Question of the Day: Why are so very few of Jesus ACTUAL WORDS...

by Terry 88 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Terry

  Topics with specificity require more focus than general topics, in my estimation.

  Page after page can become a drift like a raft without a rudder.

  Scan the Topics on JW-net and the ones with many pages are an endless drift....drift...drift...

  My personal preference is Staying on Topic or start a new one if a side issue pops up.

  It is best if the person starting the Topic makes this clear.

  Otherwise, anything is anything and everything is everything.

  I like to hear ideas and reasons, personally.

  Opinions are like assholes: everybody has one and it usually stinks.
• 

  Terry

  I think my topic here ended too abruptly. I'd like to give it another chance. Read the O.P. please....
• 

  Phizzy

  We don't have Jesus actual words because he wrote nothing down as you say. Is it not possible that he was virtually illiterate ? that all his knowledge came from listening to others ? so he actually "wrote nothing" ?

  Even the words we have which are recorded as though he actually spoke them we do not have reliable evidence for. The Gospels were written many decades after the life of Jesus, and we only have copies of many copies of those, and then they are translated.

  Textual criticism perhaps does well at getting to what was probably written originally, but how trustworthy are the originals, even if they existed ? they contradict eachother in a number of places which does not engender confidence.

  I doubt that anyone wrote down Jesus sermons and teachings close to the time, so we have frail human memory, as well as the writers agenda, and the lack of Provenance for the manuscripts all to contend with when trying to determine anything he did say.

  How strange is that, if his words were Truth and Life as is claimed in the Gospels ? Surely it would have paid God to preserve these words properly , not to so carelessly lose them ?
• 

  Terry

  It is passing strange that the NT isn't in Aramaic forcing translators to grapple with Aramaic into Greek.

  Even as a small child I was puzzled why New Testament readings would suddenly burst into Aramaic as though THIS SENTENCE MUST REALLY BE IMPORTANT TO EXACTLY PRESERVE! But, they weren't. They were trivial statements.

  Eli Eli lama sabachthani is quoted AND THEN translated. Why? WHY THIS?

  Why not Jesus Prophetic statements?

  ^ Allen C. Myers, ed. (1987). "Aramaic". The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. p. 72. ISBN 0-8028-2402-1. "It is generally agreed that Aramaic was the common language of Palestine in the first century AD. Jesus and his disciples spoke the Galilean dialect, which was distinguished from that of Jerusalem (Matt. 26:73)"
• 

  mP

  Jesus could write, in the story in John 7ish about the sinning women who is about to be stoned he "writes" with his finger in the ground. The only problem is this passage is an insertion, even the NWT admits this if you read the "footnotes"
• 

  Terry

  A very odd insertion too, if you stop and consider it.

  Muhammed, we are told, was illiterate and yet the Koran is in "perfect" Arabic.

  If only the bible were in perfect....um...anything.

  I have found in the many conversations I've had over the years that hardly any christians think about the details of their faith.

  Those who practically worship the bible are even less likely to worry over the particulars.

  It almost devolves to the level of superstition.

  Christians live and die by the words of Jesus and yet......where are they--theose actual words in Aramaic?
• 

  Phizzy

  Your last question is important Terry, as we all know many things are "lost in translation", so not having even a "Gospel" that pretends to record the words in the language and even dialect that Jesus would have used really is most remiss of god.

  And when you think that fundamentalist groups like the WT, the Westboro' Baptists etc use the scriptures we do have to castigate and persecute people, it is a total nonsense.
• 

  smiddy

  This is worth a bump .

  Isn`t it stated somewhere in Scripture , if all of Jesus sayings were written down , the world wouldn`t be able to contain them ? , or some such statement alluding to that ?

  The actual sayings attributed to Jesus in the Christian Greek Scriptures would not even fill one of the Bible books attributed to the New Testament.

  Jesus obviously did not think his sayings were worth recording for all mankind , because he never wrote anything down himself ,unlike Moses ,who Jesus was supposed to be a greater prophet of.

  Jesus apparently said a great deal to the Jews of his day without having most of it recorded by himself or anybody else for future generations.

  So obviously he did not think whatever he said , was worth while for future generations to know about , only applicable to the Jews of his day.

  smiddy
• 

  prologos

  You would think that a creator that makes it possible to have shapes of animals preserved for millions of years in amber, would do the same for sayings (if any) of the co-creator, his " special son" , if they were meant to be life saving, a cure-all . They are obviously not.