Word: christe
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...trinity of books tries to debunk the Christ of the Gospels...
...Five Gospels. The book is the product of the 74 biblical scholars (including Crossan) who belong to the Jesus Seminar. Meeting twice a year, the group votes with purposeful theatricality on the authenticity of each gospel saying, casting colored-coded beads into a box to indicate which lines of Christ were holier than others. The latest round appears in The Five Gospels, which, parodying the red-letter Bibles that display the words of Jesus in red type, prints the supposedly authentic words in red and prints the rest, in descending order of credibility, in other colors. The text...
When Jesus posed this question to his disciples in Matthew's Gospel, Peter emphatically and faithfully replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And what might the answer be today? Three newly published scholarly books put forward a startlingly revisionist reply. While Jesus may have been a carpenter, that probably meant he was illiterate and belonged to a low caste of artisans. He did not preach salvation from sin through sacrifice; he never said "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God"; neither did he say "Blessed are the pure in heart...
...Crossan, Jesus' deification was akin to the worship of Augustus Caesar -- a mixture of myth, propaganda and social convention. It was simply a thing that was done in the ancient Mediterranean world. Christ's pedigree -- his virgin birth in Bethlehem of Judea, home of his reputed ancestor King David -- is retrospective mythmaking by writers who had "already decided on the transcendental importance of the adult Jesus," Crossan says. The journey to Bethlehem from Nazareth, he adds, is "pure fiction, a creation of Luke's own imagination." He speculates that Jesus may not even have been Mary's firstborn and that...
...late as the sixth century A.D., in a mosaic in Ravenna depicting the Last Judgment, the devil was still portrayed as a haloed, winged being, standing at the left hand of Christ. Satan is dressed in blue, not red, robes. (Red was the color of the upper ether, closest to God, from which Satan was expelled; blue, the color of the closest heaven humankind could see.) By the Middle Ages, however, Satan had become a beast. His horns and hooves come from his commingling with beliefs banished by a victorious Christianity. The devil's appurtenances derive from the great Greek...