Chit Chat

By Ted Belman

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Everyone will be happier.

April 16, 2020 | 7,911 Comments »

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50 Comments / 7911 Comments

  3. dweller Said:

    You (and others around here) see Xty’s intent strictly as a matter of ‘leaving no witnesses alive to tell the tale, etc, etc.’

    But in taking that view, you overlook a significant part of their doctrine, screwy though it was, yet rational within its own parameters (& articulated by Augustine, as I recall): which was to deliberately keep on “display,” as it were, a substantial representative segment of the Jews — miserable in their dispossession, etc (in living contrast to the evident success of Xty)

    and you take these sources to be credible in your belief of your nitzri. Like most insane nutters the christians regularly vacillated in schizophrenia… yes they wanted to maintain some as proof, show others as embracing their yeshu,torture others and slaughter others, libel others….. that’s why its important to enumerate that they engaged in a serial, chronic habit of defaming, delegitimizing, libeling, swindling, torturing,and slaughtering the Jewish people. those calling themselves christians, their popes, churches, orgs, etc committed these despicable acts repeatedly over many centuries oftimes citing their bible as their inspiration for the murders etc and their mantra that the jews killed their god.
    dweller Said:

    You (and others around here) see Xty’s intent strictly as a matter of ‘leaving no witnesses alive to tell the tale, etc, etc.’

    not strictly, as you well know, the ignorant were no threat, the converted could be left alone a while, the expelled were considered no threat….. however today the Jews success in Israel is once more a threat as it is an undeniable fact that the barren land blooms for the Jews and NOT the replacement jews. hence the main stream supersesionists have a vested interest in the failure of the jews in Israel so much so that they invest in jew killing orgs. while libeling the jews again. they are merely subcontracting out their prior habits until they can once more justify doing the dirty work themselves.
    dweller Said:

    But Replacement Theology is in decline (more in some quarters than others), and has been in decline since the late 1600’s. Most Evangelicals, for example, reject it root & branch, and they constitute the largest, most vibrant & fastest growing branch of contemporary Xty.

    The most populous global churches are still supersessionist and some evangelical groups are already switching back. Much of the libel against Israel as the proxy of the jews emanates from these churches. Their 2000 year habits and their vested interest in Jewish failure in Israel renders them still as an incredulous source of untainted info about the jews. Their narratives are suspect.

  5. dweller Said:

    (He alludes regularly to “the Law & the Prophets”; never mentions “the Writings.”)

    LOL, a discussion of the allusions of a mythological character
    dweller Said:

    The learned doctors in the Temple seem to have thought he was pretty sharp, even as early as age 12. See Lk 2:41-52.

    LOL, citing the christians for information about the jews….. you know the same christianity that spent millenia defaming, delegitimizing, swindling, libeling, torturing, murdering, burning their books, etc…… now there’s a credible witness. 😛 😛 😛
    Dweller has become the parson in the pulpit citing his gospels
    dweller Said:

    he died several decades BEFORE he Temple’s destruction. In early 1st century Judea,

    he never existed, you have only the incredulous sources for your fantasies.
    dweller Said:

    the original followers of Jesus were all Judean Jews, raised among Jews, and all of the apostles devout from the get-go;

    and yet the Jews dont mention them, only the NT and the christians make the claim of their existence.
    dweller Said:

    Yet this ‘under-education’ only underscored his astonishing command of the law & its intention. The remarks of the observers were not along the lines of ‘Who is this rube? He doesn’t know jack spit.’

    LOL, Dweller citing remarks from a fairy tale as if they were facts. what was papa bear’s remarks when he found his porridge bowl empty…….. that should be proof enough of the existence of talking bears?
    dweller Said:

    No surprises there. The Jewish people have done NOTHING — zip, nada, zilch, theta, the-empty-set — to help them get the story straight, once-&-for-all. (Witness the turkeys I have to deal with on the chit-chat page.)

    of course we are trying to help you get your delusional fantasies straight by trying to help you see that your fairy tale is not real. Once you realize that your fairy tale is not reality the rest of your story will fall into place. As for why you need to beleive that your fairy tale is real and that you need to anchor it in the Jewish Torah you will have to consult an expert on delusions, or perhaps an exorcist.
    dweller Said:

    But, again, how much effort have the Jews made at helping the Xtn clumsies to get it right concerning that particular Jew whom Xtns designate their ‘God’?

    One tends to humor dangerous delusionals who have spent millenia trying to kill you. Designating the Poppa bear character as a god is no more delusional than saying that poppa bear was the progeny of a union between a god and a female bear and was the jewish bear messiah. (Just want you to see how absurd your fantasies appear from the perspectives of others).

  6. yamit82 Said:

    definition of demigod

    Dwellers god’s genes were so weak that there were no god qualities in his progeny. Most pagans cite the god woman mating to prove the progeny was at least a half god but he apparently wants to prove the result of his god woman “union” had no god qualities at all….. I think its because he wants to keep claiming he is a jew because his definition of a christian is the divinity of his yeshu. Notice that Dweller has become a christian evangelist or JW, regularly citing his NT, as if it were factual, as support for his fantasies.

  7. dweller Said:

    He wouldn’t need one. The learned doctors in the Temple seem to have thought he was pretty sharp, even as early as age 12. See Lk 2:41-52.

    There you go again equating NT gospels which we have established have no factual or historical credence. You believe and take on faith we don’t, I don’t, not that garbage, at least, Nope!!!!!

    This seems to be the problem verse christians have with the Jews:

    New International Version
    For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'”

    Looks like we Jews are holding up your show!!! 😛

    You confuse theroms for postulates but at best they are in fact historical and theological theroms.

    Zechariah 8:23 ?
    New International Version
    This is what the LORD Almighty says: “In those days ten people from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ‘Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.’..

    This is an end- times prophesy ”

    If you christians are right and the Jews wrong why will you christians come to the Jews and not the other way round???

    Rabbinic View of Christianity

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-irAG3q8TGU

  8. dweller, I have said that I have on occasion read some parts of the ‘NT’.

    I think you should watch the video Q&A With Rabbi Tovia Singer. He says there that its not possible to understand ‘NT’ without Talmud. I share this conviction. Its not I who needs to read the ‘NT’, but you need to look at the Talmud.

    Xtianity is dying. It started to die from inception. We have trees in Australia like this. Massive, seemingly healthy trees that are rotten to the core inside and useless for anything but firewood.

    Israpundit is not the forum for more detailed discussion of the subject. Nor am I that way inclined.

    Xtians have learned nothing, and ‘Jews’ have forgotten much. Xtians assumed too much, and the ‘Jews’ are to traumatised to care.

    However, we have a record of doing this before, with individuals coming to restore the culture. A branch shall emerge from a stump.

    Cheers

  9. @ mrg3105:

    “It is then very understandable why the Church, later churches, would hate…the ‘Jews’.”

    If by “later churches,” you mean the Xtn movement AFTER it was taken over by gentiles, by default, when Hadrian (after crushing the Bar Kokhba Rebellion) made the city & district of Yerusholayim off-limits to “circumcised persons” [AD 136] — thus inadvertently destroying the Judean part of the Xtn movement (which was HQ’d in Yerushalayim) — then yes, I would agree; it’s quite understandable that they’d hate the Jews.

    “…very understandable why…later churches would… seek to destroy the ‘Jews’…”

    No; there we DIS-AGREE. If they’d truly intended to destroy the Jews, they could have; they clearly did (eventually) HAVE the power to do so — more than enough power to do so. The Jews escaped destruction not by sheer happenstance, but by virtue of gentile Xty’s deliberate intent that they NOT be extirpated from the earth.

    You (and others around here) see Xty’s intent strictly as a matter of ‘leaving no witnesses alive to tell the tale, etc, etc.’

    But in taking that view, you overlook a significant part of their doctrine, screwy though it was, yet rational within its own parameters (& articulated by Augustine, as I recall): which was to deliberately keep on “display,” as it were, a substantial representative segment of the Jews — miserable in their dispossession, etc (in living contrast to the evident success of Xty)

    — to bear witness EVERYWHERE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD to the ‘truth’ of the proposition that God had in fact ‘given up on them’ (the Almighty as “Indian-giver”) for their apparent non-acknowledgement of The Christ — altho, in order to MAINTAIN this entire Supersessionist theory, the gentile church had to thoroughly ignore Rom 11:29 (“The gifts and calling of God are without His repentance [i.e., are irrevocable].”)

    “And this is the source of anti-Semitism, i.e. ‘Jew hating’…simple greed and jealousy.”

    Well, I’d say that envy (not ‘jealousy’) is indeed Replacement Theology’s biggest problem in re the Jews. Certainly it stands guilty of covetousness; in its very NATURE it violates the 10th Commandment, to which all soi-disant “Xtns” presume to subscribe.

    But Replacement Theology is in decline (more in some quarters than others), and has been in decline since the late 1600’s. Most Evangelicals, for example, reject it root & branch, and they constitute the largest, most vibrant & fastest growing branch of contemporary Xty.

    As to whether that’s the source of antisemitism generally , not so sure about that. Jew-hatred antedates Xty by centuries (indeed, millennia).

  10. @ mrg3105:

    “These people are looking for a ‘model’, no one wants to lead because Romans kill leaders, and identify ‘Jesus’ as this ‘model’.

    Revolutionary leaders, yes; political dissidents, yes. But Jesus, quite manifestly, had no such agenda, and made no pretensions to one of that sort.

    “They collect as much information about him as possible, and there is quite a lot of that because he is so different being neither a ‘rabbi’, nor belonging to any of the better known opposition group members; people tend to remember ‘different’.”

    And so this man with this extraordinarily powerful sense of himself just LET these guys make him their ‘model,’ their ‘leader,’ eh? Sorry, but he wasn’t a political revolutionary. He had a mission, Sir, a most unique one — and rabble-rousing was no part of it.

    “…’Oration’ is of course derived from Hebrew…”

    A fanciful proposition (not that it’s relevant).

