Trailblazer
Veteran Member
I agree, but I never said that I believe the Holy Spirit is God.Sure but a ray from God is not God anymore than spit from a soldiers mouth onto a peasant is the soldier ... just as a ray from Sun is not the Sun.
I believe the Holy Spirit is the Bounty of God that comes to us from God, like rays of the Sun come to us from the Sun.
Yes, Jesus was a man in the original story but Paul made him into Christ our Savior.In Scripture Jesus is depicted as a Man .. first and foremost .. in the original story. In the original story even the disciples do not believe Jesus is the Son of God .. never mind the Most High God . To the Disciples in Mark .. Jesus is a Man. The family of Jesus does not believe Jesus to be divine .. they believe him their Son who has gone off on a spiritual journy .. but one who no one takes seriously as a Guru of any kind in his home town.
John the Baptist believes Jesus to be a Man .. .. a man "Annointed by God" - in the way of David .. and King Cyrus .. both who were men "Messiahs" because that is what a Messiah is .. one annointed by God to do great things .. one adopted by God to do great things.
Jesus enters the story as a man of 30 ... who is adopted by God upon his Baptism .. as a man he is sent through ritual testing .. only after which the divine spark will be activated .. similar to the ritual trial the Pharoah would undergo .. a ritual which had some danger.
Below is a short excerpt from a longer article I posted several years ago which can be read on the link below.
"That the figure of the Nazarene, as delivered to us in Mark’s Gospel, is decisively different from the pre-existent risen Christ proclaimed by Paul, is something long recognized by thinkers like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Herder and Goethe, to mention only a few .....
Paul, who had never seen Jesus, showed great reserve towards the Palestinian traditions regarding Jesus’ life. (230) The historical Jesus and his earthly life are without significance for Paul. In all his epistles the name ‘Jesus’ occurs only 15 times, the title ‘Christ’ 378 times. In Jesus’s actual teaching he shows extraordinarily little interest. It is disputed whether in all his epistles he makes two, three or four references to sayings by Jesus. (231) It is not Jesus’ teaching, which he cannot himself have heard at all (short of hearing it in a vision), that is central to his own mission, but the person of the Redeemer and His death on the Cross."
How Paul changed the course of Christianity
This is an excerpt from the book entitled The Light Shineth in Darkness, Studies in revelation after Christ by Udo Schaefer. This section explains how Paul changed the Christianity of Jesus. It is important to note that the views expressed by this author reflect his individual perspective and...
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I think that the nature of Jesus was hotly debates because people could see that Jesus was a man yet more than a man, and they didn't know what to make of that, so at a certain point they decided in councils that Jesus was God in spite of the fact that Jesus never claimed to be God.The Nature of the divinity of Jesus or if Jesus was divine at all .. was a hotly debated subject but .. no one was arguing this divinity was at the same level of the Most High .. that Jesus was "The Father" -- even those in the 2cnd century that argued that Jesus was an Aeon .. and did not actually have physical substance ..were not claiming Jesus was " El Elyon - God most high" .. God of Abraham. . as you go on to affirm .
I believe that Jesus was a Manifestation of God but certainly not God incarnate, and that he had a twofold nature, one nature human, the other divine. That makes a lot more sense than what Trinitarian Christians believe, that Jesus was fully man and fully God, which is logically impossible.
“Unto this subtle, this mysterious and ethereal Being He hath assigned a twofold nature; the physical, pertaining to the world of matter, and the spiritual, which is born of the substance of God Himself. He hath, moreover, conferred upon Him a double station. The first station, which is related to His innermost reality, representeth Him as One Whose voice is the voice of God Himself. To this testifieth the tradition: “Manifold and mysterious is My relationship with God. I am He, Himself, and He is I, Myself, except that I am that I am, and He is that He is.” …. The second station is the human station, exemplified by the following verses: “I am but a man like you.” “Say, praise be to my Lord! Am I more than a man, an apostle?”