Was Jesus a socialist??

Hello BH:

Look..  If you think Hitler was a socialist, you're so badly informed that we have NOTHING to discuss.

excon

Interesting. I have never seen a Republicrat fight for the American people with passion and empathy like Bernie. Yes...Those of us who know him know better. He is a great man. 

Jesus was a socialist. A brown-skinned socialist at that. You do not have an argument to back up the inane statement "We know better".

Stalin was an authoritarian.
Hitler came in as a Social Democrat and evolved into a right-wing authoritarian, xenophobic dictator.
Mao was communist and was brutally oppressive, authoritarian, and totalitarian in nature.
First, you need to learn the difference between socialism and communism. Secondly, your lack of historical knowledge is stunning skewed and incorrect.
Why have you chosen to not bring up Augustine Pinochet, or Mohammad Reza Pahlavi or Benito Mussolini or Ion Antonescu or Franciso Franco or the Fifth Brazilian Republic?  

< To me socialism is enforced equality>

Hello daydreamer:

So, put that way, socialism is a good thing right?

All serious historians now agree that a Galilean Healer named Yeshua was probably active in Judea early in the first century CE (Huxley's scholarship has been discredited, he was a very lazy historian). He wasn't unique in that, Simon Magus most certainly did exist later in the same century - the Gnostic sect looked to him as their leader. Wandering Healers weren't uncommon. Yeshua was likely to have been an Essene monk, which is why His Apostles were able to drop everything to follow Him, the Essene community would take up the slack and support them.
The Romans didn't rate the Christians for about half a century, it was considered an obscure Jewish sect and not the threat the Zealots were, so they ignored them. Hence the lack of definite records prior to the growth of the movement.
Flavius Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews is probably the best historical account - although heavily (and clumsily) edited by generations of Christian scribes thereafter, if all reference to the Healer of Galilee is removed, it makes an unreadable mess of his account of the fourth decade prior to the destruction of the Temple (which occurred in 70CE - that's definitely verifiable). This post was edited by Slartibartfast at February 27, 2020 4:10 AM MST

Right. The Jesus of the NT, presented as a miracle working god-man, is an historically embellished, inaccurately retranslated myth. The gospel writers (whoever they actually were) even screwed up the name. 

All of those ”signs” of his supposed divinity, the immaculate conception, virgin birth, 12 disciples, healing the blind, raising the dead, etc, etc, were copied from some two dozen known characters of other earlier cultures.
Essentially all of the dialogue attributed to Jesus, who would have spoken Aramaic, is most likely a product of imagination and exaggeration too, given the predominance of illiteracy in first century Palestine and the decades elapsed before any of it was put to paper, ...in polished Greek, by the anonymous writers unlikely to have been direct witnesses. 

This post was edited by Don Barzini at February 27, 2020 5:03 AM MST

Greek was the lingua franca of the period, the Mediterranean and Near East was politically Roman but still culturally Greek. The Aramaic accounts were necessarily oral, for the reason you described - illiteracy. It has been surmised that the first Gospel, that of Mark, was a ghost-written account by a disciple of Simon Peter, who most certainly WAS an eyewitness. Second-hand, that's still closer to the event than most histories. Matthew and Dr Luke both had a manuscript of that, plus access to a collection of Jesuit quotations - hence those three Gospels are known as the Synoptic (with the same eye) Gospels. They were all written from different viewpoints - Mark the student, Matthew the Jewish Patriarch and Luke the Gentile physician, which is why exegesis is important - they all tell basically the same story. Luke also was a correspondent of Paul/Saul of Tarsus, whose epistles predate the Gospels and at least three of which are almost certainly authentic, with a high degree of probability of Pauline authorship for a few others. Luke's second Volume, the Acts of the Apostles,  draws on some events that he witnessed personally and others related to him by Paul, Lydia, Timothy and Thelma, all companions of Paul on one or more of his travels.
John's is a weirdie, written much later, from a different part of the world (the Greek idiom is consistent with Alexandria) and for a different reason - combating Gnosticism. The anti-Gnostic drive, as well as an undercurrent of misogyny (it's the ONLY book in the Bible where the Spirit is described with a masculine term) is probably why it got retained in the Canon at the Council of Nicaea, a sausage-fest of monumental proportions.
Incidentally, Iesous is the correct Greek rendition of the Aramaic Yeshua (Heb Yehoshua), due to alphabetical differences. Had he been born a 20th century American, he'd have been known as Josh Davidson. This post was edited by Slartibartfast at February 27, 2020 5:21 PM MST

What Church?  There were synagogues, temples and mosques.

The synagogues and temples.  

Yes the Synagogues and Temples but they are not the whole of the story.  There was more.  There was the Church.

Yes. Church means the people. Both religous leaders and people. Both Christian or Jewish. 

You are correct regarding Synagogues, Temples, and Mosques, but there is far more to faith than the different types of buildings where people meet to worship and practice their religion.  A wider scope of vision has to be adopted in order to understand what was a new but prophesied development at the time.  In the New Testament of The Bible Jesus refers to the Church as those who are followers of him.  His followers/believers were the makings and beginnings of the early church, not a building or structure but rather people of like minded faith.  As Matthew 16:18 records Jesus saying in response to Peter's confession that he believes Jesus to be the son of God "And I tell you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it."  So the Church was present at that time even if the typical gathering places of brick and mortar with stained glass windows and steeples wasn't.

Yes, that was in the New Testament.  Most of Jesus' time on earth was during the Old Testament.

No mosques that early, Muhammad was 600 years later.

Thanks for that info.

The concept of separation of powers still hadn't been born, the church by and large WAS the State, at least for strictly local affairs. Herod was a figurehead, the Procurator's role was simply to ensure that the tribute levied by Rome continued to be paid, the Scribes and Pharisees ran things.
Jesus wasn't stupid, had he tried making those demands of Rome, His movement would have been flagged as subversive and stamped out before it gained any traction. His Passion would then have been in vain. He upbraided the LOCAL government for its lack of support for the indigent. He didn't get chummy with the bankers, wealthy manipulators and other bourgeoisie, on the contrary He fashioned a makeshift whip and drove them out of the Temple, hurling imprecations and abuse at them.

Jesus Himself made the separation of powers.

Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and give unto God what is God's. 

The OT law also explains that the tithe was to support Levites, the widows and orphans. And explains how to harvest the in a way to let the poor be able to glean from the harvest...if they work.