It's not as if the trinity doctrine wasn't nonsensical enough, so someone had to extrapolate another order of silliness.

Meanwhile all the rest of the adherents to the other Abrahamic religions remain unconvinced they are actually worshiping Jesus. Kinda funny how faith works against you sometimes.

'Some' here have a slight bird saying nobody wants to have a serious discussion and answer truthfully what their belief is.

So then, someone attempts and pffft on them.

Are being false, it means that the person writing or speaking that phrase is interpreting your actions in the described manner.

Many of us have in fact managed to learn a lot about Christian theology. This attempt to find Jesus in the Torah is a prime example of theological nonsense and intellectual dishonesty. It assumes that Jesus always existed, then proves it by using that assumption to claim that any manifestation of their gods must be Jesus. The text doesn’t support that claim, the claim is entirely overlayed onto the text.

Do you hold that it is contains words from Elohim, El Shaddai, the Lord G-d, or what you would like to call Him if anything?

I am simply interested.

Nobody knows the Torah better than the Jews. Who wrote it. And they don't believe that Jesus was ever supported by it.

To come to the conclusion that he was, Christians had to resort to some pretty strained, speculative readings. By way of some pretty sly Greek-influenced exegites. Like Philo, Origen, Paul.

To this day, most Jews don't believe in Jesus. Nearly all rabbis dismiss the idea that God supported him.

To create ideas not found in the text. They were also Greek-influenced. So I don't think Christianity should be looked at as solely a Greek innovation. It's more of a Greek version of a lost Jewish sect.

Last edited Wed Sep 19, 2018, 06:17 AM - Edit history (1)

Approximately.

It might be though that even any original Jewish sect was already very Hellenistic; Greco-Roman influenced.

to G-d. Any names. Not asking about 'Jesus' here.

Elohim is thought to be plural for gods; used also for God.

So many slightly different names for God makes the Bible pretty shifty, shuffle-y. Some hint it suggests many different gods as origin of God.

And then suddenly God changes his name in part to Jesus?

It's hard to find a stable core.

'God changing His name in part to Jesus'.

But then: "Some hint it suggests...."

Hinting and suggesting.

Scholars have to start with that.

At least some though, have gotten firm. Many mythicists flatly say that God is borrowed from many other gods. Including a sky or thunder God. Or' many autocratic human " lord"s.

Some scholarly theologians were sometimes almost rational, as much as religious. Augustine and Aquinas supported the "rational soul" fairly often; supporting reason as the defining mark of humanity..

Are you from a Greek orthodox background? Lots of the New Testament seems influenced by a Greek, Philo belief in a universal " logos." Which is normally translated as "word." But which I argue is better translated by its cognate, "logic."

We communicated at a Greek Orthodox church before transitioning to one OCA: Orthodox Church in America.

It is the Jewish book of silly nonsense, mostly awful myths, frequently horrible moral edicts, and generally inaccurate history. But despite all that it has zero references to this Jesus guy.

The text doesn't control the tradition, the tradition controls how they read the text.

The claim is of course driven by the belief. However when that belief leads to specific claims about the real world we can evaluate it outside of the belief system.

Also the cited lineage of this claim puts it square in the middle of the murderous inter-Christian disputes over the “true nature of Christ”, with the triumphant orthodox side having to have the texts confirm an always existent Jesus.

Last edited Tue Sep 18, 2018, 09:16 AM - Edit history (1)

to make the claim. Followers of a tradition usually don't realize how the tradition may be inconsistent with the text.

The fact that such doctrines sometimes don't follow the text, just makes them foolish or malicious. Since they often pretend to be faithful to some original text.

For that matter though, the original text is just as ridiculous and evil,.as the misunderstanding of it.

So fidelity to the original is not any great virtue either. Though it can avoid hypocrisy and inconsistency, it has any number of other flaws in it.

And the text itself is transmitted, altered and reinterpreted by a tradition that claims authority over it. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox claim you can't actually read and understand the text without the authorized interpretation. It's really only Protestants that claim to read Scripture alone, but they don't really do that either. Then some secular readers taking cue from the Protestants try to read it the same way, but now with a secular understanding. But we can't do it either. We are really just taking educated guesses. We don't know who actually wrote most of it, when they wrote it and how it might have changed before being finalized.

So if one wants to keep a tradition alive without the murderous parts, does that still make one a murderer too?

meaning of words in texts is valid. In addition examining motivation- as in there was a centuries long bitter theological dispute going on at the time- is irrelevant.

Ok. Seems dubious to me, but you are certainly entitled to hold that position.

My position is that following a tradition does not mean endorsing everything about that tradition. If you wish to criticize such a tradition, it's not sufficient to just engage the base text, you need to look at the tradition itself, it's claims, entire history and current state.

This is a much harder thing to do that to just look at a single text or some ancient history, because you are looking at a much larger and ever growing body of literature. That doesn't mean anything in it is actually correct. It just means that shooting down the base text mostly misses the mark.

by its murderous past.

due to critical thinking skills abandoning me.

Theology is filled with dishonest actors.

So there's that.

