As a writer and amateur historian who researches and writes on topics of religion, and not being a trained scholar who is able to translate texts for myself, I rely on books such as this one to give me the tools to ply my trade. This is a particularly juicy one since the Beelzebul Controversy has always struck me as a key component to understanding just what the heck was going on back then.
In my opinion, based on wide reading, there's a real possibility that the "god" that "Jesus" was talking about in terms of the "heavenly father" and the "kingdom of god" may very well have been "Beelzebul" and not Yahweh. It seems clear from reading the works of Burton Mack:
A MYTH OF INNOCENCE (Foundations & Facets Series)
", the
The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins
,
Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth
, etc., as well as the works of other biblical scholars and historians of religion, such as Thomas L. Thompson, Phillip Davies, John van Seters, Giovanni Garbini, Niels Peter Lemche, and others, that Jesus very probably was not a Jew at all and it was only Jewish Christians who sought to cast him in that role to underwrite their "Synagogue reform" intentions, to indemnify themselves against the charge of following after "foreign gods."
In "Christian Origins and the Language of the Kingdom of God," Michael L. Humphries analyzes the "Beelzebul controversy" and draws some fascinating conclusions, though he doesn't go as far as I have in the above statement. It was only while reading his analysis that it occurred to me that it was obvious that the god of the real "Jesus" WAS Beelzebul.
This book is a very good explication of the problem of the Beelzebul Controversy and the argument is generally well presented and well-reasoned. I would recommend this book also to a general, non-expert reader for some very good background on biblical texts and how they are studied by scholars.
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