There is no need to hold onto the virgin birth story. It was indeed borrowed as the editors of my story intended to make me special. However, I emphasize that I am not special. Specialness actually subverts my message, and robs it of it's power. It's important that everyone understand that I am the same as everyone. It is true, I did not consider it grasping to be equal with God. Only in equality is there no such thing as specialness. The desire to be special is what leads to the making and maintaining of this world. And I am very much about subverting this world. I said things like, "Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brethren, you do unto me". And this is because I see everyone the same as me, equal with God. We are all "one" and equal in our original condition, as God made us. We have made of ourselves something unequal, something different, something separate and autonomous...something of a joke. This is the fiction I learned to subvert. As the "son of man", I was the son of a stonemason, not a carpenter. I chose not to follow tradition, and became a rabbi instead. I was married to the one called Mary of Magdalene. We had no children. I was very much a student, and became very much a teacher, emerging from a sabbatical in the desert with a great leap in awareness. And this is because by that time, I was being taught clearly and directly by the Great Teacher who is the Son of God...and I was listening attentively. The Great Teacher taught me that I am the Son of God, guiding me along a path that gradually removed all fear from my mind. Along that path, I lay down the concept of "Jesus" or "Yeshua ben Joseph" as a fiction, and took up the Son of God as my reality. This is a path that all will follow. It does not matter how much time passes. There is NO deadline. Given several million years, ALL will come to the realization that they have thrown away the inheritance God gave them, for the scraps of trumped up nothingness reverently called "the universe". All will withdraw faith from this universe when it is seen as the sham that it is...a cruel hoax played upon the Son of God by himself. You have all the time in the world to come to this realization. Time will not end without your consent. And while you delay the inevitable, you suffer. Why suffer? I am willing to save you time. Jesus
Ah, necessity is the mother of invention. This world was literally invented out of a sense of need. So it is built on a false premise, because the Son of God needs nothing. Jesus
I voted something else. He was a homeless guy running around in the dessert babbling about being the son of god. Which makes him all the more fascinating considering his influence thousands of years later.
Pretty much everything Paul learned about what I taught was from those he stalked and stoned...like Stephen. He heard lot's of bits and pieces of truth and wisdom, and watched how the teachers were delivering the message. He did not understand or appreciate the whole message, which at that time was called "the Way". It did not line up with his heavy investment in the ways and means of the Pharisaical school of thought. When an overwhelming sense of guilt induced Paul to change his ways, he still did not change his stripes. He condemned dissenters before his conversion, and he condemned them afterwards vehemently. To accommodate himself, he concocted an amalgam of teaching from "the Way" and combined those with Jewish thought most explicitly exampled by Isaiah Chapter 51 which appears at the beginning of Mel Gibson's movie. Like the Jews, Paul was heavily invested in the belief that "in the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth". Although this is antithetical to "the Way", it was a very popular position to take for his ambitious new mission. Paul turned my crucifixion into a blood sacrifice, and induced many, by way of sophistry, to take up that torch. With these two positions, Paul essentially torched "the Way" and burnt it to the ground. Gospels were literally burnt, and Stephen's gospel was lost to history. A copy of Thomas' gospel survived because someone took the foresight to bury a copy. The popular gospels of the Bible are novels put together from edited versions of Stephen's gospel. This is the "Q" source that scholars refer to. The name of that gospel was "Words of the Master". Paul was there consenting to the death of Stephen, twenty years after my crucifixion. He borrowed from Stephen's style and teachings, but it was all about Paul, and Paul's new and improved gospel for the masses. The popular gospels of the Bible reflect Paul's heavy influence over the decades after the death of Stephen. They appear before Paul's letters in the Bible, but actually they were composed after Paul and his influence on "the Way". "The Way" has been lost, relegated to a footnote in history. Turn on a Christian radio station today, and you can hear Paul quoted all day long. Sometimes I am quoted, those sanitized sayings the editors have permitted alongside Paul's paradigm. Jesus
I just seen that movie last week. Man, what a bloody thing to watch. They beat that poor SOB nearly to death!