Honestly, you're overthinking it:
Jesus didn't know who he was, do you?
That part is easy enough, but everything between you've managed to overcomplicate.
Okay this is the gist of the thread. "Was the God Jesus spoke to the God of the Old Testament?".
Yes. We should take a moment to recall your earlier exploration of
"What was Jesus like?"↗ Perhaps we might
revisit a suggestion↗ that Jesus emerging through post-Essene influence is actually the sort of thing a usurpation of the Hebrew experience would downplay. There are two elements about that point begging attention; first is the emergence through post-Essene influence, and then there is also the point of usurpation itself.
The thing is, none of the Jewish teachings predict Jesus no matter how you swing it. Being brought up a Jew combined to knowing he was special he must of thought "i must be the messiah". This clearly wasn't the case, as the hogwash that is the old testament says the messiah would usher in world peace, which clearly didn't happen.
There are three sentences in the paragraph quoted above:
1) That's kind of a broad claim that, by its construction, cannot be validated.
2) If, for instance, Jesus emerging through post-Essene influence isn't quite subtle enough for scholars who wouldn't waste their time on you or me, we might also recall that, while we need not particularly dispute the idea that Jesus came up thinking there was something special about himself, the textual indicators are scant°, and the most suggestive,
Lk. 2.41-52↱ is a literary curiosity. In any case, the other thing we know about Jesus as a child is that He fled to Egypt in his early years, and later returned to Nazarene, his parents guided by angels,
cf.,
Mt. 2↱. Matthew (
13.55-56↱) and Mark (
6.3↱) both include a synoptic tale in which we learn that Jesus had four brothers and an unknown number of sisters. More directly, he is the eldest son among many siblings, and also existentially scandalous in a family not without means and apparently guided by angels; it is uncertain what his time with John the Baptist actually meant, but I'm of the opinion that we cannot underestimate the effect of hearing voices in one's head; I came across a note on the crowd also hearing, in Matthew's telling, but I'm uncertan which translation that relies on. At any rate,
Mark 1.12 (RSV)↱ tells us the next thing that happened is that the Holy Spirit immediately (
εὐθύς) "drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness". "Being brought up a Jew", and, "knowing he was special", reads thinly inasmuch as many figures of history and legend can be described according to upbringing and a vague pretense of believing themselves better than others. To the other, returning to the Passover story from Luke, what Jesus said to his parents was, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" Did he know he was special? Well, his parents told him stories and believed themselves guided by angels. Did he know he was illegitimate? Yeah, try reading Lk. 2.49 in the tone of a petulant teenager mouthing off to his parents; he knew he was scandalous. Meanwhile, we actually have a record of Jesus hearing voices that drove him into the desert, and it's not oppositional propaganda.
3) We're quite a ways past that, and while folks are free to question whatever definitions and explanations the faithful put in front of them, balbutive that relies on one's own definitions doesn't happen. Peace just doesn't pop up
ex nihilo because Jesus died on the Cross, or rose again three days later, or any of that. Unless you actually know what that peace means, all you're doing is asserting your dissatisfaction with an expectation of reality according to Christian belief; to a certain degree, even in an atheistic critique, that expectation would be to the beholder. In any case, the discussion among believers I hear is well past that; and, in any case, there is some manner of vanquishing the enemies of God and Christ involved, and that clearly isn't over and done with.
Returning to the question of the God of the Old Testament, the only question of doubt is injected into the usurpation. It is pretty clear, throughout, the answer is yes.
What did happen is that the world became more and more violent, at times even the old testaments god chosen people were disgustingly killed for no reason other than being born.
What makes you think you or anyone else would understand the will of God? The Lord of the Old Testament only ever acknowledged a mistake once, when repenting of a kingship after Saul failed to complete genocide (
1 Sam. 15.11↱); animals are to be set aflame in sacrifice because it creates a sweet savor, a pleasing odor, a sweet-smelling oblation unto the Lord. Once upon a time, I could hear atheists, for instance, asking, "God's will? What kind of God wills tragedy?" Or, perhaps, "God is good? How is what happened good?" The answer, of course, is unsatisfactory, that what counts as good or tragic to us is not necessarily relevant to God. The quickest way around this is to just do what the religious people do, and judge as if one knows God's will. Meanwhile, this is the God who once smote a man for raping a woman who was obliged to have sex with him (
Gen. 38.10↱), and the long-term lesson isn't really about rape, is ostensibly about disobeying God; that it is reduced in its Christianist usurpation to a warning against masturbation does not help the matter. There is an idea in these beliefs that nothing happens withoug God's will, permission, authority, &c. If God is good, then what comes of His will is good. That you or I or anybody else might fail to comprehend why it is good remains precisely irrelevant to God.
"No reason other than being born"? You seem to have missed the point. Of every reason I might have to not want to be a Jew, I usually say lox, which, of course, is a joke; but of existential envy I cannot possibly imagine what it must be like to reconcile God's will with such catastrophes as the Nazi Holocaust. After all, "no reason other than being born", when one is Jewish, pretty much equals, "Because God says so." For whatever reason, God needed this or that to happen, and most days, it is easy enough to accept that God is not extraneous. To the other, this is the freaking
Holocaust. Suffering inflicted for no other reason than being born? Welcome to Jewish history.
But, this much is true: Where do you begin? The point at which we begin is arbitrary, so you will begin where you begin. Jesus didn't know who he was? Well, that would be perfectly human, but the idea of such frailty made the faithful so uncomfortable they enshrined heresy while maintaining the standard of heresy, and invoked a square circle to justify themselves.
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Notes:
Weigle, Luther, et al. The Bible: Revised Standard Version. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1971. University of Michigan. 5 May 2019. http://bit.ly/2rJddky
