hi Rabbi my name is Hana and I have a question for you I love your um videos so here's my question is it possible for this person that the Christians worship to is it possible that he could have been a sodic maybe of his time or or maybe just a regular old nice Jewish guy like not not a bad guy like do his teaching stand alone are they you know that's what I mean like if we just took his teachings and got rid of Christianity that's the I guess that's the question so thank you bye
interesting yeah get that question a bit and uh the problem with answering the question which is like the holy grail and New Testament study is who is the historical Jesus is it's what Albert schwitzer pursued in one of the most important works in the last 150 years on the historical Jesus that Quest but it really will always elude everyone because as it turns out uh Jesus didn't write a word I could tell you a lot about Paul because he wrote quite a bit and we have quite a few of his letters but Jesus didn't write
anything so what we have is an enormous amount of Mythology and later mythology and as the church developed the putative ideas that Jesus expressed became more embellished so even if you move from Mark the earliest surviving gospel to John I mean that there a big swing in what the kinds of things that Jesus is saying you could have like something like a a q source which could be earlier text that Matthew but regardless you're always then relying on on the Christian Bible and you can't cherry-pick you can't and people are using they're trying to apply
methodologies to figure who he is but these methodologies like dissimilarity really don't work with Jesus the criteria of embarrassment because you have to know what's embarrassing and what isn't embarrassing like we could know that Paul didn't get along with many people because it's inconceivable that that would have made it into the Christian Bible if Paul was just getting along with every nicely he's playing with all of his friends nicely and he is recording all kinds of and AXS is recording all sorts of conflicts so it's inconceivable that that would have been invented I hope he
never said anything like you know I the way the truth and the life no one can come to the father but by me if he said that that's blasphemy so but that appears in the Book of John so I'm really hoping but now it's between him and God you know I I hope he never said anything is as Blasphemous as silly as that right you know if you've seen me you've seen the father oh gosh I hope he never said that I'm relieved to know that that only appears in the in the fourth gospel will
you have that very high christology okay but that all said I I want to say this to you and please don't be offended the only people who would ever ask that question the one that you uh presented are people who were Christians so people who were Christians don't know what to do with Jesus now that they realize that he's not the Messiah and the core teachings of the church are are completely fatuous they without Merit they're incompatible with the Hebrew Bible worse they're opposed by the Jewish scriptures so I'm being very very presumptuous here and
forgive me if I got this wrong but I usually don't and then so as a Christian you know Jesus is the person who you you worshiped and prayed or prayed to or through and you know he was a Son of God and now you've you've come to know the god of Israel and realize that these teachings that he died for your sins it's all nonsensical so the problem is he can no longer exist in your in that folder using a computer as a metaphor that's labeled the Messiah he has to come out of that folder
he's clearly not the Messiah the the world's not yet redeemed the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible have not been fulfilled the question you're really asking is what do I do with them do I have to just delete him and clean the hard drive completely so I just had to throw him in a trash B and he's just disappear like can I just think he was like a a progressive hippie in Northern Galilee who's completely misunderstood right and it's striking that you're not asking the question well like who if Hari Krishna is not a Divine being
worthy of veneration as he is in the Hindu religion who was Hari Krishna who really was he you you aren't asking that right you're not asking like who was the real Buddha so what do I do with the guy and what I would say to you is that the greatest glorification of God is to take that out of your mind because it means that although you've quit smoking you're enjoying the smell of the tobacco it's not good for your soul I hope that none of the things he said in the Christian Bible are historical because
that means it would have been blasphemy for him to say that I don't think he would have said that because earlier sayings type of literature uh gospel Thomas seemed to be pointing in sayings um the Q source that Matthew and Luke Shear seem to be Less on the Miracles More on the sayings perhaps that can be that might be the case but we don't know it's not accessible but what Hashem really wants is he wants just to be close to you he wants a personal relationship with you and frankly he doesn't want you to be
thinking about the prior gods that you worshiped so the greatest thing that you can do is say you know what it's not relevant to me who he is right now I just want to cleave dasem to have a pure relationship with the Mighty is a m in the Torah to have Deus which means to have a a deep personal relationship with to love him and renounce your forign beliefs the best thing is just to wash yourself how do you do that immerse yourself in Torah there's no the way if you immerse yourself in tanak in
scripture immediately this desire to figure out who the his who who this guy really was Will recede and evaporate and disappear and when you don't care that's when you know that you're you're done with it you're never going to put that cigarette back in your mouth anyway I thank you very much for your thoughtful question Shalom if you enjoyed this program please like And [Music] subscribe for [Music]
