Reviews for The first coming

The average rating for The first coming based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-10 00:00:00 Steven Conrad An excellent re-examination of Jesus separating the actual words and intent of his preaching from the supernatural myths, the things falsely atttibuted to him, and the misguided ideology of the religion that took his name. Sheehan makes clear that Yeshua (his actual name) was an actual person who had a conventional birth, brothers and sisters, preached a message of mercy and forgiveness and was executed on a cross for that. If one can read other parts of the Bible as metaphorical myths (such as a man living inside a whale) then why not apply that same standard to Jesus? If one reads the accounts of his life in the actual order they were written, starting with Paul's letters about 20 years after his death and ending with John 50 years later, one can see the embellishments and hype being added to the story. More importantly, perhaps, is that while Jesus delivered a message of God's domain being already present through justice and mercy, the Church sought to push all of that back into the future in the afterlife and second coming through the myth of a physical, rather than metaphoric, resurrection. Jesus stressed that his message, and living it in the present, was the most important thing and that is what required resurrection. By demanding that his physical body came back to Earth, and will again in an apocalyptic moment, his supposed followers have entirely missed the point.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-07 00:00:00 Nicolas Van Tomme Sheehan has summarized the development of Christianity from the life and death of Jesus, through the visions of Peter and the early disciples and the revisions of the church as it grew from Aramaic speaking Jewishh Christians to Greek speaking Jewish Christians to Hellenistic Gentile converts to Christianity. He has shown how the church began with a concept of Jesus as the Son of Man who would judge the world at the end of time. The delay of the Second Coming forced Greek speaking Jewish Christians to give the a current role to Jesus as Lord and Christ, beginning at the resurrection for Paul. Twenty years later, Mark moved the identification of Jesus as the Son of God back to the time of his baptism. Fifteen years later, Matthew and Luke proclaimed that Jesus was the Son of God from the time of conception. Greek speaking gentile converts concluded that Jesus was pre-existent before creation as described in the Gospel of John and Paul's letter to the Philippians. All of these interpretations of Jesus miss the point of his message (according to Sheehan), that God is with us and grace has always been everywhere. The required response to the presence of God is mercy towards one's neighbors.