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noonymoon · 4 years ago

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JUSTICE FOR JESUS — Misconceptions & Prejudices about the Faith in the Biblical Jesus Christ.

PART ONE: Christianity is not a Religion, it is God‘s plan to redeem mankind and have a relationship with us forever

I‘ve used to think that Jesus is about Religion, Church, Pastors, Dogma. When you look around in the world it makes sense: Everyone believes something different, all faiths are entirely valid for the people who practice them. Of course you throw Christianity in the same pot as Islam and Judaism, they‘re called „the Abrahamic Religions“ (because Abraham was the father of Isaac, who was the father of Jacob, and Jacob is „Israel“, but also Abraham was the father of Ishmael who was only born because Abraham and Sara didn‘t put their faith in God to have a child like God promised, they were impatient and didn‘t have faith, because Sara was already old and could actually not get pregnant anymore, so Sara suggested that Abraham should have a child with Hagar, the handmaiden of Sara; and from Ishmael‘s lineage basically the Arabs and Islam came along, since God had promised to make a great nation out of Abraham, this blessing went worth to both sons of Abraham) - so basically YES, Jews and Christians worship the same God. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as it is written all over the Old and New Testament. The only difference is that Christianity has been infiltrated by Satan a loooong time ago, and Judaism (for the most part) rejects Jesus as their Messiah, even though Jesus was prophesied from the FIRST LETTER of the FIRST WORD of the FIRST BOOK of the Bible/Torah FOR the Jews! When he finally arrived FOR the Jews, the Gospel (the message of Salvation) was preached to ONLY Jews for 7 years (3 and a half years of Jesus‘ ministry, 3 and a half years after His death preached by His Apostles) and only THEN (after the Jews for the most part rejected the Gospel and persecuted everyone who believed in Jesus; our best example for this is the Apostle Paul who was actually Sha‘ul; he was formerly an extremely Jewish Pharisee who relentlessly persecuted Christians but then Jesus Himself appeared in a vision to Him and asked Him „Why are you persecuting me?“ and by seeing Jesus‘ glory and majesty, He was born-again and wrote ~70% of the New Testament) God decided to spread the message of Salvation to Greeks/Gentiles as well, because He wants to save all humans, and His chosen people would not do the work that He hoped they would. God‘s priority was always Israel until they have entirely rejected the Salvation that is ONLY found in God‘s Son, the Messiah, the Anointed One: Jesus Christ. Gladly there are a lot of messianic Jews nowadays who do their best to bring Israel‘s saviour to the Jewish people, just like it was supposed to be.

Every single Religion or Faith that there is that does not teach that you can find Salvation in Jesus Christ, the literal Son of God, will not give you peace, love and the Truth, will not give you Eternal Life (and if „Heaven“ and „Eternal Life“ sounds too ethereal for you try „different non-linear dimension“ and „consciousness transferred into a spiritual body“ - because THAT‘S how it was supposed to be before our Earth fell into a linear timeline, away from God‘s presence) and that‘s just how it is. There are tons of Religions, Faiths, even pretty much ALL Christian denominations and all the Christian cults, each one of them has a different way of denying the only thing that leads to Salvation: Jesus is the LITERAL only-begotten Son of the one true God & He died for our sins & was raised to life again by God the Father. Satan literally tries in ANY way possible to deny the LITERAL Sonship of Christ whose Father is God Almighty, YHWH. [...by the way, if you believe in that Zecharia Sitchin nonsense, please visit http://sitchiniswrong.com/ - by an ACTUAL scholar of Biblical Hebrew and of Ancient Semitic Languages]. And for the people who don‘t even bother with Jesus at all, he developed a plethora of options, to believe in something else, his first and only goal is to keep people away from Jesus, and he literally does not care how he accomplishes it. Every single Faith that does not lead to Jesus and into the Kingdom of God, has its roots in Ancient Babylon and leads into the Kingdom of Darkness. There are literally only two options, and that’s the absolute Truth, no matter if “truth” today is a “subjective matter for everyone”; that’s exactly what Satan wanted to achieve, and he sure did it. People are always extremely offended when Christians claim to have the only true God, the One who brought all things into existence despite the circumstance that they don‘t even believe in the FACT that we were brought into existence by this one God through Jesus Christ (who is the „Word of God“, and as you all know „God said: Let there be light, and there was Light“ - basically God spoke things into existence BY his Word, and his word IS Jesus Christ, the Son of God).

People rather believe in an extremely ridiculous and propagated concept of a „Big Bang“ that caused things to just „happen over time“, that our Earth is millions or billions of years old, that it is sheer „luck“ that we can survive because if we were just a tiny bit closer or less close to the Sun we would either burn up or freeze, that we evolved from ape-like men who were not very intelligible, that our extreme complex languages also probably evolved from ape-like sounds (you have no idea how ridiculous all of this sounds, when you are awake, I can‘t even type it without putting it in „quotation marks“, and you literally can NOT UNSEE the Devil’s work once your eyes have been opened) when there is literally an abundance of undeniable evidence that the Creation by an intelligent and brilliant God is a LOT more plausible; or let‘s say: there is a LOT of evidence that the public narrative is simply a deception (for example, tons of GIANT human bones have been found since at least the 1800s but of course not a single person informs us about stuff like this, and of course we don‘t make an effort to research it, because we‘re all brainwashed until we realize the Truth; people who study their Bible know EXACTLY who these giants were and they also know exactly who all those other spiritual entities are which we see in Mythology from ancient cultures) - and when the public narrative is a deception, the only logical conclusion is that something different must be true. And which book contains the entire story from the very Beginning to the very End of humankind, which fulfilled a massive amount of prophecy throughout human history 100% accurate, and is by „sheer conincidence“ the most translated and printed book of ALL time? Exactly! The Bible!

„In the beginning (TIME) God created the heavens (SPACE) and the earth (MATTER)“ — Genesis 1:1

(parantheses added)

Isn‘t it AMAZING how the inspired Word of God through the Prophets conveys complex scientific concepts in only a little sentence? THAT‘S how incredible God is! He is a Mastermind and good beyond ANYTHING. Sadly Satan has accomplished that the world sees our Creator like a hateful, narrow-minded, strict and arrogant Ruler who just wants to dominate us and put His Religion on us, but that could not be further away from the Truth. God, in fact, HATES Religion, all He ever wanted is to be loved by His people, acknowledged by His people and praised by His people (and honestly, He DESERVES praise for Everything He has done for us and for Everything that He is!) .. And then of course, you can look all around in nature! I swear, being born-again is like being a child again, before this world and our „education“ brainwashes you. When I walk outside, I just MARVEL at God‘s handiwork, it‘s literally AMAZING. When I look at flowers, veggies, fruits, animals, insects of all kinds (I even lost my fear of spiders and wasps and even hornets, it‘s just amazing to look at them), when I taste different kind of nuts, herbs and spices (by the way, isn‘t it amazing how there‘s a herb or plant for every health issue a human can have, just like the Bible says? if we really evolved from a Big Bang to THIS, how do we explain the miraculous powers of all of these things? Have they just „happened“...?) look at the funny shapes of everything; everything just blows my mind, it‘s incredible. Someday I really want to ask God what He thought when He created Romanesco Broccoli because each time I see that thing, I just marvel at its weirdness and beauty. The world is just so ridiculously beautiful and NO ONE can see it except born-again Christians (I‘m really excited for eternal Life because this Creation is in a fallen state and the Bible says that the actual glory of the actual Creation is even more magnificent, WHOA...!!!) and I sometimes literally cry because it‘s SO SAD what Satan has made us believe about our planet, about ourselves, about literally everything. And why? Just because he hates Jesus, he hates God and he most certainly hates EVERYONE else, you, me, everyone. He loves only himself and he doesn‘t care if he‘s robbing us from the most astonishing experience ever: Life! He enslaves us through spiritual warfare to desires that we would naturally not have (social status, money, power, career, material objects of all sorts, fame, success, other people no matter how toxic they are for our health, drugs, likings and addictions of all kinds, literally ANYTHING can be the work of spiritual warfare) and makes us believe on top of that that we‘re just a bunch of random Apes in a random world, that our purpose is to make money and survive in a society that grows more and more into cold robots each year, only so that at the end, we die, never knew Jesus, and perish in Hell with him. It‘s literally the saddest thing EVER.

So yes, „Religious Freedom“ is a thing; everyone CAN believe whatever they want and feel drawn to, but ONLY born-again believers in Jesus Christ will live with God forever and ever in a different dimension that is not bound to time. Just like God wanted to live with us from the very beginning! We are His masterpiece of creation! Did you know that we are more cherished than angels? He sent his LITERAL SON to die for us, ALL of us, just so that we can live with God! Isn‘t that incredible??? I’m just absolutely in Love with God and Jesus and I’ve never thought that I’d EVER say this, growing up as an Atheist and then, over 2 years deceived in a spiritual bubble that is not even real.

My prayer is that the people who are written in the book of Life and belong to God’s kingdom find Jesus Christ, and experience His Love, because once you have, there is not a single day that is sad or empty, not a single day that seems pointless, you will have peace and a blessed hope for eternity to come. Amen.

TESTIMONIES

From Buddha to Christ. Powerful Testimony.

Chinese Triad Gangster Finds Jesus In Death Encounters

SATANISM, WITCHCRAFT, DRUGZ, DEPRESSION this is my testimony

"New Age" Occult Practices Nearly Ruined My Life | Warning & Testimony

Raves, drugs, vanity, new age to Jesus Christ | My Testimony

#Jesus Christ #jesus loves you #God is Good

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ruminativerabbi · 4 years ago

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Election Day 2020

Is it possible that Election Day is finally upon us? Some other time, I’d like to write about the craziness of having these election seasons that go on endlessly—you can expect the 2024 campaign to begin in all but name about a quarter-hour after the new or not-new president is inaugurated in January—and particularly in light of the relative sanity that prevails in other countries, where political campaigns last mostly for several weeks or months. (The minimum length of an election campaign in Canada is thirty-six days, for example, but the longest on record was only eleven weeks. The candidates give a few speeches, the party publishes its platform, there are some interviews and a debate or two, then the polls open and the nation votes. Only here, where the date of the next presidential election has nothing to do with the fate of the current government, is it considered normal for people to spend two or three years campaigning for office.) Today, however, I’d like to use this space to write instead about the concept of participation in an election itself.

