re: ESPN's Trey Wingo goes off on Freeze

quote:

---

I'm not a Christian. Pure agnostic. But I'm completely correct about the Bible. Sorry it hurts your feelings that you literally don't understand the foundation of your entire religion.

---

Actually, you're not correct from a textual standpoint but you are correct from interpretive standpoint, particularly how the mainstream interprets it. That's to say, technically speaking Jesus never actually claims divinity. This made for some interesting versions of Christianity pre-Nicea and even long afterwards as many Christian groups dubbed heretics by those Christian groups commonly thought of as small-o orthodox or mainstream today (Catholics, Greek, Russian and Coptic Orthodox plus many Anglican as well as Reformation Derived Protestants etc) presented various versions of Jesus' divinity and non-divinity. Arianism which held that Jesus was separate entity created by God rather than an entity that had existed simultaneously as in trinitarian based points of view that won out was actually a prevailing opinion until Nicea and even more extreme versions regarding the divinity and/or non-divinity of Jesus were quite common. For centuries there was no settled opinion on the question of divinity and it's nature and it's never entirely been put to bed. The question of divinity informed so many non-orthodox versions Christianity that when the Catholic Church first encountered Islam it was first taken to have been another Christian heresy as opposed to a separate but related religion.

That all said, many will tell you that Jesus divinity is explicit in the Bible -- it isn't and Jesus never actually claims divinity himself. It's just that since Nicea most mainstream branches of Christianity have accepted the trinity and Christ's divinity derived as a part of this concept as a given and many are completely unaware that that's something that doesn't actually derive from the Bible but instead derives from Early Church Councils and the forced streamlining of Christianity into a state religion that Constantine wanted uniform (it wouldn't do to have a state religion where every church had its own books, and ideas, and so little agreed upon uniformly).

Of course, if you're determined to use the bible as the sole source for the question of divinity, and many are, you can derive divinity from various symbolic interpretations and using various other means of interpretation but strictly speaking it's not something claimed by Jesus.


EDIT: Forgive my typos ahead of time. I see them but it's late and I'm too lazy to edit them.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure your original post on this that made someone so red-assed was completely missed. Your overall point stands.