"Father, forgive them..."

[Guest]

Hello, TK,

Thank you for your response.

portraying the jeering jews as "ignorant" stretches crudility a tad; i can see your point for the roman soldiers, possibly.

What an interesting thing to say.

According to the narrative, Jesus says that the people he is praying for "know not what they do," so it appears that he thinks somebody is ignorant. The immediate context might favor the understanding that he is interceding for those who are actually driving the nails and erecting the cross (so to speak). Of course, I raised the possibility that the comment is "a piece of embroidery, intended to mitigate Gentile responsibility in the crucifixion of Jesus (emphasis added)."

Even still, do you think that every Jewish person who heckled at the crucifixion understood Jesus to be a genuine messiah - or even had sufficient acquaintance with Jesus to know anything but hearsay? After all, there had been false pretenders to messianic status before.

Shlamaa,
Emmet

[Guest]

Emmett--

at the very minimum, it is not "nice" to heckle someone who is being tortured, even if one is ignorant. but human nature being what it is, i suppose your interpretation could be correct, except for the embroidery part. i can't buy into that; mainly because it is exactly like something jesus would say.

TK

[Guest]

Just my 2 cents, i don't think forgiveness is conditional upon repentence , i think reconciliation is. Jesus told us that if we don't forgive neither will we be forgiven.
He did also say "if your brother repents forgive him" so apparently their is both unconditional forgiveness and reconciling forgiveness.
Now re Jesus's statement i think the "them" Jesus refers to is really two types of people, the immediate in this context but also "the world" because the world is responsible for his cruxifiction.
And forgiveness allows the unrepentant the mercy to enter the lake of fire but to be reconciled to God takes repentence and obedience and restoration and making Christ your Lord and anything else God deems necessary to get through the LOF. 8)

[Guest]

Hello, TK,

Thank you for your reply.

at the very minimum, it is not "nice" to heckle someone who is being tortured, even if one is ignorant.

I can appreciate your point, but then again, "nice" is culturally and situationally relative; we may consider Psalm 137:9, for example. And not even Jesus was "nice" all the time, no?

In the first century context, messianic pretenders were not merely a social curiosity; they had the potential to precipitate a harsh Roman reaction against the Jewish nation. As such, hecklers may have felt it appropriate or desirable (whether consciously or sub-consciously) to make an example of messianic pretenders. Public mockery was a social cue to discourage such starry-eyed aspiration, and it also served to distance both individual hecklers and the people as a whole from such troublemakers in the eyes of the Romans.

but human nature being what it is, i suppose your interpretation could be correct, except for the embroidery part. i can't buy into that; mainly because it is exactly like something jesus would say.

Reasons for suspecting it as embroidery:

(aleph) it is a striking and noble saying, so it is curious (though not utterly inexplicable) that none of the other gospels preserve it;

(beth) Luke's personal background makes the inclusion of such a seeming sop to Gentile sensibilities appear questionable.

Such considerations are, of course, not conclusive.


Shlamaa,
Emmet