In this video, J. Warner discusses the language Jesus used when describing Himself. Did His words demonstrate what He believed about Himself?But as I've already demonstrated ad nauseum, many conservative Christian scholars think the Christ-sayings in John's gospel reflect more John's theological views and less what Jesus "actually" said. So trying to establish high Christology by using John's gospel is foolish.
Mike Licona might argue that you can get Jesus beng God out of Mark, the earliest gospel, but I don't see the point. Yes, people before the 1st century believed the gods could come down to the them in the likeness of man (Acts 14:11), so the skeptic who tries to argue that the NT's Christology is only high beacuse it is late, is not doing her homework.
At the same time, low Christology can be gleaned from Paul (Jesus was declared the son of God with power by resurrectoin from the dead, Romans 1:5). Fundies will carp that this doesn't imply Paul thought Jesus lacked divine attributes until the resurrection, but Paul doesn't show much interest in Jesus' earthly life, so fundies have no basis to think Paul thought Jesus was always Lord from birth. Fundies will cite the kenosis in Phil. 2:5-8, but the "mind" that is spoken of is the one which was in "Christ Jesus", the name given to him at his birth, but not before. Paul is likely referring to the attitude Jesus had as a man on earth, not as the prexistent logos.
Mark 6:5 said Jesus "could" not do a miracle, but the parallel in Matthew 13:58 changes this to "did" not do a miracle, that is, Matthew the later author is changing Mark's earlier negation of Jesus' abilities, with a phrase that no longer implicates Jesus' abilities. That is, the earlier version of Christianity had a lower Christology. We can only wonder how many other changes scribes made to the text of Mark during the first 250 years for which we have no manuscripts, to "assimilate" it back to Matthew. I think this is the part where desperate inerrantists suddenly discover that the Synoptic Problem doesn't exist, and the similarities of Matthew and Mark imply nothing more than their drawing upon a common core of oral tradition.
Except that wiggling out of the problem like that doesn't render the skeptical hypothesis unreasonable, it just show you have the same face-saving capabilities that the Mormons have.
Furthermore, the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount are often unrelated despite following each other in chronological fashion. Most scholars explain this by saying the author has simply made a pastiche of various sayings Jesus spoke in various different circumstances, and grouped such aphorisms into one bunch.
That is, most scholars think the gospel authors replaced the original context of the Christ-sayings with the author's own created literary context, so that we can never really be confident that the "context" we read today is accurately reflecting the oral "context" Jesus originally spoke those words in.
That creates a further problem: the gospel authors did not care about "original" context as much as today's inerrantists do, and this justifies the atheist to infer the sources are not sufficiently reliable to attempt getting confident conclusions from. There was a textually dark period between Jesus' life and the earliest manuscripts, and nobody has any idea how many times scribes in that critical period did what Metzger and Aland contantly accuse them of ('assimilating' one gospel statement with another) so that for all we know, the degree to which the gospels currently agree on facts has more to do with post-authorship emendation, and less to do with what the original authors actually said.
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