While perusing the corners of the blogosphere that are my regular haunts, I’ve occasionally noted the opinion put forward that the American system of government is an outgrowth of the specific kind of democracy invented (and named) by the ancient Greeks and that, therefore, it can only be supported by Jews and Christians willing to set aside what Scripture teaches us about the way people should consent to be governed to embrace a system unrelated to their own spiritual heritage. Generally written by people who know their Bible but who are wholly ignorant of rabbinic tradition, these essays are mostly the work of people who find the distinction between ancient Israelite religion and modern Judaism a triviality to be skipped past rather than a detail of profound importance. How this could or should work for Christians, I’ll leave for others more qualified than myself to puzzle out. But for Jews, the question itself of whether people guided by Jewish tradition should enthusiastically embrace or merely stoically accept the concept of representative democracy is the question I’ve been pondering in these last days leading up to the election.

It surely is so that the Bible does not envisage the ancient Israelites participating in anything like a Jeffersonian democracy. Indeed, biblical tradition imagines an ideal state governed by a king who acts solely in accordance with the law of the Torah and actually goes so far as to legislate that the king may only be seated on the royal throne when he is actually holding his personal scroll of the Law in his arms. How practical that was, or if the kings of Israel truly obeyed that injunction, who can say? But it is a stunning image nonetheless, something along the lines of our nation requiring by law that the President actually hold a copy of the Constitution in his hands whenever meeting with visitors in the Oval Office or making a public address. (That might actually not be such a bad idea, now that I think of it.) Interestingly, the king isn’t expected to be a Torah scholar who can personally puzzle out obscure point of law: in cases where Scripture does not directly address some specific issue with which the king needs to deal, a large squadron of court prophets is also imagined to be in place specifically to transmit the word of God to the sovereign on an issue-by-issue basis. So the model of which those authors I referenced above are so enamored basically features God ruling the nation through the agency of a king who gets his governing instructions from God one way or the other: either directly from his own informed contemplation of Scripture or indirectly from the squadron of house seers installed in the palace for that precise purpose.

But that ideal kingdom is not where any of us lives today. Yes, it is certainly so that Jews who say their prayers in the traditional mode give voice daily to the hope that the messianic era will feature just such a king of the House of David empowered to rule over the Land of Israel in the mode described just above. But in our pre-redeemed world, the footfalls of the messiah have yet to heard even in the distance. For better or worse, we are—for the moment, at least—on our own.

I suppose it could be possible to argue that the kind of democracy that has evolved as the basis for government in these United States is thus merely an attractive stop-gap measure that traditionalists should support until the aforementioned footfalls become audible in the distance. There is, however, a rabbinic idea that actually corresponds precisely to the notion of participating in an election to choose a national leader. And that suggests to me a way to frame voting in a national election as a personal decision fully in sync with tradition.

In Jewish law, the concept of agency guarantees individuals the right to appoint agents to act on their behalf. When put baldly like that, it sounds almost banal. But behind that apparent banality is the legal force that enables the individual to act profoundly in ways that would otherwise be either impossible or, at the very least, impractical. For its part, the Talmud speaks about the concept of agency in absolute terms, going so far as to say that “the agent of an individual is legally empowered to act as though he or she were the individual him or herself.” There are exceptions, of course. For one, the Talmud makes clear that “the concept of agency is inoperative when the agent has been appointed specifically to commit a sin.” In other words, you can’t escape the consequence of wrongdoing by appointing an agent to commit the deed for you. So you can avoid the need to travel to a different locale by appointing an agent to marry your future spouse on your behalf or to act “as yourself” in divorce (or any) court, but you can’t escape the consequences of murdering someone by hiring a hitperson to pull the trigger. Nor was this “just” a regular feature of classical law in ancient times: it appears, at least in the broad way it was construed by the ancient sages, specifically to be a feature specifically of Jewish law. (The second exception, however, regards the commandments themselves: it is not deemed legally possible to hire an agent to fulfill obligations to God. You cannot, therefore, appoint someone to say the Shema for you or to put t’fillin on during morning prayers as though that person were you. Nor can you appoint an agent to eat matzah for you at the Pesach seder or to dine in a sukkah or to hear the shofar blasts during Rosh Hashanah.)

That set of ideas creates an interesting framework for considering the role of the individual in a republican democracy, because it leads directly to thinking of elections as opportunities for individuals to appoint as their agents the individuals they wish to see lead the nation forward. That we do this collectively—i.e., as a kind of contest in which the winner becomes the agent of us all—is just a function of the fact that no nation could function if each individual were to appoint his or her own congressperson or choose personally to serve him or herself. For practical reasons, then, we do this as a group…but the basic principle that underlies the effort is still that, by voting, we are appointing individuals as our agents to represent us in the Congress and to serve as President. We send them not to commit sins that we don’t want to sully our own hands by undertaking (that wouldn’t be allowed) or fulfill our own spiritual obligations to God, but specifically to act on our behalf to ensure the security of the nation, to guarantee justice for all its citizens, to create a safety net into which people unable to care adequately for themselves may fall, to oversee the education of our children, to care for our veterans, to guide our nation to its rightful place of leadership in the forum of nations, to watch over the planet and prevent humanity from irrevocably soiling its collective nest, and to guide our nation into solid, mutually beneficial alliances with other countries. By casting my vote on Tuesday (and, yes, I am planning to vote the old-fashioned way: in person and on Election Day), I understand myself to be participating in a national effort to appoint the individuals who will lead the nation forward.

Because I think of our representatives in Congress and as the President as agents appointed by myself (and several hundred million others) to act on our behalf in the world, I feel a concomitant freedom to inform those people regularly how I wish them to act and what I wish for them to attempt to accomplish.

It sounds a bit passé these days to refer to members of the Congress or to the President and Vice President as servants of the people, but the way the word “servant” is used in that expression comes close to what I hear in the Hebrew shaliach, the standard word for “agent.” So, to answer those who feel that participation in representative democracy is by definition an act undertaken outside the concept of tradition, my answer is that there really couldn’t be a more traditional way to think about governance than by imagining the citizenry banding together to appoint an agent to do their bidding and lead them forward.

#Election Day #democracy #shaliach #agency

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jewishconvertthings · 6 years ago

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I'm interested in learning more but so much of the vocab I'm not familiar with and I was wondering how you would recommend learning that. Preferably, if you had a suggestion that was online that would be best

Hi anon,

So there are a ton of terms to learn and a lot of them are in other languages, so I definitely get your confusion. Unfortunately, “vocab” is really vague and I honestly don’t know which specific things you’re struggling with. That being the case, this is going to be kind of long-winded to cover as much ground as possible.

First, I would recommend reading Essential Judaism by George Robinson to get a broad idea of underlying concepts. This will help you have enough of a basic framework for understanding that you’ll be able to situate those terms in a practical, useful way.

From there, please understand that many of the words and phrases you’re searching for are going to be in one of several other languages. If it’s a biblical term or reference, it’ll likely be in biblical Hebrew, if it’s a Talmudic reference, it could be in Hebrew or Aramaic, if it’s a modern reference (especially anything to do with medinat Yisrael/Israeli culture) it may be in modern Hebrew, and depending on whether your community is Ashkenazi, Sephardi, or Mizrachi, it could be in Yiddish, Ladino, or Judeo-Arabic, respectively. And all of these are written in alef-bet rather than English letters. That being the case, your best bet is to try and figure out the context of the phrase and look it up from there.

The way I’ve approached this is by making sure I have the correct words (and ideally, a common transliteration of them) and then googling them + the word “Judaism” as a search term.

So let’s say I don’t know what bishul akum means. I know that the phrase is used in discussing the halacha of kashrut, which means it’s probably a Hebrew term. I’ll then google “bishul akum meaning Judaism.” Here’s what I found:

[Image is just a screencap of the top google results, which can be found here.]

(You can do this search yourself and read more about it, but basically it refers to food that is not kosher because it was prepared entirely by a non-Jew, even if all other laws of kashrut are kept by that non-Jew in the process.)

Make sure that you’re using reputable sources once you do your search. Chabad, Aish, My Jewish Learning, Jewish Virtual Library, the Orthodox Union and other major organizations usually have solid information on these topics. Definitely also keep in mind the perspective of that organization. (Namely, if you go to an orthodox organization’s website for answers, don’t be mad if you get an orthodox answer. Liberal resources do exist, but are sometimes harder to find.)

Mainly what I would try to avoid is the many non-Jewish (often xian or messianic!!) sources that also try to define these terms. Adding “Judaism” to your search helps weed out some of them, but often enough you’ll still get hits from “hebrew4christians” and various other messianic sources. If you’re not sure, try searching the term on a known Jewish resource or organization’s website.

If you’re looking for phrases or terms that people seem to use colloquially, I’ve found the Jewish-English Lexicon website to be invaluable. So let’s say your frum friend drops “chas v’shalom” into her sentence and you have no idea what she means by this. You later search it on the Jewish-English Lexicon website:

[Image is of the search results for “chas v’shalom” on the Jewish-English Lexicon website, which can be found here.]

No exact matches, but based on the context you think the meaning might be similar to chas v’chalila, so you check it:

[Image is of the entry for “chas v’chalila,” which can be found here.]

In the notes at the bottom, you’ll also notice that it’s mentioned as a “see also.”

Long story short, it can be daunting to try to get up to speed on a lot of the terms and phrases used in Jewish spaces, especially if you’re entering a more observant space. Please don’t feel like you’re dumb or hopelessly out of the loop for not knowing all of this, even after a while. I literally had to google “sitra achra meaning” the other night because I had no idea and I’ve been done with my conversion for six months.

I hope this helps, and please feel free to follow up with further questions!

