Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
The Gospels were not written in Hebrew. They were written in Greek.
The collected sayings of the Lord may have been written in a language other than Greek, but it is unlikely, to be honest. That would presuppose a literate society with a general ability to write Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, which I think is not realistic. What is far more likely is that when wanting to provide a written record, the Gospel writers used a well established language, with a longstanding literary tradition. They went to Greek scribes, and the Greek scribes wrote the gospels to their dictation.
Why Greek and not Latin? Because Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, as Latin was of Christian Europe, and as English is for much of the world today.
St Paul was capable of writing, but even he did not write his own letters. When he adds a postscript in his own hand he remarks on how large his letters are, compared with those of the scribe. In other words, he could write, but he was not adept at it.
Because we learn to read and write at the same time we assume the two go together. They don't. It is more than possible to learn to read a language without having the ability to write it, and this would have been the case for the majority of people in the ancient world. If they could read it would not be much. And if they could read, they would not necessarily be able to write. And even if they could do both, they would use a scribe to write letters for them, and perhaps also to read and translate where necessary those they received.
There is a difference between then and now. The rabbis have had almost 2000 years to warp Judaism into an anti-christian cocoon wrapped around the Jewish people.
Im glad youre the one who said it, not me.
Speaking for myself, and for what small part of Anglicanism I can be regarded as being a part of, I have no problem with Messianics, and I respect their beliefs very highly. If it were possible for me to live a Messianic life, I would. I know far too little about it, however, so instead of fake Messianic I settle for authentic Anglo Catholic. If I can't even remember to remember to say the Angelus regularly, I would be hopeless trying to add appropriate Sabbath observance, let alone anything else.
I think authentic Messianic Christianity is the closest form to that of the Lord himself, his mother and the apostles. I don't know any Anglican who would regard that, or the aspiration to live a similar life, as crazy.
Academically, that is a very highly contentious matter. Matthew, in particular, is believed to have been written, originally, in Hebrew and, possibly, John as well. I wouldn't make a categorical statement as you have
Easy G (G²);61514994 said:
There are people all around the world who feel exactly as you do when it comes to respecting Messianic Judaism and seeing authentic Messianic Christianity as perhaps the best reflection of what the Lord would be walking out. There are other forms as well which many Jewish believers have felt would reflect what the apostles/Christ lived out as well, be it those who are Hebrew Christians/Messianic Jews within circles that are Eastern Catholic in nature---or Jewish believers expressing their Jewishness through Orthodox systems (more shared here, here, here, here, here, here , here , here , here , here , here, here , here , here, here , here, here, here and here at Jewish and Christian - Reocities if knowing of Fr. A. James Bernstein , who is a Jew that was a part of Orthodox Judaism but joined Orthodoxy when seeing the temple nature of Israel refelected there).
To see what happens around the world is beautiful.
Thanks for sharing as you did
People are indeed the most beautiful creation God has made...as they are a living Mosaic and reflection of the sheer extensiveness of diversity in heaven. People can often be united in the same struggle and desires but not realize it due to language or being on other sides of the street/unaware of what's happening in the world of another...It is indeed. I think people are much the same everywhere; we all want the same, and fear the same. People are God's most beautiful creation, imo.
Oh, by no means no rush. Not a problemYou are more than welcome.
It may take me a while to look at all of those links, but many thanks for providing them.
We can identify five gospel sources: (1) text that is common to Matthew, Mark and Luke; (2) text that is common to Matthew and Luke (taken from “Q” (3) text that is unique to Matthew; (4) text that is unique to Luke; and, (5) the gospel of John (which shares none of the stories that the other gospels have).
The most interesting, in my opinion, is where the text is shared between the three Synoptics and altered for whatever reason. For example, as Bart Ehrman discusses in Misquoting Jesus, Mark presents Jesus in anguish as he goes to the cross, while Luke removes all of the struggle and emotion from the descriptions at each point. Luke presents Jesus as resolute, knowing why he is going to the cross and certain that God will be with him in the end. Mark presents him as in such anguish that he sweats drops of blood, etc. We know that Luke used Mark as a source, so we have to ask ourselves why Luke removed these things from his record? Ehrman makes a good suggestion in his book, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.
I don’t think so. I’m not sure why you think that we have received so much of it.
The synoptics do not claim to present us with more than a single year of the life of Jesus (though, in order to complement John’s apparent three Passover meals, we have generally been told that they represent three years – even though only one Passover takes place in the Synoptics), and that can hardly be everything that Jesus taught. Perhaps he actually taught something that would clarify the theological arguments carried out today by those who follow him. What if he had laid down more specifics about whether or not his followers need to keep the Law (which Matthew answers in the affirmative, while the other gospels give no opinion on this, and Paul comes out against it)? Wouldn’t that have cleared up the question so that it wouldn’t become a debate in the church so much later? I imagine that there are a lot of things that Jesus did and said that would have been useful in a reconstruction of his life, had we heard of them.
I agree that it’s the same problem, but I would take it the other way – as reason to question the validity of the entire Bible. If people have faith in God, it needs to be for good reasons, and it should probably be separate from any claims to plenary verbal inspiration.
