7. By Works: Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 7:21)
8. By Works of a High Standard: For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes (lawyers) and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:20)
‘Woe unto you also, ye lawyers’ (Luke 11:46) said Jesus. But a lawyer worth her or his salt would ask — what constitutes a legitimate baptism?
We just ask that they be covered with the blood of Jesus. Jesus Camp 2006, Pastor Becky Fischer, Fischer’s preparatory prayer over empty meeting hall
Is self-baptism any good? Can a child give consent to be baptised? Why would Jesus be so vague? Before being baptised, before speaking in tongues, before tapping a tambourine and singing about Three Wise Men, you’ll have to win the lottery of being born at a time and a place to hear the long tall stories about baby Jesus. Here lies a common problem afflicting religious sects — a sect can only save souls on its own doorstep and not the lost souls whose only misfortune is living in the wrong time and place, and who presumably will be cast into outer darkness.
The simplest and cheapest solution for a Christian sect is to preach that those lost sheep not of this fold will be found by the good Shepherd either on the Elysian Fields of Heaven, the Half-Way House, or in the other place where you won’t have to worry about the central heating.
The Mormon solution is the most elaborate and expensive. The choicest, peachiest Mormons, the worthiest (10% tithing x minimum membership x Word of Wisdom) win the dubious privilege of attending one of the many Mormon temples and performing proxy baptisms for the dead. Now picture yourself enrobed in a white suit, as if for sacrifice: a wrinkly lizard-man in a white suit leads you by the arm to the sharp edges of a white marble ornamental tub; you step into the slimy pool of water almost to your neck; and another shrunken wrinkly lizard-man in a white suit, safe behind the sanctuary of a sacrificial altar, reads from a black book of the dead the roll-call of twelve names; yet another wrinkly lizard-man in a white suit, shedding lizardy skin across the scummy surface of sickly warm water, creeps at you from behind, grabs your wrist — and immerses you glugging under the event-horizon of water. Gasping for air, you emerge into a white-carpeted, white-suited Mormon world. Here resurrects the reason why Mormons are so dead-keen to investigate their ancestry and why roaming packs of Mormons harvest names from gravestones and from any available public record.
Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead ... The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with something very liberal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and deaths have been tabulated since records began ... This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi “final solution”, and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless think that the followers of Mr Smith should be congratulated for hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented religion. Christopher Hitches, God is Not Great p168
Hot raving camps of opinion, like two vast tribes of Israel, go to war on the Bosworth Fields of the Internet to rant with passion whether a real flesh-and-blood Jesus performed for the masses on the stage of the Holy Land.
The gospel story is an artificial, non-historical work. It has been fabricated from source materials that can be identified and traced to their incorporation into the Gospels. There is not a particle of hard evidence that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ ever existed. Harold Leidner, The Fabrication of the Christ Myth
cf.
There is a remarkable amount of documents and corroboration. Professor Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College
It’s Jesus, Jim, but not as we know him. But this mind-sapping minority sport is but the latest manifestation of opinion running back hundreds of years:
— In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (History of Life of Jesus Research) in which he traced the evolution of the modern image of Jesus to reflect the zeitgeist of authors. So which way did the swotty Schweitzer swing?
The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work final consecration never existed. The Quest of the Historical Jesus p478
Christians stand all amazed at the spectre of their religion plagiarised from the body of pagan beliefs. Wisely we reserve a helping of Albert Schweitzer’s Nobel-prize-winning humanity for the heart-shocked Christians who discover a hidden history founded in the fables, faith and fantasies of the forerunners of Jesus. One football commentator of the first century had this to stay of the promising star striker:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18:3:3
The Founding Fathers of God’s mother country were not so airy-fairy and fable-fancying as the feel-good Flavius Josephus:
If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter, ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor. Thomas Jefferson
The Roman festival of December 25th called Deus Natalis Solis Invicti celebrated the birthday of the unconquered Sun. A pretty picture in prose to compare Jesus and the Sun painted by Thomas Paine: