Jesus Man-God

Imagine being a Jewish Roman scholar, living in perhaps Athens or Alexandria. You are spending your life trying to prove Moses was a great philosopher, that the Hebrews are a cultured and intellectual race. You have read hundreds of texts, religious and philosophical, and constructed a grand theory of the formless God of Sinai and the world of forms, of the timeless stasis the law of Moses must surely point to. You are almost ready to publish when all the air is sucked out of the room by some Galilean cult that says El sired a divine bastard on a Nazarene milkmaid like he’s Jupiter from the pleb theaters, that says God has become Man and Man was always like God, that they killed him and he came back and ate fish and honeycomb, that the time for theory is over because physical Fact that weeps and bleeds has come to Earth.

Comment of the week

It’s exhilarating!

One thing I’ve noticed lately is that:

– everyone “knows” what we mean by the word “God,”
– also, “The Nature of God,” i.e., what we mean by the word “God,” is a subject of heavy debate

Meanwhile, I have begun to assign more importance to the nature of God, the man. What kind of man was Jesus? Could he win an arm wrestle? Crack a joke?

I say this because I feel like we start with an idea of abstract Perfection and then project that onto Jesus the carpenter, where I suspect we would be better off discarding our ideas about perfection and learning them from Him.