    “Latins, being Semitic…”

    Don’t think so. The Etruscans may’ve been genetically semites; not the Latins. (Again, though, this is all strictly peripheral to the matter at hand.)

    “The product is impossible to analyse”

    And you’ve actually sat down & tried? (That was a “yes” or “no” question.)

    “Since ‘Jesus’ was a somewhat under-educated…”

    In a formal sense, yes; or so it was said by some in the Gospel text. Yet this ‘under-education’ only underscored his astonishing command of the law & its intention. The remarks of the observers were not along the lines of ‘Who is this rube? He doesn’t know jack spit.’

    Rather, it was ‘How in blazes did he learn THAT? And how come he grasps it so well, particularly since he HASN’T studied???’

    To which his response was, “My doctrine [viz, my learning, my comprehension] is not my own, but His who sent me… etc.”

    “it is safe to say that ‘Christians’ are not his followers!”

    SAFER to say that some are & some aren’t.

    “This is because Xtianity is not about doing anything ‘Jesus’ would have done!”

    Xty is no monolith. Painting with a broad brush this way may be good for weatherproofing a fence; it’s piss poor for painting a portrait (let alone, a mural).

    “Vast number of interpretations that has emerged since that time suggests that the churches don’t have a clue about what ‘Jesus’ was trying to say.”

    No surprises there. The Jewish people have done NOTHING — zip, nada, zilch, theta, the-empty-set — to help them get the story straight, once-&-for-all. (Witness the turkeys I have to deal with on the chit-chat page.)

    “In fact Xtian Church has become a parody on ‘Judaism’…”

    On one level, yes; quite so, no argument here. On another level, however, it is the form, for better or for worse, in which Judaism was exported to the world. A botched job? — perhaps, in some part . But, again, how much effort have the Jews made at helping the Xtn clumsies to get it right concerning that particular Jew whom Xtns designate their ‘God’?

  11. @ mrg3105:

    “what you have is a story of a man that rebels against the injustices of the Roman occupation and goes off seeking justice.”

    Quoi??? Are you sure it was the gospels that you read? — When I ask if you’ve “read” them, I DON’T mean, were you given that [above, blockquoted] summation by some wingnut, Leninist, anti-imperialist professor, and for whom you proceeded to then faithfully regurgitate the whole can-of-beans to get yourself a good grade in the course.

    — QTC, I mean, have you actually sat down & read the gospel text for yourself?

    “[HaNitzri] is at best semi-educated in the Torah.”

    Again, by “Torah,” I assume you mean the Pentateuch specifically; not the entire Tanach — since only Torah & Nevi’im had been compiled by his day, Khtuvim not yet, other than Ruth & T’hillim. (He alludes regularly to “the Law & the Prophets”; never mentions “the Writings.”)

    “The rabbis would not talk to him because it’s like a high-school graduate wanting to have a debate with the university professors; he wouldn’t even get an appointment.”

    He wouldn’t need one. The learned doctors in the Temple seem to have thought he was pretty sharp, even as early as age 12. See Lk 2:41-52.

    Moreover, those who were CALLED ‘rabbis’ had little prominence in Jeshua’s day; he died several decades BEFORE he Temple’s destruction. In early 1st century Judea, the term rabbi did not convey the scholarly implication that it later came to have; in Jeshua’s day, rabbi was little more than a nominative of respect, like “Sir” (in fact, HE himself was often addressed “rabbi”) — and smicha l’rabbanut in AD 30 did not come as the end-product of a systematized course of instruction intended to transmit a set body of knowledge. It would be yet half-a-century & more till Yavneh.

    “You then get a ‘following’. Some people that are having an identity crisis from being born Jewish, but raised Greek, now subjugated by Romans (also Hellenised), who want some comfort zone middle ground while not being seen to antagonise Romans too much through open rebellion like some other groups of Jews that remained culturally Jewish and forcefully defended their cultural identity. It’s a very simple trauma response via the fight-or-flight mechanism, and they choose to ‘flight’, but want a ‘justification’ so as not to completely ‘loose face’ in abandoning their birthright. So they go into a mental ‘fetal position’, seeking to cling to some core values that would still allow them to claim ‘Jewishness’. The result is mostly ‘morality’ without all the legal substance.”

    Right now, all you’re doing is projecting onto the disciples of Jeshua haNitzri the present-day angst of assimilated Jews, or born Jews who were separated from the Jewish community — or from Jewish identity — who get caught up in the various “Messianic Jew” movements.

    They are susceptible to the blandishments & comforts of missionary types offering Jewish cultural & religious symbols, paraphernalia wrapped around strictly Xtn doctrine, foremost of which is the asserted ‘divinity’ of haNitzri.

    But projection is all it is that you’ve posited here, because the original followers of Jesus were all Judean Jews, raised among Jews, and all of the apostles devout from the get-go; not the least bit alienated.

    Again, and WADR, you’re trying to reconstruct history from your imagination, and (inescapably) from reverse gear. “Livet skal forstås baglaens, men leves forlaens.” [Kierkegaard] “Life is to be understood backwards, but it is lived forwards.” To be successful with the project of historical reconstruction & recovery, you must devise (or discover) a way to align yourself w/ the perspective of those who lived it. Reading the primary sources won’t, of itself, do that for you — but it would be a good start.

  12. @ mrg3105:

    “it is pointless to argue with you because…”

    Nu, you spend 1500 words arguing with me. . . because it is ‘pointless’ to do so??? ROFLMSS. (I shudder to think of what I’d be facing if you didn’t find it pointless to do so!)

    “after the vowel [“oo”] was shortened [to “o”] in Old English, the first syllable was mistaken for god ‘God’…”

    The problem w/ trying to deconstruct history in hindsight is that you must do it in reverse gear — but when it occurred it happened in the forward gear[s], so making sense of it can be a very tricky business. If you can’t put yourself in the shoes of the persons who lived it, then all you have is projection from the p-o-v of your own circumstances, both noted & unwitting.

    I would submit that there was no ‘mistaking’ the first syllable. In Old English, the word “good” was understood to be directly related to God (“from Whom all blessings flow”) — as He had created everything & pronounced it “very good.” Hence, the expression, good-bye < "God be with ye."

    “How this story came about was in itself a process of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, taking rumours at face value, and attempting to translate the untranslatable from one language and culture into another.”

    Strictly an assumption. When you have some hard evidence for it, I’ll be happy to look at it.

    “Torah, and this includes the written and the ‘oral’ texts, are a single data construct and structure.”

    That may be true of Torah (viz., the Pentateuch specifically). I see no indication, however, of the ‘oral’ texts constituting the same “single data construct & structure.” If you have evidence that it does, kindly produce it.

    “the midrash, also Torah, says that the ‘tablets’ were three dimensional, but from elsewhere it is apparent that in fact they were four-dimensional.”

    The midrash says, WADR, a lot of things. Some of them may be historical; others, strictly pedagogical. If you have evidence that the received Torah also says what you have claimed, I’ll have a look. Until then, what you’ve said remains for me an engaging assertion — albeit, for the moment, a bald one.

    “All this is missing in the Xtian texts.”

    If by “Xtian texts,” you mean NT (as distinct from subsequent treatises, commentaries, etc), then I repeat what I’ve said before: The Pentateuch was written by (“thru the agency of,” etc) a man formally & fully educated in the Pharaonic court, and who then lived the next third of his life herding sheep, during which period he spent extended stretches of time alone with God. NT was written 1500 years later by persons raised in an entirely different epoch & culture, and some of whom had had, at most, a few years with their Master; others, none at all. You are comparing apples & oranges.

    “They are not a data structure, but just documents. Almost anyone reading them can produce almost anything they want.”

    NT are not just ‘documents.’ Nor are they in the least bit subjective, as you presume. But they cannot be encountered like a sociology or physics text. If one tries approaching them w/o sharing the frame of mind in which they were transmitted, written & re-transmitted, s/he will only be either A. frustrated, or B. seduced into thinking he’s ‘acquired’ something he hasn’t.

    They contain, in point of fact, a wealth of metaphysical understanding that reveals itself only to a consciousness which is prepared for it — PRIMED for it, if you will. A consciousness that is preoccupied with its own intellect is not.

  17. @ bernard ross:

    definition of demigod

    a. A male being, often the offspring of a god and a mortal, who has some but not all of the powers of a god.
    b. An inferior deity; a minor god.
    c. A deified man.

    a. a mythological being who is part mortal, part god
    b. a lesser deity
    2. a person with outstanding or godlike attributes
    [C16: translation of Latin s?mideus]

    1. a mythological being who is partly divine and partly human.
    2. a deified mortal.

    Thesaurus
    Noun 1. demigod – a person with great powers and abilities demigod – a person with great powers and abilities
    superman, Ubermensch
    leader – a person who rules or guides or inspires others
    2. demigod – a person who is part mortal and part god daemon
    deity, divinity, god, immortal – any supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force
    Adonis – (Greek mythology) a handsome youth loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone; “when Adonis died Zeus decreed that he should spend winters in the underworld with Persephone and spend summers with Aphrodite”

  18. Dweller said:

    ….virtually everything else that could be read was published, printed, or written — including TANACH, which ultimately could not have been made available w/o their acquiescence. Given that Xtns dominated the culture, how do you know that what you read there ….. is reliable?

    😛 😛 😛 😛

    That’s a might emphatic statement so now back it up with verifiable fact not your wild imagination.

    So your latest argument is that without the Christians there is no Tanach, that the Jewish Tanach came through the Christians? There you go again,

    You have really descended into the depths of madness and fantasy!!! Give it your best shot then I will shoot you down with glee!!!!

