Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Laziness

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by neilgodfrey »

Stephan Huller wrote:Well if we don't have a lot of Jewish evidence from the first century CE written in their native tongue we just have to draw a straight line from the DSS to the second century witness of outsiders and then nothing short of a first hand Jewish obsession with the concept after the Talmud.
The Second Temple Judaism was hardly confined to the first century CE and can hardly be said to have produced little more than the DSS.

You seem to be overlooking what the abundant evidence does tell us and what we can learn from the sudden interest in "the messiah" as it came to be understood in much of rabbinic Judaism and the circumstances surrounding that development.

I see enormous problems with assuming one can draw a line from the DSS to second century Church Fathers.

I don't see anything wrong with being a little tolerant of alternative perspectives on Second Temple Judaism to your own with respect to "the messiah" concept et al.
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Clive
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Clive »

Yet, is there any doubt if the 3rd temple was built today that the Jews would immediately start up temple sacrifices for sin?
Yes -there is room for a huge amount of doubt.

A very few might, but thinking about it, It is not obvious even ultra Orthodox Jews would. Everyone is well used to Synagogues. I was brought up in Golders Green - my school friends were from liberal, reform and orthodox families.

The gospels have many examples of the tensions between the various flavours of Judaism - was Jesus healing on the Sabbath work, his disciples picking ears of corn.

We are looking at literature with many different agendas. Written by people with very different backgrounds.

And who is rejecting any particular strand?

Is it not required to look at all the different tributaries that led to this late Roman Empire monotheism?

And what was spawned from it?
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Stephan Huller
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Stephan Huller »

why do you people find it so necessary to undermine this simple thread. The question was not whether or not the Jewish concept of messiah was established in the fucking Persian period. The question was whether Christianity was rooted in Judaism. You are all so addicted to listening to those who make up sheer nonsense about Christianity that you resist any reasonable attempt to channel your considerable energies. If the gospel was written in mid second century (as many mythicists hold) then there can be no question that the concept of messiah was exactly the same as it was for the next 2000 years. If you hold as I do that the gospel was established after the fall of the temple I see no reason to doubt that this was true also. If you however want not to claim for convenience that the gospel might have based on a real historical event which occurred c 30 CE - no we don't have a lot of evidence of what Judaism was like at that time. However since the DSS show signs of the same belief I have argued that we can feel quite confident the Jewish messianic concept was known already then. For God's sake just admit that someone with a Jewish background wrote the gospel, that the same person with a Jewish background wouldn't have imagined that the god who floated down from heaven to the synagogue in Judea/Galilee would have had Jewish notions of what sort of a god that was. He wasn't Mithras, Caesar or Liberace. And similarly he wasn't the messiah.
Ulan
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Ulan »

Stephan Huller wrote:why do you people find it so necessary to undermine this simple thread. The question was not whether or not the Jewish concept of messiah was established in the fucking Persian period. The question was whether Christianity was rooted in Judaism.
You brought this upon yourself with your example, which roughly meant that only knowing enough about 2nd temple Judaism could grant you a say in these matters. People here are more or less just probing you about what is actually known about this, and as it turns out, not so much, at least nothing decisive regarding the open questions.

Which is more or less about targeting the absolute of your statement. I addressed those problems in my first answer right at the beginning of this thread. "Someone with a Jewish background" is a very broad brush in a Hellenistic setup.

And while I certainly don't see Caesar or Liberace in the background of Christianity, the question of Mithras is a bit more tricky. This wouldn't fit my line of thought, but excluding any influence? That's something that would have to be looked into more thoroughly (and already has).
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Stephan Huller »

You brought this upon yourself with your example, which roughly meant that only knowing enough about 2nd temple Judaism could grant you a say in these matters. People here are more or less just probing you about what is actually known about this, and as it turns out, not so much.
No that's not exactly true. We can't be absolutely certain about when or how the messianic concept entered into Jewish life. But there is evidence that the familiar concept of THE messiah = a secular monarch/military strongman existed in the DSS. Given that people writing in the early to mid second century identify this as an extremely familiar Jewish concept, one that requires very little in the way of exegesis or explanation it is safe to assume that THE messiah was known to the gospel writer and the Marcionite claim that he distinguished Jesus from that concept likely dates to the first century.

