How can Jesus and God be the same individual?

There is a tradition (exemplified in some of the gnostic gospels) according to which the tyranical Old Testament Jehovah is actually a baser divinity with no relation to Jesus. But that interpretation got vetoed by the later church.

Good answer, thorninmud!. I cannot find anywhere in the Bible where Jesus claimed he was the Supreme Being and I have concluded he was not, nor was the Lord that sent his Angel out the supreme Being.

The hypocrisy of the old and new testaments is largely ignored and glossed over in favor of the love thy neighbor message and other words to live by.

From what I know Jesus is the son of God or Messiah as determined by the Christian Jews at the time Jesus walked the earth.

Jesus and God from my vantage point are 2 distinct deities.

I can agree with you on that, Cruiser. I’m no Biblical scholar in any sense of the term, but come from a spiritual point of reference and do have a good spiritual sense. Keeping in mind, that Jesus was spiritual and cannot be compared to modern Christianity, therefore he was not really a Christian.

To a faithful, anything is possible.

Faith is fine, unless it gets in the way of individual observing and reasoning abilities. I find it really difficult to try and reason with certain faith based religious individuals. Like immortality of the spirit or soul. Certain Christian’s are under the assumption that immortality only exists somehow by accepting Jesus, when the Bible states clearly we each are already nativly immortal spiritual beings.

Psalm 90:10The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away..

Also, (told you I had a lot to say) how can Heaven be a place we go to when it’s already within us…

Luke 17:21Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

@seperate_reality I never said “he” was Christian and intimately familiar with Jesus the mortal Jew. His followers most of who were also Jewish were the ones that thus became our first “Christians”.

Cruiser, I know you didn’t say that. My intention is mainly to clear up some religious misunderstandings and am in no way attacking Christianity or any belief system. I’m really only bringing reasoning to the table here
Logic is exactly the same as “reason”. How does a person’s ability to reason go wrong? Why aren’t people more reasonable? To simplify it, the person accepts illogical data, then they try to reason with that illogical data. The answer is almost guaranteed to be illogical, isn’t it.
It is not going to make sense to someone that knows. It usually doesn’t make sense even to the person either, and they become confused. They can’t think with the false information they accepted. Atheism is mostly false information, but it’s also found in Religion.

@seperate_reality You and I are on the same page and I don’t have the time to get all that into the mythology of religion right now. I did read a great read called the Life and Times of Jesus that really illustrated what he was all about at a tumultuous time in history. I love talking about that aspect of his being.

But for me now I am on a spiritual journey into my own heart and soul.

I have not read that and probably will do so. Let me know if you have any spiritual question I might help you with. I believe a person is as valuable as he can help others.

They can’t.

Why can’t they? What does it mean to be an individual? For example, if you have two separate human shaped collections of flesh, blood, bone, etc… which share all sensory data and share all information and make all decisions as one being, why can’t we call them one individual?

@roundsquare Because, Jesus may have been real but, gawd…......

This is a question that my teacher in Bible College tied herself in logical knowts trying to answer to the class. In the end, it was the beginning of my loss of faith. I conclude that if what we know of Jesus’ words from our current Bible is true, then he not only never claimed to be God, he made it quite clear he was NOT God. When asked when the end times would come, Jesus replied in Matthew 24:36. “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” He made the claim of being the Son of man, He seems more to me to have been trying to teach us that we all are the sons of God.

As to reconciling the murderous Angel’s actions (presumably at the direction of GOd) with a God of love, I suppose a theist might ask what those Assyrians planed to do the next morning had they been left alive. Isn’t it likely that the carnage would have been just as great?

I will add that I have come to the conclusion that there is no God other than the Universe itself. I think God is an invention of man to explain all the unfathomable questions he faced, and that Jesus along with virtually everyone else of his time accepted that explanation. If there is any sentience guiding the Universe and what happens in the Assyrian camp, it does a great job of concealing itself. It certainly seems that cause and effect rule, and no mysterious force intervenes to change that.

@ETpro Interesting, I didn’t realize that the text of the bible actually argued against God = Jesus. Where does the concept come from?

@roundsquare I gave you the reference. Matthew 24:36 quotes Jesus as saying that nobody knows when the end times will come, not the Angels in heaven or even the Son. Only the Father nows that day and hour. If Jesus, the Holy Ghost and God the Father are all one person, how does one third of that person know something that the other two thirds don’t know?

Jesus is quoted under examination by Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin as claiming to be the son of God. Mark 14:53–65 (Matthew 26:57–67) When asked directly if he claimed to be the son of God, he answered with what the High Priest considered an insolent and blasphemous “I am.” That was heresy to the Jewish leaders because that is how God identified himself when sending Moses back to Egypt to lead Israel out of bondage. When Moses asked the burning bush “Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God answered, “Tell them ‘I AM that I AM. Tell them I AM sent you.” Ex 3 :14–15.

But the Jewish leaders had asked Jesus if he claimed to be the son of God, not if he claimed to be God.. If Jesus was teaching that all humanity are sons of God, which we are if God is our creator, then the answer is not blasphemy at all, nor is it a claim to unique divinity.

I think Jesus covers a basic spiritual truth in the verse below. He speaks of a spiritual type of collective. keep in mind, that spiritual is of non-physical, immortal, spiritual beings, including our Father God, the Supreme Being, separate and different from the physical world which the physical world includes mortal, physical, human bodies. We are each, including Jesus, of the Main God Body or the Supreme Being. In the beginning there was only the Supreme Being and then we each came off of the Main God Body, as individual spiritual beings with “freewill”. This was long before the physical world was created.