  19. Bernard Ross Said:

    “no problem making the judgement that it is a fairy tale from its basic premise of the existence of jesus as a half god man born from the union of a god an a woman popping him out as the Jewish messiah.”
    Dweller said:
    Yes, but your description is tailor-made for such a conclusion. You’ve set up a deliberately twisted, inaccurate, grand guignol rendering of what I said; you very obviously aren’t interested in even getting the description right. One can only conclude that you fear the prospect of putting yourself on the same page to discuss it.

    you said that your god had a union with a woman and out popped a jewish messiah. your argument is that he is not a half god but that argumentis foolish. check your prior pagan myths to see that those born of gods and women are mixed breeds or half breeds. Perhaps your argument is as to who had the dominant genes, since you deny he has any god in him then I assume your god had recessive genes to the dominant woman. All of your twisting and turning is the same twisted gymnastics that christianity has been trying for thousands of years, only such a myth allows them to “prove” the conclusions they came to already. Really the only thing you can say is it wasnt really mating, just a “union”. 😛

  20. mrg3105 Said:

    Assuming that the personage of ‘Jesus’ existed,

    this is not a sensible assumption to make given the evidence and the sources of the evidence supporting his “existence”. Without his existence the conversations of what he did, what he said, whether a half god or a god, all become absurd.

  21. Bernard Ross Said:

    “You have read it up and down and are still unable to show evidence for your nitzris existence, his virgin birth from the union of a god and a woman, etc etc.”
    Dweller said:
    It’s not about being ‘unable.’ It’s not for me to show you. (Nobody showed ME; I had to see it for myself. Why would I presume to show you?) The reason for you to read it is not to find evidence there. The reason for you to read it is so you’ll be in a position to even discuss it; which you aren’t as yet. You don’t even know what’s IN there.

    I do not need to read goldilocks and the 3 talking bears to be able to discuss whether they are myth or fact. The assertion of facts in your fairy tale may be discussed apart from your mythology. Your only ( 😛 😛 😛 😛 ) “evidence” comes from your “intuition” and your NT. You are unable because no credible evidence exists.

    Bernard Ross Said:

    “After your attempts to present the myth of the half god man born from the mating of a god and a woman to pop out a messiah as a factual narrative…”
    Dweller said:
    No way this was a ‘mating’ — no way Jesus was a half-god.

    when using pagan myths as your basis you should remember that unions,matings, etc produce half breeds and mixed breeds… thats basic genetics. are you saying that your god mated with a woman but did not genetically influence the progeny? In such a case why not just create another man as He did before….. DUH???
    because you need it for your ludicrous mythology.
    Bernard Ross Said:

    “Please show me WHICH NT DO YOU USE AND READ. Is it the king james version or a roman catholic version?”
    Dweller said:
    “Why? Which one of them have YOU read?”
    Bernard Ross said:
    “Still running away from the simple truth that whatever NT version you read from it came through Christian hands….”
    Dweller said:
    ….virtually everything else that could be read was published, printed, or written — including TANACH, which ultimately could not have been made available w/o their acquiescence. Given that Xtns dominated the culture, how do you know that what you read there ….. is reliable?

    😛 😛 😛 😛
    So your latest argument is that without the Christians there is no Tanach, that the Jewish Tanach came through the Christians? There you go again, comparing the Jews credibility with that of the Christian Jew killers, jew swindlers, jews book burners, jew libelers. Comparing the transmission of Jewish works down through the generations where rabbis can trace themselves back to Aaron with the ludicrous mish mash of your cult. You grow more pathetic with every post you make. The Jews transmitted their culture without Christian acquiescence and in spite of their attempts to destroy it. Your gymnastics to prove the existence of your half god man are a joke. Go back to reading your fairy tales.

  22. dweller Said:

    The only legitimate definition of ‘Christian’ is the one which THEY maintain for themselves .

    the usual rubbish… the legitimate definition and name is assigned by others: a murderer is so called by a jury, a quack is not a doctor in spite his or your claims until others assign the title, the 3 dictionaries agree and you are wrong. the neighbors did not call them jews but called them christians according to their behavior… the so called neighbors were correct and your obssessive compulsions to state otherwise are baloney.
    dweller Said:

    and to call such persons ‘Christians’ when they joined a mob to persecute Jews, or burn ‘witches’ & heretics, etc, does an outrage to rational discourse. What they did was unspeakably evil, but that does not make it the work of ‘Christianity’; no sale. You’ve got a horse that won’t run.

    the horse has been running and proving me right for almost 2000 years and continuing today in spite of your ludicrous protestations. Christianity did it, christians libeled the jews with killing their man god and proceed to libel, steal from and slaughter the jews for millenia and continue today. Christians did it, their preachers did it, their churches did it, their kings did it, their popes did it, their orgs did it. They looked to their bible for their inspiration and found it every century for millenia. Only recently they have begun to recant their horrific pogroms and libels.
    Yamit Said:

    Your jesus [narrative] never existed as depicted in [the gospels].”
    Dweller said:
    Then who wrote the Olivet Discourse? the Sermon on the Mount? the myriad sayings attributed to him? — The Avon Lady?

    Obviously the author of the fairy tale wrote it just like the author of every fairy tale who puts words in his characters mouths. OOOOOOOH, you will say no way because you find the sayings so brilliant giving you a tingling up and down your leg….. sorry, your tinglings and adoration do not make your mythological character real.

    Bernard Ross Said:

    “I… hold that the common dictionary definition is correct AND it is as commonly understood”
    Dweller said:
    You never said what was ‘correct’ about it…..Dictionaries are good for defining the language of common discourse & composition, as a grammatical & syntactical aid. NOT so good — certainly not so reliable — when it comes to argot & specialized lingo

    no need to say what is correct about a dictionary definition….. to what argot and specialized lingo do you refer? the word christian is used regularly and commonly for almost 2000 years, nothing specialized here. Same with the word follower and hijack which you also asked for red herring definitions. Its simple really, your argument fails and you resort to haggling over details as a distraction. A christian is a follower of jesus, without jesus there is no christianity…. and you have shown no evidence that your mythological character ever existed.

    dweller Said:

    They could as well have CALLED themselves “spaghetti & meatballs.” Christ would not have regarded them as his own, and he plainly SAID so.

    christ did not exist but we have no doubt that christians existed and spent almost 2000 years liubeling, seindling, torturing and killing jews……. not an indication of a reliable source of info about jews, especially a fictional jew they made into a half god man. How amusing, no evidence of your yeshu but plenty of evidence of christians. christians are real and yeshu is not.
    dweller Said:

    “No; actually HE told it to me. He tells it to MAN constantly & without surcease. His intentions for the redemption of a fallen world couldn’t have been more clear if He’d commandeered Facebook to announce them.” Jn 3:16.

    In other words your god “told you” in the christian NT from where you get your facts about your yeshu?
    dweller Said:

    Not so. As I said before, He is ‘limited’ only by His own endless integrity & fidelity —

    no evidence of a “limited” omnipotent G_D, sounds like a christian oxymoron designed to provide a basis for your yeshu mythology.
    Bernard Ross Said:

    “He can… change His mind if He wants…”.
    Dweller said:
    That’s not what HE says:“God is not a man, that He should lie;

    Changing ones mind is not lying, do you need more dictionary definitions for your next tangent? He changed his mind about humanity and started over with Noah… He was not lying.
    so many convoluted red herring posts seeking distraction and tangents. the arguments you presented over and over are reduced to a few sentences and debunked the same way. a fairy tale with no basis other than those who subscribe to the mythology delineated in the fairy tale.

  23. dweller, it is pointless to argue with you because…

    1. You do not accept that the formative Xtian texts are what they claim to be, ‘gospell’, i.e. Old English g?dspel, from g?d ‘good’ + spel ‘news, a story’ (see spell2), translating ecclesiastical Latin bona annuntiatio or bonus nuntius, used to gloss ecclesiastical Latin evangelium, from Greek euangelion ‘good news’ (see evangel); after the vowel was shortened in Old English, the first syllable was mistaken for god ‘God.’
    Being a good story they have something in common with all ‘news’ in that the story producers were not expert witnesses and that the story changed over time.

    2. How this story came about was in itself a process of
    misunderstanding, misinterpretation, taking rumours at face value, and attempting to translate the untranslatable from one language and culture into another.

    3. Torah, and this includes the written and the ‘oral’ texts, are a single data construct and structure. That is, it is an engineered design. This is not easily understood by looking at it in the physical two-dimensional form, which is why the midrash, also Torah, says that the ‘tablets’ were three dimensional, but from elsewhere it is apparent that in fact they were four-dimensional. Only when one tries to re-create a 3D model of the data, something which became possible only recently due to advances in database modelling, does one understand the complexity and the structural beauty of the Torah.
    All this is missing in the Xtian texts. They are not a data structure, but just documents. Almost anyone reading them can produce almost anything they want. It’s like a lumber yard; a ship builder will tell you it’s a ship, and a construction builder will tell you it’s a house, while a furniture maker will tell you it’s a pile of furniture.

    4. What you have is a ‘broken telegraph’.
    Assuming that the personage of ‘Jesus’ existed, what you have is a story of a man that rebels against the injustices of the Roman occupation and goes off seeking justice. He is at best semi-educated in the Torah. The rabbis would not talk to him because it’s like a high-school graduate wanting to have a debate with the university professors; he wouldn’t even get an appointment.

    5. You then get a ‘following’. Some people that are having an identity crisis from being born Jewish, but raised Greek, now subjugated by Romans (also Hellenised), who want some comfort zone middle ground while not being seen to antagonise Romans too much through open rebellion like some other groups of Jews that remained culturally Jewish and forcefully defended their cultural identity. It’s a very simple trauma response via the fight-or-flight mechanism, and they choose to ‘flight’, but want a ‘justification’ so as not to completely ‘loose face’ in abandoning their birthright. So they go into a mental ‘fetal position’, seeking to cling to some core values that would still allow them to claim ‘Jewishness’. The result is mostly ‘morality’ without all the legal substance.

    These people are looking for a ‘model’, no one wants to lead because Romans kill leaders, and identify ‘Jesus’ as this ‘model’. They collect as much information about him as possible, and there is quite a lot of that because he is so different being neither a ‘rabbi’, nor belonging to any of the better known opposition group members; people tend to remember ‘different’.

