Happy Easter with a side of Heresy Part Two

Some of what is in the description was in the other video. Look at the transcript if you care - or if there are things I left out. Some things are also added, but most of it was said on one vid or the other. Watch them both.

This is what else I have heard on YouTube Theological Seminary concerning the evolution of the Jesus story and surrounding mythology - as well as how we know the reality of His divinity - regardless of who is father was.

The God question first. There are those who think Jesus was a rip-off of Hercules. It is the other way around. Rome got the legend from the Greeks who got it from the Phoenicians who got it from the other Canaanites who got it from Sumer - the birthplace of agriculture and western civilization. The God-Man myth came first there, not in Rome. Jesus was the source, not the result. Kronos came from Baal who was El. Zeus was Yahweh legend. Look at when things were written if you doubt it. Greece came after Canaan, not before - by thousands of years. Doh!

Matt Baker did a genealogy. It seems that on the Joseph side of the story, the name of Joseph's father is different between two gospels and could be equated with an exiled Herodian prince. In other words, Jesus may not have been a distant son of David, but an actual claimant to the Herodian monarchy with a claim on the rulership of Judah, with Holy Week being an assertion of that claim (as reported by James Tabor).

We also know that Mary was of the priestly caste. She was related to Joseph of Arimathea and her cousins Zachariah and Elizabeth. So when Jesus was in the temple after he entered Jerusalem, as well as what he taught in the temple condemning the Sadducees - he was betraying his own family - a family who knew of his connection to them. He believed in universal resurrection as a pharisaic rabbi. When he dined with those people, whose main attribute was that belief, he was dining with comrades. 

According to Tabor, the belief in the resurrection was about having a spiritual end rather than sleeping in the soil (as the Sadducees believed). It had nothing to do with animating corpses. 

Jesus may have believed that God would rescue him from the Cross and affirm both his message and his heritage as rightful king. The entry and protest in Jerusalem were prophetic - consciously so. It is the suffering servant prophesy that actually came true - that Jesus had to empty himself of his vision of a new kingdom (having his last follower take care of Mary, not the Church) and abandoning the source of the stories of his divinity to him by saying he is dead to her. Our salvation is the result of that vision quest - and it is a very real comfort for our lives on earth - as is the morality of the kingdom: universal forgiveness, everyone is neighbor in whom to see as Christ and serve as if Christ. God is gentle and humble of heart, whose yoke is easy and burden light. A good message that we should try sometime. Very Spinozist before Spinoza was born.

We know of the truth of the message - even if Jesus did not have it exactly until the end - because of the Eucharist. We can experience him internally - although it only shows (or does not) through how we treat people. Empirical measurement is impossible.

The message really is good news - so Happy Easter!