in error in any way, does this mean that we can no longer believe in him as the Son of God?
- No
- No
Comments
The gospels are not newspaper reportage. So, no. It's not necessary for everything he say to be correct. But, also, what we believe can't be contradicted by scriptures because scripture has primacy over our own intuitions / reasonings. So in that sense, yes, it is necessary for us to believe everything he said was correct. But that can only be done if we remember that the Gospels. Aren't. Reportage.
To give an example of what I mean, let's take a bit from John 18: 19-24 Jesus is before Annas and he states that he always taught in the synagogues or the temple. Now this is not precisely true. I have it on good authority that he also was known to give sermons on a mount. And on a plain. He did not just teach in synagogues and temples. And then that section of John goes on to have Jesus say "I have said nothing in secret." Again, this is not literally true. The gospel accounts include multiple times where, for example, he tells a parable in public, but then explains it to the disciples in private. And he occasionally would instruct his disciples to say nothing of such-and-such (a transfiguration for example) until after he has risen from the dead. So Jesus most certainly did say some things in secret.
From a "literal truth" angle, then, Jesus is recorded as lying to the high priest. But in terms of substantive truth, what he said was accurate. He spoke openly to the people. If anybody wanted to question him, he responded. He made no secret of his teachings. There was no need to arrest him and drag him before the high priest to question him as to what he said. it could have been done quite openly in public at any time. From this perspective, the account in John, while perhaps not literally true, is substantively true. And phrasing it the way he did served John's purpose in writing it.
A much more important one is whether our understanding of Jesus must always be right. And, on that we can most definitely be wrong in our understanding. If we start from an assumption that Jesus is always right and never question our understanding then we're in a very unfortunate position.
So Jesus goes from "my hour has not yet come" to "my hour has totally come" in what narratively seem like a few minutes. One of those has to be wrong.
The second case that comes to mind is the Syro-Phœnician woman (Mark's version; Matthew's version; thread from 2020). In the space of a fairly brief conversation Jesus goes from "no I'm not going to help your sub-human daughter" to "of course I'll help your daughter". We're meant to take the second of these statements as right, which means that the first one was wrong.
There may be other scriptural examples of this, but a Jesus who changes his mind is a Jesus who is initially wrong.
Defining wrong as thinking aloud is harsh though. In English, wrong is not something like that. Mileage varies but ..wrong answer, wrong action, wrong idea and wrong that it is your turn to shop do not seem easily applicable to Jesus. If I think back to times I was wrong about stuff it may have been about putting on sunscreen or or not or much more serious, like not realising I was unfit to drive and having a crash or maybe saying something unkind. There are degrees of wrong ..right? There are things that looking back one would di different in hindsight ..another aspect of wrong albeit subjective.
Now, more conservative theologians will say Jesus was just testing the woman. Others say Jesus was in error here, and learned a lesson when the woman replies even dogs feed on the crumbs dropped by the children. I happen to believe Jesus got schooled here.
If you ask what the crucifixion reference is about, I can't say clearly myself, but I suspect it's got something to do with the whole business of wine/blood/Passover/communion symbolism, and also this later bit recorded in Matthew 26:29, "I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.” Also a reference to the wine at the wedding feast of the Lamb, and just possibly an Isaiah 63 reference, but a bit twisted, where the blood involved is his own: "And he became their Savior."
She says "they have no wine" and his reply is essentially "It's not time to squeeze this particular grape" meaning himself. Yeah, weird. But then he gets on with the task at hand.
Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
- because Jesus himself was born of a woman.
But my answers to the original questions in the OP are no and no.
However it seems like Christians quite often merge together ideas about "truth" as if they (for example factual truth, honest truth, uplifting truth) are all the same, and then often seem to get angry when it is pointed out that spiritual stories and parables do not have to be Good and True to impart important lessons.
I do believe that the writers were honest. That they presented events as they had heard about them (or seen them). They presented an honest and truthful representation of events.
But that is a different thing. Our role is, as I see it, to see some things about the person shown there and develop a relationship with that person - not the persona presented.
Of course the immutability of God is related to this - the idea that God cannot change because God is perfect. But I don't subscribe to that either - perfection is not the top of a pyramid. It is a whole range. And so the idea of the SoG being also mutable and changeable is fine.
Not least, because a relationship changes people. So Jesus must change with each new relationship. I think.
I agree. It is the most natural way to read this passage.
I would be astonished if he didn't. This is the whole point that I am getting at. If he had knowledge that no-one else had, this makes him not fully human. I think it is a form of monophysitism - that the divine nature overwhelmed and obliterated the human nature.
Re having knowledge no one else had, whether He had all kinds of extra knowledge (not mentioned in Scripture, I mean, like the solar system and such) or not, I don’t think that makes Him not fully human at all. In my view, He may have known then about the orbit of Pluto, or may have if He thought about it, or may have if He asked His Father—or not. It could have been part of the “emptying” process to lose that knowledge (while on Earth, before dying and rising again). Of course, now He does, I am sure.