    6. Then the ‘followers’ (i.e. ‘apostles’ Old English apostol, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek apostolos ‘messenger,’ from apostellein ‘send forth’) start to, spread the message! Here they come a cropper because in the Jewish culture brilliance is in saying things succinctly, but of course the Greeks, observing Jewish rabbis teaching all day by REPETITION, decide that more is beautiful and adopt what Romans would later call oration as the ‘proof’ of intelligence. Oration is of course derived from Hebrew, and would mean something like ‘to enlighten’ given that Torah is compared to light. Greeks simply left off the initial T, to be left with are but Latins, being Semitic, restated this with Latin orator, what should be TorahTorah!

    7. All this mangling of languages and ideas plucked from sometimes the written and sometimes from the then-yet-to-be-written ‘oral’ Torah was intertwined with ‘a good story’ to produce, vois là, a new ‘religion’.

    The product is impossible to analyse, particularly over the passage of time and copious editing that sought to bring the ‘story’ to a more rational form, yet failed.

    8. In all this what’s missing is the contemporary cultural context that had to have been that of the story’s main character, ‘Jesus’. Since ‘Jesus’ was a somewhat under-educated, but never the less observant normative Jew, raised in the Jewish culture, it is safe to say that ‘Christians’ are not his followers! This is because Xtianity is not about doing anything ‘Jesus’ would have done! Xtianity takes up the ‘story’ after the death of its main personage! And, the vast number of interpretations that has emerged since that time suggests that the churches don’t have a clue about what ‘Jesus’ was trying to say. In fact Xtian Church has become a parody on ‘Judaism’ while being an embodiment of Greek culture and Roman aspirations.

    9. It is then very understandable why the Church, later churches, would hate and seek to destroy the ‘Jews’. It is difficult to live a life knowing that somewhere close by there is someone that knows you are doing everything wrong. ‘Jews’ are the everlasting thorn of the Xtianity’s own making. ‘Jews’ are hated because…they know and understand too much. What is worse, the ‘Jews’, despite everything, have survived, and are today managing an economy more viable than either Greece or Italy despite all of the Islamic world out to eliminate us. It’s hard to deny the status of the ‘chosen people’ based on this alone. And this is the source of anti-Semitism, i.e. ‘Jew hating’…simple greed and jealousy.

  24. @ bernard ross:

    “they have a vested interest in delegitimizing jews. therefore, for me they are without credibility and nothing they offer can be accepted without other evidence……. their word is crap.”

    In that case, you’d be well-advised to not read anything, because at one point or another, ultimately everything in the culture that passed thru the hands of whoever got it to you existed only by their permission, stated or implicit.

    “When you’ve READ the narratives for yourself, you’ll be in a position to make a judgment about them — not unless; not until.”

    “no problem making the judgement that it is a fairy tale from its basic premise of the existence of jesus as a half god man born from the union of a god an a woman popping him out as the Jewish messiah.”

    Yes, but your description is tailor-made for such a conclusion. You’ve set up a deliberately twisted, inaccurate, grand guignol rendering of what I said; you very obviously aren’t interested in even getting the description right. One can only conclude that you fear the prospect of putting yourself on the same page to discuss it.

    “you read the whole thing over an over, presented your arguments of using the christian filtered NT, the brilliant sayings of your nitzri and your intuition as your evidence.”

    Nonsense. The only reference to “evidence” that I made was to evidence of the authenticity of the sayings; they couldn’t be faked. That’s all I said. The rest is all your twisting & turning to keep reality at bay.

    “I have no problem with the credibility of the GOSPELS; that is the matter at hand here, not the persecutors or persecutions of Jews, which you repeatedly fall back on for use as a red herring.”

    “the only transmitter of your gospels came through the hands of those who spent 2000 years libeling jews…. “

    The text stands up pretty well in spite of all that. It speaks for itself.

    “You accept as facts narratives coming from the hands of jew killers.”

    It’s quite obvious that the narratives were not written by Jew-killers.

    “Narratives which are absurd to Jews.”

    Not absurd to THIS JEW.

  25. @ bernard ross:

    “fictitious traits of fictitious half gods from fictitious fairy tales….”

    “Until you’ve actually READ those ‘fictitious fairy tales’ for yourself, you can’t say that you know them to BE ‘fairy tales’ — you don’t even know what’s IN those ‘fairy tales’ — and aren’t even on the same page w/ those who HAVE read them, regardless of their assessment of the narrative or its merits. When you presume to hold forth on the matter this way, all you do is expose yourself for the blustering, bloviating, ignorant buffoon you are.”

    “You have read it up and down and are still unable to show evidence for your nitzris existence, his virgin birth from the union of a god and a woman, etc etc.”

    It’s not about being ‘unable.’ It’s not for me to show you. (Nobody showed ME; I had to see it for myself. Why would I presume to show you?) The reason for you to read it is not to find evidence there. The reason for you to read it is so you’ll be in a position to even discuss it; which you aren’t as yet. You don’t even know what’s IN there.

    “After your attempts to present the myth of the half god man born from the mating of a god and a woman to pop out a messiah as a factual narrative…”

    No way this was a ‘mating’ — no way Jesus was a half-god. Jesus had to die, had to be killable; it was an integral & necessary part of his mission right from the jump; a mission which could not be completed w/o that happening.

    No way that an infinite ‘god’ of ANY kind — semi-god, demigod, hemi-god, half-god, quarter-god, double-god, triple-god, half-god w/ a lime twist, quarter-god into a half-pike followed by a triple axel into a half-gainer — could be killed by finite men; absolutely out of the question.

    “… I need know no more, that is enough for me.”

    A back-handed way of admitting you’re a coward offering the standard coward’s cop-out.

    “Please show me WHICH NT DO YOU USE AND READ. Is it the king james version or a roman catholic version?”

    “Why? Which one of them have YOU read?”

    “running away from the obvious question to your claim that you got your NT from jewish sources.”

    “Nice try, but no cigar. I simply have no intention of letting you control the direction of this exchange; I’ve seen, more than once, what happens when I DO let you do that. Aint happenin’ again. Truth be told, it’s YOU who are doing the running, yahnkele. I asked you to define ‘Jewish sources,’ as you use the term, several wks & a hundred posts ago (& several times again since). So far, however. . . silence. ‘S’matter? — Cat gotcher tongue?”

    “Still running away from the simple truth that whatever NT version you read from it came through christian hands….”

    Again, it’s you who are doing the running — and your assertion is more simplistic than ‘simple,’ and hardly ‘truthful’ when considered head-on.

    Those “christian hands” represented the dominant culture not only when NT passed thru their hands but also when virtually everything else that could be read was published, printed, or written — including TANACH, which ultimately could not have been made available w/o their acquiescence. Given that Xtns dominated the culture, how do you know that what you read there (whenever you DO get ’round to reading Tanach) is reliable?

  26. @ bernard ross:

    “Mr. presumptuous tells [Adonoi] that he had to work with what he had……. this he tells to the omnipotent creator of the universe and all species.”

    “No; actually HE told it to me. He tells it to MAN constantly & without surcease. His intentions for the redemption of a fallen world couldn’t have been more clear if He’d commandeered Facebook to announce them.” Jn 3:16.

    “In spite of your citation from the NT and your unexplained unintelligible English, regarding ‘he told me’…”

    Not unintelligible. You just aren’t listening. Jn 3:19.

    “your presumption remains that you have limited G_D to the boundaries of your imagination and beliefs…”

    Not so. As I said before, He is ‘limited’ only by His own endless integrity & fidelity — a matter I can see for myself, quite independent of imagination. You could too, if you weren’t malicious; makes you dull, dense.

    “He is omnipotent”

    Yes. Also, however, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent. It is you who limit Him. All that matters to you is power.

    “He can do what he wants“

    He wants His creation to be happy.

    “He can… change His mind if He wants…”.

    That’s not what HE says:

    “God is not a man, that He should lie; neither the son of man, that He should repent: when He hath said, will He not do it? or when He hath spoken, will He not make it good?” Num 23:19

    “The Glory of Israel will not lie nor repent; for He is not a man, that He should repent.” 1 Sam 15:29

    “therefore your argument is absurd.”

    QTC: Therefore my argument is right on target.

    “If [God] doesnt have, he merely can create… ”

    “Obviously you WOULD prefer that He simply abandoned the notion of redemption altogether & started over from scratch. It’s apparent that the only divine attribute that means anything at all to you is omnipotence. Doesn’t occur to you, does it, that He might actually care about what comes of His creation. . . . (Must say, it’s not hard to imagine what your idea of a Father consists of.)”

    “My ‘preferences,’ and yours, are irrelevant therefore no need to mention them at all.”

    “Ah, but they are quite CONSPICUOUSLY relevant to you; reason indeed for mention of them.”

    “my statement is still correct and you still avoid its truth: preferences and opinions have no relation to fact except to demonstrate you projecting your preferences as attributes of your god.”

    And you are NOT doing that?

    Very well, prove that your ‘god’ is omnipotent, and that in so characterizing him, you are not merely “projecting your OWN preferences as attributes of your ‘god’.”

    “I would expect an omnipotent G_D to be capable at least of what I can conceive and then more.”

    “As I said, omnipotence is the only divine attribute that means anything to you (quite understandably, as you are, at your core, a straight-down-the-line, stone-cold, power-tripper). But the omnipotence of the Most High is conditioned by His OTHER attributes, such as His omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence.”

    “Rubbish, evidence please for your fantasies!”

    Evidence please for yours. Show me your evidence of His ‘omnipotence.’

  27. @ bernard ross:

    “You then tried to say that the dictionaries are incorrect and the Christians definition of themselves should be used…”

    I didn’t ‘try’ to say ANYTHING. I quite definitely DID say that if the dictionaries didn’t consult first with the Xtn community when preparing a definition, then they’re outrageously out of line. Check the posting record.

    “I disagreed but stated it was moot as the jew killing christians of 2000 years called themselves christians even though you said they were not real christians and used the nicene creed as your definition but they also subscribed to the nicene creed AND called themselves christians.”

