(March 1, 2014 at 2:15 pm)xpastor Wrote: You need to read a bit more carefully and also look at some modern biblical scholarship if you're going to pontificate like that.
1. It is true that the bible compares worshiping other gods to adultery. Usually it is not just one person, but rather the whole nation of Israel that is said to have committed adultery with false gods. However, the story you refer to is about plain old adultery.
2. It doesn't say that the whole crowd burst in on her. Just that she was caught in the act, possibly just by one person, her husband for all we know. People do get caught in the act by their spouses, you know. The crowd was assembled after she had been caught, supposedly to inflict the penalty for adultery which was stoning to death. There's a tip-off that the story is probably fictional. The Romans did not allow the locals to inflict the death penalty.
3. The woman taken in adultery is almost certainly just a made-up story. It is the most doubtful passage in the entire New Testament, appearing sometimes in Luke and sometimes in John, and not at all in the oldest manuscripts. In other words, long after Jesus' time, someone made up the story to argue that adulterous people should be forgiven rather than sanctioned with the ultimate penalty, which in Christian circles might be kicking them out of the church.
4. Nope. Jesus' mommy never told him that he was the Son of God. The vast majority of modern scholars believe that Jesus never made such a claim, and that it was written in long after his death.
Seriously, the first three gospels do preserve some of Jesus' teaching: the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, and his prophecies of a imminent end to the world. However, they have many additions to make a theological point both in Jesus' supposed teaching and in the miracle stories. You don't think that he really cast out demons or healed the blind, do you?
As a fully grown mature modern American I am perfectly capable of reading and understanding the Bible as well as other ethnocentric religious fairy tales and arriving at a reasonable analysis of them. Therefore I don't need nor require the opinion of so-called "experts" to develop my own conclusions.
1. The story about the woman caught in the very act of adultery is plainly about a Jewish woman worshiping a non-traditional Jewish deity (aka God). Jesus was rambling all over the countryside telling folks how he popped out of heaven to clue them in on how to live their miserable lives. In essence Jesus said that he was God himself by doing all of his magic tricks. So when the crowd brought the woman before him he couldn't condemn her for worshiping a foreign deity because that's what he claimed to be himself.
2. The locals didn't give a squat about the Roman rules. The narrative contains several scenes where they tried their damnedest to kill Jesus. They were basically incompetent so Jesus always escaped. They finally got the Romans to put the cuffs on him and do what they kept bumbling, which was to kill Jesus.
Of course in the Babylonian Talmud the Jews boast about how they killed Jesus using five different methods. The Bible writers just used crucifixion.
3. Chances are the entire New Testament story is just a fable. Paul was the first guy to write about the Jesus character and he was preaching about him in the 30s. His disciples wrote the Gospels filling in the backstory. Paul didn't care what they wrote as long as they wrote about Jesus. Since the Gospels were written during the time of the first revolt and subsequent sacking of Jerusalem the story contains some political events involving the three main rebel leaders. So the writers incorporated actual political elements into their religious fairy tale.
4. So here Mary is an some "angel" appears and tells her that she's going to have God's baby. And then the twit and Joe don't tell the kid that his real daddy is God? Talk about family secrets.
The Jesus character is most likely a metaphor for the union of Judea and Samaria to fulfill some Old Testament prophecy. Mary represents Samaria, who was a virgin in that Samaria had never produced any prophets to the Jews. Joseph represents Judea, who accepts the Samaritan prophet as if he was indeed from Judea.
The Jesus character is a heresy for the Jewish religion at that time because it introduced the idea of a man as their invisible sky deity. That was counter to all of their previous religious practices.
