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Not, "how do we know Jesus was God," or even "how do we know Jesus existed," but simply, does the implied epistemology of Jesus' words conflict in any way with the epistemology of the philosophers before, during, or after his time?  Is there any cross-over between the two?

 

Jesus described things in very simple terms.  A "rich man" and Lazarus.  A fig tree that won't bear fruit.  A woman at a well drawing water.  A man left for dead in a ditch.  From these simple images he created teaching analogies, or parables.

 

But, there's never any doubt that rich men, fig trees, and ditches exist, somewhere, and could exist, in the configurations he gives.  There's never any doubt that humans might behave as he shows them behaving. His parables are all supremely plausible.  So there's no question of "what if the world is a dream?" or "a father would never do that to his son," or "quantum randomness explains the Big Bang" or any common philosophical objection to the reality Jesus assumes.

 

The subtext to all of Jesus' parables is just, “get real”. We're dealing with reality here, not Platonic forms, or multiverses, or determinism.

 

The point I'm making with all this is that Jesus taught things that were morally relevant, not things that were metaphysically relevant. This is why it's hard to paint Jesus as a philosopher. He already knew everything, and was just teaching what was the most important. The rest could be figured out later by theologians and philosophers after him.

 

Can anyone gainsay this? Is there any objection a philosopher has made to Jesus' mode of knowing as applied to others (not mode of knowing applied to himself), that sticks? Or is it as I surmise: that Jesus is concerned about moral reality and the bare minimum of theology and philosophy needed to convey that successfully, and is not concerned with the fluffy, airy “deep” questions that make so many thinkers philosophical basket-bases?

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