    No; I said they were not in fact Christians because their behavior was a blot on the teachings of Christ. (In fact, if he’s their ‘God,’ then their very conduct takes his name in vain.) I did NOT allude to the Nicene Creed in that context — because the creeds are doctrinal, striclty ideological matters — but rather, to the remarks of Christ himself, because you had pulled out yet another definition of “Christian’ at that point: a “follower of Christ,” and that is not a doctrinal matter but a MORAL one, relating to behavior.

    “You first said it is what christians call themselves and then said it was defined as subscribing to the nicene creed.”

    You conflate & confuse two separate isssues:

    I said it is for Xtns to DEFINE what constitutes a Xtn — an ideological matter; hence, the allusion to the Nicene Creed (just as it is for Jews, or certainly nobody other than Jews, to define what constitutes a JEW).

    Whether somebody is or isn’t, in reality, a “follower of Christ,” however, is a bite of a different bagel. One can be a follower of Christ WITHOUT being a ‘Christian’ (viz., w/o subscribing to the Nicene Creed ) — and vice versa.

    No follower of Christ — whether he were doctrinally, creedally ‘Christian’ or not — could engage in persecution, or make common cause w/ those who did, without persecuting Christ himself. “Even as you did it unto these, the least of my brothers, you did it unto me.” haNitzri didn’t say much about doctrinal matters, but he was clear and STERN in the matter of persons presuming to use his name as a cover for evil. See Mt 7:21-23.

    “I… hold that the common dictionary definition is correct AND it is as commonly understood”

    You never said what was ‘correct’ about it. Your idea of ‘correct’ is apparently whatever is expedient for your agenda.

    Dictionaries are good for defining the language of common discourse & composition, as a grammatical & syntactical aid. NOT so good — certainly not so reliable — when it comes to argot & specialized lingo.

    “Christ = Christian, DUH??”

    Yeah, sure. Just like Democrat Party = democratic. . . .[DU-UH!??]

    Take everything at face value, do you? You must be a real easy sell for anybody with a shoddy product he wants to unload. All he has to do is come up w/ the right NAME for it, and you’re a willing sucker already looking for the signature line. Little wonder that every other word out of your mouth is “swindle.” Your attitude has likely set you up to get taken time & again by every scam artist & his sister Katya. A fraier is always subject to the power of words.

    “Its all baloney, those who did the killings called themselves christians, subscribed to the nicene creed”

    They could as well have CALLED themselves “spaghetti & meatballs.” Christ would not have regarded them as his own, and he plainly SAID so.

    What’s more, the fact is, as I’ve said before, that for most of the lifetime of Xty, whole populations were subject to the regional state religion, whatever it was. There was little if any individual conviction, except among cloistered communities of monks & nuns, isolated mystics & the occasional stray intellectual.

    The vast majority of persons knew NOTHING of Xty; they simply went along to get along. They were illiterate, and couldn’t even SPELL “Christ” — let alone, read the record of what the man said. They sure-as-blazes didn’t know beans about scriptures OR doctrines — and to call such persons ‘Christians’ when they joined a mob to persecute Jews, or burn ‘witches’ & heretics, etc, does an outrage to rational discourse. What they did was unspeakably evil, but that does not make it the work of ‘Christianity’; no sale.

    You’ve got a horse that won’t run.

  28. @ yamit82:

    “…’The Talmud is a legal commentary’ That’s not how you described it earlier and many times in the past. Adjusting your definitions to suit your lying responses?”

    Nothing I’ve said about Talmud contradicts anything else I’ve said about Talmud. If you can FIND a contradiction in two remarks of mine, produce it. Otherwise, pound sand w/ your bloated head.

    “You don’t know the date of acts not really you just cite, your slimy chritian liars versions and cannot date anything in that book accurately.”

    It’s accepted by all accounts that Paul died before the temple’s destruction.

    It’s also accepted that Paul wrote Acts

    — which makes no mention of war or the Temple’s destruction.

    Move on; this is asinine & infantile, even for you.

    “Certainly if [NT] were true and really happened the oral tradition would have noted and commented something? Yet there is no direct references.”

    Wouldn’t be the first time Jewish history was suppressed by the rabbis.

    “Have you every heard of scribal historical backdating?”

    Heard of it, and I know it’s not easy to do; extraordinarily difficult, too many variables to juggle & unknowns to cover for. You have evidence of actual scribal backdating in NT?

    — or are you just flinging dung at the wall in hopes that something will (finally) stick?

    “All you can do essentially is to quote [NT] written mostly by anonymous authors none of whom knew your yeshu in person”

    Hard to conclude from the text that the writers of the GOSPELS (specifically) didn’t know him personally.

    “Funny that your Jewish christians…”

    More properly designated Christian Jews.

    “… failed to tell anybody because the real Jews were totally silent about them as though they didn’t exist. “

    You don’t know this, and have no WAY of knowing it. All you DO know is that no known writings appear to exist. The “why” of it is a mystery to you as much as anybody else.

    “Jews noticed and wrote about everything important and a lot that wasn’t but wrt to your invisible Jewish christians total silence. You don’t consider that strange , odd or easily explainable?”

    It would be odd or strange. . . . if it were true.

    Actually, however, Jews wrote very little about ANYTHING during the period (esp WRT religion); oral tradition was still very strong (among the disciples too, BTW) , and was consciously & deliberately maintained thus by the rabbonim until they elected to alter that policy. If you think I’m wrong, produce some Jewish writings from the era — ANY Jewish writings from the period.

    “Do you have an open or closed mind?”

    Open. I’m the one who has said I regard the matter of ‘apparent silence’ as an open question, subject to a few possibilities (despite the fact of prior suppressions, and despite the universality of human nature). It’s you & your bozo buddy who are insisting — out of hand — that the gospel is a ‘lie’ or ‘fairy tale.’

    “We know of Jewish sectarians like Nazarene’s and Gnostics and others who probably were the basis for later christianity. Your jesus [narrative] never existed as depicted in [the gospels].”

    Then who wrote the Olivet Discourse? the Sermon on the Mount? the myriad sayings attributed to him?

    — The Avon Lady?

    “yes I have read [NT].”

    Yes, you’ve read it — the same way a lynch mob adjudicated the charges against a Jew

    — ‘Sure we’re gonna give ‘im a trial. THEN we’re gonna hang ‘im!‘

    Yeah, I’ve SEEN how you read NT.

  29. @ bernard ross:

    “You seem to have missed the point. Mr Ross, who identifies as a ‘Jew,’ presumes to decide who is or isn’t a Christian, using definitions he finds convenient, and without recourse to how christians define themselves — and sees nothing wrong with that.”

    “As ususal, you are an absolute and unaabashed, unashamed LIAR!”

    As usual (indeed, as ALWAYS), I am nothing of the sort — and LIKEWISE as usual, you have resorted to your standard pattern of emotionally & hyperbolically explaining away your own inattention to the facts, selective memory of events, and tenuous relation to reality as the product of somebody else’s ‘lying.’

    “You asked me to define christian, just like you just asked me to define the word follower”

    Not so. I DID ask you to define your term, “christian sources” — since you had introduced the expression into the discourse and used it routinely thereafter WITHOUT defining it. (It was only after many such requests for a definition that you finally obliged — w/ a lame & thoroughly USELESS one: “Christian sources are sources which are christian.”)

    I don’t recall asking you for your definition of CHRISTIAN (if you can find a post where I did, show it to me) — and cannot imagine why I would, since I KNOW the only legitimate definition accepted by Christians themselves.

    The following colloquy [from #29 & 46, pg 13] shows how the matter of defining “Christian” FIRST arose in this exchange — and it’s clear that it wasn’t the result of my asking you for a definition :

    [Mar]: “[Dweller] says that he is a Christian…”

    [dweller]: “When have I said that? You’re clearly wrong again. Actually, I’m just about the only regular poster here who insists that I [dweller] am NOT a ‘Christian’…”

    [BR]: “obviously Mar55 antennae are clearer than yours”

    [dweller]: “Not when her antennae are drunk. Then they forget the facts.

    The fact is that I’ve never called myself a ‘Christian’ on this site (or anywhere else ). So my statement was correct, and hers is flat-out wrong. And PresentCompany is (as is altogether typical for him) fullovit.

    If you think otherwise, show me the actual post. Surely you should be able to find ONE among the thousands, if I said such a thing. But then, I know the actual definition of the word, while the others use it only as an epithet.”

    [BR]: “…’Chris·tian,’ noun1. a person who has received Christian baptism…’…”

    [dweller]: “…’Christian baptism’ as defined by whom ? Even the scripture itself refers to not one but TWO types of ‘baptisms’ — and NEITHER of them is called ‘christian’ baptism therein.”

    [BR]: ”… ‘or is a believer in Jesus Christ and his teachings’…”

    [dweller]: “As arbitrated & assessed by WHOM? — Mt 7:21-23. You cannot rely on a dictionary for such a definition. Dictionaries are notorious for having their own axes to grind in these matters (just as YOU quite obviously do), and it’s reflected not only in how they presume to define words, but also in the very words they choose to include & exclude.

    The only legitimate definition of ‘Christian’ is the one which THEY maintain for themselves .

    That definition is the one which went into play when Xty first formalized itself as a separate & distinct religion — at Nicaea in 325. The Nicene Creed clearly asserts that Jesus was ‘God’ — and to be a Christian, one would have to subscribe to it (and as well, to the subsequent creeds, e.g., the Athanasian Creed, etc).

    If you don’t hold to the ‘divinity’ of Christ, then whatever else you may believe about him, you cannot be a Christian. That’s the touchstone; everything else is immaterial to the question.

    And on the Jewish side of the divide, the RAMBAN [Nachmanides] is equally clear in the matter. He states that the fundamental (and solitary) distinguishing factor between Judaism & Xty revolves about the question of Christ’s purported ‘divinity’ — and nothing else. A Jew can, e.g., believe — rightly or wrongly — in Christ’s messiahship, and REMAIN a Jew.

    He CANNOT, however, believe in Christ’s ‘divinity‘ and remain so.

    I’ve written of this before, numerous times, on this site — some of those posts addressed directly to you.

