The bible says to not strain at a gnat, but a parable is not a gnat ;)

[yeshuaslavejeff]

< musical tune from a spoonful of honey >
"and a spoonful of reasoning makes the poisoning go down, the poisoning go down ..... "

Yet, even if there was a case that did not involve poisoning, there's a more important and serious principle in God's Instructions to His disciples:

it is paraphrased here: "Do not give a bottle of booze to an alcoholic; do not even put it within his reach or ability to get it and drink it."

i.e. never cause someone else weak in faith to stumble; why destroy someone else's faith or soul due to a lust of the flesh ?

God has said not to; and will hold them accountable who causes another to stumble.

 

[stephen583]

With regard to the parables found in the Gospel, I find it odd that so many religious people seem to regard them only metaphorically as teachings, stories, or fables, when the Scripture explicitly states the testimony of Christ, is the Spirit of Prophecy, (Revelation 1:2, 19:10).

Has anyone ever considered the parables of the Gospel might actually represent prophecy about the future ?

 

[Open Heart]

Have you ever tried pork cooked medium rare or even medium? No of course not. Me either.

Pigs eat their own feces. That pretty much ruled them out for ancient healthy choices.

Just as shellfish from warm Mediterranean waters ruminating in the silt at the mouth of the Nile. Not healthy.

If you had actually read my post, you would have seen that I wrote, IF THEY ARE COOKED PROPERLY.

Rabbits also eat their own feces. In neither case does it make them less healthy to eat. Unclean meat is NOT LESS HEALTHY.

The reason for setting certain meats aside to not eat was to separate Israel from the nations. Most socializing happens over food and drink. You're a good Jewish boy, you go down to the local pizza hut, flirt with the baptist girl, end up marrying her, and before you know it, you have a Christmas tree in your living room. In the same way, abstaining from unclean meats prevented Israelites from socializing with idolaters and intermarrying.

 

[Open Heart]

Has anyone ever considered the parables of the Gospel might actually represent prophecy about the future ?

I sincerely hope you are kidding.

 

[Open Heart]

I suggest you take it up with the experts among the Karaites. I'm sure they can handle whatever accusations you bring against them. Here is Nehemia Gordon's contact info. He's a good one to talk to. His father is an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, as was his grandfather as each generation before that. Nehemia was being trained to be a Rabbi too, except he kept asking where different teachings were in the Tanach and finding out they weren't there. He's rather a Jewish Berean.
http://www.nehemiaswall.com/contact

I've talked with Karaites before. Just because they are heretics doesn't mean I shun them.

 

[stephen583]

I sincerely hope you are kidding.

No. I'm certainly not kidding. All the parables of the Gospel are not merely fables meant to convey moral lessons, or generalized warnings about what might occur in the future should these lessons not be heeded, but they were actual specific prophecies of what would occur. I should think that would be apparent to anyone who has eyes to see, and ears to hear.

Then again, when the disciples asked Jesus when the End would come, He reached out and touched a fig tree so that it withered and would no longer produce fruit. Maybe it's not so apparent to everyone anymore.

 

[Vicomte13]

The Karaites disobey Deuteronomy 17:8-13, which gives authority to the religious leaders to interpret the law.

The religious leaders were not given power under the Torah to add or subtract anything to the law. And in the Torah, God laid out the judgments that the judges were to give in various cases, so judges were not left with freedom of interpretation. In case of doubt, the High Priest was given the Urim and Thummim as direct oracles by which God could always be consulted directly.

The cardinal difference between Karaites and traditional Judaism is that the Karaites accept the Torah as being God's Law (as do all Jews - even the Reform, who honor it in the breach - but, like Samaritans, they reject the rest of the Jewish writings, the rest of the Old Testament, as being authoritative. God gave the law to Moses and the Israelites, and he explictly bound them in that law to add nothing, and to subtract nothing.

Exercising "interpretive authority", the Priests and Levites added much, and subtracted much. The Karaites reject all of that. Jesus criticized it also, pointing out several places where the Jewish religious authorities, in adding to the law, nullified the actual law.

Of course Jesus went further than that. God gave the law of divorce to Moses. But Jesus nullified it...thereby creating a conflict with his own words in another place, where he said that not a penstroke nor an iota of the law would pass until the end of the world.

The two statements cannot be perfectly reconciled, and so looking at what Jesus said and did, one must realize that Jesus did strike away several laws that were not simply traditions of the rabbis but were part of the written Torah, that the world hasn't ended yet, and therefore that his statement that not a penstroke or iota would pass from the law is a rhetorical exaggeration, just like his statement that the mustard seed is the smallest seed. It isn't. It was the smallest seed that farmers in Israel were accustomed to, and that was good enough for his purposes.

The tension between the Law and Jesus' teachings is present even within Jesus' teachings, and within Christianity itself we can see the echoes of the schools of Hillel and of Shammai, in that most Christians think Jesus changed the law through the power of grace and the authority of divine Sonship, but a minority think that he did not and could not, and that all of the Jewish strictures apply to Christians also, and will until the end of time.