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eksbdan-blog · 5 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://passingbynehushtan.com/2019/11/05/man-cross-sin-of-the-world-how-part-3/

How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? One way. Part 3. Preparation for Sacrifice.

This is an article in a series. Please see:

How Can a Person Die in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1.

How Can a Man Die for the Sins of the World By His Own Sacrifice? Only one way. Part 2. The Messianic Secret

The Preparation for Sacrifice: Our Messed Up Moral Theology

Well, first, why is a sacrifice for sin, and collectively for the world’s sin, even needed? What is this whole business in Judaism and Christianity about sin atonement through a sacrifice of a living thing that brings satisfaction with God and, in the Christian version, an ultimate kind, for a final sort of redemption?

You know, in this whole search for how the mega-Day of Atonement works, this is the most important starting out: to begin with, what is a sacrifice?

That’s easy.

It’s a token to God, a symbol of you. In the symbol, you are putting a replacement value for yourself, for which you need representation in a way that you could not do otherwise.

But why do you need a symbol for yourself given to God? Why cant he just look and see what you are without it?

He can and does, but without your attention to him, and only by his attention to you, this is the gazing of a creator on his creation but not the view of a creator on a creation that is himself a creator (hey, you know I could not edit that out!). A creator has free will, personal loves, and motivations, and a creator who is a creature has a vital interest in the judgment of and between propositions of reality for his survival. Therefore the position of the minor creator who is judged is of one who engages voluntarily in this his created function for his ultimate life and expression of love. The creature gives back to the Creator a token of his creators will for him, an expression that the Creator has claimed all space and things in it, even those that can deny Him.

If the sacrifice is of an animal, the animal, in an economy of a people who depend upon them for day-to-day existence, represents the highest non-human value. Its death in the sacrifice is your loss of carnal profit. To God, it is an expression of faith that He will accept your sincerity in placing him above people and things, and spiritual life above the highest carnal life.

So, you are saying in one symbol something about your belief in a higher existence. In that existence is both the conception of ultimate value and an idea of its future acquisition. The acquisition is by your sacrifice a returned value by God. But this is by the God who replaces your value expression of faith in Him through that sacrifice as your final intrinsic value. Your faith, so represented through this mediator, is what God accepts, to life, when that faith is equal to God.

It’s the most consequential, active, and sincere kind of communication to another person, not only because its to God. God is only an idea before this sacrifice. This sacrifice is to be the result of plumbing the depths of your soul, given to the highest imaginable person. The expression is by an expensive proof of the depth of that sincerity. This is your evidence that, to you, he not just an idea but a reality.

A few interesting things come out thinking of sacrifice like this.

1. This sacrificial picture is of you and your symbol, a mediator between you and God.

2. Given to God is not you before his acceptance of you, its a better mediator of your particular faith in a Truth about him.

3. Given to you is not God in a sacrificial exchange, it’s the better mediator of a specific proprietary truth of God of which he places highest.

4. In the whole picture, the object of focus is not the act of sacrifice, the objects of sacrifice, or the two parties in communion through the sacrifice. It’s not about things. It’s about meanings, not things, objects, persons or ideas. We could only refer to the focus as a particular truth. Yes, a truth of persons, things, and ideas, but about what it is that those are to hold in which is placed the most significant value.

First Things First

I hope you can see things and persons are not important before any sacrifice is given and accepted, only after as your practical means to their understanding and access. Of first importance is not a goat, a priest, a “Law,” not you, not “God” or any idea. A mediator is not just a thing; its a meaning first and foremost. A goat is just a means of its carrying. But you have to have a particular goat. It cant be diseased, unclean, of the wrong sex. It has to show as a great value, and that value is not a general, voluntary, indistinct value to whoever is giving or accepting this sacrifice. Ultimate cost as not in things of carnal value and another name for spiritual value is a knowledge of it, not its discursive tokens. If we hold this truth dearly and tightly, it will prevent us from thinking that the worship of the idea of God is a substitute for the supreme valuation and instrumentality of an idea’s very spiritual and informative reason for being. Everything is about knowledge, information, not stuff. After you have that knowledge, then things, people and ideas can represent it, while never replacing it. They become only its means of access in consciousness.

Now, does not this principle of first-things-first in consideration of the meaning of the Christ on the Cross speak of a moral obligation before even trying to divine it? I say that we don’t understand the depth of first-things-first because of our abject immorality in refusing the essence of that principle. But it’s all about maintaining minimal honesty. I say that it is not honest, in so many ways that I will speak of here, that Christ/Cross is not ultimately represented by “propitiation,” “death,” “love,” “mosaic Law fulfilled in a universal, “atonement,” “the burden of the sin of the World,” “murder,” “the intersection of God’s love and His justice,” “redemption, “persecution for righteousness,” “the redeeming benefits of his Passion and death” or any other current or historical after the 1st century. These are no meanings, they are the ideational symbols of meaning. Meaning is knowledge, information, and that is a very different thing. First-things-first and first is supposed to be about the specific biblical revelation which is going to be put for God himself long before we choose a few words to represent it.

I thought a lot about how to best illustrate this, that knowledge is first and it symbols second, especially with God. Let me just go with this.

James Tour is a synthetic chemist of renown. In a presentation about the impossibility of man creating life, a pretense that the Science has taken up as it intruded into metaphysics in the 20th century, he showed this slide:

Tour is saying that in the lab, the DNA and RNA code determines everything else. This is the means by which life looks and functions, not its matter. In the fantasy that science creates life in the lab, it is assumed that taking only one existing carbohydrate and copying existing DNA and RNA code, all by human intervention, is the creation of life. But the ugly truth is that when we do this it is by the intervention of intelligent beings. The replicate the origin of life it has to be untouched by people. You leave the right building blocks of life in a soup under a lamp, wait, and see what crawls out. But we cannot even get without human intervention one single carbohydrate, nucleic acid, lipid and protein, the basis for all cell life, let alone the code to run them in a cell. The upshot is that the cell may be our natural focus as a lifeform, but what is life ultimately is that DNA, which is a very abstract thing, and even more impossible, without which nothing lives a nanosecond. Even if the impossible happened, that a frog crawled out fo that soup, where did the DNA come from?

We look at Christ on the Cross, and we think “cell.” We as theologians are like scientists, who think that we can explain the whole of this mystery by using certain formulas and phrases which go only as far as revealing the external appearances of a theological cell and call it a sufficient reveal. We wickedly replicate Jesus on the Cross as “Jesus dying for our sins,” or “Jesus fulfilling the Jewish sacrificial Law,” or “Jesus showing his love for us by being our substitution before the wrath of God.” Perhaps “Jesus laying down his life for his friends.” These are not life. These are ideas, cells, the possible containers and signposts of life, but not life itself, which is that biblical code, that knowledge, which makes the whole thing run in the first place.

And these are our fakes, our replacements for life, created examples which we hold up as truth so we can think of ourselves as having a handle and a part in the impossible. They make us feel big. But the ugly truth is that we can’t reproduce the cell of Jesus on the Cross, and I mean that not only in the sense that we can’t do it ourselves. We cant produce it because of the impossible distance we are from divine knowledge in which we can only show, never imitate out of our minds.

We can’t because that knowledge, that information, is far more important but even more impossible for us than the theological cell. The only thing we can do is, first, admitting that the code, the divine knowledge behind it, is first, and then admit that our place is only to show it and put it first as our impossible reason for being that came from God exclusively. The impossibility of a relationship with God is not because of cells, it’s because of knowledge, and our only duty is knowing, confessing, repenting and then showing it as God’s ultimate value, not only God’s cells.

Christ on the Cross is an ideational cell, but using ideas as the whole of their meaning makes it easy to say that its meaning is something like “propitiation for sin.” It looks sort of like life, like what Miller-Urey cooked up in the lab the ’50s called it life, but real life is something that happened without the taint of human hands by an impossible act of God alone. This is not to be some naive possession of faith. In the Bible, there is an even more remarkable objective demonstration of a singular divine source for spiritual life than DNA is of a cell. DNA is the ultimate mark of God in a biological entity. Shall we leave it out of a spiritual entity, or shall we hold it up before all of our expressions of faith are uttered?

Our Theology: Fixing or Breaking Humanity?

No matter your theory of soteriology, everyone pretty much agrees that what Jesus was doing up there on that pole was being the subject of a sacrifice to God for sin. I’ll get to this shortly, this necessary instrumentality of the sacrifice as a means of communication with God. But before I do, you know I’m going to give you a preview of where I’m going.

What people debate is the extent to which this understanding of the Christian sacrifice is primarily the appeasement of God’s wrath. The summing up all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10). A ransom paid to or victory over Satan and satanic powers (Origen, Mark 10:45). Fixing of broken humanity. Of the punishment of Christ in our place. There are many others. Most are a mixture of them, with one leading. But all attempts are to argue based on one against another, among the choices that historical scholarship has given us. To assume that we must take our alternatives from among the biblical interpreters after the apostles is, however, only safe if they are also offering us a more fundamental choice. They are not, because they don’t know what would be alternative other than some new and creative conclusion over biblical knowledge which speaks to our un-revelational bent. I’m asking if the more fundamental choice is not of a conclusion as the first value of the study, as important as it is, but the only possible biblical motivation that morally precipitates the survey from the outset.

Looking at the list of theories I just gave you, can you classify this as a whole? If you chose “conceptual” instead of “phenomenal,” then you are right. In the place of “phenomenal” could be factual, demonstrative, practice, informational, or that about knowledge instead of the mental symbols, the conclusions, used for their representation. Miraculous phenomena of scripture are entirely unstated or subordinate and only supportive of a particular way of thinking summarized and never self-contained in a theoretical idea.

It’s the opposite of revelation. In revelation, our theories are optional and can only be supportive of the content of the discussion, a vision of transcendent reality. Not formative of that reality. That original appearance is what it is, and how we think about it is not to confused with that appearance but is only a means of its understanding. What happens when you forget this and start to believe your theories determine truth, reality, fact, their master? Do you realize how much blood spilled over creedal theology that places religious propositions as the faith itself? Not just physical blood, I’m talking about spiritual blood. When such things invite as much opacity and paradox and divisiveness as they may give in elucidation? We cry about the fragmentation and disunity of the church because we can’t bear to see it smaller when what is formative goes relegated only to a moment of antiquity.

