Tfw reading the sermon on the mount for the first time and realizing how much of this stuff I already consciously and...

>implying they hadn't existed for at least hundreds of years in the torah
Have you ever read the torah, you ignorant ass? Just compare the sermon on the mount with the decalogue.

Have you? Try actually reading the Torah, Prophets and Writings, not just the decalogue. Everything about the righteousness of the oppressed is in the Old Testament. Compare the Beatitudes to Psalms 24:4-5, 37:11, 73:1, and Isaiah 61:2-3.

Man, all the parallels to the Old Testament are actually pointed out in my copy of Bible.
Of course, Jesus' sermon is overshadowed by older prophecies but his message was new nonetheless. What was even the point of Jesus if everything he said was already said in the past?

>What was even the point of Jesus if everything he said was already said in the past?
I don't know, that's for Christians to explain. Jesus was clearly a product of his time.

>hurr I woulda figured it out first if I was there
>unlike the hundreds of thousands of years of Homo sapiens that all lived before they were articulated
DAMN user you must be FUCKING SMART DOG

Aren't you, by chance, a jew, my friend?

The old wisdom always has to be reintroduced when a society has come to stray from the path of their original natural laws. The different ways of telling old stories are simply a method of revivifying them to be more analogous to the current mode of life, in the case that people have stopped following the old guidance because it was written for, about, and therefore is only relevant to, an old way of life that we have become detached from thereby making it seemingly irrelevant or outdated. We've frankly been telling each the same stories for thousands of years but just updating the vehicles that the story is told through to give it relevance and relatability anew. While my familiarity with the Bible is not so good (as a matter of memory, not having not read it), I have heard mention that a primary commonality between all the prophets is that they arise when the current king has become a corrupt, or heretical, or unjust despot, and that the message of the prophet is for them to return to the way of God and stop violating our intrinsic moral framework before bad things happen; and to tie the matter of Jesus together with that: Jesus was just the last, and final, in a long line of prophets all espousing such the same general message, although Jesus just seems to do it better. He accomplishes it as the apex model of articulation rather than being a simple messenger bringing an appeal from God ("go and tell the king X"), or a messenger appealed through by God ("don't worry if you have a clumsy tongue, for I shall speak through you when the time is come"), which is of course unnecessary since he himself is God.

At least that's how it seems to me.

But the thing is, Old Testament has a form of spirituality that is quite different from the New Testament. Especially the Pentateuch; it's pathos sometimes even contradicts the christian pathos (compare "eye for an eye" with "another cheek").
We are certainly not telling the same old stories in new clothes because the meaning of modern "stories" is different. We are living in the age of different social circumstances than before, and Christ was preaching in a whole different age than all prophets prior. Humanity is constantly evolving and not only technologically or socially; spiritually it also changes.
>to return to the way of God
But "the way of God' itself had changed with the coming of Christ. Instead of demanding absolute submission from humanity he gave us a choice through the figure of Christ: accept "the way of God" or abide in self-confined sin. God's image and pathos has changed in the New Testament. He became more "respectful" with humanity (it is really hard to put this theological concepts in plain words so don't fret on me about it) then before when he was treating us as his servants. We became his sons.

almost as if God from NT is different from OT...

Christ can suck my d*ck

It is theologically-correct to say that his attude to us changed. But you can also say that it is our concept of God changed.

>that his attude to us changed.
Let me elaborate this.
The humanity had changed since the times of OT, so God changed his attitude towards us.
Instead of being mindless fucks who would worship anything and sin like there's no tomorrow we became more adhering to God and so He gaved us his grace, the Redeemer.

>I understand that such a demand made more sense for the earliest days of the religion when the final judgement was understood to be so near
Is there any historical evidence that they believed the end times to be near? Or at least, any more than say the minority of every generation that says the end of times is right around the corner?
I feel the Christ's ministry was radical back then, radical 1000 years ago, and remains so today

You had better read On the Genealogy of Morals pronto my guy

Perhaps Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship for user here, i.e. if intellectual honesty has made the cut of revalued values. OP has just been conditioned in and by a Christian culture, and the purpose of his having read the Sermon is to learn that once it was radical, not at all the conventional wisdom that it now seems to have become. Bonhoeffer's book focuses on the Sermon, and endeavors to show just how radical it still truly is.

