Was Jesus a tolerant liberal type or an authoritarian disciplinarian type?

The Beatitudes?

Wouldn't an authoritarian disciplinarian type have responded to pressure to use his popularity as a spring-board for armed revolution against Rome?

"But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them--bring them here and kill them in front of me.'"

Plenty of material to support both sides of this question, but of course that's par for the course when it comes to the Christian bible.

Christian.

One of the things that the Jesus Seminar is known to say, from their research, is that there are about 4 words that they are relatively certain that Jesus himself spoke, and were not put into his mouth by writers of the Bible who didn't even begin writing the darned thing (and I believe Luke was the earliest one, followed at some considerable distance in time by the others) until about 20 years after the crucifixion, ... 4 words that are more likely a direct quote from Jesus, "Our father in heaven ...." And you may notice that those words, or words to that effect, were likely very commonly spoken by many people of that time (and ever since too).

Personally, I think waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much is made of the Bible. I just brought this up to help OP out, since I am interested in the issues surrounding this question.

http://bible.cc/luke/19-27.htm

The point is, there is no CLEAR answer from the bible, otherwise Christians would agree on this. Like so many topics, blatantly contradictory passages can be found. What answer do you want? You'll find it in the bible.

translation issues are quite interesting, especially if the original was written in Greek.

You get the funny feeling that you are reading about everything all at the same time, or at least I did. It's hard to explain, because I don't know Greek.

For a small peek at what I'm referring to here, go to the Oxford English Dictionary and read some/any etymologies that go all of the way back to the Greek and look at those roots ....

And don't forget that there's an older Mother Tongue before that, which linguists think was more like the Hindu language.

A final allusion to the nature of language and meaning, do you know anything about Noam Chomsky's work on Transformational Grammar?

Nice chatting with you, must go wash the kitchen floor now.

Solidarity!

Makes you wonder if Aristotle and other notable intellectuals of his era had any inkling how much their ideas would influence and shape the future.

the Classics anymore. I have a nephew who did this, because he already had a career in robotics. I don't get to see him often, but he's one fine conversationalist.

I had only a cursory acquaintance with that text in one or another of some under-grad philosophy class, but even that impressed me with its pure intellectual elegance, beauty, actually. That seemed more apparent in his Posterior Analytics than in any of the selections that we read from Aristotle's other works, which were FINE too, but not quite so distilled as his text about logic.

very open ended. By identifying the best, most likely facts possible, they pay honest respect to the unanswered questions, The Mystery, the authentic Faith it takes to face the empty/indeterminate tomb, without the puerile security blanket guarantees of The Bible.

. . . in my PERSONAL humble opinion.

It seems that they are not working from "the best, most likely facts possible", and are not very honest. Rather, they let their theological prejudices govern their criticism.

I am not going to discuss this one further. New Testament criticism is an extremely controversial and technical subject, and one that I really do not know all that much about. (For one thing, my knowledge of Koine Greek is not very good.) I was briefly a student of Raymond Brown's; he was extremely critical of the Jesus Seminar.

"Jesus Seminar" is not about theology but about philology, search for the "Q" by philological methods. Of course Gospel of John, what ever theological merits it has, is not a good source for looking what might have been the original content of Q.

And throwing out the entire Gospel of John is bad Biblical criticism.

All the books are "authentic" books, Jesus Seminar was working under the hypothesis that there was historical Jesus and a collection of his sayings, and trying to find out what is historically "authentic". John may be very inspired theological/spiritual/mythological writing, but as source of possible historical veracity it is of secundary importance to synoptic gospels, Paul and gnostic sources such as Gospel of Thomas.

and the king of the story is a "hard man", unpopular usurper and a capitalist. Parables can be interpreted many ways.

Jesus appears as a more authoritarian discliparian type in certain parts of the gospels, such as his diatribes against the scribes and Pharisees and the cleansing of the temple. The minor epistles (such as Jude) and Revelation also have a more authoritarian cast.

Both strands are in the New Testament. In the Gospels, Jesus said "let me who is without sin among you cast the first stone." But he also said "I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished."

You asked.

I don't see an authoritarian making that statement.

I don't see anything to show that he was authoritarian. Even his rants against the Pharises are rants against those who abuse their positions of power.

Though I don't think of Jesus as a political being at all.

The Jesus I was taught about throughout my childhood was the epitome of the tolerant, liberal type.

was the tolerant liberal type.
And the Church since Peter has been nothing but authoritarian disciplinarian.

I know Ecumenism is practically heresy now, too bad, because it's like life-blood to some authentic Catholics. Many of us call ourselves un-churched now. I prefer to think of myself as a Free Catholic member of the church with no walls.

I've known tolerant, liberal types go all authoritarian at certain times. And even Stalin was kind to little kids, and you don't get much more authoritarian than that.

People are complex. Reducing them to stencils isn't possible, but the attempt says a lot about those trying to do so. (Even they're complex, because they do it differently by context.)

I always give her the example of the Matthew 25 which says to be helpful to poor or he never said anything about abortion and gays and she goes nuts telling me how Jesus said things to contradict those claims.

You assume Jesus represents a single person.



Or that he is not whomever the writers of any particular gospel want him to be.



Or that he existed in the 1st place.

I'm agnostic myself.

He never wrote anything down that we know of and left it to others to spread and interpret what he did say, leaving us with a 2000 year old game of "telephone."

Both views are within different gospels, in other words, and all have been open to some wildly varying interpretation.

In 100 years the GOP will probably make Reagan the Son of God.