One choice, theirs, is the biblical truth thought given understanding is because of true religious, philosophical propositions supported by their independent reasonability and biblical proof texts. They have made up their minds, correctly, that what the Bible is offering and the way it provides it in the form of revelation is the same as what they have determined is its ultimately revealed cognitive object. Still, they have also decided that this is an idea. God’s revelation gave us a notion, and we sort it out by a discussion of competing notions. Since these notions are the goal, they are the end and the greatest value in the knowledge within the biblical truth dialectic, they determine the kind and power of their derived biblical information. That, whatever you come up with, it ends in a superior idea, with the Bible brought only to serve it and give it such substance as to bring any sense of a theophany of God brought essentially by human hands and thoughts to human construction.

Our choice is that God is to be thought functional and productive not of ideas but appearances of himself by revealed miraculous information, not its symbols. It may just be that what we should be talking about is how the historical fact of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, is collectively the informational equivalent of God first, not a particular idea of God. Instead, an event divinely intended to orient and clear not our reason by rehashed ideas but our vision of transcendence by His intended device of display: a limited but powerful cognitive manifestation of himself. The knowledge of God is not a submissive puppy to our ideas about it but meant to stand in for God himself at the place in the mind which would otherwise turn toward itself.

This is not a description of our “apologetics.” Our apologetics involves all manner of argumentation for the truth of a religion, most of which are the same propositional logic and thinking. This is a description of Christian thought, which produces nothing more than what historical fact and prophetic fulfillment reveal about the mind of God and his Son. By which end-product is not ideas but the reality, power, and nature of his existence which form for us competent representative ideas, ideas which can’t detach, become independent or superior in the mind to that appearance.

concept of biblical data toward the construction of a Christian thought over it

biblical phenomena of God’s knowledge to phenomena of his cognitive manifestation.

Why this latter is not defaulting is plain to see. To religious philosophies, this would be offensive. It seems to be a predetermination that the Bible is a supernatural revelation before a focused search, serious thought, and honest discussion. That serious search and discussion are to be that determinative exercise. Question: what kind of search and discussion over what essential biblical information? Of course, to presuppose such a thing that the Bible is a value before correct absorption is a great evil. But as great and destructive an evil is to presume that the Bible can’t support itself, which is the working presumption that no objective deity produced it and a particular revelation shows it.

Our divines and laypeople may believe that it is a supernatural document, but also that it’s not so easy to see without a finely milled and polished lens by some expert theological artisan, or from the naïve fever swamps of the emotions. That its lines of evidence may interpret in other ways that make it ambiguous without a lot of help by smart people, or else interpretation informs by how a person might feel that day and its ability to get him through the night. These deny that an honest study of the material is possible and a true conclusion forthcoming outside of cultural or practical norms of thought and production. These reject a presupposition that the subject and biblical object in view is intrinsically prepared for the naivety and misunderstandings that come from hypocritical motivations. They deny that the object of revelation contains its own means of penetration into a subject that is sufficiently willing to receive it. They deny that the Bible has a theological “vital center.” They reject those ideas. The only divine things of an idiomatic and idiosyncratic possibility. Nothing, if not potentially Holy mental objects, can save us, sanctify us, and release us from the presence of sin.

Have They Seen the Miraculous in Scripture?

The reason we reject the truth that sits right before us is that by so doing, it restricts the quality and raises the number of the participants in the church by asserting a single, overarching biblical locus and most fundamental biblical ground: that God has appeared, in a biblical manner and with divine, otherwise impossible information that he intended to stand in his place to faith. Some don’t see it, so we have to give them something else so that they will believe. The problem is that there is no other kind of revelation suggested in the New Testament, as all that profess “faith” there either saw the Lord with their own eyes perform the miracles he did or they saw the same miracle through the historical fulfillment of the prophets. Not my dreams, not by Anslem, not by the Host, not by baptism, not by tradition, not by reason and not by “penal substitution theory of atonement,” regardless of how accurate reflections of biblical truth they may be. But the world must bring in these choices, or else how small would be a church that had a faith that only God himself in a public miracle justifies a choice? A faith processed to holiness within a spirit open to anything that will show him the truth, which truth is God’s highest value? Not sermons, songs, works, “faith” as “trust” or any other definition that itself requires definition, programs, tithes, theology books, syllogisms, and religious propositions and creeds. What would the church then do except, meeting to meeting, give understanding into the mind of God through what the prophets said should come (Acts 26:22)?

Are the Church and its churchmen the successors to the apostles in any sense, or, spiritually, people of the world? This one thing we know, that, typically, if they have seen the miraculous in scripture, it is based on a rational or emotional persuasion after an accumulated moment of personal need or an easy decision after a long tradition. Any prophetic miracle, if acknowledged at all, becomes only but a tool for persuading the hard-hearted who do not have a faith built primarily on common persuasion, but only on a superior divine construction. To would not be faith built on our modern opacities of emotion, reason or tradition, and must be pushed out at all costs either consciously or subconsciously.

It is easy to see that a concept is a construction, an entirely artificial and changeable mental object, and is not in the place of the progenitors of its existence and use, but is its child. Its child is its reality. No one sane presumes that he will form an idea, a settled view, of anything without first having exposure to what exists to necessitate it. Christianity should not be in the business of persuading anyone who can’t see the miraculous in messianic prophecy, for example, and accept in its place of revelation the Christus Victor theory of atonement or “when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.” But that is the de facto Christian business as universally conceived.

Liberal/Conservative Sin

Everyone who is a conservative knows this, but they ignore it. Invested in the whole of the monolithic Christian establishment in increasing its numbers, but also while insisting, correctly, that “faith,” or some work in response, is indispensably emblematic of a genuine convert. The two are mutually exclusive. The church, in the conservative functional estimation, is in existence imitate only what only God can do. But a faith thought supernaturally generated is faith against God and in the miraculous abilities of humans if such a belief represents by such pedestrian proofs as “I believe in Jesus,” giving to the poor, or the “ransom theory,” your feelings or your dreams. Conservatives must wake up to the fact that their theology is a fool’s errand if their “faith” and “sacrament” grounds in statements and physical actions around propositional instead of demonstrated, revealed biblical truth. The proof of prophetic promise and its historical fulfillment. Their counter-revelational alternative will grow numbers but also make a mere chimera of a church.

The Christian kind of truth awakens faith only in the divinity of an unconstructed and original manifestation of God. A sacrament is the reflexive, original, and unconstructed animation of the body in exclusive response by its obvious implications. Everything else is sophistic at best. If there is one thing that the church is not in business for it is persuading someone that God appeared before them in scripture since you don’t persuade someone that your tire is flat of the Fuller-Brush salesman is standing before them on their doorstep (I don’t think they make door-to-door visits anymore, but I’m thinking of my childhood and its a nostalgic choice. Anything will do). If the appearance is by an objective scriptural display such persuasion not piety is by the persuader the presumptive putting of himself in place of God. Peter, in context, makes clear that to give everyone a “reason for the hope that is in you” is not a call to preach the Ontological Argument. Or Calvin, to take communion, to give money, to be nice, to implore the audience to accept his personally preferred argument for God, but to give everyone the prophets fulfilled predictions of the Son of God and its spiritual implications.

All that said, I have not given you my answer to what the image of Christ on the Cross means. It’s just to prepare you a little. I am sorry if I seem overly harsh, but this subject so amps me up emotionally, and this I dare not hide too much, or else you may miss what is at stake here.

Now, the liberal view of Christ’s sacrifice essentially is that, with a view of sin as against God because of our actions and attitudes against others, what God intends of an ultimate moral example is putting others before our neighbor. Sin is acting greedy, cruel, and prejudiced, from a heart which is the same. To them, the whole of Jesus’ ministry was teaching the world how to be kind and compassionate for its moral education. It’s for those that may spend too much time pining away for objective spiritual objects and qualities that will give them something while neglecting those closer to home, in the here and now. To liberals, you deal with sin by taking the compassion of the Cross to gauge our consciences against its highest possible state of cleanliness, where the essence of the act lies entirely between one person and another. Both sin and the Sacrifice for it are here, “at hand,” and within our power. Sin is not loving your neighbor, and salvation is loving your neighbor by its most excellent example of Christ on the Cross.

To conservatives, though, Christ’s sacrifice is more than this. Sin is not just what we do. It’s who we are naturally, and it’s deep in a place where we can’t reach. The sacrifice of Jesus was in itself propitiatory by virtue of the act itself, which set a bridge between our hopeless condition and God’s nature. Although the essences of sin and its solution are unseen, we have to believe that they are there. Whatever we do, we have to respect the distance between ourselves and their inviolate spiritual objectivity, which requires our obedience to laws over which we have no control, not what we can achieve if they had no power or reality. This sacrifice realigned the potentialities of a relationship with God. An act that we are to emulate but could never duplicate.

To conservatives, the benefits of the Cross to us are made first accessible through a heartfelt belief in the independent power ex operato of the Lamb in the covering of our sin, with resurrection following as the seal of its truth, long before we think that what we do subsequently is important. Sin, manifest in actions but not seen, is spiritual disobedience to the unseen, God’s Holiness, revealed through God’s manifestation of it by the Cross of Christ, his obedience to God in consummating sacrificial Law. So salvation is the result of a kind of obedience to that which is unseen but manifested by God to us in Christ’s transcendent obedience. All of this sounds so pious, but its far from pious when you discover their view of the nature of this obedience, of Christ’s and ours.

Conservative Protestants also go a step further as a kind of blend of the liberal and conservative takes, both closing down faith as locked to God’s agency and opening it up to a voluntary definitional content. Particularly the Calvinists.

