About eighteen months ago I started down an eighteen-month rabbit hole, only recently to emerge. The hole was highly restrictive yet absurdly complex - at least for me. The quest started innocently enough. If Jesus did, then how in the Greek did he make mention of collective entities - entities that he himself was a part. Notably to me, the ekkelsia (church) was in mind.
Now, before you ran around shouting an answer like, “We, we, we!”. We is a first person plural. True, a collective may consist of many individuals or parts, but it is not a plural. A restriction was that Jesus had to speak the word and he had to be part of that collective. A complexity was that Jesus never says he is part of the ekkelsia.
Suppose your car could talk. Think about it, I mean Mr. Ed did talk and he was a horse. Suppose every single piece of your car, as an individual and distinct piece could talk, then in what frame of reference would the car (collective) speak. See, the car is not a piece - not a piece of the car - but a collective term that identifies the sum total of all the individual parts. The car could not speak in the first, second, or third person, UNLESS speaking to other such entities. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. How is the car able to give a narrative without speaking from a place of “personhood”?
SIDENOTE: We all need to belong to a “hood” - personhood is an easy and familiar starting point.
Like I was saying, I was looking around in a rabbit hole. In my internet search I came upon two, no three, websites that seemed to fit the details for which I was questing. First, https://kindlepreneur.com/point-of-view/ and https://kindlepreneur.com/fourth-person/ delves into the a point of view. The second website is https://christswords.com and lastly (third) is https://rediscoveryingjesus.subsatck.com.
The last two sites produce mild conniption fits in the corpuscles of my thinking. I eventually decided to develop my own “Jesus Words Only” ‘bible’ modules to use inside the “theWord” bible software program that I use for searching into such biblical thingies. This took some time. Actually a lot of time - a steep learning curve for this less than agile mind. Jesus spoken about 30,426 words in total, which are recorded in the four gospels and the first chapter of Acts.
Did you ever wonder what words Jesus actually used, how many times, and what words he did not use? Hmmmm?
As of this writing two things stand out to me - I sure there are many, many more. Ya know, a fact is simply a point were we agree to let investigation cease.
One thing is this. Jesus did not use the word “hope” - at all. Yes, hope as in the noun “elpis”, as in the Greek. Wait, wait, wait, don’t stop reading. “Hope” is not even used anywhere in the gospel writings or up and through Acts 1:8, which holds the last words spoken by Jesus. Peter is the first to use “elpis” in Acts 2:26. He did use elpizo, a verb, two times - Luke 6:34 and John 5:45.
There was no “hope” in Jesus’s message. This boggled my mind. “So what!”, might be your thought. I reply with a “So WHAT? How can this not be important.”
A second thingy is this, one of his most spoken phrases is, wait for it, wait for it, is “son of the man”. Jesus uses this phase in more than seventy-five verses. Without getting too messy, but for the purpose of searching the Greek, the phrase is huios ho/hE/to anthrOpos. So what! SO WHAT?. Do ya know how many times it is used elsewhere in the new testament. I’m guessing you probably don’t. One time. Yes, just one time in Acts 7:56. Boy, I bet you can now really smoke some friends in that biblical trivia game.
Well, the first thingy, “no hope” in Jesus’s message, left be bummed out for about two weeks. But that’s okay cuz there was another direction I was permitted to go. So I went there.
The second thingy, “son of-the man/mankind” and Paul’s total lack of use thereof has me awondering. Awondering is more than just a simple wondering. Then I speculated that Paul’s use of the word “Christ” is a replacement for Jesus’ “son of-the man/mankind”.
Okay then. That should about do it for now.
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