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The Exodus gives the major paradigmatic Jewish answer to the question, what is God doing with evil? Evil comes here in the shape of the wicked powerful empire oppressing the enslaved Israelites. But when the people are freed, they behave themselves in a thoroughly pagan manner, as they continue to do in the deeply ambiguous entry into the Land, in the period of the Judges, and then in the monarchy.

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by daronmedway:
Good grief Leo, do you really believe that? I mean. Really? Because if you do then you should do the decent thing and get out of the pulpit.

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Given that most theologians have thought thus for nearly a century...

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by daronmedway:
Good grief Leo, do you really believe that? I mean. Really? Because if you do then you should do the decent thing and get out of the pulpit.

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Given that most theologians have thought thus for nearly a century...

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Ooooh, a WHOLE CENTURY? Jaysoos, that's practically apostolic!

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, let me get this straight. Are you, personally, denying the deity of Christ? Because if so, damn.

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Originally posted by daronmedway:

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by daronmedway:

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by pydseybare:
Show me a Rabbinical school that holds an unorthodox dead teacher, who claimed to be divine, to be authoritative. It doesn't exist.

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Jesus never claimed to be divine. Indeed, he pushed such claims away.

Except in the 4th gospel, which most scholars believe as NOT containing the original words of Jesus.

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Good grief Leo, do you really believe that? I mean. Really? Because if you do then you should do the decent thing and get out of the pulpit.

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Given that most theologians have thought thus for nearly a century, then anyone with a smattering of theology would leave their pulpits and there will hardly be any preachers left except liars and fundamentalists.

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Only liars and fundamentalists believe that Jesus, both directly and indirectly, claimed to be God and that the scriptures accurately testify to that claim? O Kaaay.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Funny, I see Him doing it everywhere. Disposition is ALL here. I started to learn that long ago here walking around the legs of the giants.

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, let me get this straight. Are you, personally, denying the deity of Christ? Because if so, damn.

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Not at all - merely pointing out that nowhere in the synoptics does he claim divinity - God reveals in the subtle, the indirect. See for example Philippians where he does not 'cling to' equality with God.

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34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...

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Originally posted by leo:

I am astonished that people think the the 4th gospel contains the literal, real words of Jesus. If they did, how does one account for him speaking in very long passages whereas the synoptics have short bursts and stories? There is almost nothing in John that is said in the synoptics - were there two different Jesuses?

This was all standard stuff back when I did A'level nearly 50 years ago.

Why do people deny the insights of biblical scholarship and not trust experts? It would be a very different story in terms of medical experts.

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You continue to astonish me. Leo, I did my graduate work in the field of texts, among the "experts," and I can tell you that this is one bubble long overdue to be popped. (Go do the work yourself, if you find this incredible.)

Why does John look and sound so very different from the synoptics? Easy--because he had a different purpose in writing. Why repeat what everybody knows already? Particularly when you are writing umpty years later, and the first three books have circulated?

As for the difference in the utterances of Jesus (short vs. long, pithy vs theological discourses), it's a rare human being that confines himelf solely to one form of discourse. Each writer picked out what was germane to his purposes. You could do the same with my own published writings--a bit from Microcosmographie is going to read decidedly differently from the practical book on Vietnamese culture I wrote, and that again very differently from the children's books, or the sermons to new immigrant believers. If you were (per impossibile) trying to reconstruct my style of communication from my extant utterances, you would have a damn hard time of melding some of the higher flights of theological fancy with the equally genuine "Take a flying fuck at a doughnut, why don't you?" Indeed, I suspect you'd flatly deny one or the other as spurious.

As for trusting experts,

Look, I AM an expert in several fields, and any decent expert knows that his pet theories could be overturned at any moment when new evidence turns up. It keeps you humble. Or should.

Do you not remember the widespread medical theory of the four humors of man, and how resistant people were to the new germ theory which overtook it? You couldn't get the freakin' experts in the medical field to even wash their hands--or their instruments--so wedded were they to the idea that what mattered was balancing the (non-existent) "humors" in the human body. And so they went about blithely infecting and reinfecting their patients, causing untold number of deaths, in the name of medical expertise. Now there's a cautionary tale about trusting experts if I ever saw one.

