Was Jesus a great moral teacher?

[Alex K]

Duh. As opposed to all the other stuff, which is verbatim from one historical person? Come on!

Duh. Where did I say ALL the other stuff is verbatim from one historical person? For one thing I would toss every bit of the Gospel of John as totally unhistorical.

As for the stuff in the other three gospels, the earliest one (Mark) was written at least 30 years after his death. I would also agree with modern critical scholars that Jesus probably never claimed to be the messiah or to be the apocalyptic figure referred to as the Son of Man, and he never said many other things which are attributed to him.

You can usually tell sayings which are made up because they speak to a situation which applies to the church decades after Jesus lived. That is the test that I applied to the words above.

You can sometimes tell sayings which are authentic because the church would NOT be likely to write them in. (This is known as the criterion of dissimilarity.) Examples would be Jesus' statement that the law of Moses will continue in force until the end of time and elsewhere that he was sent only "to the lost sheep of the House of Israel." By the time the gospels were written the mission to the gentiles was in full swing and Paul had convinced most Christians that the law of Moses had been replaced by salvation through Jesus' death, etc. The only plausible reason for attributing these contradictory statements to Jesus would be a tradition of his authentic sayings.

Interesting! So one can be confident that these passages are later additions. I find that more justified than talking about what jesus said and what not. The fact that they leave these passages in even though they are at odds with Paul's message, might be an argument for their importance in tradition (i think it's called the argument from embarassment or so, right), but not really for a historical Jesus saying them.