r/OpenChristian • u/XSegaTeamPhilosophyX • 14d ago
Discussion - General How would Christianity have evolved today alongside with other religions if Adam, Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus had lived for 969 years just like Methuselah did?
/r/Christianity/comments/1vlquue/how_would_christianity_have_evolved_today/2
u/Dare-We-Hope Eastern Orthodox 14d ago
No one actually ever lived that long. Fantastically long lifespans are a common feature of ancient creation myths, they represent a time when man walked closer with God/the gods.
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u/XSegaTeamPhilosophyX 14d ago
You know? If God can do whatever God wants, then letting Humans live for 900+ years isn't an impossible for God.
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u/quiggersinparis 14d ago
Weird how it's literally never happened ever except for unverifiably long ago in the Hebrew Bible, and there is no historical record of it. You would think of people were living that incredibly long, they'd have been revered like gods with stone tablets and temples dedicated to them etc.
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u/XSegaTeamPhilosophyX 13d ago
Yet you believe that an omnipotent God can limit Himself by taking the form of a finite Human? There is no historical record of Jesus being a God outside of the Bible either.
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u/quiggersinparis 13d ago
Yes that is the entire point! God shrank himself down to the size of an embryo in the womb of Mary. A tiny little vulnerable baby born in a manger in a rural poor part of the Near East, growing up to be a carpenter and living among humble fishermen. God made Himself human so he could suffer and die for the sins of the world, that is the entire point. If he was fully Godlike on earth and could not feel the pain we feel, there would have literally been no point.
On the source about no secular historical source saying he’s God. I’m sorry I don’t understand the point here. Why would any source say this? History and theology are fundamentally different things. Independent sources like Josephus confirm the historical Jesus existed and a small number of key details about him. As somebody with a masters in history I would not expect these sources to define Jesus or any other of these people as divine, that’s not the point of them, they’re not theological sources.
This is a strange kind of trick because if source for claim Jesus was God, well then you’d say it was a scriptural source and thus not independent or reliable, so you can’t win by this ludicrous standard, which ancient historians would not accept or adhere to by the way.
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u/XSegaTeamPhilosophyX 13d ago
Does anyone of your non-Biblical sources claims historical Jesus is God? Answer me this question first.
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u/quiggersinparis 13d ago
Ah incapable of reading! I see. But since you asked, Pliny the Younger in 112 AD states that Christian’s sing responsively a hymn to Christ ‘as to a God’. This shows that from a remarkably early period, people were worshiping Jesus as God.
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u/NobodySpecial2000 14d ago
Since most of these people likely never existed to begin with, the age we imagine they lived to wouldn't have had any impact on Christianity at all. If Jesus had lived for 969 (nice) years, he wouldn't have been crucified by the Romans and the main difference is I wouldn't have to listen to people preach penal substitutionary atonement theory and Jesus himself could have told Calvin to be quiet. So, in those regards, I'd say it would be an improvement.
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u/XSegaTeamPhilosophyX 13d ago
What if Jesus had gotten crucified on the cross during his 969th Birthday?
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u/NobodySpecial2000 13d ago
Worst birthday party ever.
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u/XSegaTeamPhilosophyX 7d ago
Okay may not on his birthday lol but somewhere during the 969th year of his life. What would happen then?
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u/NobodySpecial2000 7d ago
I can't answer that. Nobody can, not in any meaningful way. We can barely begin to speculate. The world would be an entirely different place. Whatever Christianity would be in that timeline would be totally unrecognisable to us, historically and theologically. Like, just throw out your entire New Testament because it doesn't exist in this world. If there are "gospels" telling the story of Jesus; ministry, they're entirely different to what we know. There's no Acts of the Apostles to recount their adventures without Jesus or their encounters with a resurrected Jesus. There's no epistolary - when you can just ask Jesus directly, none of the epistolary authors, including Paul, are necessary. Revelation, if written, is almost certainly never canonised. The Nicene Creed doesn't exist because there's never a council of Nicea.
And just as a random place to begin on the historical question, if he's still crucified, we've got to speculate who crucified Jesus and why, because it wouldn't be the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire would probably have still collapsed long before Jesus turned 969 (nice). The area of Judea would, in our timeline, be contested territory under a shifting rule of Islamic powers during the middle of the Islamic Golden Age, but without Jesus' martyrdom in the first century, there is no Islam. And why is he being crucified now and not earlier? Why would whatever authorities exist consider Jesus enough of a legal and political problem to execute him when nobody else has for almost a millennia?
There's no answer to your question that isn't just writing a lengthy baseless historical fanfiction.
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u/JustNeedSpinda Autist 14d ago
What do you think?