It's not very good, but about all I have time or ability to do right now and he's bugging me for a response. If anyone can correct gross errors or suggest clarity, I'd appreciate it.
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You say you don't believe "any of this stuff." Out of curiosity, do you doubt the historicity of the events themselves or just the post-event claims and conclusions we draw from them? If both, I'm curious of the basis of doubting the historicity.
I apologize for the poor grammar and structure here. Parenting is bar none the most difficult (and rewarding) things I have ever done, and I am absolutely exhausted when I get kids to bed (emotionally, physically, and mentallly). Were I 20 or 30 it might be easier. Regrettably, if I don't get a light day and free lunch, I rarely have time to spend on such things these days. I think we have another year or two before I start to reclaim some part of my mind and time. OK, enough excuses...
Volumes could be (and have been) written on such things, and it's a lot to handle in an email on borrowed time. I'm a bit all over the place here but this should give you some idea (scattered though it is) of some of the Christian responses. I wish I had more time to reflect and digest and synthesize for you and suggest a few literate works but like any complex subject there is a lot of "cruft" to get to a shared context, and it can feel a bit like explaining third order derivatives to someone that won't or hasn't studied arithmetic. It's all the more difficult when you're an amateur mathematician yourself who clings to limited understanding. Though I am intellectually motivated in this area, and spend a great deal of time studying these things and reading early and recent thinkers, there is a ton of divergence and reconvergence of many of these ideas and thousands of years and culture losing context, etc., and much of it is still very difficult to me to synthesize. Thankfully, though, the basics are all pretty simple to the extent we are required to understand them. Too few people stop there, though and don't ask the sort of probing questions you and I would ask. If they did, then maybe we would have a better and more full shared vocabulary and context in the world to discuss these concepts. Left to theologians, it remains somewhat obtuse and mysterious.
I commend you for trying to understand even when it doesn't resonate, and I only hope I can shed some light for you - not to convince you but out of respect for you and your inquiry (and of course a glimmer of hope you might one day understand and agree). Your intellect would be very useful to Christendom. I dare say even pagan philosophers have contributed to proper theology, and a great number of modern theologians are non-Christians, but study these things for their intellectual value.
Standing back a bit, the over-arching element that most fail to appreciate is the self-limiting habit of God. What God "can do" is not always the same thing as what he "does." Also difficult is the interwoven notion that God can "know all things" and yet "freewill" can still exist. A branch of Christian theology driven by symbolic logic known as Evangelical Open Theism would handle this by the theory that God knows everything but "everything" doesn't include the future because it doesn't exist yet. They handle his prophetic ability by his power akin to a master chessman who knows every conceivable move and can not be thwarted by any particular move to ensure a particular outcome. That's a bit of a digression, but I think studying Open Theists like Greg Boyd might really interest you on a number of philosophical levels, and Judas is practically a case study for them. I don't think they have it quite right, but it's a very interesting theory. There are a number of Boyd lectures online, and a number of peer reviewed papers by this crowd that even non-Christian logicians seem to appreciate. Much of that pure symbologic logic is lost on me, but it's stimulating reading. A friend recently recommended the following article about God and time which although I haven't read it seems to have an excellent bibliography of some "unconventional" authors you might benefit from reading "
http://internal.ccuniversity.edu/seminary/Cottrell.pdf".
With regard to "blame", some of the "suspects"/"sinners" here would include the Jewish crowds (who "gave him up"), the Jewish leaders (who gave him up out of fear and vengeance and to remove a threat to their own camps/divisions) and Pilate (who sacrificed him out of weakness or political or other gain) - of Judas (who betrayed him), of the other disciples (who failed him in their watch). All of them sinned. It is never God's will that man sin. However, God is able to redeem man's sin and use it for his purposes. The fact that God can and does use man's sin to his ends doesn't negate the condemnation of the sinner for their actions. There are many examples of this in scripture. There is a big debate about whether God's foreknowing events such as this prevents freewill from being exercised. Questioning whether it could have come out any other way is interesting, but usually leads to sophistry as our logic fails when a "mover" outside our physicality that is not bound by time (or perhaps cause and effect) is involved. The philosophy of staunch Calvinist (the main thread evolving from the Reformation such as Presbyterians) would suggest God intended for the sinner to sin and that each of their evil actions would derive from God's will which controls everything with "meticulous sovereignty" akin to a director in a play (I disagree strongly with this view by the way). Their critics (such as myself) would say they make God the "author of evil" instead of merely working with that evil and orchestrating His larger will within those freewill choices (both good and bad). Looking at Judas as an example, I think it could well have happened through another person if necessary as God has a lot of variables at His disposal and there are plenty of evil intentions to work with without causing an individual to do a bad thing. Pharaoh (re: egyptian exile - Moses) is another example. The bible says God "hardened his heart" and many people think that means God caused Pharaoh to treat the Egyptians badly. I don't think that's a necssary conclusion. I think God found Pharaoh already with an evil heart and having done evil continually, God "gave him over" to his "reprobation" (as the bible says God will do when a person has gone so far down the path of evil, etc.) and quit intervening to protect His people from Pharaoh or influencing Pharaoh in ways that would restrain his evil. In that way, His will was done with the Egyptians to get them exiled so that they could become His people and enter the promised land and so on. That doesn't mean that Pharaoh was to be "praised" for his evil anymore than Judas, but only that God can be praised for using even such evil to further His larger plans. God likewise used evil nations to do His bidding and judge peoples -- that doesn't give virtue to their actions. God had been restraining evil and He simply let it go for the furtherance of His plan. We have many examples of evil men and evil intentions (through wars and otherwise) leading to horrific situations that in the scheme of things turn out to be positive turning points for mankind or a society. That doesn't mean we praise those evil men or their actions. Not a perfect analogy, but if I shoot someone, and during surgery to remove the bullet they discover a tumor that would have killed him and they remove it, I still go to jail and am not a hero for saving his life. I see Judas in the same way.