John 14:20 At that day ye shall know that I [am] in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.

@seperate_reality Exactly. If there is a creator, and if there is a spiritual world, then that seems a given ti me.

ETpro, If i have learned anything in my spiritual search, it is that truth will make sense. your comment is quite rational, by the way too. Nothing should be real or true, unless you yourself have realized it.

@seperate_reality I did realize the reality of spirituality before I realized that it was highly likely I was wrong in that belief.

ETpro, can you please explain that further, because I’m not quite understanding what you mean. To me it sounds more like a contradiction, where you realized spirituality, but you drop the ball from there.

@seperate_reality I was an evangelical Christian at one time. I went to bible college. I believed very firmly in God and the spirit realm in the supreme being and all mankind. But the deeper I got in my studies, the more inconsistencies and outright contradictions I began to see in the Bible itself and the theology I was being taught. So I dropped out of that study and turned to how the Bible we revere today came to be what it is, and to the study of science that migh explain how the Universe got hereif God didn’t create it.

I came to the conclusion that there is a finite possibility that there is a God, or that the Universe itself is a super intelligence capable of transmuting itself. But the likelihood of that seems to me down around the likelihood that unicorns exist and have magical flying powers. That would make me an atheistic agnostic. I don’;t deny that there could be a spiritual realm. For those who still need to believe in one to feel OK in this strange and wonderful (but often dangerous) Universe, I don’t work to take that away from them, After all, they may be right.

I also believe that if there is a supreme being, my being intellectually honest about my perceptions of that being’s existence is not an affront to the being. I have examined Pascal’s wager and find it nonsense. Since there are over 2000 different Supreme Beings, each mutually exclusive, that man has put forward as the one true God, how on Earth is one to know which one to place your bet on? Turns out Pascal planed to save his own soul by betting on the one he had been told about as a kid, never bothering to even examine the legitimacy of the claims of the other several thousand.

I understand now. I was lucky enough to find the correct knowledge or spiritual truths, so have not been down the road you have trodden. Believe me, it makes a world of difference finding the real truths of life. Because of my spiritual studies through my religion, I can easily understand the spiritual message of Jesus and can see how he would get frustrated not being able to get man to understand spirituality. It was not his or man’s fault either, because that knowledge was simply not available in his time like it is today.

@ETpro Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant is, given that the bible seems to say that Jesus IS NOT God, where did the idea that Jesus IS God come from?

@seperate_reality Funny you should say that. Only those in deep doubt about their own convictions say anything different than that. Ask a devout Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian or what have you—or for that matter, and atheist. All will say they arrived at their position exactly like you believe you did. But they can’t all be right.

@roundsquare Aha, very interesting question. I would say that Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus) may have been one of the early advocated of the divinity of Christ. The Early Christians led by James, Peter and John were largely centered in Jerusalem, all Jewish, and used the Septuagint (Greek translation) or Targum in Aramaic as the scriptures.

Constantine’s conversion to Christianity had a great influence on how the new religion developed, although history suggests it might have been more a political move to consolidate his power than true conviction of faith. Whatever the case, the Bible we have today was not canonized till 325. By that time, it appears that the teaching of Christ’s divinity was firmly in place.

ETpro, true and spirituality is very much subjective. There is really no way i can prove to you my own personal results from my studies. I just hope you have not given up your own personal search for truth.

ETpro, there are Christian’s who think Jesus is God, but you already knew that right? I do know why some Christians think that way, but I’m not going to explain it, because humans do have trouble understanding spirituality. I’m pretty good with helping someone understand in person, but online is totally different.

@seperate_reality Rest assured I continue to search. There is no single piece of knowledge that I desire more than the understanding of creatin and our relationship to it.

Individual is a human term and applies to humans. Christ is an individual. God is God.

broughtlow, what is the “being” in human being and could this being, be considered an individual?

ETpro, good to hear!

@seperate_reality I believe we are all man (mankind) male and female. The terms later than this I really don’t subscribe to. Human? I use it cause people have a perception of it.

I believe we are each non-physical, immortal, spiritual beings and are not the mortal, physical, human body we operate (like a car) and view in a mirror. So, each spiritual being (you and me) are individuals and the Supreme Being or God.

Dictionary.com
3.Individual:a distinct, indivisible entity; a single thing, being, instance, or item.

@seperate_reality I believe part of this but I believe that the possibility exists for us to become one with God but in the same way my arm is one with me yet not one in the same.

like what Jesus said. Spirituality, which is of the spirit, and a non-physical, immortal, nature, which is native to each of us and not about man or human bodies named Hank who will die. We as “immortal” spiritual beings never die and only the mortal human body dies. Jesus never wanted anyone to worship and pray to him and simply wanted his followers to “realize” and understand the difference between you as a non-physical, immortal, spiritual being vs you operating a mortal, physical, human body named Luke or whatever identity you have. There are two different and separate realities, the non-physical spiritual reality (native to us) and the physical world reality which includes physical bodies (non-native to us)

John 14:20 At that day ye shall know that I [am] in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. (a type of spiritual collective)

John 3:6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh;(mortal, physical human body) and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”(you as a non-physical, immortal, Spiritual Being).