The New Testament as a guide for living for atheists

[No Robots]

So, I guess you consider yourself an "original thinker," someone who is unable or unwilling to acknowledge where his ideas actually come from.

 

[TomC]

So, I guess you consider yourself an "original thinker," someone who is unable or unwilling to acknowledge where his ideas actually come from.

You guess incorrectly.
Tom

 

[No Robots]

Soooo, back to the question of Jews who regard Jesus as a Jew. See "Knowing and preaching the Jewish Jesus," an interview with Amy-Jill Levine.

​

 

[TomC]

Soooo, back to the question of Jews who regard Jesus as a Jew. See "Knowing and preaching the Jewish Jesus," an interview with Amy-Jill Levine.

​

I consider Jesus to be(most likely) a Jew.

Why would I care about another so-called "expert" opinion? Christianity is a vicious Jewish heresy, IMHO. Combines Jewish crap about a "bumbling sky king with superpowers" with "Convert or suffer!". Not as bad as Islam, but not very different.
Tom

 

[No Robots]

Didn't say they were experts. Said they were Jews, some of them prominent, who claim that Jesus was a Jew. The ones I have mentioned are experts. In fact, there is no expert, Jewish or otherwise, who does not recognize Jesus as a Jew.

 

[No Robots]

I don't get the hostility to expertise. I rely on a mechanic to help me with my car. I rely on NT scholars to help me understand the text.

 

[TomC]

Didn't say they were experts. Said they were Jews, some of them prominent, who claim that Jesus was a Jew. The ones I have mentioned are experts. In fact, there is no expert, Jewish or otherwise, who does not recognize Jesus as a Jew.

I'm confident that Jesus was a Jew.
I'm also confident that He'd be horrified by the pagan religion created in His name.
Tom

 

[No Robots]

Didn't say they were experts. Said they were Jews, some of them prominent, who claim that Jesus was a Jew. The ones I have mentioned are experts. In fact, there is no expert, Jewish or otherwise, who does not recognize Jesus as a Jew.

I'm confident that Jesus was a Jew.
I'm also confident that He'd be horrified by the pagan religion created in His name.
Tom

Of course. As Constantin Brunner puts it:

Did Christ have any idea of the pagan horrors of darkness that would be made of his words? Do our black, heathen priests, who call themselves Christian, have a notion of the judgement Christ would have had passed on them, after he had already passed such a terrible judgement on the white rabbis? And as for the revelation of the three-person Gods, he did not even believe in that of one. He did not believe the personal God of the rabbis to be the revealer of the Torah; it was precisely his quarrel with the rabbis that he did not believe their God of tradition.

 

[steve_bank]

Soooo, back to the question of Jews who regard Jesus as a Jew. See "Knowing and preaching the Jewish Jesus," an interview with Amy-Jill Levine.

​

Yet another video substituted as a response to what we are saying.

No expertise in that.

As to slavery, modern archology has shown the wrkers on the Egyptian pyramids were nor slaves and were well fed and were paid. Not slaves in the American slavery sense.

There is no evidence of Jews as Egyptain slaves.

More likely they were assimilated into other cultures.

Th ea;;ged esac[e fprm Egy[t and [aring te Red Sea apear to be a conflatn of difernt stoies and evemts at diffent times. It is what you would expect in the times by writers putting oral stories to paper adapting ten to suerve thier culture.

 

[No Robots]

Soooo, back to the question of Jews who regard Jesus as a Jew. See "Knowing and preaching the Jewish Jesus," an interview with Amy-Jill Levine.

​

Yet another video substituted as a response to what we are saying.

No expertise in that.

As to slavery, modern archology has shown the wrkers on the Egyptian pyramids were nor slaves and were well fed and were paid. Not slaves in the American slavery sense.

There is no evidence of Jews as Egyptain slaves.

More likely they were assimilated into other cultures.

Th ea;;ged esac[e fprm Egy[t and [aring te Red Sea apear to be a conflatn of difernt stoies and evemts at diffent times. It is what you would expect in the times by writers putting oral stories to paper adapting ten to suerve thier culture.

What you were (and are) talking about is that Jesus is not a Jew. I am demonstrating that all experts, including Jews, do consider Jesus a Jew.

The person whom you dismiss is Amy-Jill Levine, University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Graduate Department of Religion, and Department of Jewish Studies. She is co-author of The Jewish Annotated New Testament. One of her books, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, specifically addresses the de-Judaization of Jesus in Christian theology. The significance of The Annotated Jewish New Testament is that all of its annotations are written by contemporary Jewish scholars of the New Testament, including Dr. Mark Nanos (Paul Within Judaism studies), Dr. Adele Reinhartz (Gospel of John), Dr. Shaye Cohen (Second Temple studies), and dozens more.

 

[TomC]

What you were (and are) talking about is that Jesus is not a Jew. I am demonstrating that all experts, including Jews, do consider Jesus a Jew.

He didn't say that.
Nor have I.

What we're saying is that Jesus was a Jew. Which is very different from a Christian.
Tom

 

[No Robots]

What you were (and are) talking about is that Jesus is not a Jew. I am demonstrating that all experts, including Jews, do consider Jesus a Jew.

He didn't say that.
Nor have I.

What we're saying is that Jesus was a Jew. Which is very different from a Christian.
Tom

Is that what you're say, steve_bank, that Jesus was a Jew?

 

[TomC]

What you were (and are) talking about is that Jesus is not a Jew. I am demonstrating that all experts, including Jews, do consider Jesus a Jew.

He didn't say that.
Nor have I.

What we're saying is that Jesus was a Jew. Which is very different from a Christian.
Tom

Is that what you're say, steve_bank, that Jesus was a Jew?

I can't speak for @steve_bank .
But that is definitely what I'm saying.