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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

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Originally posted by leo:
Why do people deny the insights of biblical scholarship and not trust experts? It would be a very different story in terms of medical experts.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, how do you deal with (to cite one example) this, from Matthew 23?

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34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...

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Jesus is claiming to the be the one who sends prophets etc. into the world. Can't get much clearer a claim to deity, unless you hold out for "I am God. Worship me!"

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, how do you deal with (to cite one example) this, from Matthew 23?

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34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...

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Jesus is claiming to the be the one who sends prophets etc. into the world. Can't get much clearer a claim to deity, unless you hold out for "I am God. Worship me!"

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And how do deal with the fact that Jesus says, instead? also? that this the 'Wisdom of God' speaking, not he himself?

More to the point, even the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Commission accepts that the dialogue between Jesus and the pharisees reflects a later stage of hostility between the church as it moved away from being a Jewish sect and Judaism, post 70 CE, post-temple and reinventing itself.

As does this article which sees Matthew as editing material and making it relevant to the later situation.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Why should I accept a Vatican commission's opinion on the matter? The text is right there, you can look up the manuscripts and any variants in the apparatus to Nestle-Aland, and theorizing about "the church reworking ... to reflect later situations..." is just that, mere theorizing--in a vacuum. There is no actual evidence of any such thing happening. Show it to me in the manuscripts.

[mended broken code]

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Originally posted by daronmedway:
Interesting thread. At some point in the last century the Holy Spirit told some over privileged boffins that the scriptures do not in fact testify to the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and even if they did, it wouldn't matter because scripture - and especially anything in the NT - isn't God-breathed and should therefore be understood as the product of liars with hidden agendas.

With friends like these who needs enemies?

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, how do you deal with (to cite one example) this, from Matthew 23?

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34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...

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Jesus is claiming to the be the one who sends prophets etc. into the world. Can't get much clearer a claim to deity, unless you hold out for "I am God. Worship me!"

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And how do deal with the fact that Jesus says, instead? also? that this the 'Wisdom of God' speaking, not he himself?

More to the point, even the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Commission accepts that the dialogue between Jesus and the pharisees reflects a later stage of hostility between the church as it moved away from being a Jewish sect and Judaism, post 70 CE, post-temple and reinventing itself.

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When that occurs…’ – not too likely while we stick to our core ideas, of course. More likely, I guess, in a democratic society – but then Anabaptists wouldn’t be trying to impose our Christian beliefs as such, rather we’d be supporting the freedom of others to disagree with us. Remember that ‘being the largest and most influential’ is partly the artificial effect of those careerists and others, and also of the assumption of a ‘Christian country’ and of being a nominal Christian as a result.

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essentially the new post-Theodosius arrangement (it wasn’t just Constantine, Gamaliel) made everybody in the Empire nominally Christian; which surely is a significant change OF DOCTRINE compared to the NT DOCTRINE of spiritual rebirth through faith.

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The doctrines about Church/State relations are a major non-essential in themselves, and there are other doctrines which may not be ‘about’ church and state but appear to have grown from the ‘mindset’ that goes with that dubious link

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including much of the position of the papacy.

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that the ‘Constantinian’ or ‘Christendom’ churches, precisely by being that kind of church, are outside the original Christian tradition, and so can’t meaningfully claim to be guardians of that Tradition

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, how do you deal with (to cite one example) this, from Matthew 23?

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34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...

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Jesus is claiming to the be the one who sends prophets etc. into the world. Can't get much clearer a claim to deity, unless you hold out for "I am God. Worship me!"

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And how do deal with the fact that Jesus says, instead? also? that this the 'Wisdom of God' speaking, not he himself?

More to the point, even the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Commission accepts that the dialogue between Jesus and the pharisees reflects a later stage of hostility between the church as it moved away from being a Jewish sect and Judaism, post 70 CE, post-temple and reinventing itself.

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It seems to me you're claiming that the Gospel of John contains long discourses that are not characteristic of the teaching of Jesus, and therefore are the result of theologising by the early Church (or, at least, the community associated with the authoring of the 4th Gospel).

And, you're also here claiming that sections of the Synoptics that (for example) appear to put claims of divinity in the mouth of Jesus are also the result of the Church re-inventing itself.