    But like the other Jewish-insecure types around here, you read not for comprehension, but for support, validation & reinforcement. So you ignore what FAILS to reinforce — or what challenges the parameters of the box you live in.”

  30. yamit82 Said:

    Funny that your Jewish christians failed to tell anybody because the real Jews were totally silent about them as though they didn’t exist. Jews noticed and wrote about everything important and a lot that wasn’t but wrt to your invisible Jewish christians total silence.

    LOL

  31. dweller Said:

    “If you attempt to prove that the early christians were jews…”
    Dweller Said
    Not trying to ‘prove’ anything; there’s nothing to prove. There’s no way they — the 1st century Judean disciples — could’ve been anything but Jews.

    I have already told you that there is no evidence for your nitzri myth or his judean disciples. there are various sects of jews but no evidence that they had any link to the yeshu and disciples myths which were likely fabricated to craft a link from the pagan religion to the hijacked hebrew bible.

    dweller Said:

    When you’ve READ the narratives for yourself, you’ll be in a position to make a judgment about them — not unless; not until.

    rubbish! I dont need to read goldilocks and the 3 bears to know that it is a fairy tale rather than a factual account. As soon as you tell me that the plot includes a messiah named goldilocks born of a union between a god and a woman and that she eats porridge with 3 talking bears I can make an intelligent judgement of the facts. The same is true of your nitzri and the 12 talking panderas. Once you give me the laughable beginning the rest is easy.

  32. dweller Said:

    Not trying to ‘prove’ anything; there’s nothing to prove. There’s no way they — the 1st century Judean disciples — could’ve been anything but Jews.

    “… then it makes sense that they would have observed jewish norms, etc. and the talmud would likely have had a better handle on what were Jewish norms in Jewish history as opposed to the source from the jew libelers.”

    This is bone-headed & ignorant. There was NO Talmud at the time the Book of Acts was written.

    Moreover, they are 2 different genres of literature.

    Acts is a chronicle; a history — completed BEFORE destruction of the Temple.

    Talmud is legal commentary, w/ its own characteristic internal discipline

    — and the earliest part of which would not even begin to be written for well over a century AFTER the Book of Acts was completed.

    “The Talmud is a legal commentary” That’s not how you described it earlier and many times in the past. Adjusting your definitions to suit your lying responses???

    You don’t know the date of acts not really you just cite, your slimy chritian liars versions and cannot date anything in that book accurately. Have you every heard of scribal historical backdating?

    The Mishna may have been written in the first century CE but what was the Mishna but the oral law put to pen. Certainly if any of your myths were true and really happened the oral tradition would have noted and commented something? Yet there is no direct references. You ask BR to have an open mind for the incredible and take much as an article of faith yet you close your mind to the several Hypotheses presented even through every one is more plausible than your inane screeds. It’s all a lie like you are all BS up the proverbial creek without a paddle. All you can do essentially is to quote your stupid book written mostly by anonymous authors none of whom knew your yeshu in person and based all their writings and beliefs on heresy years after the supposed events.

    Funny that your Jewish christians failed to tell anybody because the real Jews were totally silent about them as though they didn’t exist. Jews noticed and wrote about everything important and a lot that wasn’t but wrt to your invisible Jewish christians total silence. You don’t consider that strange , odd or easily explainable? Do you have an open or closed mind????? I know 😛

    We know of Jewish sectarians like Nazarene’s and Gnostics and others who probably were the basis for later christianity. Your jesus shmuck myth never existed as depicted in that mythical farce of a book and yes I have read it. 😉

  33. dweller Said:

    you’ll have a right to make a judgment over whether in fact a ‘hijacking’ has occurred

    hi·jack ?h??jak/Submit verb

    take over (something) and use it for a different purpose.

    christianity hijacked the hebrew bible and used it as a foundation stone to build their bible. Since then they have been libeling and killing the witnesses to their crime. Why do I keep having to post definitions to you for simple words that every one knows?

    dweller Said:

    “YOU could figure it out too, if you didn’t have your brains lodged between your cheeks. And I don’t mean the cheeks that sit on your face — I mean the cheeks you sit on.”

    Why introduce your fetishes here, they are irrelevant to the discussion?

    dweller Said:

    This is bone-headed & ignorant. There was NO Talmud at the time the Book of Acts was written.

    no need for red herrings…. Acts comes through the christians and therefore there is no credibility regarding any facts contained therein including dates. Revisionism can include backdating as already given. However, it is moot as you are long spinning your “neighbors” shtick which was already shown to be irrelevant.
    Your whole MO is that of an evangelist who comes spouting the myths of his religion and quotes his intuition and religions documents as proof of the facts of his religions myths. I see no difference between your pagan myths of gods mating with woman than others in spite of you and your religions attempt to graft your myths onto the Hebrew bible.

    You have lots of long winded posts which boil down to citing sources filtered through Christianity, citing the brilliance of sayings of your mythological character and citing your ………(wait for it)…….intuition 😛

  34. Bernard Ross Said:

    “Mr. presumptuous tells [Adonoi] that he had to work with what he had……. this he tells to the omnipotent creator of the universe and all species.”
    Dweller said:
    “No; actually HE told it to me. He tells it to MAN constantly & without surcease. …. Jn 3:16

    In spite of your citation from the NT and your unexplained unintelligible English, regarding “he told me”, your presumption remains that you have limited G_D to the boundaries of your imagination and beliefs… He is omnipotent,He can do what he wants and change His mind if He wants…. therefore your argument is absurd.
    dweller Said:

    I said and deliberately lifted it out of its context (now restored, above, in boldface) to imply something which you know damned well I neither said nor suggested —

    rubbish, a red herring, you still avoid answering to your presumption and to “He told it to me” lots of psychobabble but no substance.
    dweller Said:

    “My ‘preferences,’ and yours, are irrelevant therefore no need to mention them at all.”

    my statement is still correct and you still avoid its truth: preferences and opinions have no relation to fact except to demonstrate you projecting your preferences as attributes of your god.

    dweller Said:

    But the omnipotence of the Most High is conditioned by His OTHER attributes, such as His omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence.

    Rubbish, evidence please for your fantasies! You spin out your tales so long when your point is simple and ridiculous.
    Bernard ross Said:

    “fictitious traits of fictitious half gods from fictitious fairy tales….”
    Dweller said:
    Until you’ve actually READ those ‘fictitious fairy tales’ for yourself, you can’t say that you know them to BE ‘fairy tales’

    more rubbish from he with long winded red herrings. You have read it up and down and are still unable to show evidence for your nitzris existence, his virgin birth from the union of a god and a woman, etc etc. After your attempts to present the myth of the half god man born from the mating of a god and a woman to pop out a messiah as a factual narrative, I need know no more, that is enough for me.
    Bernard Ross Said:

    “Please show me WHICH NT DO YOU USE AND READ. Is it the king james version or a roman catholic version?”
    Dweller said:
    “Why? Which one of them have YOU read?”
    Bernard Ross said:
    “running away from the obvious question to your claim that you got your NT from jewish sources.”
    Dweller said:
    Nice try, but no cigar. I simply have no intention of letting you control the direction of this exchange;

    Still running away from the simple truth that whatever NT version you read from it came through christian hands…. the same hands who have been lying about Jews for 2000 years and still ongoing today. they have a vested interest in delegitimizing jews. therefore, for me they are without credibility and nothing they offer can be accepted without other evidence……. their word is crap.
    dweller Said:

    When you’ve READ the narratives for yourself, you’ll be in a position to make a judgment about them — not unless; not until.

    no problem making the judgement that it is a fairy tale from its basic premise of the existence of jesus as a half god man born from the union of a god an a woman popping him out as the Jewish messiah. you read the whole thing over an over, presented your arguments of using the christian filtered NT, the brilliant sayings of your nitzri and your intuition as your evidence. these are ludicrous arguments giving no evidence to the basis of the NT and christianity.
    dweller Said:

    I “have no problem” with the credibility of the GOSPELS; that is the matter at hand here, not the persecutors or persecutions of Jews, which you repeatedly fall back on for use as a red herring.

    the only transmitter of your gospels came through the hands of those who spent 2000 years libeling jews…. and yet you cite these documents given to you by those sources. I asked you which NT you used but you ran away from the truth. You accept as facts narratives coming from the hands of jew killers. Narratives which are absurd to Jews.

  35. @ bernard ross:

    “There isn’t a problem with the fact it is a single statement [viz., that Acts 11:26 alludes to the disciples being called ‘Christians’ by outsiders w/o ever using the word again]. This is the norm in the Talmud where important points are only stated once in its entirety.”

    “Irrelevant. Book of Acts is not Talmud.”

    “If you attempt to prove that the early christians were jews…”

    Not trying to ‘prove’ anything; there’s nothing to prove. There’s no way they — the 1st century Judean disciples — could’ve been anything but Jews.

    “… then it makes sense that they would have observed jewish norms, etc. and the talmud would likely have had a better handle on what were Jewish norms in Jewish history as opposed to the source from the jew libelers.”

    This is bone-headed & ignorant. There was NO Talmud at the time the Book of Acts was written.

    Moreover, they are 2 different genres of literature.

    Acts is a chronicle; a history — completed BEFORE destruction of the Temple.

    Talmud is legal commentary, w/ its own characteristic internal discipline

    — and the earliest part of which would not even begin to be written for well over a century AFTER the Book of Acts was completed.

  36. @ yamit82:

    “It is only in modern times that in some missionary and other circles, the claim is again made that it should be possible to embrace faith in Jesus as the Christ (i.e., become a Christian) while remaining a Jew.”

    I guess the writers & researchers of this monograph (orig < Encyclopedia Judaica, reprinted on JVL/AICE) must have considered the 13th century to constitute “modern times” — since the RAMBAN [Nachmanides] had no problem with the proposition of a Jew’s embracing faith in Jesus as [Moshiach], so long as this did not extend to viewing him ALSO as ‘God.’ That latter was, for him, the only true deal breaker.

