re: #317 BeerDrinking_VictoryMonkey

I read the NT once, on my second time now & still haven’t found the part that says that the best way to bring about the Kingdom of God is to hand over all power to a secular state.

Jesus’s teachings about the Basileia of God are much debated.

The Gospel of Thomas made a case, through selective quotations of the sayings tradition and the three Synoptic Gospels, that Jesus saw the Basileia as already here, if believers all agreed to give up worldly possessions and to help one another. The state becomes irrelevant. There was a movement in the 1990s among NT scholars to boost Thomas as “The Fifth Gospel”.

Others say that Jesus saw himself as John the Baptist’s apocalyptic Messiah; in which case, Jesus’s political programme was for the Jews to revolt and install him as King. I’m not sure what he’d have done afterward to KEEP his kingdom, but if Caliph ‘Umar’s later career is a guide, Jesus would have tried to incite a general anti-Roman (and anti-Parthian) uprising among fellow Semites. But I’m veering into supposition here.

“Who do you say that I am” … heh