{"id":210,"date":"2012-05-26T19:37:56","date_gmt":"2012-05-26T13:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intelligent-torvalds.74-208-171-134.plesk.page\/?p=210"},"modified":"2025-08-24T15:25:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T20:25:20","slug":"jesus-artifacts-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/?p=210","title":{"rendered":"Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>While I am asking\u2014\u201cWhat is truth? \u00a0What is faith? \u00a0Who is God? \u00a0What is He trying to say to us?\u201d\u2014trying to come to some understanding of Bible passages in their complete contexts, millions of priests, pastors, preachers and Bible teachers all over the world open their Bibles on their own and construct sermons and homilies and Bible lessons, complete with life applications, every week without even consulting me.\u00a0 The vast majority of them don\u2019t know who I am or what I\u2019m trying to do here.\u00a0 While I, with my philosophical bent of mind, endeavor to construct an abstract truth of the Bible, real people are doing real things with the Bible, in real space and real time.\u00a0 They come to real conclusions about Bible passages\u2014if this is so then we should do thus and such\u2014and they are having real success gathering others around them who think and act in accordance with their teachings.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Now I\u2019ve heard, admittedly, a very small fraction of the sermons, homilies and Bible lessons presented by a handful of the millions of priests, pastors, preachers and Bible teachers who prepare these things every week.\u00a0 And when I\u2019ve done so I\u2019ve been a bit like the dinner guest who, as the hostess serves a succulent pork roast, all he can think about and speak about is cholesterol, hardening of the arteries, heart attack and stroke.\u00a0 No matter what portion of scripture the preacher chose to expound upon, that same kind of expansion of context<\/a> that I\u2019ve been following here, went on in my head. \u00a0Sometimes, it\u2019s true, the expansion only served to reinforce the preacher\u2019s point.\u00a0 That was a good day, a Sunday I didn\u2019t need a week to recover from.\u00a0 But far too often the expansion of context that ballooned uncontrollably in my mind severely limited, if not completely refuted, the preacher\u2019s point.<\/p>\n

On those days, I didn\u2019t want to sit and listen to a sermon.\u00a0 I wanted to stand and make a dialogue of it, and not some postmodern-happy-go-lucky-all-points-of-view-are-equal dialogue.\u00a0 I mean a good old-fashioned Socratic brawl of a dialogue where I played Socrates and the preacher played the bumbling Sophist, and at the end of it, it would be clear to everyone present\u2014including the preacher\u2014that he doesn\u2019t really know what he was talking about.<\/p>\n

So why call this WHAT KIND OF CARPENTER IS JESUS?\u00a0 Why not call it PREACHERS DON\u2019T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE BIBLE? or something like that?\u00a0 I won\u2019t say I haven\u2019t thought that or even said it before.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that whenever I thought or said it, I couldn\u2019t get away with it.\u00a0 The same expansion of context that created the problem for me also solved it.\u00a0 To consider that solution I\u2019ll need to take my first direct look at the question, what kind of carpenter is Jesus?<\/p>\n

Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 2<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to What Kind of Carpenter is Jesus? Introduction<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 4<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Jesus’ Artifacts, Part 7<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Torture, Part 4<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Apostles and Prophets, Part 1<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Romans, Part 73<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Romans, Part 82<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Fear – Deuteronomy, Part 3<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Who Am I? Part 8<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Christianity, Part 3<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
Back to Exploration, Part 15<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I am asking\u2014\u201cWhat is truth? \u00a0What is faith? \u00a0Who is God? \u00a0What is He trying to say to us?\u201d\u2014trying to come to some understanding of Bible passages in their complete contexts, millions of priests, pastors, preachers and Bible teachers … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jesus-artifacts","category-what-kind-of-carpenter-is-jesus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27546,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/27546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/religiousmind.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}