"Find a 33 year old man from peasant stock , make him and his message more influenced than Jesus. Make him walk on water, raise a man who was dead for four days and is stinking from decay, heal the blind, maimed and sick"

"Convict him falsely of a crime of blasphemy he did not commit, scourge him with sixty cat and nine stripes and crucify him , bury him in and waite outside for him to raise up from the dead after six days"

xris Paul had a epiphiny on the road to Damascus, were Jesus appeared to him as a bright light, blinding him with the words, Paul Pual why do you persecute me (he meant of course the christains)

Sorry if you know this

KaseiJin

Resectfully, could you post in more digestably chunks, you are one really imformed guys, but I dont think referal to numerous bible verses will make the participants in this thread really go and open there bibles and read the actual word

A person once came up to Napoleon and said we should invent a better religion than Christianity. To which Napoleon is said to have replied OK

"Find a 33 year old man from peasant stock , make him and his message more influenced than Jesus. Make him walk on water, raise a man who was dead for four days and is stinking from decay, heal the blind, maimed and sick"

"Convict him falsely of a crime of blasphemy he did not commit, scourge him with sixty cat and nine stripes and crucify him , bury him in and waite outside for him to raise up from the dead after six days"

Let him say he is the Son of God

Then come back to me and I will start you new suggested religion

Peace to you

Alan

Alan his epiphany was the realisation he could make Christianity his own.He manipulated it from a simple message of hope from a wise man .He made it into something that controlled men not comforted them.

. . . KaseiJin

Resectfully, could you post in more digestably chunks, you are one really imformed guys, but I dont think referal to numerous bible verses will make the participants in this thread really go and open there bibles and read the actual word

I will take the suggestion into consideration, Alan. I may be able to swing it, but the arrangement might become too loose to follow up on (for those reading, that is). I do agree that the length of my posts are a bit on the heavy side, and even that alone might cause some to skim them, rather than carefully read them.

I do think it is ashame that more people do not really study biblical works--not only canonical material. It would also be good to make efforts to do some study in the original languages, as well . . . but I know it's just not possible for most folk (time and daily routine and life style just really get in the way).

One thing that is good to keep in mind, I would urge (and as I will slowly present) is, just because some matter is in written form, and happened to have been on a document which through the course of practice and familiarity of usage was considered a standard (canonical process for first and early second century Christian works), it would be wrong to take the written matter at face value (as Napoleon is said to have done) without testing it for historical value; to the degree that it can be tested.

Anyway, I'll help with the testing. . .and will consider you suggestion very seriously. Thanks AM.


ps. We would not be able to consider Yeshua a Christian; he was a Jew.

Who attributed these words to jesus..Alan..and i did know Jesus was a Jew..but who educated him is more to the point..

Who actually educated Jesus is unknown , most likely the Pharisees (teachers) of the day. It is postulated that Jesus was hugely intelligent, thus he been able to confound the learned men in the temple while still only a child of twelve. By the way the only mention in the bible of him as a child

xris the writer of Revelations is said to be the apostle John in his old age, he was supposed to have written this book in a cave on the island of Patmos just off the coast of present Turkey , sometime in the late first century maybe AD 90

No one knows for sure, if I had not read the bible and I came across this book I would think it a work of science fiction or fantasy. I find it very hard to believe, all this wrath and everlasting punishment

But my disbelief or belief will not alter the truth about scripture, I simply don't know the answers

The truth will be the truth, whatever this mysterious truth is or is not

Paul is the culprit, he transfers his own beliefs into the Jesus story.He is the power house that argues with Peter and stamps his mark on the new book.

Thank you! Could you please give us a brief summary of your position relating to biblical text. Should we accept what we like and dismis what we find unpalatable if you get me drift.

Alan, we must endevour to seek out and associate as many details as possible on textual matters, so as to come to as accurate an average understanding as possible on these biblical textual matters. It would be very wrong to pick and choose--regardless.

Alan, our Bible of today is a collection of documents which a small number of people in the very far past had kept in a routine-like practice of usage (for especially the NT), and had come (therefore) to consider sactioned. While there are many documents from which they could have chosen, only a few were selected.

As I have pointed out, and as I am slowly presenting, these documents reflect the artistic imagination of the human brain in many ways, reflect the cultural social settings in other ways, and reflect the understandings of natural principles.