Which seems to come down to a claim that we don't know for certain if we have any of the words of Jesus recorded for us. Which is a consistent position, though certainly not one without controversy. Is that, indeed, your position?

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Originally posted by daronmedway:
Interesting thread. At some point in the last century the Holy Spirit told some over privileged boffins that the scriptures do not in fact testify to the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and even if they did, it wouldn't matter because scripture - and especially anything in the NT - isn't God-breathed and should therefore be understood as the product of liars with hidden agendas.

With friends like these who needs enemies?

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Originally posted by leo:
One of the best tests is to translate the Greek back into Aramaic. When you do that with the synoptic, you get:

1) stuff that has a rhythm and rhyme - just like the rabbis taught

2) stuff that goes against later teachings but which they couldn't remove since the oral tradition was so strong.

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
Though the inability to proof text (and, I would say that's evident without recourse to modern Biblical scholarship, just on the fact that the Bible in a complex document that doesn't lend itself to a simple "plain reading" interpretation on which proof-texting largely depends) or to use the Bible as "the foundation of a simple sort of authority" do not preclude the Bible being the word of God. It just means it takes a bit of effort to hear the word of God clearly.

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, how do you deal with (to cite one example) this, from Matthew 23?

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34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...

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Jesus is claiming to the be the one who sends prophets etc. into the world. Can't get much clearer a claim to deity, unless you hold out for "I am God. Worship me!"

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And how do deal with the fact that Jesus says, instead? also? that this the 'Wisdom of God' speaking, not he himself?

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Originally posted by leo:
More to the point, even the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Commission accepts that the dialogue between Jesus and the pharisees reflects a later stage of hostility between the church as it moved away from being a Jewish sect and Judaism, post 70 CE, post-temple and reinventing itself.

As does this article which sees Matthew as editing material and making it relevant to the later situation.

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Originally posted by hatless:

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
Though the inability to proof text (and, I would say that's evident without recourse to modern Biblical scholarship, just on the fact that the Bible in a complex document that doesn't lend itself to a simple "plain reading" interpretation on which proof-texting largely depends) or to use the Bible as "the foundation of a simple sort of authority" do not preclude the Bible being the word of God. It just means it takes a bit of effort to hear the word of God clearly.

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Yes, or a more sophisticated understanding of what 'word of God' means.

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Dunn sheds new light on the Gospel of John which is practically ignored as completely unhistorical by modern Jesus-questers. Dunn admits that the Gospel of John is written from a post resurrection perspective of the Spirit or Paraclete, yet it preserves unique historical information which cannot be found in the synoptic gospels. While Jesus' ministry starts after the imprisonment of John the Baptist and is mostly confined to Galilee, John's Gospel retains the memory of Jesus emerging from the circle of John the Baptist and commencing his ministry in Judea which was concurrent with and complemented John the Baptist's ministry. It reveals how Jesus had a following in and around Jerusalem who played prominent roles at the very end of Jesus' life and for the start of the earliest followers in Jerusalem.

Dunn explains how the Gospel of John has striking parallels in Jewish apocalyptic writings and shares ideas found in Merkabah mysticism. However, instead of ascending to Heaven, Jesus came down from Heaven to reveal the mysteries of God. To Johannine Jewish Christians, Jesus was the personification and incarnation of God's Wisdom. To the sages of Israel, God's Wisdom was inscripturated into the Torah.

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As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out. And it was night.

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Originally posted by k-mann:

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Originally posted by leo:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Leo, how do you deal with (to cite one example) this, from Matthew 23?

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34 Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...

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Jesus is claiming to the be the one who sends prophets etc. into the world. Can't get much clearer a claim to deity, unless you hold out for "I am God. Worship me!"

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And how do deal with the fact that Jesus says, instead? also? that this the 'Wisdom of God' speaking, not he himself?

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Well, in Matthew 23, Christ explicitly identifies himself as the sender of prophets, wise men and scribes. Faced with Luke 11:49, we are left with two choices: Either there is a contradiction here, or Christ Himself is ‘the Wisdom of God.’ I see no reason to assume the contradiction, and find it more plausible that Christ identified himself as the ‘Wisdom of God.’ This can be tied to the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament (including the Deuterocanonical works) and the wisdom tradition that follows from it (represented, for instance, by Philo of Alexandria). There, the Wisdom and the Logos are identified. This represents a degree of Hellenisation, or perhaps a contextualisation.

