Jesus: A Superstitious Man Living in an Eschatological Hotbed

Despite my last post challenging Christians to prove to me that Jesus did not lie in John 8:44, no one has been able to debunk my post or, as I see it, truth can not be debunked!

So, just how mortal was Jesus once the Christology has been striped away? Just where did he get his un-Biblical information from? In fact, as noted at the end of this post, Jesus was not an all knowing Christ who fabricated stories about Satan, but a superstitious Jew who believed in the oral and written lore of his people.

Thus, based on a careful reading of the Gospel texts, we find a fallible Jewish man making mistakes about the end times and a man who was highly influenced by the myths and Jewish folklore of the day (see below).

As an example of oral lore here, the creator Gospel of Matthew, without a personal Hebrew Bible to check himself against, misquotes a proof text in trying to prove the credence of his work. An example (as noted by the late Bruce Metzger) is found in Matthew 27: 9 where the creator of Matthew’s Gospel wrongly attributes a verse found in Zechariah 11: 12 -13 to Jeremiah.

Based on the challenge of my post about John 8: 44, we know that what Jesus believed and taught was not some divine revelation passed down directly from God, but Jesus simply used popular stories circulating in the general population to impress, entertain and teach from just as many wondering ancient bards would use Hesiod's Theogony and his Works and Day or just like the cuneiform text of the Atrahasis story and the Epic of Gilgamesh was used by folk moralist to reveal why thing are in the world the way they are and what the gods really wanted from humans.

At the time of Jesus, the Palestinian Jewish world was awash in rapidly developing Jewish folk- lore. Apart fro the Essenes at Qumran rewriting and re-editing the Hebrew Bible into Hebrew Peshim (commentaries: pesher פשר = "Commentary" or theological works including over 900 other documents) to prove that God had now chosen them alone.

Well know Jews such as Philo, Josephus, and latter Pseudo-Philo were also re-editing Jewish folklore to make what they considered orthodox theology and truthful histories like the ancient Israelite schools had done who fused the Hebrew Bible from fragments making a whole running narrative form what we now know from different views of who and what the gods (E =Elohim) or god (J=Yahweh) wanted and thought.

In the time of Jesus, eschatological dogmas were revealed in apocalyptic literature in which long dead ancient Jewish figures such as Enoch, Elijah, Adam and Eve, Moses and the Jewish Patriarchs seemed to have arisen out of their long lost graves to pin divine revelations from God about the mysteries of Heaven and Hell. Just like the rest of first century Jewish Palestine, Jesus swam in this world filled with competing Jewish religious legends where both God and Satan wrestled for control of human minds and the world.

Not only were forged texts written in long dead (and mythological) names, but the Jews themselves were entering into a time of collecting and editing their oral legends into what was to latter be called the Talmud.

If one knows Jewish theology, then one is aware that Jews believed Moses received both the Written and the Oral Torah on Mount Sinai. In other words, just as tradition plays a major factor in the formulation religious truth in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, so too does tradition play a major factor in teaching the truth of God to the Jews as recorded in the Talmud.

It is at just such a time in first century Palestine that a thirty year old man named Jesus (much like William Miller in 1843 & 1844, Joseph Smith or David Koresh) thought the world as he knew it, was going to end in his life time and the judgment of God would be pored out on sinful humanity.

So, while no one can give any Biblical to my post as to why Jesus can claimed Satan was a lair and a murder, the answer is to be found in how popular Jewish folklore of the day influenced him and shaped the beliefs of Jesus. Although most of this folklore has long been lost, the Jewish Talmud gives us a good idea how Jesus came to understand God, theology and himself as an End Time prophet.

So just where did Jesus get his theology about God, the world and himself? As I stated above; from oral living religious legends such as the lore that made up both the Palestinian and Babylonia Talmuds. Although they were formed in the fifth century, both contain oral and written sources that go back much earlier, to and even beyond the time of Jesus.

The Talmud on Satan:
Although satan does not appear in Gensis 3, later rabbinic sources identified satan with the serpent in Eden (Sofa. 9b; Sanh. 29a). He is identified in a more impersonal way with the evil inclination which infects humanity (B. Bat. 16a). In a more personal way, he is the source behind God’s testing of Abraham (Sanh. 89b). Additionally, satan is responsible for many of the sins mentioned in the OT. For example, it is satan who was responsible for the Israelites worshiping the golden calf because of his lie that Moses would not return from mount Sinai (Sabb. 89a). He is the driving force behind David’s sin with Bathsheba (Sanh. 107a), and it is he who provokes the gentiles to ridicule Jewish laws, thus weakening the religious loyalties of the Jews (Yoma 67b). (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol.5, Satan p. 988.)

In the final analysis, it is only when Jesus is placed in the context of the average religious Jew swimming in an eschatological world where the apocalyptic mind ran wild with stories and fears of Satan, devils, demons and judgments from God that Jesus is not really a pathological liar, but a man simply caught up in the lore of popular Jewish superstitions.