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Warning, off-topic Jesus stuff

Kelvin wrote:
> You may be right, but don't miss his motivations for doing so.  He wouldn't
> hang out there just for the sake of hanging out there.  And he certainly
> wouldn't do it just to shake up the establishment or rock fundamentalism.  He
> wasn't about that.

You may also be right, but could you provide some textual support for that?  I
don't mean to be combative; this is something I've been pondering on myself.
It seems to me that a *lot* of what he did was to shake up the establishment
and rock fundamentalism (attacking the temple grounds, violating the sabbath
laws, etc.).  In fact, I would have said that he was *largely* about *exactly*
that.  And as far as his motivations for hanging out "there", I'm not sure we
can be so glib about their simplicity.  It strikes me that your position is
more based on your assumptions about Jesus (as well as about "those places")
than on specific textual references.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're
necessarily wrong, just that what you wrote seems to me to be putting the cart
before the horse, methodologically.  Sure, he says the sick, not the healthy,
need physicians, but I don't think the implicatons of that saying are as
obvious or universal as people often make them out to be.  Sometimes we see him
say things like "go, and sin no more" (although that pericope may be
apocryphal), but other times he's just *there* (or they came to him).  To the
woman in Luke 7, he simply says "go in peace".  In Matthew 9 (cf. Mark 2),
there's no indication that he does more than just eat with the tax collectors
and sinners.  He says "but go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not
sacrifice'."  Sometimes he seems to be just meeting people where they're at,
and other times he seems to be calling them to a higher standard.  There's no
indication, for example, that he tells the tax collectors to stop being tax
collectors, and for all his instructions to "sell what you have and give the
money to the poor", the Johannian gospel implies that he had a fair number of
wealthy friends.  Why didn't he tell Mary/Martha/Lazarus, or Joseph of
Arimathea for that matter, to sell all they have?  I'm not claiming to have an
answer, here, only that I'm not sure the answer is obvious, and I often have
the nagging feeling that people who express your position are projecting their
own morality onto the text.

Just musing.  Hope I haven't offended,
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu        http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"Standing on a well-chilled cinder we see the fading of the suns and try
to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
				     - Georges Lematre

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