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Originally posted by leo:
More to the point, even the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Commission accepts that the dialogue between Jesus and the pharisees reflects a later stage of hostility between the church as it moved away from being a Jewish sect and Judaism, post 70 CE, post-temple and reinventing itself.

As does this article which sees Matthew as editing material and making it relevant to the later situation.

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Yes, and that helps your point about John, how?

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:

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Originally posted by Barnabas62;
Frankly, it's a wonder we're here at all. There is more grace of God in that than we will ever see if we insist on looking for faults outside our own traditions.

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Kind of see what you’re getting at here. But might I point out that in this case ‘my own tradition’ was nominally Anglican by family and evangelical Protestant via Crusaders and Uni CU. By analysing the Irish Troubles I was alerted to serious faults in that, and a previously unrealised fault in the RC case, and found an alternative tradition which mostly resolved those faults. I don’t pretend the Anabaptists are fault-free (you should hear me sometimes in our local Anabaptist Network study group!); and judging by the Anabaptist literature I’m currently reading, Anabaptists are not blind to their faults anyway.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:

The more people in NI adopt Anabaptist principles, the greater the weight of opinion against the violence. Advocating Anabaptism also offers both believers and unbelievers a positive image of Christianity to set against all that violence in the name of Jesus. And sectarians who are unlikely to listen to secular or theologically liberal calls to love may have more trouble objecting to a biblical argument against their ways?

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Aye, man's, our word of God, on God, seen from the fecund gutter of evolution - where 99.9999% of mutation is deleterious - under His sun.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
In reply to pydseybare; well of course we won't change the reality in NI if we sit on our backsides and do and say nothing! And while most of your alternatives are peaceable, Mormons aren't, by the way.

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There are many approaches to NI - Buddhism for one, 'liberal'Christianity for another, which are unlikely to even be listened to, let alone succeed, because they need the antagonists to change at the very foundations of their beliefs. The 'Anabaptist' approach is itself less likely to work on Catholics because they have that claim to authority outside the Scriptures which I've recently been arguing about with StevHep. But even changing one side's view could help considerably.

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Point of information: an 'anabaptist' approach is as offensive to Calvinist evangelicals as it is to Roman Catholics.

The fact is that very near to nobody is interested in the anabaptist approach to anything in the context of Northern Ireland.

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For Protestants, Anabaptism has the benefit that it takes the Bible seriously, so doesn't require them to give up their most fundamental belief. The challenge from Anabaptism also focusses on a point of agreement with their Catholic opponents, which gives it a decided 'makes you think' aspect. What other approach does that in that particular way?

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If you think about it, the other things Catholics and Protestants disagree about need not lead to any physical fighting at all - just at worst a very vitriolic 'Hell' thread on Sof or equivalent. But setting up a 'Christian country' in which people of other beliefs are discriminated against and you believe it's OK to fight to establish/defend/expand such a state, you'e already in potential warfare territory. In the Crusades it was "Christians" vs Muslims, in NI it's two versions of Christianity, both wanting to be the top dog, neither wanting to be the second class citizens under the other. Yet both are in fact being unbiblical; an argument challenging them to be MORE faithful to the Bible has at least possibilities that other approaches don't have.

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Anabaptism also offers a view of a better form of Christianity to those who may be put off by the NI extremists.

Overall, better than nothing, surely??

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:


Oh by the way, I am basically a Calvinist evangelical - just that like many Calvinistic Baptists I think Calvin got the state/church thing wrong. For a mainstream Calvinist example look at Robert Haldane's commentary on Romans 13 published by Calvinist publishers Banner of Truth Trust.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:

You haven't tackled my point that it's the state link and the mindset that goes with it which creates the apparent need for warfare and violence in NI and many other situations. As I recall you also oppose the State Church/Christian country thing - but you don't seem to share that view of it; or do you? Far more important to deal with that life-and-death reality than scoring cheap points slagging me off about my Calvinism.

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