I’m going to do a philosophical post of my own making for today. I will get back to studying others next week.
With this post, I am certainly exercising the creative side. I will try to analyze the mind of a first-century citizen and his writings with my 21st-century views. Up front, I will admit that much of what I speculate is just that, speculation. I will also admit that I will likely be scorned and called a heretic by some for these words. But, I am very comfortable with my relations with Jesus, so those accusations don’t scare me as much as they might have at an earlier point in my life.
EVERYTHING in the 21st century would likely be deemed a miracle by those who lived in Jesus’ time. Let’s face it the first-century mind was just not attuned to the unexpected. Things stayed pretty much the same for hundreds of years at a time. If we are to totally believe the biblical accounts there were many miracles performed in those days. Why did they suddenly stop? Why does God not do that anymore?
They say that in order to be spiritual you must have faith. Faith is acceptance of some things that you can’t explain or don’t have definite proof of. But to me, that does not mean that we must accept everything that the first-century citizen believed to be supernatural was really that. I have faith that Jesus was from the creator of the universe and that he walked this earth. I don’t necessarily believe that everything reported in the gospel accounts was 100% factual. I’m sure some of it was just an old man’s faulty memories. Psychologists today have shown that as you age, you tend to recreate your thoughts to fit your narrative. I’m sure the same happened twenty-one centuries ago and the centuries after when the biblical text was written.
Death to God probably means something completely different than it does to us. For that reason even though Jesus died on the cross does not mean that he ceased to exist on God’s plane. I am sure that there are millions today who would be considered dead by first-century citizens that are still walking this earth. In the first century, if you had a heart attack, it most often meant certain death. Today, the vast majority of heart attack victims survive. I am one of them.
While I believe that parts of the Bible are meant for our times, I am just as convinced that much of the events described were not. While some of the Bible was probably inspired by God, it inspired first-century intellect and that is a far cry from even the most ignorant of us today.
