I could never accept that Jesus (pbuh) was an actor, it makes him sound false and I believe he was a real man, given special gifts by G-d but a man all the same.
I didn't really say what I meant by him being "Actor." I didn't want to go into too much detail.
A lot of people have a different concept of Jesus. One reads the Four Gospels and wonders what his true purpose had been. To some he is just like any other philosopher (or perhaps even a guru) -- Confucism, Buddha, Plato, Aristotle, etc. Others think of him as a campaigner for justice, a social justice activist. He went around healing the sick and helping the poor. He was advocate for the oppressed, and had a strong link with a lot of people in the community. He got to know people and connected with them. This may seem like the kind of view a secular person/atheist might have, but a view that many Christians have as well.
There is a common belief that Jesus might have been sent to resolve certain misconceptions about God.
There was a prevailing view at the time that God was someone who made rules for people, and that God wouldn't accept people who couldn't follow the rules. If God was to send a message to us, it would either be a complaint that we weren't following the rules, or a new set of rules!!! I believe that a lot of us at some stage in our lives thought of God as a Judge somewhere in heaven at the Head of some Divine Legal System, one bigger, fatter and more powerful than any humanly-designed and man-made legal system ever set up. As the man-made legal systems followed rules, so did the Divine equivalent.
That was the misconception of God, that he was up there making rules, checking us all against some rule book. The heavenly legal system was just a heavenly copy of earthly, man-made legal systems. As earthly legal-systems followed rules, so did the heavenly one.
The religious leaders would then have been teaching people that you had to follow their rules because that was how it worked in heaven!!! Just like we teach you to follow rules, God and His angels in heaven follow rules, so you had better listen to us because we speak for God!!!
The theory goes that Jesus came to somehow resolve that misconception. Religious leaders had taught an incorrect concept of God, so God sent Jesus to clear up that misconception.
The critical element here is hierarchy. Legal systems are founded on a hierarchy. Legal systems have structure. If someone breaks the rules, the whole structure collapses. This was the idea of how Justice worked, an idea that continues to have influence in today's world. Obviously if this is one's idea of Justice, one must also think that God's Justice would be like that.
The theory goes that God sent Jesus to prove these religious leaders wrong. He came not to deceive but to enlighten. God sent Jesus as an Actor, to play out His own role and purpose. People believed that God needed a hierarchy to establish His authority over people. God didn't use one, and His agent, Jesus, didn't use one either. People believed that God's Justice was about following rules. The idea of Justice that Jesus conveyed was not one of following rules, but one of being practical and realistic about people. Rules don't always represent the true attitudes of people, so Jesus didn't judge people by rules.
The purpose of doing this was to demonstrate to human beings the right way of conceptualising God -- not as a Divine Legalist, not as one who gave people what they deserved (as required by the rules), but one understood their weakness and accepted them for who they were as people.
How a human being could act "like God" might seem profound. But Jesus would have had a personal understanding of God and unlike us, came from heaven. Jesus, having lived in heaven, knew how God treated human beings because he was one himself. He was then able to demonstrate to other humans, on earth, how God would treat human beings.
In Islam we accept the special talents/gifts of Jesus (pbuh), we accept the virgin birth but deny completely the idea that Jesus (pbuh) was anything other than human. So let us explore, G-d created Adam (pbuh) and we all accept he was the first man but people do not claim him to be a son of G-d. Yet he had no mother or father, G-d simply created him. So why would anyone believe Jesus (pbuh), who had a human mother, was literally the son of G-d rather than a creation of G-d? I realise I am asking the wrong person but I would like to put that question out there.
I would really like to understand this one, so could a couple of other Christians give me their concepts on Father, Son and Holy Ghost please and answer the question about Adam & Jesus (pbut)?
I don't have that much of a problem with the idea that Jesus was "just a human being." Whether one thinks of him as God, Son of God or a creation of God, I believe there is something more important that. The thing to me that is most important is what purpose or role he served. If Christianity is pursuit of a relationship with God, and if Jesus helped us to conceptualise God, that to me is just the same as thing. It is
Logos, God expressing Himself and making Himself understood.
