The Sage or the Philosopher

Jesus did give long sermons. The Gospel of Thomas is a sayings Gospel - the idea is to take his sermons and note the sound bites, the meat of the message. Also, Thomas takes parables and gives them in brief rather than building a great deal of narrative around the parable.

The difference between Thomas and the Synoptic Gospels is mostly style. Sure, the religion in Thomas is a little more... mystical, perhaps, but not by much. The Synoptic Gospels were narratives, Thomas was a collection of sayings. It's style.

John, however, is quite different. John was written long after the Synoptic Gospels and long after Thomas. It is also likely that John was written, in part, in response to the Gospel of Thomas given the theological disagreements between the two and the remarkably negative portrayal of Thomas in John's Gospel.

I knew the first part of that, but what I didn't know was that that was in his own wording...I thought they were more likely to have been original sayings given the time difference (of course not entirely authentic though). Since John's was written long after the rest I thought his was more affected by the oral tradition than the Gospel of Thomas. Also...the Jesus Seminar, leading on this issue, confirms that many of the shorter sayings "with a twist" were Jesus' original words.

Identifying original sayings is probably impossible. Even the historical existence of Jesus is questionable.

As for lineage; because John was written after Thomas and the Synotpic Gospels, John is not as influenced as the other Gospels by the oral tradition. The later the Gospel is written, the further removed said Gospel is from the oral tradition.

I know this...but I didnt mention that oral tradition affecting his work did I? I'm not sure I could go back and read, I was just saying that, with time comes more distortion so logically why wouldnt Thomas' be more accurate.

Neither. Going with Kierkegaard, Christ was neither a sage nor philosopher: "Christ is God-man."

Jesus was a spiritual teacher. Most spiritual teachers are something of a sage and a philosopher, but not really either in any professional sense; their profession is spiritual guidance.

Ok...this didn't work =) I need people who also have read up on much more of the history of Jesus to answer this question...or basically instead of Jesus just the main question wasn't answered. I know you believe in what you have been taught in Churches (of course not all of you) to be perfectly true but I'm coming mainly from the Jesus seminar and historical truths and scholars take on him...and also a certain perspective within that but basically the true one. To answer this question you need a lot larger idea of what I was talking about and what is the truth of Jesus.

The Jesus of the Gospel is the historical Jesus.

Which Gospel? Even in the Bible, the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels and the Jesus of John are different characters. Then if you include apocrypha, the character becomes even more diverse.

The Jesus of the Gospels at large cannot accurately represent the historic figure Jesus as some of them give different perspectives of the man. The Gospels are scripture, not history.

AWohlfarth - As a matter of history, there is not much we can say about Jesus because there is remarkable dearth of historic information about the man. From what little we do have, we can say that Jesus was a spiritual teacher.

The point was to exam more deeply who he was as a figure...simply dismissing the issue is the opposite of what I was trying to do. I wanted to let people discuss what their opinions were from what they're read, or what they think. I actually think more specifically I was trying to prove a point, that Jesus was quite similar to Siddhartha, but no one got the chance to look into that deeper becuase others dismissed the topic as impossible.

Sure, the comparison to the Buddha is apt.

Socrates was a philosopher in the original sense - he was not trying to establish a set in stone philosophy, but instead, he was trying to engage students in discourse to help them break through their preconceived notions in order to experience something beyond themselves. Jesus was doing very much the same thing. So were Plato and Aristotle.

Philosophy was, in the beginning, a spiritual activity. Jesus taught spiritual activity. Jesus did not become God-man until centuries after his death; the early Christians would have found the idea to be absurd.

The impossibility comes into play when we talk about Jesus historically. We just don't know well enough to say. All we can do is look at the Gospels and go from there.