[zeek]

Originally Posted by awareness

You're really seeing into Jesus. If what you're seeing is true then Jesus was Hellenized. In fact, if true, Jesus was a syncretizer of Judaism and Hellenism.

Here are two contrasting views on the subject for thoughtful consideration:

Greek believers at Corinth did not care for the corporate church life, but cared instead for their personal and individual interests. This produced division. Whenever there are divisions there cannot be the temple of God. Therefore, after covering certain crucial matters in chapters one and two, Paul indicates in chapter three that the Corinthians are completely wrong in caring for their individual interests and not for God's temple, God's corporate building.

In 3:17 Paul specifically points out that God's building, the temple, is holy. It is not secular, worldly, or Greek. Actually, the word holy in this verse stands in contrast to anything Greek. God's holy temple is separate from anything human, secular, and worldly; in particular, it is separated from anything Greek.

If we consider the context of the first three chapters of this book, we shall realize that Paul's intention was to impress the believers at Corinth that God's building is separate from anything Greek. The Greek believers still valued their wisdom, philosophy, culture, and way of living. They regarded Greek culture as the best. But Paul says that God's temple is holy, separate from anything worldly and particularly from anything Greek.

In verse 16 Paul emphasizes the fact that the Spirit of God dwells in the believers as His corporate temple. But as long as the believers at Corinth were individualistic and as long as they cared for their personal interests, especially for their Greek philosophy and way of living, they were neither holy nor corporate. Then they could not experience very much of the indwelling of the Spirit or enjoy the Spirit's indwelling. If we do not have a proper corporate church life, we cannot have much enjoyment of the indwelling of the Spirit. Yes, the Spirit dwells within our spirit. But the Spirit's indwelling in the church corporately is much richer and is more prevailing than His indwelling in the believers individually.

If we consider all these matters, we shall realize that Paul's concept is deep. His thought is to convince all the individualistic Greek believers that they must care for the corporate church life and not for their individualistic interests, preferences, and choices. (Life-Study of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 23, Section 2)

If Greek thinking was so inimical to the church, then surely Jesus couldn't have been influenced by it. In fact, according to Lee, Jesus couldn't have been affected by anything human, secular or worldly. So to Lee the Greek thinking that crept into the church was "poor poor Christianity". Both the Judaizers and the Hellenizers were off. Jesus and the church must admit no earthly, human, cultural origin.

Ancient Christians did not consider it accidental that the Incarnation occurred at the historical moment of conjunction between the Jewish religion, Greek philosophy, and the Roman Empire.
[Tarnas, Richard. Passion of the Western Mind (Kindle Locations 1895-1896). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]

Tarnas says that the so called Church fathers recognized cultural and philosophical influences and believed that the convergence of ideas was of Providential origins. To Lee that was evidence of their corruption. Lee was consistent in this regard in that he denied that his Chinese background influenced his own thinking even though someone with any knowledge of Taoism could see that his theology coincidentally correlated with that way of thinking. Having spent 13 years under his teaching I came to believe that he was unconscious of and in denial about the influence of his own cultural origin on his thinking. That would mean that he deceived himself before he went on to deceive others. This is not unusual. The most convincing liars are those who first lie to themselves.


Don't you think, that based on what I have already presented below, it's warranted to conclude that if Jesus' critique of the Judaic purity system was informed by a Hellenistic Judaism that he based this view on the teaching he received from his parents and the local synagogue? Would the local practice of Judaism in Galilee by the first century have been a Hellenized practice? After all, the region had been under Greek influence for over 300 years. The character of Jesus teaching is powerful but not in the way of formal Greek philosophy except as it is presented in the Gospel of John which is probably less a reflection of the historical Jesus manner of discourse than that of the author. He was, rather, more like the Greek Cynic philosopher.

The historical Jesus was, then, a peasant Jewish Cynic. His peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Cynicism are neither inexplicable nor unlikely. But his work was among the farms and villages of Lower Galilee. His strategy, implicitly for himself and explicitly for his followers, was the combination of free healing and common eating, a religious and economic egalitarianism that negated alike and at once the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power. And, lest he himself be interpreted as simply the new broker of a new God, he moved on constantly, settling down neither at Nazareth nor Capernaum. He was neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the brokerless kingdom of God. Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

If this is true then "Poor poor Christianity" goes right back to Jesus himself. Crossan goes on:

I propose that at the heart of any Christianity there is always, covertly or overtly, a dialectic between a historically read Jesus and a theologically read Christ. Christianity is always, in other words, a Jesus/Christ/ianity. The New Testament itself contains a spectrum of divergent theological interpretations, each of which focuses on different aspects or clusters of aspects concerning the historical Jesus, or better, different historical Jesuses. It may be, for example, only the sayings, or only the miracles, or only the death, that is of primary concern for a given tradition, but any of those emphases presumes divergent historical Jesuses who said something, did something, and died in a certain way. I think, therefore, that different visions of the historical Jesus present a certain dialectic with different theological interpretations and that the New Testament itself is an obvious expression of that plurality’s inevitability. Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

That to me sounds more like Christianity as it exists in the real world past and present and the local church movement is part of it.