What protestants generally do is center the appropriation of the virtues of Christ on the Cross upon our sin and faith in this his work, where our faith and Christ’s work come together, and Christ’s virtues imputed to us in our unworthiness and hopelessness. This is the same as most protestants where a biblically-centsacrered “faith” is key, something that resists the subjective insularity of the liberal point of contact with God and the objectively displayed sacramental mysterium of the Catholic one. Faith is faith in Jesus as the sole judge of men’s souls and only means of salvation. Trust in his work, and the revelation of the doctrines of salvation that come through it compensates for our sin, allowing God to see us as he sees his Son and have salvation.

But the consequence of the Calvinist idea is when you make “faith,” the idea, of highest theological importance while also insisting that this is something very different from “work” as used biblically, you conceive of faith which you can’t describe in any terms that infer work. If no kind of work it can only be a sort of feeling in response to God, which is perfect if you want to value an idea, not its revelation, supremely. Thought around information then has no part in the initiation of faith, since faith is limited to the idea, not what informationally motivates it. Then, a faith with no moral implication for man for its legal engagement in a kind of initial synergistic exchange with God. Conservative protestants generally do this by refusing to identify the content of faith as one thing biblically, and the Calvinists go one step beyond and kill it off entirely by refusing to consider faith as anything but a vague and divinely infused sense.

When ones initial faith can’t be in any essential sense a work, thought only given by God and not performed by man, you no longer have to ask “what, exactly, beyond persons, propositions and objects is faith in. Because “faith” has an understood instead of scripturally experienced meaning as I describe, thorough some kind of learned and handled personal or biblically un-speciated information, its then not passively consequential by the influence of a certain of God’s power in his scriptural appearances alone. Faith is to them by definition a kind of work if it’s not around feelings with general scriptural knowledge, and this cannot stand because “faith is not by the works of the Law.” So faith becomes only an effect, and the exact nature of its spiritual power within the individual becomes religiously inconsequential and not worthy of prolonged reflection. My thought is, isn’t the essential nature of “work” spiritual, and the description of that work a knowledge which necessitates an appropriate idea of “faith?”

As the world has it, however, since people saved were set to be so before the foundation of the world, the unsaved accept their salvation not by a personal act of any kind but by “receiving or laying hold on what God has provided in the merits of Christ” in a point of their justification. But this brings up all kinds of paradoxical quandaries, making what is it about faith in Christ’s work on the Cross that is in any way essential to justification and salvation very murky. If faith is only an effect of regeneration, and justification and is entirely the result of an act of God, faith is only “the instrument for receiving or laying hold on what God has provided in the merits of Christ” after God lays hold of us. It’s no wonder why the content of the gospel need only be faith propositions, images of truth. Not necessarily faith predicates, truth itself, since entertained propositions may be confidently held without reflection. If by premises, premises must be thought over and experienced if they are to produce truth propositions, and this cannot be. Faith then becomes only something for our education, playing a part in sanctification, accompanying but unnecessary in the justifying faith of salvation.1

Look, I’m not even objecting to the Calvinist view. I mention this, not to upbraid Calvinists, but to establish the kind of cultural forces that have shaped our view of the possibility and power of revelation. You can’t make “faith” normed and undefined as something like “trust” or confidence.” Refusing to identify it with a particular biblical revelation from which it cannot detach by its use, expecting then that it’s not subsequently going up for rejection as playing an active part in your salvation. But, like voting in our country and getting the kind of government we want, we also get the kind of theology we want.

You can see that I am angling toward a view of faith in salvation centered on the Cross as something other than a symbol of a divine substance. I’m going for a divine but accessible knowledge by which God is taught an equivalent to faith’s informed revelatory content. Crucial in justifying faith and sanctification and salvation. The Cross of Christ is not either a religious idea or a mere act of compassion or a rite, which makes it’s meaning vulnerable to ambiguity and the whole question given sophistry.

But I’ll get to that later. All of this is to go beyond proposing either the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is a self-contained symbol for carnal salvation or a transcendent essence for spiritual salvation. I propose, both, but where our faith in Him and it, somehow, in whatever order and sense, completes and shows completion of a connection between God and us through Christ while not being a work of our own.

Sacrifice?

Isn’t this just a very antiquated idea of a mediated and highly conditional relationship with God? After all, we are living in a time when just about everyone takes for granted the truth of the pantheistic story of God in everything and the God who is immediately accessible through sincerity of feeling. Or, that, no worries, you will live again no matter what, just perhaps not in the kind of physical body you would have hoped. What does the idea of sacrifice, before we even discuss the Christian variety, commend itself as a starting point for a revelationally built grasp of God?

I assure you, although you can end up with pantheism, the pantheistic model is not a good start, for no other reason than you begin a search for the understanding of something entirely foreign to our natural understanding and desires and end at the same place. You may end there, but your search starts for something else, and you start with nothing, not something. Dropping the restraints of the idea of some Law standing between you and an ultimate positive state is a prejudice that answers to no authority since you just disallowed it. What you want to believe is not taken as integration into a wider and objective reality in which it fits, but it’s a luxury you can’t afford if what you want is something real and transcendent. So do you mind if we assume that, like all other relations in our lives that demand respect for rules, it might be wise to think that if there is an objective creator God, he might need an approach in a certain way? That takes in to account the ontological gap between him and his creation?

Ok, then, what are we supposed to do to bridge this gap? That’s why sacrifice as a basic relational concept between God and man makes so much sense.

Heres the thing. Sacrifice is the giving up of something of carnal value for something of a higher, spiritual value. But sacrifice is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end of understanding beyond the act. A teaching tool about the meaning of these concepts “spiritual” and “carnal,” with which humanity has so much trouble and defines sin and righteousness. It turns out as well that the understanding of sin and righteousness is not even the end values of the teaching tool of real sacrifice, it’s a vision of God himself in our utter helplessness to see him otherwise.

If you think about sacrifice according to the pagan way, for what use can an interdimensional being have with a dead goat? No, you are not going to give him food. No, if this being is the real God, and you just want you to give him something to show you value him more, what does this “value” mean? Whatever it is, count it as sitting exactly between our righteousness and our sin, our arrogance, and the false sense of power, in his mind, between which He expects us to make a moral decision.

How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? Only One Way. Part 4. The Man.

http://www.facebook.com/cmichaelpatton. Do Calvinists Believe in Salvation by Faith Alone? – Credo House Ministries. Credo House Ministries. https://credohouse.org/blog/do-calvinists-really-believe-in-salvation-by-faith-alone. Published March 14, 2012. Accessed November 7, 2019. ↩

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idelsarchive · 6 years ago

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for almost 25 years now, rachel blau duplessis has been working on what she predicts will be a six-volume poem titled 'drafts.'

david kaufmann, “midrashic sensibility: rachel blau du plessis and the poetry of textual reverence,” tablet

“duplessis refers to covenants and therefore to the covenant, and like many progressives she seems to locate her yiddishkeit in no small part in a secularized version of the jewish demand for justice. in ‘hard copy,’ the emphasis lies on witness and repair. but when she describes herself and her work, duplessis defines her jewishness in broader terms. you could call it an attitude, ‘a reverence for textuality so intense it moves into an antic quality within the seriousness, an exilic, nomadic sensibility, a certain kind of humor … a quarrel with the negative space some call god, a particular, actually somewhat skeptical, somewhat hopeful attitude to fulfillment and messianic hope.’

i have culled this quote from an essay called ‘midrashic sensibilities’ in order to suggest that her greatest tie to the practices of judaism lies with her ‘reverence for textuality’ and, more specifically, that aggressive, loving, and creative approach to texts we call midrash. midrash became a preferred term among jewish literary critics in the 1980s. it was used (and overused) as a way of both claiming and justifying the speculative forms of interpretation that marked that time. duplessis’ poems are midrashic to the extent that they are more often than not meditations on other poems or texts.”

#jumblr #jewish feminism #midrash

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bldgrelationshipwgod · 5 years ago

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The Trinity – a Pagan invention, or an ancient Jewish idea? TuviaPollack

A common Jewish objection against Christianity or against Messianic Judaism is that the theology of the Trinity is a gentile idea, developed in the 4th century by Catholic scholars, & that there are no Jewish sources for these beliefs.

However, anyone who has digged around in the sources of the early church fathers knows that the decisions that were made in the 4th century were mostly just an affirmation of the doctrines & the New Testament canon that had already been established organically during the past few hundred years.

There were discussions about the nature of Jesus as God & man, etc, but the basic ideas of the trinity & Jesus being God were already established. The discussions were about the exact nature.

Why were these doctrines so basic already? Because they are very clear in the New Testament. “Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” “Me and my Father are One.”

An objection we often hear is that there are historic sources pointing to the Evionites as a sect of Jews who believed in Jesus as the Messiah, but didn’t see him as divine. The claim is that these were Jesus’ original followers, but that they eventually died out, and that the gentile church with their pagan-inspired trinity theology took over. It’s a nice story if you don’t believe in Jesus, but it doesn’t hold up.

First of all, we know from the New Testament that Paul fought against false prophets and Judaizers. We shouldn’t be surprised that sects of Jews who believed in Jesus but denied his divinity existed. The fact that they existed doesn’t mean that they were Jesus’ original followers. Second of all, who says that the idea of trinity didn’t exist within Judaism before Jesus? The doctrine is actually present in the Old Testament if you only know where to look for it.

Why can’t we find any Jewish sages speak of it? That is expected. Following the split of Christianity, that doctrine must have been scrapped and censored. However, there are a few remnants. A number of clues in ancient writings that seem to point to the idea of the trinity being present in Jewish thought before Jesus, and even lingering on a few hundred years after.

After reading a number of books on the subject, such as “The Great Mystery, or How Can Three Be One,” by Rabbi Tsvi Nassi (1800 – 1877), and “The Messiah in the Old Testament,” by Dr. Risto Santala (available to read for free online), I was myself convinced that the idea of the trinity had existed long before Jesus, at least in some form or another.

I used the knowledge from these books to write parts of a chapter in my book, “The Secret Scroll of Magdala,” where one of my main characters, Daniel, sits together with his wife Naamah and studies Torah together with their rabbi, Yishmael. Daniel and Naamah are Nazarene Jews (Christians) while Yishmael is a Pharisee.

