My love for, and disappointment with, the Book of Luke

The book of Luke has surprised me quite a bit. At first I was blown away, thinking, wow, this stuff is awesome!
And not just the obvious, moral overtones that are generally the most clearly defined basis for modern ethics (not that the Christians can claim these morals as their own, though I have met individuals that do). Really, I found allot of support for the gnostic notions I mentioned at the very beginning of my blog. And this has delighted me. You see, I have always found dogmatic 'youre going to hell' Christians to be loathsome at best, and in the Bible belt of California, I often argued with them from my scant knowledge of the scripture they claim inerrant. But now, in the book of Luke, I have an entire arsenal at my command!
Check it out.
As concerns the gnostic belief that Jesus was an 'enlightened' human being, as opposed to an incarnation of God, Luke is pretty damn clear. Jesus never calls himself 'son of God' only 'son of man' something like ten or fifteen times.
Demons, however, are all about calling him the son of God. So are those who mock him as he suffers. They ask him if he is the son of God and Jesus says 'ye yourselves say it.' Do Christians, in their rather Greek insistence that their savior is God incarnate, put more faith in the words of demons and murderers than the words of the Christ himself? What the hell?
There is one source that is less dismissible, however, and that is God himself. When Jesus is baptized, God comes down in form of a dove (another example of cross culturation with Greek ideas) and he says that Jesus is "my beloved son, in thee I am most pleased" (Luke 3:21) But wait! Hold thy tongues, thou vile dogmatists! Luke gives us a very important qualifier right afterward, and it is probably the only example of an interesting genealogy.
Okay, so I skimmed it like I did all the others, but at the end of Jesus' supposed lineage is this: "...which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God" (Luke 3:38).
Kapow!
Adam is the son of God because God created him. He had no father other than God. And was Adam perfect like Christ? Was he intelligent and well spoken and pure in the eyes of the lord? Fuck no! He was a putz! He ate the forbidden fruit and doomed mankind to a frightful life of knowledge, shame and death! He is not the son of God because he is perfect, or a Herculean incarnation of divine power, he is the son of God because he is a human being.

Further more, he points to the path of realization in all humans, not the normal your-all-gonna-burn attitude Christians today are so famous for. Jesus says that while humility is good, "everyone that is perfect shall be as his master" (Luke 6) because those who rule themselves need no law. "He hath come to redeem us from the curse of the law" (Galatians 3:13). This echoes the gnostic gospel Thomas pretty clearly but not as much as when Jesus says, "for behold the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20).
And as for a general distrust for the establishment, the book of Luke is rich. First, the Pharisees are railed against constantly, so that you get the picture of them not much different from Mel Gibson's the Passion: horrible men with claw like fingers and scowling faces. Christ rails against money and exploitation by the rich everywhere. Encouraging charity and coming down very clearly on the issue of money: "ye cannot serve God and mammon." But he also states some pretty Buddhist reasons. He likens mental riches ("the riches of heaven") with a house that is built on a rock, whereas status and wealth are as a house that falls at the first sign of in-climate weather.
And what gets Jesus killed? Well its not until he hits the Pharisees in the pocket book (kicking the money changers out of the temple) that the Pharisees take the gloves off. But he spends allot of time generally pissing off the establishment before this. Remember, the gnostics revered personal experience of the divine, not what a church or any congregation of the unwashed masses proclaim, for we see in the book of Luke, they are often wrong.
Some of these things are just manners of rule breaking. Jesus is the ultimate rebel, he suggests that foreigners are better neighbors than than rabbis can be (the good Samaritan), and he allows his disciples to have corn on the sabbath.
What? On the Sabbath?! Yes. They were hungry, and in Luke Jesus tells the Pharisees that this is okay because he "is the lord of the Sabbath." But in Mark 2:27, he has a more humanistic approach, saying "the sabbath was created for man, not man for the sabbath." This implies that the whole of God's laws are not something to be followed for fear of reprisal but because the law is good for people to live by. You know -supposedly.
But the one who possesses experiential, emotional knowledge is always more committed than those who simply obey, for when a blind man shouts out to the Christ to be healed, the followers hush him and rebuke him as a sinner. But the man wails and screams to be cured, and of course Jesus is committed to lifting the man's affliction, in one of many Asclepius-like healings. Another note about the importance experiential knowledge: Jesus usually tells those he has healed that their own faith, not his divinity, is responsible for their miraculous recovery.
I would like to get to where Luke really lets me down, but Ive taken way too much time on this one, for now lets just say it has to do with the social contract. And we'll get to that next time.