We all have an opinion on the matter, and universal agreement isn't possible because what Jesus said in one place contradicts what he actually did in several places.

My own solution is to note that he was talking to Jews, that only Jews were ever bound under the Jewish law, so that whether or not the Jewish law remains perfectly intact, or was changed by Jesus, or ceased to exist with the destruction of the Temple, which marked the end of that "kosmos" doesn't make any different to a Gentile like me. Neither me nor any of my people were ever Jews, or subject to the Jewish law, and so it does not matter at all from my perspective whether the Law is gone or still in force, because that Law didn't apply to Gentiles before Moses, in the time of Moses, or since Moses. It was a law for Israelites only.

The Law of Jesus is the law for the rest of us, and that is much simpler and more direct (and less known, because people are so fascinated by the Jewish law...because Jesus' audience was Jewish and THEY were fascinated by that Law) than the Law of Moses.

The Law that applies to ME is the Law of YHWH at creation, of Noah after the Flood, and of Jesus.

The kosher laws of the Jews are interesting, but they were never laws for me or my ancestors going back to the beginning of time. So it's a purely academic exercise, and not something to get exercised with one another over.

Oysters in the Eastern Med are squidgy. I'm pretty sure that if the Promised Land were in Norway, YHWH would not have made shellfish "unclean", because they're not unclean THERE. They sure are in the land that God gave to the Hebrews though. Hebrews were never meant to be in Norway.

 

[Vicomte13]

That's very nice. It has absolutely nothing to do with clean meats being healthier than unclean meats. They both spoil at roughly the same rate.

It has to do with God's law that meat could be eaten the day it was prepared (slaughtered and cooked) or the day after, but no later.

Clean meats ARE less prone to parasites than unclean meats. The clean meats are the meats (and milk) of cud-chewing ruminants: pure herbivores. The eating of blood concentrates parasites. Pigs and lions and bats and eagles carry blood-borne parasites that cows and sheet and seed-eating birds with a crop don't have.

In deep sea fish, plankton eaters like salmon don't concentrate mercury, but fish-eating-fish like sharks and swordfish do.

Of course, the Hebrews were not intended to be out in the Atlantic Ocean fishing in the deep sea. And if they WERE, they had left Israel and were no longer doing the required thrice-yearly pilgrimages, and thus were cut off from their people.

Because Jews scattered to the world (or rather, were scattered to it, by the Babylonians and then the Roman), because because Jews themselves migrated all over the place after the scattering, and want to maintain a belief that they are tied back to Israel and the Torah and still a people, some paradoxical rules and concepts have come up. Truth is, under the Law, Jews living too far from Jerusalem to be able to make the requisite pilgrimages aren't Jews any more at all. They are cut off from their people by the absence.

Obviously Jews today (and in other days) did not accept this, but it is the logical effect of the Law as written.

In any case, it doesn't matter much, except to Jews and Judaizers.

Still, when God gave the food laws in Exodus, he specifically promised the Hebrews that if they obeyed, he would not inflict the diseases on them that people suffered in Egypt. Whether that protection from disease was the result of the hygenic practices of the Law (I think so, you don't), or the effect of a supervenient grace that simply protected the Hebrews if they obeyed (I also think that, as do you), will forever remain a subject of debate.

But the debate is academic for Gentiles, because whichever way it comes out on earth or in heaven, we were never subject to those laws in any case (though obviously if the law was meant to be hygienic, then following it should reap health benefits, especially in a post-nuclear-holocaust world where refrigeration and food standards are off the table.

 

[Vicomte13]

SHRIMP!

You scamp you, stirring up trouble and needling!

I dub thee: "Shrimp Scampi!"

 

[Vicomte13]

Have you ever tried pork cooked medium rare or even medium

Of course! I love Prosciutto, Italian style. That's salt and air-cured RAW pork, at least the real stuff. If the farm is really clean, and the pigs are fed right, and the meat is frozen, pork doesn't have parasites. (That's why the Japanese never ate sushi - it's not a "traditional food" - it's a food they only started to eat in the 20th Century, after the age of refrigeration allowed the freezing of fish, which kills the parasites, allowing the fish to be eaten raw.)

Such techniques didn't exist in ancient Israel, and God was sending Hebrews into a specific sub-tropical land with particular health challenges. He knew that 1800 years later he was going to send his Son and make all foods clean for the Jews too. So that kosher law was an intermediate law for Hebrews living in a specific territory for a specific, bounded time.

Of course, the Jews mostly rejected Jesus and think that the kosher law, which God ended in the First Century, still applies to Jews, even if they live in Norway. This is delusive, but what're you going to do? It's also delusive that Christians are not judged by their deeds, because Jesus said about 20 times that they are.

People are argumentative and believe whatever they want to believe, and there's nothing you can do about it. It has always been so and always will be.

 

[-57]

The flow of Genesis seems to be similar to the flow of Revelation. I agree that Genesis speaks of events that actually happened. However, each element of the creation has a figurative/spiritual literal meaning ... similar to when Jesus says "soon comes the night when no one can work" the night was coming, but he also spoke of what it was like after his crucifixion.

