Evolution makes Jesus a liar

[Scholar in training]

It is clear they believed Yahweh to be a more powerful God than the gods of surrounding nations.

Can you show me some passages about this topic?

Even Elijah's witness is not so much that the God of Israel is the only god, as that the God of Israel is greater than Baal and claims the allegiance of Israel. OTOH deutero-Isaiah is a clear denunciation of the very claim of other gods to be gods at all.

Well, take 1 Kings 18:20-29, for example. Elijah and the prophets of Baal are on Mt. Carmel, and the prophets actions don't get a whiff of a response - as if the god they are calling to doesn't exist. To contrast that, Elijah's prayer gets a response from the Lord.

But the Exile was a turning point. Right up to and even after the fall of Jerusalem, idol worship was part of daily life in Judah. But after the return from Babylon, it never re-appears.

Are you sure? I don't know much about post-exilic Israel aside from a few details here and there in the Greek occupation and some in the Roman occupation, but I was under the impression that the Greeks forced quite a lot of their culture on the Jews.

 

[artybloke]

Are you sure? I don't know much about post-exilic Israel aside from a few details here and there in the Greek occupation and some in the Roman occupation, but I was under the impression that the Greeks forced quite a lot of their culture on the Jews.

From what I know of the Greeks, and the later Roman empire, they didn't force their religion onto other people as such. Greek became the lingua franca, and operated rather the way the British Empire operated, where British culture became the high water mark of culture, such that even in the 1960's even black Caribbeans looked to England as the homeland.

I can't remember his name, but one of the early Ptolomaic kings tried to build a statue of himself in the Temple grounds (the so-called Abomination of Desecration in Daniel), but this was the cause of the Maccabean revolt and I don't think they tried it again. (I suspect a reading of 1 Maccabees in the Apocrypha might help.)

Not having idols was the sticking-point for the post-exilic Jews, the point they were not prepared to compromise on, and were prepared to go to war about. I don't think that was the case for the pre-exilic communities.

 

[shernren]

I would concur. A good argument I have heard is this: if Jesus had seen Jews worshipping idols at any time wouldn't He have raised a ruckus about it? So there must be a reason for the absence of recorded warnings against idolatry. The most probable reason that Jesus never spoke against idols was that there were no idols, at least outwardly, for Him to speak against.