The idea that the gospel author lived in an environment which didn't know the Jewish messianic concept is extremely unlikely which leaves us - given Jesus's obvious estrangement from that ideal in terms of how he was portrayed - with only one possibility, Jesus represents something else from the Jewish 'cupboard' of religious ideas.

As I said somewhere in the middle of this thread, given that the original 'mythical' or 'supernatural' gospel narrative has Jesus floating down from heaven to a Jewish house of worship declaring that is 'the year of favor' it is impossible that any other cultural context could be at work here. The gospel might have been written by a Samaritan, a Jew, a Jewish proselyte or some other sectarian background that bridged those aforementioned categories but this was not written by a Gentile or written for another audience or culture.

Moreover when Peter announces that Jesus is the Christ, Clement of Alexandria points out that the gospel has Jesus correct Peter to recognize him as a divine being. Once again, the familiar Jewish concept was known to the gospel writer and here - as with a number of other occasions (i.e. the blind man in Jericho who at first announces Jesus as 'the son of David' but then has his eyes open and then calls him 'the Lord' according to Marcionite exegesis etc) the familiar messianic concept is being actively rejected in favor of identify Jesus with a god, the very god who gave the ten commandments to Moses.

I make 'absolute' statements about the Jewish origins for the gospel and the theology of Paul because there is no other reasonable alternative. Mithras did not announce the ten commandments. Osiris did not have a year of favor which commenced in the seventh month of the Jewish calendar. The concept of 'gospel' was not connected with any pagan religious setting. The only answer time and time again is that the gospel was written for an exclusively Jewish audience as it references only Jewish theological themes.
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Stephan Huller »

And of course the upshot of this is that I have the only viable 'mythicist' (mythicist from our standpoint of 'disbelief' in the idea that a god could float down from heaven) theory. All other claims that Jesus could have been Osiris, Davy Crockett, Jim Nabors etc need to be abandoned. It's either Jesus = אִשּׁוֺ (God's man/God's fire Deut 4.36 etc) or Jesus = a Jewish man/proselyte named 'Yeshu.' There are only two alternatives.

מן־השמים השמיעך את־קלו ליסרך ועל־הארץ הראך את־אשו הגדולה ודבריו שמעת מתוך האש׃

If you people knew how important this fucking passage is in the history of Jewish thought - how it was used to prove two powers in heaven (God speaking in heaven and Jesus/Ishu present in the fire) you'd understand that resistance is futile. But you're either lazy, self-centered or have a conscious or unconscious resistance to Jewish influence in early Christianity.

Just look up Deuteronomy 4:36 in book about Jewish interest in two powers in heaven and then recognize that the 'two powers' in heaven sectarian community (i.e ha minim) is always identified as an early Christian sectarian group. It's incredible that no one else can see that this is the answer to everything. But then again you're all lazy I guess. :confusedsmiley:

Again I am not saying that this 'is the truth' per se. But it is the only viable 'mythicist' theory.
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by spin »

I sometimes think that Stephan is an acolyte of the GSM, given his bold abandonment of logic and testability and the mastering of the art of spaghetti reasoning. Clement says X so that's what was behind this story and Tertullian says Y so that story means what he thinks it does and Irenaeus says Z so naturally he knows best about this other thingy and it all leads back to Marcion. You can see that the individual pasta strands form a nexus that is at the core of Stephan's musings about what lies beneath. And so pastafarianism is the one true way to enlightenment. Shanti.
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Ulan
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Ulan »

Stephan Huller wrote:I make 'absolute' statements about the Jewish origins for the gospel and the theology of Paul because there is no other reasonable alternative. Mithras did not announce the ten commandments. Osiris did not have a year of favor which commenced in the seventh month of the Jewish calendar. The concept of 'gospel' was not connected with any pagan religious setting. The only answer time and time again is that the gospel was written for an exclusively Jewish audience as it references only Jewish theological themes.
I thought we were already past this point. I already said that rejecting any Jewish influence or participation in the making of the gospel is ridiculous. Which is also the position of most people who debate with you in this thread. It's your rejection of any outside influence which is based on more or less... not much. You rely too much on your reconstructions of unknown entities.