Genesis has a literal meaning....but figuring out a "spiritual" meaning can open a huge can of worms unless something in scripture directly point to it.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

Genesis has a literal meaning....but figuring out a "spiritual" meaning can open a huge can of worms unless something in scripture directly point to it.

It's not that difficult. If you do "word" studies, then do a word study on each word in the creation discourse. Search for that particular Strongs number using an electronic bible, read through the verses that pop up and their contexts ... and voila. You get a sense of what a tree means, what water means, what earth means, what beast means .. etc.

 

[-57]

No it's not. And strictly speaking, the genre isn't parable either, but creation myth. Like all myths, it teaches eternal truths about the nature of the divine and man, in this case, that God created, and that mankind knows good from evil but is "fallen" meaning there is something intrinsically corrupt about mankind on a moral level. Most people are uneducated about myths, and think they are "lies." This most definitely is not the case. One needs to understand the difference between a truth and a fact: truths are abstractions and facts are not. Myths teach truths, but not facts.

I strongly disagree. Genesis was historical and literal. Adam was formed from the dust and Eve from his rib. To deny a literal Genesis is to deny a large portion of scripture.

For example Paul wrote:

1 Cor 15:47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.
1 Tim 2:13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve;

...the NT presents Adam as fact. Formed first from the dust.

 

[-57]

It's not that difficult. If you do "word" studies, then do a word study on each word in the creation discourse. Search for that particular Strongs number using an electronic bible, read through the verses that pop up and their contexts ... and voila. You get a sense of what a tree means, what water means, what earth means, what beast means .. etc.

Or you can just read Genesis and understand God formed Adam from the dust then Eve from Adams rib....placed them into a garden where they fell.

When you try to spiritualize each word...you are open for major errors as you try to string the "sense" of the words together.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

Or you can just read Genesis and understand God formed Adam from the dust then Eve from Adams rib....placed them into a garden where they fell.

When you try to spiritualize each word...you are open for major errors as you try to string the "sense" of the words together.

Regrettably, God has spiritualized me, so this is the only way I can understand what is going on. Most churches are like the above post.

 

[-57]

Regrettably, God has spiritualized me, so this is the only way I can understand what is going on. Most churches are like the above post.

Do you believe God actually made Adam from the dust the Eve from Adams rib....or do you believe God used evolutionism to create mankind?

 

[Gregory Thompson]

Do you believe God actually made Adam from the dust the Eve from Adams rib....or do you believe God used evolutionism to create mankind?

I believe both literal and spiritual at the same time, because God has made me able to. Did you know that the way Wisdom was taken out of God in the beginning is much like the way Woman (not named as separate until later) was taken out of Adam? (Proverbs 8)

 

[Gregory Thompson]

So in this sense, humanity is a parable of what God is like, as advised in Genesis: made in the image and likeness

 

[Hank77]

I've talked with Karaites before. Just because they are heretics doesn't mean I shun them.

They remind me of the Bereans of Judaism, "show me in the Writings". Tanach only. No Oral Law.
My grandson asked me why the Jews tie phylacteries to their heads, so I read him the scripture. What do you think God meant? He wanted them to keep the Law always in their minds to remember it, he said. That's the Karaite answer too.
So I wouldn't think of them as heretics anymore than Protestants are heretics to some.

 

[Vicomte13]

They remind me of the Bereans of Judaism, "show me in the Writings". Tanach only.

Karaites are not TaNaKh Only. They are Torah Only. TaNaKh is Torah-Nevi'im-Kethuvim: Law, Prophets, Writings. Karaites reject the Prophets and the Writings as authoritative, and accept the Law alone, Torah alone. The Prophets and the Writings are mere written traditions to them, not law, and they categorically reject them as sources of law.

A careful read of the Prophets and the Writings reveals that the Karaites have a point. The law is all in the Torah, plus Joshua. The only new LAW, as such, after that is the "Law of Kings" in Samuel, but the terms of the law of kings is not fully specified, and God makes it clear that this was a bad secondary law imposed because the people had rejected God as their King.

It's a bit like the difference between Sola Scriptura Protestantism - that would be the Karaites, sort of - and traditionalist Catholicism - that would be the Judaism of the Temple.

Now, what queers it further is that if there were Christian Karaites, the Christian version would say "Just Jesus", observe that Jesus was God, and the source of all New Testament law, and reject the Epistles of Paul, Peter, etc., as being of any real authority. The Epistles would be reduced to tradition. Only what God said directly, in the person of Jesus, is binding.

I'm not far from that position myself, tell you the truth.

The great blindness of the Karaites and the Jews is that they don't see the divinity of Christ, which means that they are still assiduously applying (or, in the case of Conservative and Reform Jews, ignoring or defying) the Mosaic laws.

The Christians know that Jesus is divine, so they follow him in the supersession of the Torah. That way they can not be wrong by ignoring the Law of Moses, and just be wrong for generically the law of Jesus.