Considering the profusion of apocalyptic writing during the Second Temple period and the similar language used by Jesus, Paul, and John in Revelation, yes there is. Daniel 11-12 has the apocalypse happening during the reign of Antiochus IV (c. 164 BC) which it calls "the end of time". The Damascus Document used by the Qumran sect says their teacher of righteousness appeared at the end of days (CD 6.10-12) i.e. the community believed it existed in the end times (see also 1QSa 1.1). Jesus uses highly apocalyptic language in Mark 13 involving the coming of the Son of Man, and in Mark 9:1 he says this will happen while some of his disciples are still alive. Paul says Jesus is coming soon and that some of his contemporaries will be around when he returns at the eschaton, e.g. 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17. Revelation 1 says the vision reveals what must "soon take place" and that "the time is near", at 22:7 Jesus says he is "coming soon".

Some other Jewish apocalyptic writings from that era, and earlier, include 1 Enoch, sections of Jubilees, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, and much of the Qumran literature.

>you disagree with me
>you must be a jew
I'm not.

>>you must be a jew
>I'm not.
Understatement of the role of Christ and considering him to be "just another prophet" is a typically judaistic point of view.

Yea but like the reasons that God changed its mind seems lame anyway

>it's pathos sometimes even contradicts the christian pathos (compare "eye for an eye" with "another cheek")
The entire Bible is structured so that the Old Testament paves the way for Christ's emergence. The story of someone like Job holds its own wisdom, of course, but it's pretty clearly being used to help demonstrate that Christ was a desperately needed change for both man and God

God is unchangable. The only thing that changes is humanity and it's relationship with God.
>The entire Bible is structured so that the Old Testament paves the way for Christ's emergence.
It may seem so, but you should keep in mind that Old Testament is basically the Torah, and the Torah is way older than Bible. OT may be percieved as an independent body of religious text (as it is in Judaism tradition) while NT can't because it heavily relies on OT.

>the story of Job holds its own significance
>addresses the problem of evil with because God

Christian ethics is just a worse version of schools that already existed back then, but require less extreme suspension of disbelief. At the end of the day, Christianity only works if the historical basis for it is sound, but that's impossible to verify and highly unlikely anyway. The best you can do is have a highly eclectic reading of it like existentialism which doesn't jive with any major denomination.

>Christian ethics is just a worse version of schools that already existed back then
It is not entirely correct to juxtapose christian ethics with any philosophical ethics, because christian ethics are not based on any sort of reason.

George MacDonald had a really good essay on this. Money isn't neccesarily a terrible thing but clinging to it thinking it is your 'salvation' is what is a sin. There is nothing neccesarily wrong with having a lot of money from doing GOOD works but making shoddy works and mass producing them as cheaply as possible to turn a profit is something to be ashamed of imo.

In our technological world where we can sell things at the click of a button there will be a lot more billionaires and rich people in general. The market has also never been as global and worldwide. But I'd go as far as to say this has had a negative effect on society as a whole. We are more disconnected from one another than ever, more selfish, and less obiedient to reason. So most people blame others or systems on their own problems. Not realizing they need to repent and be born again.

>God is unchangeable
That doesn't make any sense coz Jesus wasn't around in OT. Nor do humans fundamentally changed between OT and NT

I'll give it a read, sounds good

That just goes to show you how culturally significant Christianity had become since the sermon was written down, to the point that many people are almost completely dominated by Christian values to the point they don't even recognize them as Christian. Those morals in the gospels aren't exactly the default ethics that Human beings just develop out of nothing.

Jesus and everyone who followed him had their lives fucking ruined. They ended up poor, with no wife, despised, and eventually they were dragged to court, tried, and killed in the most gruesome way imaginable: their only reconciliation being the hope that after they die things will somehow get better.

Jesus was a complete and total failure in life. Don't follow the teachings of an emasculated loser.

fbfp

>I'm reading the David Bentley Hart translation so I feel comfortable in assuming I'm reading the closest thing I can to the original gospels.
DBH projects his own views on the text.

To an extent, of course. But it's better than the committee-negotiated translations in terms of accuracy and honest portrayal of the sentiment