    “The majority of the court held – on grounds of secular rather than theological or halakhic reasoning – that in the historicosocial consciousness and in the linguistic usage of the ordinary man (and hence, by implication, of the Israel legislator) the term Jew could not be construed to include a Jew [Daniel Rufeisen] who had formally embraced Christianity…”

    We discussed this before. Ted had posted an article. The problem w/ Rufeisen was that while he was no longer a priest, he had never left the RCC and apparently didn’t plan to, notwithstanding his position & petition. Everything else was peripheral & not material. The issue in his case was thus not one of belief but of affiliation.

    It is curious, though, that in excerpting that quotation, you overlooked another one just two lines earlier in the very same monograph:

    “Some sects saw in Jesus mainly a prophet and not the ‘Christ,’ others seem to have believed in him as the Messiah, but did not draw the christological and other conclusions that subsequently became fundamental in the teaching of the Church (the divinity of the Christ, trinitarian conception of the Godhead, abrogation of the Law)…”

  37. @ bernard ross:

    “After Adam there was now already in existence a human species, albeit a fallen one. Adonoi had to work with what He had — or would you prefer that He simply abandoned the notion of redemption altogether & just started over from scratch?”

    “Mr. presumptuous tells [Adonoi] that he had to work with what he had……. this he tells to the omnipotent creator of the universe and all species.”

    “No; actually HE told it to me. He tells it to MAN constantly & without surcease. His intentions for the redemption of a fallen world couldn’t have been more clear if He’d commandeered Facebook to announce them.” Jn 3:16

    “Auditory hallucinations, particularly experiences of hearing voices, are the most common and often prominent feature of psychosis.”

    Who said anything about “hearing voices”?

    As usual, you have taken a snippet of something I said and deliberately lifted it out of its context (now restored, above, in boldface) to imply something which you know damned well I neither said nor suggested — in order to afford yourself the pretext for an occasion to get in another of your standard sophomoric digs. This is the reason (one, in a crowded field) why it’s impossible to take you seriously in these matters, except for Capt Huff’n’puff, of course (whose dishonesty meshes w/ yours, so he finds he can USE you, even as you use him).

    “If [God] doesnt have, he merely can create… ”

    “Obviously you WOULD prefer that He simply abandoned the notion of redemption altogether & started over from scratch.

    “It’s apparent that the only divine attribute that means anything at all to you is omnipotence. Doesn’t occur to you, does it, that He might actually care about what comes of His creation. . . . (Must say, it’s not hard to imagine what your idea of a Father consists of.)”

    “My ‘preferences,’ and yours, are irrelevant therefore no need to mention them at all.”

    Ah, but they are quite CONSPICUOUSLY relevant to you; reason indeed for mention of them.

    “I would expect an omnipotent G_D to be capable at least of what I can conceive and then more.”

    As I said, omnipotence is the only divine attribute that means anything to you (quite understandably, as you are, at your core, a straight down the line, stone-cold, power-tripper).

    But the omnipotence of the Most High is conditioned by His OTHER attributes, such as His omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence.

    “Its quite simple, no need for a lot of fairy tales, stories and myths which are obviously invented to prop up yur yeshu pandera fairy tale.”

    Pantera is the fairy tale.

    Moreover, if you are prepared to swallow the tissue-thin, manure-edged stories of Celsus, a flagrant, late-2nd century apologist for the Roman Empire; who asserted that Jews were nothing but escaped Egyptian slaves who should be returned to their masters; who held that “A properly understood worship of gods & demons is quite compatible with a purified monotheism”

    — then (wise man that you are) you’re MORE than a sucker for fairy tales, you are a character IN a fairy tale (and a universally acknowledged one): a Khelemer khakhom.

    “He wrote… in the dirt (and in succession as they leaned over his shoulder, one at a time, to see what he wrote) the secret sin of every one of the men who tried to trap him by bringing him the woman caught in adultery, to see what he would do with her.”

    “of course you find this psychobabble impressive”

    “Not psychobabble. He was clairvoyant. When they came up close to him, he read them; couldn’t help but read them. His channels of perception were clean as a whistle; glatt kosher.”

    “fictious traits of fictitious half gods from fictiitous fairy tales….”

    Until you’ve actually READ those ‘fictitious fairy tales’ for yourself, you can’t say that you know them to BE ‘fairy tales’ — you don’t even know what’s IN those ‘fairy tales’ — and aren’t even on the same page w/ those who HAVE read them, regardless of their assessment of the narrative or its merits.

    When you presume to hold forth on the matter this way, all you do is expose yourself for the blustering, bloviating, ignorant buffoon you are.

    “your narrative appears to be dissembling…”

    “Dissembling”??? — no dissembling on my end. I shoot from the hip, but I shoot straight.

    “…replete with all the usual claims of the usual proselytizers”

    That, of itself, doesn’t make me wrong. They agree w/ my opposition to drunk driving too. Nu?

    “One cannot have a credible discussion with those who claim their intuition…for the source of their belief”

    No, apparently not. But not ‘BECAUSE’ of my intuition. Most of your ‘discussion’ thus far has been anything but credible — mostly because when one pulls the bark off your trunk, you are revealed to be all about justifying your vile maliciousness under the cover of solicitous concern for Israel & the Jewish people. You’re a 24-karat fake, bubbeleh.

    Having an active intuition helps me see this in some depth, but it isn’t required. I’m FAR from being the only one around here who sees what you’re about. It’s in your posts; hard to miss, really, intuition or no intuition.

    “Please show me WHICH NT DO YOU USE AND READ. Is it the king james version or a roman catholic version?”

    “Why? Which one of them have YOU read?”

    “running away from the obvious question to your claim that you got your NT from jewish sources.”

    Nice try, but no cigar. I simply have no intention of letting you control the direction of this exchange; I’ve seen, more than once, what happens when I DO let you do that. Aint happenin’ again.

    Truth be told, it’s YOU who are doing the running, yahnkele. I asked you to define “Jewish sources,” as you use the term, several wks & a hundred posts ago (& several times again since). So far, however. . . silence. ‘S’matter? — Cat gotcher tongue?

    “There is no such thing as a ‘Jewish messiah.’ There is only one Messiah — THE Messiah — who is nobody’s ‘possession,’ but was promised TO:

    A. the Jews; and promised as well, TO:
    B. the World, thru the Jews.

    If he is the Messiah, then he is a Jew — not a ‘Jewish messiah,’ as distinct from some other ‘Messiah’…”

    “brilliant saying composite fiction is certainly NOT the Jewish messiah.”

    Just finished noting there is no such thing as a strictly “Jewish messiah.” As for whether the sayings are brilliant OR composite fiction, you wouldn’t know, one way or the other, inasmuch as you lack the gumption AND the integrity to examine them for yourself.

    “…narratives emanating from, or passing through, the hands of Christianity; a source of no credibility…”

    When you’ve READ the narratives for yourself, you’ll be in a position to make a judgment about them — not unless; not until.

    “… proven liars, libelers, swindlers, torturers and slaughterers of the Jews. However, you have no problem with their credibility.”

    You deliberately attempt, very strenuously & quite persistently, to conflate the issues, but I have no intention of letting you get away with it. I “have no problem” with the credibility of the GOSPELS; that is the matter at hand here, not the persecutors or persecutions of Jews, which you repeatedly fall back on for use as a red herring.

    “certainly an omnipotent G_D can do whatever men can do or whatever men can conceive of or imagine.”

    “You’re sounding more like a self-styled “Christian” all the time. They take the same view as you’ve just expressed. But the truth is that ‘an omnipotent God can do whatever men can do or whatever men can conceive of or imagine’ ONLY if He’s made in the image of Man (instead of vice versa).

    “If He is in fact God, then there are some things which He cannot do. Dying is one of them. (Lying is another; breaking His word is a third.)”

    “so dweller decides what G_D is capable of doing”

    No, I didn’t ‘decide’ it. He decided it.
    All I did was figure it out — using the common sense & reasoning capability that He gives every man as a birthright. YOU could figure it out too, if you didn’t have your brains lodged…”

    “I think you use the ‘same common sense and reasoning capability’ as the… Christians[,] who hijacked the Jewish bible and slaughtered the Jews to get rid of the witnesses.”

    1. When you’ve READ their Bible and compared it with the Jewish Bible (of course, you’d have to get ’round to reading THAT sometime too), you’ll have a right to make a judgment over whether in fact a ‘hijacking’ has occurred. Till then, you’re just parroting talking points over what you don’t know for yourself.

    2. If they’d wanted to “get rid of the witnesses,” then ALL the Jews would be dead & all the Tanachim destroyed (and Jewish-wannabe twits like PresentCompany wouldn’t be around to rail & hiss). Clearly, however, there are plenty of ‘witnesses’ still around.

    “YOU could figure it out too, if you didn’t have your brains lodged between your cheeks. And I don’t mean the cheeks that sit on your face — I mean the cheeks you sit on.”

    “Did they teach you these things at the Pauline academy of ‘celibacy’?”

    Nah. You taught me these things, Bernard. And I daresay, I’m not the only one to have taken the lesson from your postings. As to your parting gibe, it’s obvious you have problem w/ celibacy, or you wouldn’t keep returning to the subject as you do.

    Frankly I think you feel threatened at hearing somebody actually SAY — as I have indeed said — that one doesn’t die w/o sexual releases. They aren’t like air, water, food & shelter — though for many they do provide ‘needed’ reinforcement & support to a vain but flagging ego.

    Making that observation, however, does not mean that YoursTruly is ‘celibate’; rather, that in re the matter of sexual release, he can take it or leave it (unlike PresentCompany, it would seem).

  43. dweller Said:

    “Because [1]he was, like Adam, a direct & original creation (except that he was born thru a woman), he came into the world, like Adam, [2]not subject to yetzer hara, thus [3]not subject to compulsion either. And because, unlike Adam, [4]he never yielded to temptation, [5]he never lost his bright nature and never became subject to compulsion.”