If the traditional understanding of the Church is that He was testing her, or even having the conversation to make a point to those around Him, then I’ll take that as the most probable interpretation as well. But I’m not sola scriptura, so others’ mileage may vary.
I'm assuming that being at a wedding, Jesus is at that point lost in thought and either - like many single people - ruminating about his own wedding and/or seeing the entire episode as a metaphor for his ministry.
So when he's asked to provide for the wedding it's a little close to the bone, which is why he answers (essentially) "I'm not ready to die"
I’ve often reflected on the Baptism of Jesus (described in all the synoptics) as well as the Transfiguration. Paradox is layered upon paradox here. John baptises for the forgiveness of sins, but Jesus is without sin. John professes embarrassment and unworthiness to baptise Jesus. When Jesus goes down to the Jordan to be baptised by John the Baptist (Matthew 3: 13- 17), he is doing the will of his Father and understands what needs to be done, ‘to fulfil all righteousness’. When Jesus looks up to see the heavens open and the Spirit of God descending on him as a dove, something happens that is a luminous mystery hidden from us, beyond any realistic explanation we as humans might provide.
There is gift but also rupture. Mark uses an unusual term for the opening of the heavens, σχιζομένους, schizomenous, which means "tearing" or "ripping" (Mark 1:10), a term that may presage the tearing of the veil of the Temple. God speaks and says, ‘You are my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.’ Did the human person who was Jesus experience this as revelatory, or as a deepening of what he knew was there already? The questions we might ask here are absurd and if I were to talk about what I might ‘find’ or discern or consider to be historical facts or ‘truths,’ I would only reveal my ignorance and inability to speak of what in Jesus Christ was fully Divine. I can only accept what is beyond my human and limited and understanding, that in his humanity, Jesus Christ was also deity, the Son of God.
When we ask about Jesus being ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ at various stages in his ministry, it seems to me we are only looking at the human aspect of Jesus Christ, unable to account for or even acknowledge the Divine.
If there had been such a woman, would have Jesus done wrong by turning her away?
I don't think there's any good answer to that question.
Unless we're happy to say that the difference between deserving help and not deserving help is being able to come up with witty comebacks, I think we've got to go for the interpretation that Jesus could tell he was dealing with someone capable of witty comebacks and wanted the woman to make her point for the benefit of his disciples.
Human-knowledge is a product of human's struggle to make sense of the world around them. It is finite, inperfect and relies on models for understanding whether those models are contained in language and culture or whether they are defined by mathematical equations.
God-knowledge is the result of creation. God does not seek to make sense, it just is for him. God's model for creation is creation. He does not know that apples fall downwards, he knows which apples falls when downwards.
Now I am sort of willing to let Jesus have God-knowledge, but I have a huge doubt about how much of it was useful to him as human. I mean it might help him catch a ball, know who was going to betray him, but it does not really allow him to talk to other people. I imagine God does have access to human-knowledge but really most of the time Jesus' human recall was going to be over precise and rather get a lot more information than he needed. It is sort of setting a programme on a BBC micro to search the internet for a piece of information and then getting back several billion responses because you did not ask precisely enough. I guess I am saying Jesus most of the time found it easier to just use his normal human knowledge.
In a general sense, treating the Syro-Phoenician woman with such contempt would be inconsistent with pretty much everything we see from him in terms of treatment of women and of people on the fringes of society. It simply doesn’t fit.
Moreover, Matthew tells this story immediately after reporting Jesus’s teaching on (ritual) handwashing before eating and cleanliness, where he tells us Jesus said: I have a hard time imagining that Matthew intended us to see Jesus as defiling himself in exactly the way he just schooled the Pharisees about.
But most importantly to me, if Jesus really did mean what he said to the Syro-Phoenician woman, then he has violated the Law, particularly the understanding of the Law that he has been teaching throughout Matthew, starting with the Sermon on the Mount. And he hasn’t just violated a relatively unimportant bit of the Law; he has violated what he will describe later in Matthew as one of the two great commandments that the entire Law hangs on—“you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (And Jesus made pretty clear elsewhere that the Syro-Phoenician woman would qualify as his neighbor.)
I’m not an inerrantist, but I do think the Gospels and the rest of the NT are focused on having us see Jesus as the one who has fulfilled, not broken, the law. The writer of Hebrews specifically says that Jesus was tempted in every way that we are, but did not sin. So to find that Jesus meant what he said to the Syro-Phoenician woman, we have to conclude not only that the Jesus-fulfilled-the-Law focus of the NT, including Matthew, is wrong, or we also have to conclude that Matthew somehow thought that Jesus being so callous toward someone bearing the image of God was consistent with the Law as Jesus understood the Law. I just don’t think a reading in context will support that.
That's what makes the story so interesting. It breaks the pattern of other tales of Jesus.
To conclude that Jesus didn't mean what he said to the Syro-Phœnician woman (or when he claims "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel") is just another way of saying that Jesus was wrong, that he was bearing false witness.
IOW, that Jesus was wrong (or at least mistaken in his timing), and that Mary (by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) was right.
She needed to say no more, except to the wine waiters, and her Son needed to say no more, except to the wine waiters...
