AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Ah, yes, the silences within the text. What's not being said? Heh. I gotta read The da Vinci Code so that I can get in the loop.

origen thought jesus was half dolphin half human.

This comment comes from a position of abject ignorance—I haven't opened a bible in years--but the comparison you are making is odd.

That is to say, we do know that a majority of the population both then and now are (a) married during their lifetime and (b) share no dolphinous heritage. Enlighten a former and fallen Christian: where is the evidence that Jesus was celibate? If, as you say, we are working in a vacuum of good evidence one way or another, is it not safe to assume that he lived as a man.

A better analogy may be drawn to whether Jesus laughed, something that seems to come up as an equally silly argument. Of course he laughed! Do we have any evidence of this, not really. Most depictions tend toward the serious, if not dour. And yet, we can make the assumption that he laughed because (a) that's what people do, and (b) there isn't any indication that he behaved differently.

When Jesus did behave differently, we are informed of this. Performing miracles, rising from the dead, etc.: all things the average Joe didn't do, we know.

I have a feeling that the question of whether Jesus was married is one of convention--we assume (via Paul) that within early Christian communities marriage was somewhat frowned upon. We also assume things like women waited "on table" (did that mean they cleaned up or that they ran the finances). Christ's marriage is not (just) an idle question for those who wish to model their own life on his.

Alex makes some interesting points, but somehow, I have trouble with the idea that a very significant fact such as the existence of a wife would have escaped being documented pretty clearly if it were true.

You have a point about laughter and humor. I would expect that Jesus had a good sense of humor, although I am unaware of any places where this shows through in the Gospels. In my experience, people with deep spirituality also have a good sense of humor, particularly about themselves. Humor is an excellent teaching tool.

I actually read somewhere about a theory that Jesus was actually a woman, or perhaps even of ambiguous gender. Now that is something that likely would not have been documented, and would likely not have been revealed to more that a few very close associates. IIRC, there was a book about this, although I can't imagine what evidence there would be and how the book would not be almost completely filled with the authors speculations.

These theories were obviously the result of confusion with the passage of time. Jesus was human with divine aspect (as is well known), he was not part dolphin. However his *wife* was a dolphin.

Alex, those are very good, strong points; the “dolphin” notion was an attempt at a reductio, but it doesn’t have the same logical status as does the claim that Jesus was married. You’re quite right.

Now, about whether Jesus was married: there is no evidence that states that he was married, none at all, from even moderately early sources. That’s not inconsequential, especially when he was strongly associated with two prominent unmarried eschatological prophets (John the Baptist and Paul). His reported teachings cohere with a position that regarded marriage as less-than-ideal for theological devotion (and there’s no mention of his marital status when the topic of marital relations or family relations appears in the gospels). On the whole, I just see no reason whatever to think Jesus married — and in this, I’m in the company of some pretty iconoclastic NT scholars; Dom Crossan, for instance, thinks Jesus couldn’t afford to marry.

Christ was without sin and that pretty much rules out the marriage theory. From my limited theological studies, including such NT scholars as Gordon Fee and Russell Spitler, the absence of a reference to Christ being married would indicate that it wasn't an issue. Bottom line - those who propose that Christ was married, including the Mormon cult, seek to make Christ more man than God, and in the process, make themselves more like God. Simply put, during his thirty-three years of maturation and entering adulthood, our Lord had no time for marriage. As to the comment about dual or feminine sexuality, all scripture points to a "son" being born to Mary. Sometimes, we think too much.

This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:

This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.