This is about as much of a summary as I can give. I will continue presenting the details which tend much more so than not, to back up this summary.

Which 'Daniel' would you speaking of, then? Of course, I know which one, but this introductory question was simply to point out that there is more than one Daniel, you see. The Masoretic text does take one of them, but there is another too, and at what is essentially our present 12:4, the other text does not give us this, but instead says simply 'injustice will abound.'

However, at the same time, there are other texts which have this very same apocalyptic mantric model, such as the Akkadian Prophecies, or, the Enoch texts. The link between the Jewish textual traditions in apocalyptic texts and those of the Mesopotamia are greater than their differences, thus suggesting a strong line of influence in style and language mimic.

What we always have to look for, in finding things that are worth really holding on to, is the element of pure univerality and timelessness. We can check that for the Masoretic Daniel:
[INDENT] We will notice, in chapter eight, of Daniel, that the spokesman of the vision which is being described tells Daniel that the prophecy was about the appointed time of the end. (8:19, 26) We will also find that repeated in verses 9, 10 of chapter twelve. It cannot escape notice, when paying attention, that when the vision that is said to have occurred, Daniel had been told to keep the words secret and sealed until the end--a time when Michael was to 'stand up,' and 'a time of distress such as had not been made to occur, nor would ever occur again' was to occur.

We can see a type of play on this in the technique used at Revelation 22:6, 10, when the spokesman is said to have ordered that John to 'not seal the book,' for the end was to be then. This line of thought, the earlier sect's tenet (as highlighted and discussed above) is in those documents, just as the speech claimed to have been made by Peter (Acts 2:14~21, 40 --also compare Mt 24:15 regarding the prophecy of Daniel) is in that document, because they were expecting such to happen then and there, in their life times. They also attributed such a message to Yeshua. That claim was a false claim, just as the prophecy in Daniel is a false claim. [/INDENT]There will be a tendency by some to attempt to apply the looseness① of Jewish apoclyptic literature (Revelation included) to anything in the present stream of time, and, if we were to allow it, such would continue for as long as any social group of human beings were to still hold to such documents as being anything but mere human creativity. If any 'last day,' or 'last days,' come before our sun expands out in size (some estimated 5.5 million years down the road [if my memory on that figure is correct]) so as to end life on this planet as we know it, even, there will surely be a last days during the period of dehydration of the planet. (but nothing like what the ancient Jewish [or other traditions for that matter] thought of it as being.)



① And it had to be loose in order to be interpreted in any number of associations as time went on--which may have well lead to scribal changes and alterations along the way.

In picking up from post #79 (second from bottom on page 8), we can see Luke tells us that after the incident at the tomb, the five or more women went back and told the eleven disciples, and the others but they did not believe the women. At that point in the text (vs 12) we have another spurious entry that probably wouldn't have been in the original. (about Peter's having gone off alone to view the tomb)

Luke then goes into a little side story about two of Yeshua's troupe traveling to a nearby villiage. (this is an error; there was no villiage of that name in that area) ① It was on into the night, or early evening, that these two are said to have arrived back at Jerusalem where we are told then that Yeshua had appeared to Peter. (cf. 1 Cor 15:5) Then, at about that very moment, Yeshua is said to have suddenly appeared in their midst, in the flesh.

This clearly contradicts Matthew's narrative report in a number of ways. First, Matthew (the text) tells us that Yeshua had told (direct quote) the two Marys to tell the disciples that he would meet them in Galilee (the 'angel' had too). In Mark's account, the same thing is told the women by the young man in a white robe sitting to the right side inside the tomb; not by Yeshua himself.

Then, since Yeshua is said to have met the women while they had been on their way back to the disciples (Mt 28:8) the account of Luke, in putting emphasis on the men and Peter's having met Yeshua, is awkward. Of course, John contradicts the whole of these narrative reports. Again, holding Luke as the control, the other accounts amount to hisorical error (in the sense that such did not occur in history, thus is an error of report). I'll pick up next, from here.





① This section has been very well shown to have been a take on the Jacob by the well story of Hebrew tradition.

In order to prevent any misconceptions or misunderstandings there are a few points which would best be expounded on here in a couple or so of posts. Of course, in presenting on this thread in a way so as to make it more readable, I am summarizing detail rather than presenting it here. (Of course there will be times that I will present detail.)