Jesus was a Jew. Not a Christian.

Much less a Muslim.

Jesus wasn't orthodox, by the standards of His day, but He was a Jew. He'd have been completely obnoxed by the pagan religion, Christianity, created and attributed to Him.

He was a Jew. Christianity isn't Jewish.
Tom

 

[No Robots]

What Jesus was, what he taught, was Judaism. The heathen distorted him and his teaching to fit their own limited understanding. The time has come to come to the right understanding.

 

[TomC]

What Jesus was, what he taught, was Judaism.

I don't know exactly, since there is no record of Jesus' existence, much less His teachings.
But it certainly wasn't Judaism, based on the NT.

Whatever Jesus thought or taught, it wasn't Christianity. Of that, I'm sure.
Tom
ETA ~If it was anything to do with Creedal Christianity~

 

[No Robots]

I don't know exactly, since there is no record of Jesus' existence, much less His teachings.
But it certainly wasn't Judaism, based on the NT.

The NT is thoroughly Jewish literature. Here is Kaufmann Kohler:

And so I might go through the four Gospels and find without difficulty the Rabbinical parallels and originals to all the teachings and doings of Jesus. How can Christians with any sense of right speak of the Jews as having rejected Christ, if the Jews recognize Jesus as one amongst their hundreds of rabbis, even through he was in one direction or another more powerful or more interesting a personality than many of them? Let our Christian friends study the Jewish sources, and they will think and judge better of Judaism and also more humanly or sensibly of Jesus.

I have already mentioned Amy-Jill Levine's The Jewish Annotated New Testament.

Here is Constantin Brunner:

This basic principle will yield an understanding of authentic Christianity: all that is authentically Christian is Jewish and to be found in the writings of the New Testament, which were all written by Jews and almost exclusively only for Jews.

And here is Leo Baeck:

[T]he Gospel, which was originally something Jewish, becomes a book—and certainly not a minor work—within Jewish literature. This is not because, or not only because, it contains sentences which also appear in the same or a similar form in the Jewish works of that time. Nor is it such—in fact, it is even less so—because the Hebrew or Aramaic breaks again and again through the word forms and sentence formations of the Greek translation. Rather it is a Jewish book because—by all means and entirely because—the pure air of which it is full and which it breathes is that of the Holy Scriptures; because a Jewish spirit, and none other, lives in it; because Jewish faith and Jewish hope, Jewish suffering and Jewish distress, Jewish knowledge and Jewish expectations, and these alone, resound through it—a Jewish book in the midst of Jewish books. Judaism may not pass it by, nor mistake it, nor wish to give up al claims here. Here, too, Judaism should comprehend and take note of what is its own.

To deny that the NT is Jewish literature is to perpetuate the anti-Jewish, dejudaizing practices of traditional Christian religion.

 

[TomC]

The NT is thoroughly Jewish literature.

You can't be serious.

Jewish literature doesn't include a demigod or trinity.

Christianity is fundamentally pagan.

Unfortunately, for the human race, Christianity came to include some of the worst ethics of both paganism and judaism, then added "Convert or die".

Then they developed ocean going ships and gunpowder.
Tom

 

[Learner]

The NT is thoroughly Jewish literature.

You can't be serious.

Jewish literature doesn't include a demigod or trinity.

(responding in no particular order)
I think No robots is serious.
Christianity was as Jewish a sect as we're all the 'other' various groups ... like the Sadducees, Essenes, Pharisees and Zealots. All residing under the banner of Judaism. The Karaites who still exist today reject the Oral law and are strictly Torah only. Similar to the Maccabees, who rejected Rabbinical traditions. So what's new about the differences between Jews within Judaism?

Christianity is fundamentally pagan.

I suppose that's a perspective, all religions could say that of each other.

Unfortunately, for the human race, Christianity came to include some of the worst ethics of both paganism and judaism, then added "Convert or die".

Jesus is the core ethics of Christianity. The irony I also hear from 'non Christians' who would change the angle view also to argue about things that they see goes against Jesus's teachings, being not Jesus like.

Then they developed ocean going ships and gunpowder.
Tom.

So unlike Jesus and what He commands.

 

[TomC]

Jesus is the core ethics of Christianity.

In what way?

I'm looking at a history of Christendom dominated by war, genocide, slavery, and oppression.
Like I've said, Jesus would be horrified by Christian culture and theology in general. And the paganism of "The Creed" in particular. IMHO.
Tom

 

[steve_bank]

Sigh....is there a flabbergasted emoji?

Robot

I am saying the historical Jesus would have been a Jew preaching to Jews in a time of unrest, rebellion, ansd a prophesy of the return of a king in the line of David.

Christianity is not Jewish. The split occurred in the 1st-2nd century when non Jewish Christians co-opted Jewish scripture and Jesus as their own. For a while they were seen by Rome as Jewish heretics and that afforded them a measure of tolerance for a while.

The Christian enmity towards Jews goes back to the beginning.

As has been pointed out on several threads Christianity is a mix of many indluences. more pagan from Roman times than anything else.

The halo that appeared in images of Jesus is not Jewish. Images or any rpresentaion of god was blasphemous. It would be considered idolatry.

As I have asked, do you keep kosher as an obseveant Jew would do?

I am not ant-Jewish or any religious or ethnic group based simplyon rhe basis of who they are or what they belive.

I look at actions, for example Israeli occupation and displacement of Palestinians based on a biblical mandate to the land.

Don't embarrass yourself by playing the anti Jew card.

It is ethnic stereotyping of the worse kind when you refer collectively to 'Jews' as a kind of monolithic block.

Why not become a Jew? As I understand it to pass review by a Jewish religious court in part you have to demonstrate living as a Jew for some period of time.