I imagine there are lots of things I would say that you would not. And vice versa. However, not Hebrew.
A possible alternative for the collected sayings later found in Matthew is Aramaic. Matthew itself is thought to be 80 - 90, give or take a decade. But John was either written in Ephesus or Syria, ca 100 - 110. Bit pointless using Aramaic there, or anywhere, come to that. Few could read it, and fewer write it.
Rather like writing a political manifesto today in Welsh. No disrespect to the Welsh; it can be done, and some can read it, but it is not really the way to disseminate any given message as widely as possible.
Amazing erudition courtesy of An Introduction to the New Testament, by RE Brown (nihil obstat). Flippant bits in between all mine. In case anyone was fooled into thinking I knew all this stuff by myself; I don't.
As I said, it is a highly contentious area - different academics hold to different opinions on these two gospels, both in relation to original language and in purpose.
Regarding widest possible distribution - we do not know that their aim was to spread it far and wide. Both John and Matthew could be argued to be written to/for indigenous Jews, not for everyone on earth at the time, and therefore writing in a semitic language would make more sense. The content of the two gospels is more Jew-friendly (if you see my point), as opposed to Luke who was writing for a particular purpose to a particular person. Mark is the podcast gospel - a very portable, short account of what he deemed to be the things that people really ought to know about Messiah; every section of Mark has a particular lesson for the knowing reader to discover, buried in the writing of each page. It is just like a modern podcast where you can learn the essence of a subject in a relatively short, yet deep, session of reading / hearing. That is why Mark is one of the best to start reading if people are searching into Christianity.
Thats a really awful thing to say.
Using a computer on Shabbat is a violation of doing work all in itself. This is a universal understood by all Jews. How would you define מְלָאכָה mlachah (used most commonly in the Torah to refer to craftsmanship or handiwork)? Traditionally, it is defined in 39 categories of things that were performed in the construction of the tabernacle in the wilderness. The commandment specifically says that you will do no mlachah on Shabbat. In fact, even sitting in McDonalds is enough to violate Shabbat, since those who pass by (if they know me not that anyone in New York knows me!) would assume that I had bought something to eat. (I didnt of course. I was sitting there because of the free Internet, with my computer and book that Im reading.)
What we see in the Acts of the Apostles is a letter written to forbid Gentile believers from eating three things: (1) meat offered to idols; (2) blood; and, (3) the meat of strangled animals. This is a far cry from the kosher standards of Jewish food, even assuming differences between then and now. We can actually be certain that Paul didnt teach even these restrictions, since he stated outright in his writings that we know an idol is nothing and that anyone who eats the meat sacrified to idols does so with faith and is not guilty before God. He specifically said that those who do not eat should not judge those who do, and those who eat should not look down on those who do not eat whom he described as weak of faith.
1 Corinthians 8:4 So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that An idol is nothing at all in the world and that There is no God but one. 5 For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many gods and many lords), 6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
7 But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. 8 But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.
9 Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idols temple, wont that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 11 So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. (NIV)
There is no reason to imagine that Paul did not teach this very thing in his congregation in Antioch, and it was the weak conscience of those who came from James that caused Peter, Barnabas and the rest of the Jews to fall into hypocrisy (in Romans 14, he does not say weak conscience but weak faith that keeps someone from eating all things).
The problem was very much with the food. A Jew who ate in the home of a Gentile was considered defiled because of the types of things that they brought into their homes as food in addition to the stereotypical practices of Gentiles at the time. Your failure to acknowledge this is striking. The issue was certainly that James emissaries had come to see what was going on in Pauls congregations, and when they found Peter and the others eating things that were forbidden, they called them out for it and at their instigation, Peter withdrew from fellowship with the congregation. Paul was steamed and called him on the carpet for it, stating that he was essentially destroying the work of God. Elsewhere (in Ephesians) it is at least claimed that Paul wrote about the work of God bringing down the division between the two bodies Jews and Gentiles and he states that this division was brought down through the cross.
Ephesians 2:14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two [that is, the circumcision (Jews) and uncircumcision (Gentiles) as expressed above in this chapter], thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with Gods people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. (New International Version)
The fact that Peter, Barnabas and the rest withdrew from the Gentiles represented to Paul a failure to recognize the completed work of God, and it was all about their insistence on the importance of keeping Torah. Paul opposed them staunchly and vehemently, making it clear that Jesus death was an abolishment of the Torah and the Mitzvah (commandment) and that through the cross there was no longer any dividing barrier between Jew and Gentile, but that all would have access to God in the same way and that was without Torah.
Romans 3:21 But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. (New International Version)
The phrase apart from the law here in Greek is χωρὶς νόμου, without law. The righteousness of God that Paul preached was without the Torah. He said it so often and in so many ways that it should be clear enough.
Well, Paul's bro Peter did seem to imply that his sayings were difficult to understandWe've either misread Paul or it is simply he is wrong. I'd rather take the stance that Paul was a liar and false apostle tham that God made a boo-boo. One of those three options has to be it.
We've either misread Paul or it is simply he is wrong. I'd rather take the stance that Paul was a liar and false apostle tham that God made a boo-boo. One of those three options has to be it.
