more from this thinker     |     more from this text

Single Idea 7351

[filed under theme 29. Religion / B. Monotheistic Religion / 4. Christianity / a. Christianity ]

Full Idea

Jesus was a member of the school of Hillel the Elder, and may have sat under him. He repeated some of the sayings of Hillel, ...and turned his ideas into a moral theology, stripping the law of all but its moral and ethical elements.

Gist of Idea

Jesus turned the ideas of Hillel into a theology reduced to its moral elements

Source

report of Jesus (reports [c.32]) by Paul Johnson - The History of the Jews Pt II

Book Ref

Johnson,Paul: 'A History of the Jews' [Phoenix 1993], p.128

A Reaction

The crucial move, it seems to me, is to strip Judaism of its complexity, and reduce it to very simple moral maxims, which means that ordinary illiterate people no longer need priests to understand and follow it. Jesus was, above all, a great teacher.

The 36 ideas with the same theme [general ideas about the Christian religion]:

7351 Jesus turned the ideas of Hillel into a theology reduced to its moral elements [Jesus, by Johnson,P]
1867 Christians presented Jesus as a new kind of logos to oppose that of the philosophers [Celsus]
6818 Allah cannot have begotten a son, as He is self-sufficient [Mohammed]
20211 Life aims at the Beatific Vision - of perfect happiness, and revealed truth [Aquinas, by Zagzebski]
9115 To love God means to love whatever God wills to be loved [William of Ockham]
7252 A tyrant exploits Christians because they don't value this life, and are made to be slaves [Rousseau]
8102 We cannot speak against Christianity without anger, or speak for it without love [Joubert]
21798 To universalise 'give everything to the poor' leads to absurdity [Hegel]
6915 Hegel made the last attempt to restore Christianity, which philosophy had destroyed [Hegel, by Feuerbach]
6686 Hegel said he was offering an encyclopaedic rationalisation of Christianity [Hegel, by Graham]
4178 Christianity is a pessimistic religion, in which the world is equated with evil [Schopenhauer]
6902 Catholicism concerns God in himself, Protestantism what God is for man [Feuerbach]
7216 The ethics of the Gospel has been supplemented by barbarous Old Testament values [Mill]
16008 The best way to be a Christian is without 'Christianity' [Kierkegaard]
20735 We need to see that Christianity cannot be understood [Kierkegaard]
2917 Christianity is a revolt of things crawling on the ground against elevated things [Nietzsche]
2867 Christianity is Platonism for the people [Nietzsche]
20245 Christianity hoped for a short cut to perfection, that skipped the hard labour of morality [Nietzsche]
20247 Christianity was successful because of its heathen rituals [Nietzsche]
14813 Science rejecting the teaching of Christianity in favour of Epicurus shows the superiority of the latter [Nietzsche]
14832 The Sermon on the Mount is vanity - praying to one part of oneself, and demonising the rest [Nietzsche]
14837 Christ seems warm hearted, and suppressed intellect in favour of the intellectually weak [Nietzsche]
14850 Christ was the noblest human being [Nietzsche]
7160 Christian belief is kept alive because it is soothing - the proof based on pleasure [Nietzsche]
2901 How could the Church intelligently fight against passion if it preferred poorness of spirit to intelligence? [Nietzsche]
18325 Christians believe that only God can know what is good for man [Nietzsche]
4499 Primitive Christianity is abolition of the state; it is opposed to defence, justice, patriotism and class [Nietzsche]
22653 Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James]
20719 Punish the heretic, but be indulgent to the sinner [Weber]
7606 The idea that Jesus was God was only settled in the fourth century [Armstrong,K]
23055 Christians introduced the idea that a religion needs a creed [Gray]
9272 Without Christianity we lose the idea that human history has a meaning [Gray]
9279 What was our original sin, and how could Christ's suffering redeem it? [Gray]
7483 Paul's early writings mention few striking episodes from Jesus' life [Watson]
7484 Jesus never intended to start a new religion [Watson]
20737 Protestantism brought the modern emphasis on inner states of the soul [Aho]