Since it seems that it will be a while before my book gets published, I thought I’d share a small part of this specific chapter with you. It takes place in the synagogue of Jericho in the spring of year 68 AD, just a few weeks before the Romans sacked the city.

I want to make clear that these characters and the story are fictional. It is based on ideas from the above mentioned books, but I have also added a lot of my own imagination and assumptions, based on my own personal beliefs.

* * *

Naamah considered herself fortunate. It wasn’t considered proper for women to study Torah, yet her husband, Daniel, was not only supportive, but encouraging her to learn more. Now she was sitting together with Daniel and Jericho’s rabbi, Yishmael, in the synagogue’s study center. The walls were lined with shelves filled with scrolls of all shapes and sizes. There were a number of tables throughout the room. During the day Yishmael would use this space to teach boys and men of all ages who wanted to deepen their knowledge of the Torah. Women were not allowed. That’s why Yishmael had his lessons with Naamah and Daniel in the middle of the night. There was a cold white light from the full moon that shone through the windows. Oil lamps were scattered throughout the room and cast flickering shadows. They were carefully arranged so that they would provide the needed light, but still not be too close to a scroll. One little mishap, and all the scrolls would be lost forever.

* * * (skipping a part of the chapter that is not relevant) * * *

Naamah had been scrolling the Torah scroll backwards a bit while they were talking, and now she had found the part she had been looking for. “Rabbi, can I ask you something? Who is God talking about here?” She pointed to a section of the scroll. Yishmael peered down at it. Naamah wasn’t sure, but didn’t she notice a hesitation? Some sort of insecurity? He slowly read through the section she had pointed out. “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared. Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him. If you listen carefully to what he says and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose those who oppose you.” Yishmael looked up. “Look… some of the wisest rabbis in the world have discussed who this angel might be for centuries.” “And…? Have they reached a conclusion?” Yishmael took a long breath and closed his eyes. “I am not sure I should tell you.” “Why?” Yishmael didn’t reply. His eyes were closed, and Naamah saw that his lips formed soundless words. He was praying. He opened his eyes and looked at her and Daniel. “Very well. I will tell you. Most rabbis agree that the angel God refers to here is not a regular angel. After all, it says malach – which also means messenger. Since God says that ‘my Name is in him,’ he cannot be an angel, but another type of messenger. Most rabbis agree that this is about… Metatron.” His voice went down to a whisper. A shiver went down Naamah’s spine. “Metatron? ‘Next to the throne’ in Greek? Is that the angel that is closest to God?” “Yes and no. Since no one can see God and live, this Metatron hears God’s words and tells it to the humans that God speaks to. Whether it is Abraham, Moses, Elijah, anyone. No one actually spoke directly to God, but to Metatron. Therefore, Metatron is God. Or rather, he is more God than he is an angel. Some speak of him as the Word of God. Depending which language you speak, it becomes Davar, Mimra, or Logos. In Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek.” “So let me see if I understand. You say this is a messenger of God who actually is God but he is also an angel?” “Well, not really. He is the Word of God, so he is constantly coming out of God. The psalm says ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you.’ Many say that this must be Metatron, since he is constantly begotten of God, as he is always his connection to human beings. One must even draw the conclusion that Metatron was the one who said this to Moses as well. And Metatron was therefore in the pillar of cloud that walked before the people of Israel in the desert.” “I have a question about this,” Daniel said. “This Metatron – was he created by God, or did he always exist as a part of God?” Yishmael went silent again. Naamah thought she could really see how he was thinking back and forth whether to tell them more or not. He got up from his seat and went up to the window. Looking back and forth, to make sure no one was listening. As he came back to talk to them he lowered his voice. “I am not allowed to tell you this.” “Why?” “Because it is too easily misunderstood. Our wise rabbis have decreed that what I am about to teach you must be kept secret unless the student is at least forty years old, and has studied Torah for at least ten years. You are both far from fulfilling these criteria.” “But why those restrictions?” “Because it can be wrongly interpreted as idol worship. People might think that it means that we believe in three gods. Of course we don’t. God is one, and one only. But he is also three. This is what we call raz deshlosha – the secret of the three.” Yishmael was whispering again. Naamah felt a cold shiver tingle throughout her body. They were being told the deepest secrets now, she knew that. Yishmael got up again and went to bring another scroll. He opened it up, and pointed to a section. Naamah immediately recognized that it was the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. “Read this section.” Naamah eyed the part he had pointed to and started to read with a trembling voice. “I will tell of the kindnesses of the Lord, the deeds for which he is to be praised, according to all the Lord has done for us — yes, the many good things he has done for Israel, according to his compassion and many kindnesses. He said, ‘Surely they are my people, children who will be true to me’; and so he became their Savior. In all their distress he too was distressed, and the angel of his presence saved them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old. Yet they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit. So he turned and became their enemy and he himself fought against them.” Naamah looked up at Yishmael with a puzzled look. Yishmael smiled. “Who do you think is the angel of his presence? Who can that be if not Metatron, right? The one messenger that conveys God’s actual presence. This is Metatron who leads them out of Egypt in the pillar of cloud, redeeming them, lifting them up, carrying them. And then, when the text speaks of how we rebelled against God, which led to the Babylonian captivity, it says that we grieved his Holy Spirit. So we can see three manifestations of God’s presence here. The Father, the Metatron, and the Holy Spirit. This has been a secret knowledge among Pharisaic rabbis for hundreds of years. It has been conveyed from mouth to ear only, never to be written down, due to the sensitivity. If the Sanhedrin finds out that I have told you, I might lose my license to be a rabbi. But I trust you.” “So you are telling us that God is three but still one?” “Exactly. The same God. But in some sort of mystical way, that we can’t fully understand, he is also three. Every day during the prayers we say the Shma, right? Shma Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai echad – Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. We say his name three times, and then we confirm that he is One. Three but still one.” “But how can we know that these are ‘parts of God?’ How can we know that they are not angels?” Naamah wondered. “Well, how did God create the world?” “I’m sorry?” “God created the world through his Word. By saying things. ‘Let there be light.’ So Metatron cannot be a created being. He has always been with God, since eternity. In a way he is God – or at least part of God. Why do you think God said ‘Let us make mankind in our image?’ Why do you think that the very word for God, Elohim, is in plural form in Hebrew? God is so more complex than we can imagine, even if he is One. When God said ‘Let there be light’ – that was the light of Metatron.” Naamah nodded. She loved these late night lessons with Yishmael. She often felt that she got closer to God for every time. Now she felt like she had found gold. This was amazing. She closed her eyes and started to speak slowly. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” As she opened her eyes she realized that Daniel and Yishmael were staring at her in awe. They were stunned. “That… that was beautiful,” Yishmael said. “That is exactly right. This is very deep knowledge about the very nature of God.” Naamah leaned over to Daniel and whispered to him. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” Daniel turned to her. “You mean…?” “Yes. Yeshua is Metatron. He is the son of God. The one who is constantly begotten by God. He is the Word. I must search the other prophets. There must be some sort of clue somewhere that the Metatron and the Messiah are the same.” Naamah admired Daniel for many things. He had studied with Pharisees, Esseans, Evionites and Nazarenes and was very learned. But she had a gift for finding connections in the scriptures that he didn’t posses. “You are wonderful, you know that?” Daniel got up and gave Naamah a kiss on her lips. She kissed him back and smiled at him. She got up and went to the shelf. She grabbed the scroll of the twelve minor prophets. “Looking for something?” Yishmael wondered. “Yes,” she said, as she quickly eyed through the writings of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah and Jonah. As she reached Micah she exclaimed “found it!” Yishmael got up from his seat and went over to Naamah to see what she pointed at. “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.” Yishmael nodded. “Yes, this is a prophecy about the Messiah who will be born in Bethlehem.” “But it says that his origins are from old, from ancient times,” Naamah said. “Yes, that is because the idea and thought about the Messiah in God’s plan is since ancient times.” “But that’s not what it says,” Naamah protested. “It says that he is from old. The Messiah himself is of ancient times.” “What are you trying to say?” “That the Messiah and the Metatron are the same, and his name is Yeshua.” “No!” Yishmael became very assertive. “That is not true. The Messiah is a human being that God will send to be our king. Metatron is not the Messiah, chas veshalom. The Messiah will establish a kingdom of peace. Everlasting eternal peace. He will rule the entire world from Jerusalem. I wish it had been Yeshua, but it wasn’t. He was killed, and all hopes that he was the Messiah died with him. If he really was the Messiah we wouldn’t be living in fear for the Romans now.” Naamah’s mouth became thin and she kept scrolling forward, determined to find something more. Another passage that could confirm to her that the Metatron was the Messiah. She didn’t answer Yishmael’s protests. She knew that those prophecies of the Messiah would be fulfilled at his second coming, but Yishmael didn’t see the distinction between the prophecies of the first and second coming. He had studied in the yeshiva of Jerusalem with some of the most prominent Pharisees. Including Yochanan ben Zakai, one of the wisest and most revered teachers among the Pharisees in Jerusalem. She kept scrolling forward past Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai and Zechariah. Just when she thought she wouldn’t find anything else she found it. “Here! Look! Look what Malachi wrote!” This time Daniel came up to her and read it out loud. “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come, says the Lord Almighty.” “See?” she said. “The messenger of the covenant. The angel of the covenant. The same as the angel of the presence. It has to be Metatron. Who else could it be? And here it says that he will become flesh. He will come to his temple. It’s crystal clear. Metatron is the Messiah. The Messiah is Metatron. He is the Word that is begotten by God.” Naamah shivered throughout her body and prayed a silent prayer of thanks to God for revealing this to her. Daniel and Yishmael read through the same passage. Daniel embraced her. “You found gold again, honey.” But Yishmael just shook his head. “I don’t know what to do with you two.” He gave them a sad smile. “I am trying to teach you the true Pharisaic teaching, but you only seem to drift further away.” He rolled up the scrolls to put them back in the shelves.