Personally I could care less what someone believes without proof. The theology angle is of some interest to me. If someone wants to "believe" references to whomever exist in the OT, more power to them, but trying to convince someone who doesn't have such blind faith is a bit more of a challenge when the best answer is essentially 'it's in there, but it just doesn't say it'. Especially when literary biblical references against the divinity of Christ are actually stronger than for it.

The theology angle is of 'some' interest to you. So, there's that. At the least interest.

I have positively no intention of proselytizing anyone, anywhere. It's nowheres even remotely near that. I got stopped several times out shopping and asked "if I was saved". I got totally bummed out. We Orthodox don't practice that. We're not uppity and elitist in our Faith, but we don't do that and are not encouraged to or taught to do that.

And then there are the JWs. No further comment.

Show us your 'faith' by acts, not just rattling off Bible verses by rote that many times are picked out leaving adjacent ones by the wayside.

Moses did not exist, so you have post Christ theologians interpreting myths to find evidence for a Jesus that we can't be sure resembled anything in the NT.

And then it's Turtles, all the way down.

breaks the rules, however, DU members often hold subjective views, as do I.

I read the entire King James version, every Book, as a work of literature, and the culture of times gone by. "praise be"

No matter what your intent or that how you viewed it as a piece of literature.

So, In the interest of dialogue, and assuming that these responders feel that they are serious, here are my points:

The Messiah was to be born at Bethlehem: Micah 5:2

The Messiah would be from the tribe of Judah: Genesis 49:10


The Messiah would be tortured to death: Psalm 22:1-31


The Messiah’s life, including His eventual suffering, silence at his arrest and trial, death and burial in a rich man’s tomb, and resurrection: Isaiah 52:13-53:12

I could refer to more, but these are sufficient.

Some thought they could resurrect. Or live on in memory (Sirach).

Most cultures have stories of heroes dying to save their people. It's a common kind of story, worldwide, historically.

Before Jesus, you could say Socrates died as a martyr for Reason.

Some scholars suggest that the story of Jesus was doctored, redacted; to make it look like earlier stories, prophesies. Especially the birth and resurrection narratives. The beginning and end of stories are where scribal additions are most likely to take place.

It was about 70 yrs after the alleged death of Christ before anyone even bothered writing down anything he allegedly said. Compare this to Socrates who lived and died 4 centuries before Christ and his disciples were writing his words down before he died. It’s far more reasonable to assume the Christ mythology was almost completely manufactured.

Jesus wasn't the only charlatan with a messianic claim and those who authored the bible would have been well aware of this. They went to great lengths to establish a messianic claim for Jesus and failed miserably for a number of reasons beyond those you cite.

The OT is referencing a messiah, not Jesus. So if one is convinced going in that Jesus is indeed the legitimate messiah, then OT messianic references become circular logic. The problem here is that early Christians couldn't even manage to convince very many Jews of Jesus' messianic claim, which is why they later decided to deify him knowing full well the messianic claims were weak at best.

So that's why we call him Jesus of Bethlehem, right? Oh wait, no we don't. It's actually Jesus of Nazareth. The bible is conspicuously mum on Jesus' early life, except for his place of birth. Kinda makes you go, hmmm. Early Christians would have been well aware of the OT prophecies, so they penciled in a story about a Bethlehem birth. Problem solved.


Selective reading at it's best. The first words of Genesis 49:10 actually says: "The scepter will not depart from Judah". The problem Christians have with using this as proof is the scepter departed from Judah about 6 centuries before Jesus was born and they were subject to foreign rule. Oooopsie!


This is especially comical coming from the one who constantly reminds us the bible is not to be taken literally. Nowhere is this more true than the book of Psalm, and even more comical is it doesn't actually say what you claim even if one goes with the Christian translations. So you might want to do some more research here because you're actually conflating two different frequent Christian messianic claims. Meanwhile the Jewish translation say something completely different.

The passage you cite doesn't actually say that, but even if it did once again this version of events don't jive with historical accuracy. The purpose of crucifixion was to deter criminals and rebels. As such the idea was to make it as humiliating and public as possible. Those who were crucified weren't taken down after their death. They were displayed as human lawn ornaments as a statement of deterrence. That was the whole point. As such their corpses were left to rot and be eaten by scavengers, not taken down and buried. So what we really have is another case of the narrative fulfilling the prophecy.

A few other things Christians conveniently ignore is all the ways in which the biblical narrative of Jesus disqualifies his messianic claim. Besides the ones previously mentioned, they tend to ignore the line of succession to King David had been broken by the time of Jesus. They ignore the contradictions cited by different gospels in his line of succession. They ignore that if Mary was indeed impregnated by the holy poltergeist, he couldn't possibly be the heir of King David. They cite Micah 5:2 while ignoring the other parts of Micah's prophecies which weren't fulfilled. They also ignore the most glaring example of disqualification found at the heart of mainstream Christianity. If Jesus was god, he couldn't possibly be the messiah as those two things aren't even remotely synonymous in the OT. Jews do not worship the messiah as this would be a glaring violation of idolatry laws.

I could refer to more, but these are sufficient.