Now that Christmas is past, I am thinking about Jesus and what He actually claimed. Just because someone claims something does not make it true. There are some that rather than engaging the best documented writings from antiquity they would rather disparage the sources. So how accurate are our source material for the actual claims of Jesus? I wanted to know for myself if the documents we call the Bible were accurately recorded & transmitted and do the modern translation fairly represent the actual text. Thats why I did all that schooling! I wanted to be able to make my mind up based on the evidence and not just allow my faith to be in some preacher making claims . . . My conclusion is a yes (Eyewitness reports and Lower or Textual criticism) and yes in some modern translations. Translations are only as good as the text they are translating - (Although severely dated in language, the KJV is an excellent translation, but is inferior to translations such as the NAS and ESV because the basis is the Textus Receptus prepared by Erasmus - which was missing some parts and had others added as the RCC required him to add) Those translations which are inaccurate are normally either not a translation (The Message or The Living Bible) or wrong because of an agenda (New World Translation, TNIV and now the latest NIV since it is just the TNIV rehashed.) With that out of the way what did Jesus actually claim? Jesus claimed to be God. (Not a god, the God. The Great I AM, the God of Abraham, the Creator, the God of the Bible). In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis wrote, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” – C.S. Lewis Islam and others claim that Jesus was a prophet or a great moral teacher. Jesus did not give us this option. In a funny textual note Muslims reject the NT since their Imams claim it was corrupted. We now have copies that were extant when Mohammed was alive and he claimed that the Gospel of Jesus was the truth. So either Mohammed was wrong (do even go there with the Gospel of Q). . . or Muslims are being mislead by their current leadership.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 05:23:56 +0000
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