Your side point about Jesus "holding back" from himself since he was God is also difficult -- there is no concept more difficult than the trinity and we don't have a lot of information and probably couldn't comprehend the reality of a prime mover God even if we had more. There is no shortage of metaphors etc. to try and understand the Trinity, and all no doubt fall short of the reality. We are bound in this 4 dimensional reality, and really don't have capacity to escape that context. However, we do have bits and pieces to form some understanding to the extent we need to understand it. One of the best metaphors to me is to view God as the Sun. We don't really see the sun - we feel its warmth and see photons that evidence it's reality. The Holy Spirit can be seen as its warmth and Jesus the light. Both are different from the sun but part of it. There is only one sun, but it has different aspects and we experience it differently through each. Others speak to "personalities" of God - god in three "persons" but that doesn't really help me so much. The bible doesn't really say we have a trinity or three part God (or three essence or three nature God) and there are MANY views of this. I personally lean towards a "two-part/essence" God with the Spirit merely being the spirit shared by both. Since the "spiritual" is so hard to grasp, none of probably get it right anyway so I cling pretty loosely to this largely unknowable idea. I even have some respect for those who question whether Jesus is actually God but instead would share in God's deity as a prince would be fully "royal" without being King. The bible requires us to believe that He has the full authority of God and that He rules God's kingdom, and that we worship him as God, but the same would apply in many cultures to a prince, and many of the relevant texts are somewhat ambiguous. There are some unambiguous texts that convince me that He is actually God, but I don't think that's the measure of true Faith that some would. The narrative of John's visions in Revelation and paying attention to who the characters are in that vision make it pretty clear that Jesus is speaking and is spoken of as the alpha and omega, which (among other parts of that narrative) is clearly a reference to the everlasting Yahweh (the Father, God, who always was and created all things). So, I think those would deny Jesus' "GOD-ness" get it wrong, but if it were that important at that level, I believe Jesus or his apostles would have made it abundantly clear for us.
With respect to Jesus as god-man and his logical omniscience that would seem to follow, there is a concept called "kenosis" (greek for "emptying") that describes God's emptying of aspects of his deity so that as "god-man" Jesus was both fully man and fully God in His "nature," but he lacked certain characteristics of his "god-ness" that would have prevented him from having full "humanity" with all the weaknesses and temptations etc. that a man would have. The bible says he came in the "form" of man, but didn't "cling" to His godness in that aspect so that he could fully identify with us, be tempted as we would be, and yet fulfill God's law as no man had ever been able to do and be the perfect sacrifice that the former jewish system had only hoped to have had in their animal sacrifices. The bible also tells us that Jesus lacked full knowledge and only lived day by day by the influence of God's "spirit" which communicated to Him what the "Father" (the part of God in Heaven that emptied himself partially by becoming a man) wanted Him to do and to know. So, yes, I think God held back some things from Jesus and that he had to walk in faith just as we are to do. Things were revealed to him progressively, I believe and he remained faithful to the end even when it became clear that he must die. In fact, in the hours before his arrest, he struggled with the Father in prayer hoping the Father's will could happen any other way. So, yes, in that way God did in a way kill himself (but only the man, his offspring) as the ultimate expression of His love for man. No greater love has any man but that he lay down his life for another. Since God can't die fully, this was the most full way He could do that without being non-existent (not a possibility).
As to "why have you forsaken me," that too is a much-misconstrued saying. There are many theories about this, but the main ones (or the ones that resonate with me) are (1) in order for Jesus to fully be a sacrifice for all sins of men forever and enable them to be forgiven by God (if they choose to "join his team"), he had to actually (spiritually) take on those sins. So, this man who knew no sin in a sense "became sin" at the instant of his death and at that moment he felt separation for the first time from His father in heaven and felt the full guilt of sin committed by others. In this view, it was a cry of agony. It doesn't require that GOd actually "forsook" Jesus, but that he felt that way. OR (2) this was merely Jesus' way of confirming that this was that prophesied moment in history that scriptures had spoken of in the prophets. This phrase was a very familiar part of a prophesy about the messiah who was to come and would immediately have brought to mind in those jews observing the scene that this was that moment (most Jews still didn't "get it" yet at that time - and still don't). The quoting of that verse didn't mean to imply that Jesus actually was forsaken in that moment, but instead simply applying that scripture to this moment so that the rest of it which did apply to Him would be noticed by those in observance. (3) very similar to 2 above, He was fulfilling the prophets (Psalm 22 in this case), and he was speaking as mankind's representative and asking God on their behalf a very rhetorical "why are you not helping me?" That was the question - the answer was man's sin, and Jesus was providing the solution to the very question he was asking.
There are a good many books and philosophers and theologians throughout the ages who have grappled deeply and voluminously with these issues, and I think far too few philosophers today respect or read those with as much intellectual vigor as they would some pagan philosopher who babbles sophistrial (is that a word?) nonsense.