Most people argue from better known bases, like gMark with its peculiar mix of fake Jewish-only geography and disregard for Jewish customs. Which obviously doesn't mean it's non-Jewish in origin and might be the product of major reworking, but it at least leaves the question open of what kind of Jewish influence we have here.
Stephan Huller
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Stephan Huller »

Clement says X so that's what was behind this story and Tertullian says Y so that story means what he thinks it does and Irenaeus says Z so naturally he knows best about this other thingy and it all leads back to Marcion.
If you only knew that Apelles, the Marcionite is REPEATEDLY said to have identified Jesus with the fiery divinity at Sinai, the Jewish fire god etc it stands to reason that Apelles represents the Marcionite position as such. The fact that Justin, Clement and other Church Fathers identify Jesus with the angel 'man' who appeared in the fire is enough to say that it is a better 'mythicist' theory than all others - especially when the rabbinic sources tell us that the minim used Deuteronomy 4.36 as their basis to their two powers understanding and the term אשו appears there and Simon Magus and the heretics already mentioned identify Jesus with the same fire.

This is the best 'mythicist' theory because it embraces the logical starting point for Christianity - viz. Judaism. That's my point. It's better than Jesus was Osiris, Jesus was this pagan god or that. The texts that survive were edited by a historicist or someone actively espousing Jesus = a man of flesh and blood. This is a ten foot high wall for all mythicists to climb. The texts don't reflect the beliefs and were actively designed to refute those who espoused the 'Jesus = a god' POV.

No mythicist theory is going to be as convincing as the status quo YOU - spin - accept (viz. 'historical Jewish man). But historical Jewish god אשו trumps all opponents including Carrier's idiotic 'Jesus' god from Philo.

All mythicist theorizing is going to suffer from this 'spaghetti' logic as you call it. But at least my pasta is al dente.
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Re: Is the Rejection of Jewish Origin for Xristianity = Lazi

Post by Stephan Huller »

Andrei Orlov on the tradition related to Deut 4:26 http://www.marquette.edu/maqom/orlovvoice.html:
Scholars point to a paradigm shift in Deuteronomy’s switch of the revelatory axis from the visual to the aural plane.[28] In this new, theo-aural, as opposed to theo-phanic, understanding, even God's revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai in Exod 19, an event marking a vital nexus of the visual anthropomorphic paradigm, becomes now reinterpreted in the terms of its aural counterpart. Deut 4:36 describes the Sinai theophany as hearing of the divine Voice: "Out of heaven he let you hear his voice, that he might discipline you; and on earth he let you see his great fire and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire." Here the revelation is received not in form of tablets, the media that might implicitly underline the corporeality of the Deity; rather "the commandments were heard from out of the midst of the fire... uttered by the Deity from heaven."[29] This transcendent nature of the Deity's revelation that now chooses to manifest itself as the formless voice in the fire eliminates any need of its corporal representation in the form of the anthropomorphic Glory of God.

The depiction of the Deity's activity and presence as the voice in the fire thus becomes one of the distinctive features of the Shem theology.[30] The classic example of this imagery can be found in the account of God's appearance to Elijah on Mount Horeb in 1 Kings 19:11-13:
He said, "Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
This passage vividly recalls the description found in chapter eight of the Apocalypse of Abraham where the Deity is described as "the voice of the Mighty One coming down from the heavens in a stream of fire." And although in the account found in 1 Kings 19 the fire is not mentioned directly, the fiery nature of the divine Voice is implicitly reaffirmed through the portrayal of the seer wrapping his face in the mantle to shield himself from the dangerous nature of the encounter with the divine Voice.
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