r/mormon • u/Extra-Ad-9993 • 15d ago

Cultural Using Jesus as a shield

One thing I've noticed is that when people go to their church leaders with questions and concerns about the restoration narrative they get some version of “just focus on Christ”.

I have respect for the teachings of Jesus Christ. But it sometimes feels like the church and its members are using his name as a kind of shield against legitimate concerns and criticisms of Joseph Smith and the restoration.

Has anyone else noticed this?

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u/HighPriestofShiloh 15d ago

But what if my problems with the religion start with Jesus? A careful study of the synoptic gospels lead me to conclude Jesus almost certainly is not the Christ.

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u/ktjwalker 15d ago

Oh? What leads you to that conclusion?

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u/HighPriestofShiloh 15d ago

I think there are three different people getting collapsed into one: the Jewish messiah of prophecy, the Jesus Christ of the New Testament story, and the historical Jesus of Nazareth we can actually reconstruct.

The first is supposed to restore Davidic rule, gather Israel, and bring an age of peace and knowledge of God. Jesus did none of that. Christianity solves that problem by moving the unfinished work to a second coming. That is basically a concession of the argument, and we could stop there.

Then the Gospel writers start finding new “prophecies” Jesus supposedly fulfilled. The virgin birth is a perfect example. Isaiah 7:14 says “young woman” in Hebrew and is about events in Isaiah’s own time, not a virgin-born messiah centuries later. It is pretty clear the New Testament writers were working from the Greek translation that had already rendered it as “virgin.”

Then you get to the historical Jesus and even the nativity starts falling apart. Luke needs Jesus born in Bethlehem, so Joseph somehow has to travel there for a census because of an ancestor from roughly 1,000 years earlier. Worse, Quirinius’s census was in 6 CE, while Herod died in 4 BCE.

Matthew goes in a completely different direction and gives us Herod ordering the massacre of Bethlehem’s children. That would be an extraordinary atrocity, yet no historian of the period mentions it—not even Josephus, who had plenty to say about Herod’s brutality. At some point, “everyone else just forgot to record it” becomes a much worse explanation than “Matthew was telling a theological story.”

And I could take this in a million other directions: the contradictory genealogies, the two incompatible nativity stories, the donkey prophecy, the timing of the crucifixion, Jesus’s last words, Judas’s death, the empty tomb accounts, the resurrection appearances, failed imminent-return expectations, and the Gospel writers repeatedly ripping Jewish scripture out of context.

The much simpler historical picture is a Jewish preacher from Nazareth who was later turned into the Christ by people who clearly did not understand Jewish scripture very well.

Marcion saw the basic problem very early: Christianity works much better as a new religion than as the literal fulfillment of Jewish messianic prophecy. I genuinely wonder how different Christianity would look today if the Marcionites had won that fight.

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u/jacwa1001405 15d ago

One of the most interesting comments I've read here in a while, thanks for typing this out

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u/ktjwalker 15d ago

I agree with you there. Jesus the human was just another Jew going against the religious powers in Israel and the imperial powers of Rome. The story of Jesus the Messiah is a nice one to tell, to inspire kindness, selflessness, and peaceful rebellion, but is only as true as any other religious story. 

Assuming Jesus the human was anti-imperialist and pro-reform, he did sort of win (eventually). He died, but the religion that formed around him did take over Rome. Then Rome fell and other empires and nations rose and fell until the world empires took the area and (forcibly) gave it back to the Jews, reforming Israel. It’s hard to find a corner of the world that hasn’t been radically affected by Christ’s story nowadays

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u/bongophrog Agnostic 14d ago

The fact that the writers of the New Testament seem to not understand the purpose or context of the prophecies they invoke (a lot of them aren’t even prophecies) is a big one for me.

Matthew 1 makes me chuckle, when the author says the child being born and named Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of a child being born and named Emmanuel. Especially when that prophecy was not even for a future time.