Here’s an informative debate between scholars on two sides of the issue in case your interested in learning more about it: youtube.com/watch?v=oIxxDfkaXVY
That’s kinda off topic.
Again, you’re using the notion of embarrassment in a generic sense. So, we’re not talking about the same thing.
Anyway, the idea that Jesus was God laying down his powers is fantastical to the point of absurdity. It is, in all probability, a mythical embellishment of whatever actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth.
Embarrassment is always relative. Swords are embarrassing to the pacifists while pacifism is embarrassing to the warriors. I’ve proudly done things in the past that are embarrassing to me now, so there is no one perspective on embarrassing situations that could be used as a scientific tool of substantiation.
True. Embarrassment is always relative. I already acknowledged that and supplied the sword episode as a case in point. But, I explained that the criteria of embarrassment is a historical methodological technique. It’s not about being embarrassed in an emotional sense. It’s about facts in a story that run counter to the overarching narrative as presented that suggest what may really have happened.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQox1hQrABQ[/youtube]
Here he’s demonstrating the apparent reasoning of God by saying:
now we’ve got to
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intervene! Now you have to believe it! You
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have to believe it and the revelation
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must be personal, so
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we’ll pick the most backward; the most
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barbaric; the most illiterate; the most
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superstitious; and the most savage people
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we can find in the most stony area of
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the of the world. We won’t appear to the
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Chinese who can already read.That’s a valid point. Why wait 100,000 years with complete indifference to immorality and then pick the dumbest people in the roughest place to reveal yourself? It seems more likely that those people invented the religion in the image of their backward ways, but begs the question of who Jesus could have been.
“Dumbest” is your adjective not his. Were they really? If we’re talking about Abraham, I’ll grant that they were probably illiterate. Were they the most superstitious, backward or savage? I doubt it. They were probably like many other tribes at the time. I read it as antisemitic hyperbole.
Now according to the mythical narrative, it didn’t take 100,000 years, more like 6,000 from Adam till now. But, in the real world, it’s a valid question for the Abrahamic religions. It’s basically and illustrative way of framing the theological problem of evil. I don’t know what you mean about Jesus. He was most likely a first century Galilean Jew who made messianic claims, drew a small following and was executed by the Roman governor for it. His stunned followers developed a mythological/theological narrative that explained what had happened and that narrative became the foundation of the religious institution known as the church.