An odd story, though I rather like the idea of Mary being in charge at this point, as it were. Our former Diocesan Bishop put great emphasis on the story illustrating God's generosity, which I suppose is another valid POV.
A couple points here.
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Does anyone think that if the Syrophoenician woman had just fallen silent, turned away in tears, on His Semitic remark, He wouldn't have healed her child? I can easily give Him the greatest good will in this. His appalling disciples (us) were involved before He encountered her, with them. Of course He was speaking to them. And although He certainly didn't have any non-culturally acquired academic knowledge (how absurd), the Spirit gave Him as much ability to supernaturally read others as necessary (even to see them presciently in His mind's eye, like Nathaniel). I bet He was still moved to tears by her courage, even feeling it was coming.
That being the case, what does it mean to say that someone is talking using "rabbinic rhetoric"?
Presumably the immediate audience were not Rabbis. Even if one could infer that some were somehow proto-Rabbis, there's not much evidence that these kinds of people formed the early church.
So what was the point of it? And wouldn't the crowd have thought that the rhetoric and argument was so far over their heads that they didn't understand it, never mind remember it.
In any case, what I meant was teaching in the style of rabbis, which could, as I understand it, include rhetorical questions and challenging propositions intended to elicit response and even rebuttal.
We are Matthew’s audience. We are an indirect audience of Jesus, but the people present—his disciples, the woman and others—were his primary audience. They were who he was actually talking to.
And I think the Gospels are full of places where familiarity with the culture of the time and place is assumed.
The argument that everything Jesus said must be taken at face value or deemed “insincere” seems equally fraught, if not more so. People use humor, hyperbole, rhetorical questions, sarcasm, figures of speech and many other non-face-value-literal forms of speech all the time. And people use context clues and other means of parsing meaning all the time.
I think Jesus was quite sincere in the point he wanted to make. That he used rhetoric that shouldn’t be taken at literal, face value to make that point doesn’t call his sincerity into question, in my opinion. Rather, it demonstrates that he could draw on a variety of communication techniques.
This.
I'm sort of bemused, watching this thread and seeing some people argue that if a statement cannot be true in the most literal sense there is, that means the person who said it is a liar, or at least in error. I don't think anyone here would submit to their own communication being judged by the same standard! Very odd.
This.
EDIT: Argh, I thought it would automatically shrink both comments down a lot smaller, but I can’t delete y post, so my apologies for all the text followed by “This.”
(Blush)
In other words, Jesus could be wrong about everything else; about using Semite language to her, in which He didn't have our modern, guilt ridden sensitivity; about all the nasty parable theology, about what He was. His human imagination saw Satan fall. His belief made Him Yahweh, the desert storm God of Moses. But if He were Love's nature incarnate, we can still have good will toward Him.
Well, of course, those of us who believe He is God Incarnate don’t think He was wrong about “everything else.” The question about whether or not He did or didn’t have certain human limitations because of being God and man is a different matter than Him being wrong about what He was/is, seeing Satan fall, being the God of Moses, etc. Indeed, if He is Love’s Nature incarnate as you postulate at the end, then he isn’t wrong about those things, at very least His Own Nature. Having good will towards Him would be kind of an understatement in that case.
My not believing certainly liberates me from having to believe impossible things about a theoretical God. I don't see how Him being Love's nature incarnate makes His beliefs about His pre-incarnation right. Particularly as Yahweh was a Bronze Age monster. Not Love. So no, one cannot have good will towards that monster, but one can have good will, unconditional positive regard, to a man who believed He'd been that monster, whether He was Love incarnate or just entirely natural. In His humane humanity he transmuted, transcended the human id monstrosity.
… yeah, we’ll have to disagree on tons of this. Peace be with you, regardless.
And peace be with you @ChastMastr.
Again I'm intrigued. As you disagree on tons, what grains do you agree on?
I think in this comment, “whether He was Love Incarnate” is where that begins and ends.
That's great, except Yahweh wasn't Love who doesn't damn either.
Obviously
We’re
Going
To
Have
To
Disagree
About
That
Again.
😑
On what basis was the God of the OT Love? How was the set-up (forbidden fruit, Satan serpent) in Eden, Love? How was The Flood, Love? How was The Gainsaying of Korah, Love? How was The Heresy of Peor, Love? How was Sodom & Gomorrah, Love? Or do we... passover Bronze Age Love?
But that won't wash with you either. Besides, at the risk of playing amateur host or admin, there are sand-pit threads for you to play in @Martin54 where you can tell us for the millionth time why you no longer hold the Christian faith to be tenable.
We know. You've told us. We get it.
No you don't. You keep putting belief, 'mystery', before realism. The answer to this thread title is no. Rationally, reasonably, really, no. In faith. Even if Jesus were God incarnate. My not believing the latter has nothing to do with the critique that incarnate God was not the monster Yahweh, and was not any of the cultural developments of it. At what point does the God of our imaginings, including Jesus', become Love? He hasn't yet on this site (not surprisingly as it doesn't in the NT) in its majority. When will it? And on what basis?
Please stop turning every thread into your blog.