* * * (skipping a part of the chapter that is not relevant) * * *

Naamah went home with Daniel tired but happy that night. As the sun was rising and they reached their door, Daniel turned to Naamah and gave her a kiss. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he quoted. “I will never forget those words. Write that down, Naamah. We must have those words written down.”

* * *

This was a part of a chapter from my book “The Secret Scroll of Magdala,” which I am still working on rewriting. It is a duology of two books that have a total of 103 chapters. Only if you read both of them will you find out how come these words that Naamah made up eventually made it into the Gospel of John.

#Nov.18

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poetryofchrist · 6 years ago

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Biblical Studies Carnival 156 February 2019

Welcome to the 156th Biblical Studies Carnival February 2019 - The Lego Edition

TNK/OT

Posts this month heralded a new English translation of the Old Testament announced by the Jewish Telegraphic Society some months ago and in Carnival 153.

Deane Galbraith of Remnants of Giants notes Two New Misprinted Bibles.

when the authorities became aware of the error, most copies of the Wicked Bible were destroyed. Only a few copies survived, and these have become valuable collectors’ items.

Several reviewers from the Jewish Review of Books held a symposium on the Alter translation.

Alter’s Hebrew Bible is the only single-author translation by someone who has spent a lifetime studying literary artistry in both Hebrew and English. This is not to say that it is, or could be, beyond criticism.

Robert Alter wrote a short introduction in Ancient Near East Today.

The first might be described as strictly literary, which is to say, an attempt to find workable English equivalents for the cadences, the expressive syntax, the sound play, the thematic shaping of narrative through strategic word choice, and much else in the Hebrew. The other impetus is an effort to render faithfully the semantic force of the Hebrew words.

The apogee of classical form, all of them with shield and helmet (Ezekiel 38:5)

Bob MacDonald (your host) reviewed the reviewers in a series of posts: Has translation of the Bible into English reached its apogee?

Discussion of Alter's translations are not new in the blogosphere. Here is an early mention in the archives of the NY Times from 1996.

Also a post estimating how long it takes to translate the First Testament.

Goldingay reports that translating the First Testament consumed an hour of his time daily for five years. (7 days a week?) That would be 7*50*5 = 1750 hours. ... My estimate of what pace I could keep by the end of the project was 10 verses per hour. That would be 2,320 hours. From June 2015, I scheduled 4 hours a day 5 days a week 45 weeks of the year = 900 hours a year or about 3150 hours to November 2018.

James Davila posts about an article and responses on Alter's Bible.

To call it the best solo English Bible is, given the competition, not saying much. But one is also tempted to call it the best modern English Bible, period—a judgment with which Alter appears to agree.

Goldingay's First Testament is reviewed here.

The section titles in the FT are fantastic and funny, creative and clever. For example, “How David acquired his grandfather” for Ruth 4:11-22; “How to be the bad guy” for 2 Kings 21:1-12; “Let me tell you a story” for Proverbs 7:1-20. ...the FT forces me to think creatively about how to communicate biblical terms in ways people can more easily comprehend.

Sarah O'Connor via Marg Mowczko on Numbers 5:11ff.

In a world dominated by men, where a man’s honor was often valued above a woman’s life, the Bible stands out in its protection of women. Remember that the next time you read Numbers. If you ever do, I mean.

Marg Mowczko on the household codes.

The so-called household codes in Ephesians chapters 5-6 and Colossians chapters 3-4 are often used to support the idea of “gender roles.” These gender roles usually boil down to “the submission of all women to male-only authority.” But these codes were not primarily about gender roles or even gender. They were about power.

Rachel Barenblatt ponders the light of the world on parashah tetzaveh.

אמּת suitable for ages 4+ includes tool set and box

The Hasidic master known as the Sfat Emet reads this verse in a beautiful way. First he notes the verse from Proverbs, "The candle of God is the soul of a human being." When we are in dark places, we light a candle to help us see.

James McGrath ponders what is in the Bible (or not) considering translation or paraphrase.

“If you oppress poor people, you insult the God who made them; but kindness shown to the poor is an act of worship.”

Via James Davila, a usage history of Goy.

... a careful tracing of “the genealogy of the goy, from the Hebrew Bible [where “Israel is one goy among many”] to the rabbis and church fathers of the second and third centuries” of the Common Era ...

And again on Ethnic and Cultural Identities in the Rabbinic Goy Discourse.

...the authors offer a most insightful analysis of Paul’s motivations, arguing that the creation of a new model of equal membership of Jews and others within the ekklesia required a new binary language, which would obliterate any particular ethnic identities, and at the same time maintain the separate identity of the gentile qua gentile in the messianic age.

And moving on to Ki Tissa, a question raised about the legitimacy of sacrifice on Mt Carmel.

Clearly, in Elijah’s perception, Yahwistic altars such as the one that he repaired on Mount Carmel were not only legitimate, but their destruction represented an affront to YHWH, indeed a tangible expression of the people’s abandonment of their covenant with YHWH. The contrast between such a perception and the Deuteronomic law reflected in the Book of Kings itself that proscribes sacrificial worship outside of the Jerusalem temple could hardly be greater!

Rachel Adelman writes on atoning for the golden calf with the Kapporet.

Atop the kappōret, the ark’s cover, sat the golden cherubim, which framed the empty space (tokh) where God would speak with Moses. Drawing on the connection between the word kappōret and the root כ.פ.ר (“atone”), and noting how the golden calf episode interrupts the Tabernacle account, the rabbis suggest that the ark cover served as a means of atoning for the Israelites’ collective sin.

Henry Neufeld considers Hezekiah's horrible prayer.

... in 2 Kings 21 we see Manasseh, generally considered the worst king of Judah, took the throne at 12 years of age on the death of his father. His birth would have occurred in those 15 years added to Hezekiah’s life.

and follows up with a counter interpretation from Brevard Childs.

Ackroyd (“An Interpretation of the Babylonian Exile,” Studies, 157ff.) has mounted a persuasive case against interpreting it as a smug response that the judgment will not personally affect him. Rather, it is an acceptance of the divine will in which Isaiah’s form of the response (39:8) emphasizes the certainty of divine blessing at least in his lifetime.

Andrew Perriman rethinks the identity of the servant.

Philip proclaims the crucified and resurrected Jesus as Israel’s Lord and Christ, no doubt drawing out the theological significance of the extraordinary turn of events through the analogy with—but not identification with—Isaiah’s portrayal of Israel as a suffering servant.

And he has a follow-up here.

as things stand, we have to reckon, both historically and canonically, with its current location. It’s an integral part of the story of the exile and the return from exile.

Deane Galbraith argues against the class prejudice of scholars about Tobit.

The class characteristics of the Tobit family are frequently missed by commentators, despite many indications of their wealth and status.

New and Old together

NT Julia Blum relates issues about Sabbath observance in Matthew.

The gospels are the only first century source that we have, where healing is permitted and performed on Shabbat. Jesus advocates – perhaps even establishes – the same approach that later, slightly modified, will become normative in Rabbinic Judaism.

Also on the parables.

For instance, we find a parable similar to Jesus’ Parable of the Lost Coin in a Jewish commentary on the Song of Songs—Song of Songs Rabbah. Remarkably, here the parable itself is likened to the Lost Coin. “The matter is like a king who lost a coin or a precious pearl in his house. He will find it by the light of a penny-worth wick. Likewise, do not let the parable appear of little worth to you: through the parable, a man can stand on the words of Torah.

Via Brian Small on FB, Report of a symposium on Hays Echos. Response by Rafael Rodriquez, and reply from Richard Hays (more to come in March).

[T]his is a book that offers an account of the narrative representation of Israel, Jesus, and the church in the canonical Gospels, with particular attention to the ways in which the four Evangelists reread Israel’s Scripture—as well as the ways in which Israel’s Scripture prefigures and illuminates the central character in the Gospel stories.

Second response by Eric Barreto and reply from Hays.

...the significance of the New Testament is not to be found on a single literary or historical layer; instead, the Gospels and Paul alike are palimpsests of interpretive activity.

Who will go up for us?

... the chief point of coherence that lies at the center of my [Hays] argument: namely, the christological coherence of the Gospel narratives, all four of which in their distinctive ways proclaim the identity of Jesus as the definitive embodiment of Israel’s God. This was a deeply scandalous claim within the world of ancient Judaism, and it is a point on which the four Gospels converge and agree.

The third tangential response is also available, the fourth still to come in April. A technical note on pre-existence from Larry Hurtado.

final things are first things ... it was a short (but remarkable) step from belief in Jesus’ eschatological significance to belief in his pre-existence, and likely required very little time to make that step.

He also examines the Christological idea that Jesus was considered angelic noting much detail on the last 120 years of thinking on this subject.

The simple fact is that earliest Jesus-followers had a rich body of angel-speculations available to them and were convinced of the reality of angels, but they never referred to Jesus as an angel (to judge from the NT texts).

Ian Paul asks about sexual boundaries and gospel freedom.

Instead of questioning the meaning of scriptural passages, the bishop appeals to ‘other sources of authority such as reason, scientific evidence and in serious dialogue with other disciplines’. This is not crude rationalistic liberalism, however, as an important step in his argument is that he sets out a biblical justification as to why scripture itself mandates us to go beyond it.

Ian also writes on the miraculous catch of fish (lectionary for February 5th).

We will see the metaphorical boat of the early church filled almost to sinking throughout Acts, as on several occasions thousands come to faith in Jesus at a time, and the structural nets of leadership need expanding and reconsidering, not least when the ‘gentile mission’ takes off under Paul’s ministry.

Bosco Peters has an opinion on these fishy tales too.

In last Sunday’s Gospel reading (Luke 5:1-11), fish were perfectly happy, swimming their happy fishy life, and then they are caught in half-cleaned nets, dragged to the shore and left, dead and dying, on abandoned boats in the late afternoon heat. And Jesus seems to say: “follow me – what we did to those fish, that’s what we are going to do to people”!

Airtonyo points to a chapter of Class Struggle in the New Testament available online.