The first point I'll examine is that of the village name provided by Luke's narrative. There are two traditions of witnesses to the gospel documents, the Alexandrian tradition (AT), and the Western tradition (WT). In the later chapters of Luke we have a rather major division of exemplar tradition (that means, in lay terms, that the content of the writings is rather different). I'll provide the text content on this single point below:[INDENT]Codex Bezae (AT)
hesan de duo poreuomenoi eks auton en auti ti hemera eis komen apexousan stadious eksykonta apo Ierousaleme onomati Oulammaus

Codex Vatianus (WT)
kai idou duo eks auton en auti ti hemera hisan poreuomenoi eis komen apekousan stadious eksykonta apo Ierousaleme hi onoma Emmaous

We will also find in various different renderings within individual witnesses in these traditions, oulamlouz and oumaous.
[/INDENT]The first thing that is seen that there is no firm opinion on the name of that said villiage, therefore we must check outside information (extra-biblical texts), and check archaeological studies using the distance (stadious eksykonta = 60 stadia [one stadia is about 1.1 kilometers]).

Josephus mentions one villiage which he gives as Ammaous which was at a distance from Jerusaslem of about 30~35 stadia. Also archaeological studies give us one El-Qubeiba (present name) which lies about 60 stadia from Jerusalem, which was probably a village in that general late 1st century BCE~1st century CE [ The Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 CE may have caused that area to have been vacated ].

However, we run into one more problem with a major text, Codex Sinaiticus (and also Nth 079vid) which gives us 160 stadia, rather than 60. Then, in summing up three other lines of evidence and reasoning, we can come to see the major possible problem here.

As the textual form evolved, later scribal tendencies were far removed from the early sect's emotional and understood attachment with Judaism, and details of tenets and teaching methods which were very Jewish, were lost, or somewhat weak in the minds of those scribes. There is an actual town named Emmaus which is about 175 stadia from Jerusalem. It is mentioned in 1 Maccabees 3:40, 57; 4:3 as the location where there had been an actual, historical battle. (the text's immediate and overall context does not allow for any 'spiritual' or prophetic meaning)

In the confusion (and we are talking late 2nd to early 4th century CE here) over what had originally been intended, some obviously penned 160 to meet the requirements of the actual distance to that real town (totally ignoring the other points in Luke's text). However, the more obvious intent of the original is that Luke had intended to present a teaching behind the words--telling a story which, while not really a true historical event, is used to instil a morale or point-of-teaching.

In the Hebrew Masoretic text tradition, at Genesis 28:19 (the story of Jaccob) we find that a name Beth-el was given to a place that used to bear the name Luts (or Luz, depending on the transliteration used). In the Septuagint (LXX) there at 28:19 we find that the name of that place had been given as Oulamlous. This was either an unitnentional misreading of the Hebrew (in Hebrew oolam loots means, formerly Luts) or an intentional alteration of the original text. At any rate, as time passed, later mid to late second century BCE Christian scribes had lost touch with the reality of the orginal intent.

Therefore, we can arrive at the secure conclusion that this short story given by Luke was to borrow on the story of Jacob, which it fits very, very closely (if one really studies it--and it was commonly used in Hebrew expositions and story telling in that era) to impart a teaching regarding those of that day (the early Christian people) being within the Jewish law and model, only to await the second coming to be freed from that. (this requires a thorough investigation of the intro of Acts too, since it is basically a two volume document)

So, in the end, we can determine that most likely this pericope (little story) was not even intended to be a report of actual history by Luke, but had been used as a fanciful and 'cryptic-like' instrument to communicate an early Christian teaching. It was not history, so the error was made by those who had lost touch with that Jewish element of the early sect, and tried to present it as an actual historical event.

But you see folks, this much to properly explain one single summarizing sentence I had earlier made, is a good example as to why I avoid the detail as much as I can, and make summary statements. Of course, however, if anybody doubts that summary, I'm always very willing to provide the detail on the grounds that the challenger carefully pays attention to the details and thinks logically and conscientiously on and over them !!

I will next explain why it is erroneous to appeal to creative analogies to try to make the incoherent, coherent, when it comes to the gospel narratives, and will carefully demonstrate the error you have committed, Alan. I encourage you to carefully consider it . . . each and every detail, please. Thanks ! KJ