Well, Paul's bro Peter did seem to imply that his sayings were difficult to understand
2 Peter 3:15 and the long-suffering of our Lord count ye salvation, according as also our beloved brother Paul--according to the wisdom given to him--did write to you
16 as also in all the epistles, speaking in them concerning these things, among which things are certain hard to be understood, which the untaught and unstable do wrest, as also the other Writings, unto their own destruction
Not sure that I understand your Hebrew, ....
but zara is short for: ...Zarathustrianism
...The first monotheistic religion with a written legacy....
what is zara and Zarathustrianism in Hebrew ???
thanx for asking, ...zara
Anachronism is a wonderful thing.
General individual aristocratic or higher middle class readers of the Bible are not found until way into the 16th century; lower classes far later; 19th century at best. At any time before that the Bible was read out in church, and then expounded to the congregation in homily form. And even your 'Jew-friendly' versions take pains to explain what it is that the Jews are up to; they do not assume that those listening will know. Hardly what one would expect if they were addressed to Jewish people, or even Jewish converts.
However, this is probably getting far too much off topic. Perhaps another time and another place, Av.
I suspect you have misread the blessed Paul. In my view he was neither a liar nor a false apostle, and God did not make a mistake in calling him.
He was certainly a hothead, prone to speak/write without thinking through what he was saying. But he was a hothead who got things done, and without whom our faith would not be what it is today, and because he is so important to our faith I personally cannot accept him being maligned.
Certainly we can postulate the Way without St Paul. But it would have remained a minor cult related to Judaism at best, and by now probably be forgotten. Christianity is following Christ, but Our Lady, the apostles and evangelists show us how to do this by their example. We do not have to do exactly the same as any of them, but they all point to the Lord. St Paul is no exception to this.
Just so you know, you just (I'm sure accidently) addressed Avodat as Father in Hebrew.
Indeed..What we see in the Acts of the Apostles is a letter written to forbid Gentile believers from eating three things: (1) meat offered to idols; (2) blood; and, (3) the meat of strangled animals. This is a far cry from the kosher standards of Jewish food, even assuming differences between then and now. We can actually be certain that Paul didn’t teach even these restrictions, since he stated outright in his writings that “we know an idol is nothing” and that anyone who eats the meat sacrified to idols does so “with faith” and is not guilty before God. He specifically said that those who do not eat should not judge those who do, and those who eat should not look down on those who do not eat — whom he described as “weak of faith.”
1 Corinthians 8:4 So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.” 5 For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”There is no reason to imagine that Paul did not teach this very thing in his congregation in Antioch, and it was the weak conscience of those who came from James that caused Peter, Barnabas and the rest of the Jews to fall into hypocrisy (in Romans 14, he does not say weak conscience but weak faith that keeps someone from eating “all things”, 6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
7 But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. 8 But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.
9 Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 11 So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. (NIV)
.
The problem was very much with the food. A Jew who ate in the home of a Gentile was considered defiled because of the types of things that they brought into their homes as food – in addition to the stereotypical practices of Gentiles at the time.
...........The fact that Peter, Barnabas and the rest withdrew from the Gentiles represented to Paul a failure to recognize the completed work of God, and it was all about their insistence on the importance of keeping Torah. Paul opposed them staunchly and vehemently, making it clear that Jesus’ death was an abolishment of the Torah and the Mitzvah (commandment) and that through the cross there was no longer any dividing barrier between Jew and Gentile, but that all would have access to God in the same way – and that was without Torah.
Romans 3:21 But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. (New International Version)The phrase “apart from the law” here in Greek is χωρὶς νόμου, “without law.” The righteousness of God that Paul preached was without the Torah. He said it so often and in so many ways that it should be clear enough.
In Roman culture, food is highly important in social gatherings. To be a good host, food and drink must be provided in abundance. Since non-Jews did not keep Kosher, Jewish people did not visit a Romans home. (Roast mouse was a big delicacy in Rome, but hardly Kosher). The Roman lifestyle and food made them ritually unclean, even as a Gentile according to the subset of laws for Gentiles residing in the land. So, for a Jewish person to enter the home of a Roman/Gentile meant the Jewish person was entering an unclean home and would have to snub the person culturally, not participating in the most important social convention of the society.
Acts 11:11 Now the apostles and the brethren who were throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. 2 And when Peter came up to Jerusalem, those who were circumcised took issue with him, 3 saying, “You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them.”
That Peter went to uncircumcised men and ate with them was the issue.
.
I wasn't talking about God making a mistake in calling Paul, that's not what I meant in my last statement. If what Yonah says is true and the Torah is void and null today then God made a major blunder, because He stated that those instructions were forever. And Yeshua continued to teach from the Torah - if is less than 3 years it was all gonna be null and void, what a waste of time! Di God make a big boo-boo and did Yeshua waste His time teaching? I don't think so. So, Paul has been misunderstood or he was a false apostle. I won't accept the other options, cos actually they're not options at all. If God made a mistake, then how could we be assured that all that Yeshua did was enough, or even necessary? So, it's down to either Paul's been misunderstood and was Torah-Observant or he missed as much as he may have gotten right.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?