It is not uncommon to find unchecked entrepreneurial assumptions influencing the interpretation of the New Testament world, not only in the popular press but even within the discourse of biblical studies. ... the retrojection of entrepreneurialism demonstrates just how totalizing neoliberal capitalism has become as an implicit hermeneutical frame—a way of seeing and structuring the entire world—in every field and period of human knowledge.

Phillip Long continues his posts on the New Testament, with daily sequential posts on The Acts of the Apostles, e.g. Gamaliel:

Gamaliel urges careful deliberation before acting. ... Why does Gamaliel give this advice to the Council? Is this, as Dunn says, simply “shrewd politics”? Or is there more to this story?

What were they praying for when Peter appeared?

... if they were praying for his release, then their response to Peter’s escape from prison is unusual.

and Herod Agrippa (I)

Agrippa is therefore demonstrating his piousness by pursuing the leaders of the Christian community.

Via FB, James McGrath points out a Zondervan online course with an introduction to Who wrote the Book of Acts.

Together with the Gospel of Luke and the Letter to the Hebrews, the book of Acts contains some of the most cultured Greek writing in the New Testament. On the other hand, roughness of Greek style turns up where Luke appears to be following Semitic sources or imitating the Septuagint.

Wayne Coppins ponders Angelika Reichert pondering the I in Romans 7.

Consequently, it appears sensible to modify how the question is posed, i.e. instead of the question of the meaning of the positive statements about the “I”, to place the question of their function in the flow of vv. 14-23 in the foreground.

James Tabor has a two part post on the 6 greatest ideas in the writings of Paul.

Helmet, repaired in the very place of its failure in its classical form

/from part 1/... putting “justification by faith” at the center of Paul’s thought throws everything off balance. ... the New Testament gospels are essentially Pauline documents, with underlying elements of the earlier Jesus tradition. .../from part 2/ he, as a Suffering Servant, along with Christ, would also pour out his blood as an offering, and thus “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering”

Ken Schenck has posted a 10 part series on Leadership beginning with Corinth.

At some point around AD49, a Christian couple arrived at the city of Corinth named Priscilla and Aquila. I put the wife's name first because the New Testament typically puts her name first when it is referring to their ministry together. This fact suggests that she generally took the lead in ministry between the two.

Christopher Scott explores soteriology.

For an entire semester we talked about elements of salvation, biblical views on what it means to be saved, historical interpretations of salvation, as well as people that have tried to make salvation something other than what the Bible describes it as.

Airtonyo quotes Moltmann on fundamentalism

O documento divino da revelação não pode estar sujeito à interpretação humana mas, ao contrário, a interpretação humana deve estar sujeita ao documento divino da revelação.

Claude Mariottini posts his fifth study on the explore God Chicago 2019 series. "Is Jesus really God?"

... the writers of the New Testament, as they tried to identify the one who died on the cross and the one who overcame the grave, concluded that the one whom they called “the Christ,” was fully human and fully God.

Larry Hurtado notes the usage of the phrase son of God in early Christian writings.

So, it’s clear that the NT authors vary in their use of the expression “son of God”, with no clear pattern readily apparent to me. The authors of GJohn and 1 John easily out-distance other NT texts in usage of the phrase, and in the confessional significance attached to it.

James McGrath posts on the doctrine of personal infallibility citing Lars Cade.

Many Christians think something like this: “The Bible is True. I believe the Bible. Therefore, everything I believe is true.” This also applies to the morality of actions they may take or motives they may have (see: defending the separation of families by quoting Romans 13). With such a mentality, it simply does not occur to people that they may be wrong.

Peter Gurry examines the textual problems with Hebrews 11:11.

Thus, in one single verse, we must judge between ‘longer’ and ‘shorter’ texts, and not make a fetish of either. There is no royal road or short cut in these matters.

Other notes Via ETC via Paleojudaica among a clutch of debunkings, Is codex sinaiticus a fake? Short answer, No.

Obviously, the two sets of images were not taken to the level of precision that Daniels’ theory needs. If they were, we would see no difference in colour at all, because those two versions of yellow that you see in this image are the exact same colour in real life.

Also via James Davila, Dating Biblical Texts to the Persian Period.

By grappling with these questions, the essays in this volume evince a greater degree of precision vis-a-vis dating and historical context.

James McGrath interviews Pete Enns about his book How the Bible actually works. Larry Hurtado points out two new books from Jörg Frey,

One of the most productive NT scholars today is Professor Jörg Frey (University of Zurich), and so it is very good news to have a couple of his major works now available in English.

and on the marginalia review of books, has a review of Paula Fredriksen’s When Christians were Jews.

I have attempted to reimagine the stages by which the earliest Jesus-community would have first come together again, after the crucifixion. To understand how and why, despite the difficulties, these first followers of Jesus would have resettled in Jerusalem. To reconstruct the steps by which they became in some sense the center of a movement that was already fracturing bitterly within two decades of its founder’s death. To see how the seriatim waves of expectation, disappointment, and fresh interpretation would have sustained this astonishing assembly in the long decades framed by Pilate’s troops in 30 and Titus’s in 70.

Phillip Long reviews Douglas Mangum and Josh Westbury, eds. Linguistics & Biblical Exegesis

The second volume of the Lexham Methods series surveys the often difficult field of linguistics. Since the essays in this volume are all aimed at students who are doing exegesis of the whole Bible, examples are given for both the Old and New Testaments.

Amy Erikson reviews the five scrolls. Table of Contents and list of authors is here.

... there are contributions from six scholars working in South Africa, several from the United States, two from scholars based in China, and two based in Australia. ... The volume also contains essays by scholars from Israel, Argentina, and the Netherlands. The result is an eclectic collection of fresh readings that explores not only how a reader’s context might influence one’s reading of the text but also how the Bible might enrich a reader’s understanding of his or her context.

James Pate reviews George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles.

"Imagine Sheldon Cooper in the pulpit, only with the desire to be a poet."

James Davila points to a review by Yitz Landes of The Origins of Midrash.

for much of antiquity, including during the early rabbinic period, the Semitic root d.r.sh referred to teaching—textual or otherwise. Mandel thus overturns the consensus understanding that early uses of the root d.r.sh refer to textual interpretation, and that only later was the root expanded to encompass teaching more generally.

James Hanson reviews According to the Scriptures.

If all you know is the New Testament, you do not know the New Testament” - so the late New Testament scholar Martin Hengel is reputed to have said... Allen has done a great service by compiling a truly comprehensive bibliography on the question of the Jewish Scriptures in the New Testament, both in general and specifically in relation to Jesus’s death.

April DeConick speaks about silenced voices in religion. Kings of Israel - Todd Bolen links to a board game.

If the players are able to build enough altars before the game ends, they win. If the game ends by either the team running out of sin cubes or idols, or by Assyria destroying Israel, the prophets lose.

A conversation from Michael Langlois: Campus Protestant m’a demandé comment l’archéologie éclaire la Bible. A note on the Hebrew language from Autumn Light.

So next time you hear Murphy’s Law— If anything can go wrong—it will. remember Goldberg’s Corollary: If anything can go wrong—God forbid—it won’t.

Also from Jonathan Orr-Stav, an answer to a question about ס and פ as parashot markers.

The division into parashot is usually to indicate a contextual change, so there isn’t a consistency in the size or number of verses involved. In the case of the Ten Commandments, for example, each commandment is a parashah in its own right—presumably to underline its importance.

Jim Davila and Drew Longacre both note a new book: The Masora on Scripture and its Methods.

The ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible contain thousands of Masora comments of two types: Masora Magna and Masora Prava. How does this complex defense mechanism, which contains counting of words and combinations from the Bible, work?

Again via Jim Davila, a new trilingual inscription found near the tomb of Darius the Great.

the most famous trilingual inscription from Iran is the Behistun inscription, which (rather like the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian) was key to the decipherment of Akkadian.

Via Ekaterini G. Tsalampouni an article on the pomegranate from ASOR.

The pomegranate is attested in ancient Elam during the 4th millennium BCE, and then spread to the rest of the Near East, with the original shrub (Punica protopunica L.) reaching Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine by the end of the 3rd millennium. Sumerians appear to have been involved in domestication of the pomegranate (Punica granatum L.), and the fruit quickly became an important symbol.

Call for papers for Medicine in the Bible, Warsaw 2019.

Contributors should aim at offering a comparative perspective by keeping an eye on the embeddedness of medical discourses in their surrounding cultures( ancient Babylonian, Near Eastern, Graeco-Roman, Persian, Byzantine/Syriac or early Islamicate traditions). Such a perspective will allow for assessing Jewish and Talmudic medical knowledge within a broader history of ancient knowledge cultures and helps to determine their distinct epistemologies or particular Jewishness.

Conference announcement on the New Song

the meaning of the Bible's poetry as Jewish and Christian scripture in the 21st century - the difficulties (ambiguity, genre blending/bending, figurative language), the dynamics (poetry as experience relayed and as experience relived, theological explorations of form and content, prosody and parallelism), and the effects and demands on hearers and reading communities.

Liturgy redefines liturgy. Take your pick of three definitions,

[Liturgy] was in ancient Greece a public service established by the city-state whereby its richest members (whether citizens or resident aliens), more or less voluntarily, financed the State with their personal wealth.

Kurk Gayle announces a posthumous book by Suzanne McCarthy Valiant or Virtuous? Gender Bias in Bible Translation. Ian Paul remembers Michael Green. Vimoth Ramachandra reflects on grief. Jim Gordon speaks of loss. Future carnivals Please contact Phillip Long @plong42 to volunteer for a carnival. Note that June is currently open.

March 2019 (Due April 1) - Spencer Robinson, @spoiledmilks

April 2019 (Due May 1) - Christopher Scott

May 2019 (Due June 1) - Claude Mariottini, @DrMariottini

June 2019 (Due July 1) -

July 2019 (Due August 1) - Lindsay Kennedy, @digitalseminary

August 2019 (Due September 1) - Amateur Exegete, @amateurexegete

The dreaded bin of everlasting stor-age.

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