    Assuming that you do not believe that you are repeating a fairy tale but actually believe that the aforesaid is factual then what is the evidence upon which you believe your described events to be factual?
    dweller Said:

    I answered that (it was the specialness of the manner of his creation & the retention of his bright nature at all times) —

    Indeed the alleged manner of his creation, if he existed at all, is quite extraordinary being the progeny of a god and a woman; but then what is your evidence of this extraordinary event?
    dweller Said:

    what Jeshua DID that was extraordinary…..What he DID was to tempt haSoton (even as the latter tempts man): He tempted the Adversary — one time only — to overstep his lawful mandate on earth.

    once more, what is your evidence for this story?

    dweller Said:

    It was BECAUSE of what was true of him …..that he was CAPABLE of doing what I’ve set forth here

    where is the evidence upon which you base your belief that he was either true or capable or even existed.
    dweller Said:

    the Adversary came for him, and in taking him into his own abode took unto himself the one soul to which he had no lawful right.

    Upon what evidence do you base any of these assertions? It sounds as if you are just here to tell us your christian fairy tales.
    dweller Said:

    — or that it didn’t really happen,

    gosh, now there’s an idea you have not considered.
    dweller Said:

    For the great bulk of its existence, NT was utterly inaccessible to the vast majority of those who became its nominal adherents — because in the broad scope of history most persons were illiterate until quite recently….
    So until then, they had no clue as to what was even in NT. All they knew was what they were told ……..

    Through what hands did your “jewish” NT travel until it reached to you, was it Jewish hands? Which NT version do you use, you still haven’t answered this question?
    Once one believes in the existence of the fictional yeshu then there are no limits in beleiving the rest of the tale. Everything about your nitzri depends as a starter on the “fact” of his existence.Its as easy to assert one part of the fairy tale as another as there is no evidence of any of it. Discussing what a fictional character did is absurd unless within the context of it being analysed as a work of fiction representing the intentions of the author.

  44. @ mrg3105:

    “You are a by-product of a culture that has been conditioned by Greek-like thinking since antiquity.”

    And PresentCompany ‘escaped’ it, did he?

    @ mrg3105:

    “Your mode of thinking is based in Greek culture. This Greek cultural influence that was translated into conquered Egypt, Rome, and eventually became the standard of the Xtian churches is based on the literal thinking.”

    Everybody thinks “literally” about SOME things, and not others. They simply differ over which things to take literally. Furthermore, there is nothing about a passage that is seen to be symbolic (metaphorical, allegorical, etc) which necessarily keeps it from being quite literal at the same time. Truth is not structurally limited, in every circumstance, to only one level for its expression of itself.

    As for whatever may or may not be the standard of thinking in Xtn churches: I wasn’t raised in any ‘church’ — and have never had, or wanted, anything to do with one. I was raised in a shul; was the hazzan’s protégé.

    “For this reason where as Xtian texts are prose, the Torah is a SONG”

    Oh, come off it. The REASON the Torah is a ‘song’ is simply that the Torah (what remains to us of it) is all-of-a-piece — and was written NOT by somebody who thought like a pre-hellenistic Jew, but by someone who was raised & formally educated in the pharaonic court BEFORE spending the next third of his life mostly alone w/ a herd of sheep in Midyan.

    The name, “Moses,” is not ivrit. If he’d been raised as a Hebrew slave, I seriously doubt that you’d be much impressed with his writing, if he was even literate. Torah may be a ‘song,’ but the rest of Tanach is no ‘song’; think about it.

    “… all of it [is a song], Talmud included.”

    No way you can lump Talmud together with Torah.

    As I said earlier, on the previous page: “The Talmud also contains serious discussions over the relative sizes (and merits) of various rabbis’ whoozisses. The Talmud is a grab bag of all sorts of stuff; some of it is treasure, some is drecklichkeit.”

    “Its an accounting report vs poetry.”

    Again, I ask how long it’s been since you last read that “accounting report.”

    “The problem of deriving ANY meaning from Xtian texsts is that they were written by people speaking Greek and largely immersed in Greek culture”

    Strictly an assumption. As I said last week (on this thread, if I recall correctly), I’ve seen evidence suggesting that some of the gospels MAY, in fact, have been originally written b’ivrit or b’amrit.

    “Xtian texts are the interior ‘decorations’, entirely subjective and endlessly variable.”

    If by “Xtian texts,” you mean the gospels specifically & other elements of NT (as distinct from subsequent commentaries, treatises, etc), then that’s sheer nonsense. There’s nothing at all ‘subjective’ about them, but they’re not apprehensible to a mind that is not framed with the same perspective in which they were WRITTEN. You can’t read them like a botany or history textbook.

    That’s why those who use the gospels as a tool of proselytization are really barking up the wrong tree. The gospels cannot “take you there.” You have to BE there first, THEN the gospels make sense.

    “It is because of this [subjectivity & variability in NT]] that Xtianity has been so successful in propagating itself.”

    Sorry, but this is manifest poppycock. Truth be told, NT had little at all to do with propagation of Xty. For the great bulk of its existence, NT was utterly inaccessible to the vast majority of those who became its nominal adherents — because in the broad scope of history most persons were illiterate until quite recently.

    So until then, they had no clue as to what was even in NT. All they knew was what they were told (if they were told anything about scripture) by clergy on boring Sunday mornings for an hour or so.

    The success of the King James Bible [1611] came w/ the Gutenberg’s printing press & the Protestant Reformation’s ethos of relating the individual first & foremost to the scriptures instead of to the altar. Until then, scriptures were written laboriously by hand & reading them was limited to monastics, preachers & intellectuals.

    “NT is the insult to His Intelligence.”

    Not remotely. I daresay, in fact, that your crack very likely put Him in stitches. It occurs to me that the Most High must have a great sense of humor; sometimes I think that if we could see ourselves as He sees us, we’d probably never stop laughing. . . .

    NT is a magnificent metaphysical document — one of the rare ones to ever make it into print (at all), since it was uncommon (dangerous, actually) to put that kind of thing into writing.

    “Its an insult to my vastly simpler intelligence also.”

    Subtext: PresentCompany is lost in his intellect, which is strictly a “sending” faculty, and NT gives him no ‘target’ to shoot at. He ALSO has a receiving faculty, however — but they cannot both be fully operational at the same time.

    In a whole man, they operate in tandem — like two legs — for both balance and locomotion.

  45. @ mrg3105:

    “What made [Jeshua haNitzri] so extraordinary?”

    “Because he was, like Adam, a direct & original creation (except that he was born thru a woman), he came into the world, like Adam, not subject to yetzer hara, thus not subject to compulsion either. And because, unlike Adam, he never yielded to temptation, he never lost his bright nature and never became subject to compulsion.”

    “And this God said to whom?”

    “Define, b’vakasha, ‘said’ — as you use it here [prev pg, #13]. For example, do you mean:

    Spoke?

    In words of language?

    Silently?

    Aloud? generating sound physically audible to a human ear?

    By means of vocal chords? (if not via vocal chords, then by what means?)

    In a manner capable of being recorded for human posterity?

    ANY of the above? SOME of the above? (If so, which of the above?)

    NONE of the above? OTHER means & parameters altogether? (If so, what other means or parameters?)”

    “This is BS.”

    It is no more ‘BS’ than the question which prompted it. You clearly intimate that what I wrote could not be so unless God said it was so. So I asked you to define what you meant by “God said.” I venture to say, under the circumstances, MY question was more courteous than yours.

    “I simply asked where is it written that God said what you assert.”

    NO, Sir. You asked whom God said it to; c’est tout. There was nothing of ‘writing’ in your question. (Check the posts.)

    If you meant to ask where it was written, you SHOULD have. Jeshua haNitzri seems to have been — and may well have been, among other things — clairvoyant. I myself am not.

    “Even if it did, there is not one place in xtian texts where the God-made-rules that require two ACCEPTED witnesses to be present are satisfied as a requirement.”

    So, you think that if God doesn’t say whatever He’s got to say to at least two “accepted” witnesses, and stand over them to make sure they get it all down in black-&-white, that He didn’t actually say it?

    — or that it didn’t really happen, whether He said it happened or He remained silent over its occurrence?

    If a tree falls in the forest. . . . vey iz mir.

  46. @ mrg3105:

    “What made ‘Jesus’ so extraordinary?”

    “Because he was, like Adam, a direct & original creation (except that he was born thru a woman), he came into the world, like Adam, not subject to yetzer hara, thus not subject to compulsion either. And because, unlike Adam, he never yielded to temptation, he never lost his bright nature and never became subject to compulsion.”

    “And this God said to whom?”

    “Would you have responded with the same question if my remark had been made by Rashi or Ibn Ezra or Nachmanides?“

    “Your problem is that you are a Greek-thinker. That is, you are a by-product of a culture that has been conditioned by Greek-like thinking since antiquity.”

    I’ve been told precisely the reverse by others — some of them on this very blogsite (and who are not especially cordial to me notwithstanding their perception of my “Jewish” way of reasoning, thinking, disputing, etc). Frankly, I didn’t take very seriously their perception, so you’ll perhaps be less-than-shocked to learn that I treat your observation the same way: a distraction in both instances.

    As I see it, there is no ‘Greek’ thinking, ‘Jewish’ thinking, or any OTHER thinking. There’s just thinking — and NOT thinking.

    “In any case, no rabbi would make statements like that you made.”

    My question — bolded above, for your convenience — still awaits an answer.

    “[JC] did what that was so extraordinary?”

    Your question has changed; good. The original question was what was extraordinary about him. I answered that (it was the specialness of the manner of his creation & the retention of his bright nature at all times) — and you asked whom God “said” this to. NOW the question has become what Jeshua DID that was extraordinary.

    Very well: What he DID was to tempt haSoton (even as the latter tempts man): He tempted the Adversary — one time only — to overstep his lawful mandate on earth.

    It was BECAUSE of what was true of him as I explained in the answer to your original question that he was CAPABLE of doing what I’ve set forth here in the reply to your revised question.

    “He performed ‘miracles’?”

    A meaningless word. Some of the things he did were UNEXPECTED, in light of what was known of phenomena, and were thus called ‘miracles.’ They all, however, obeyed the laws of the universe.

    “He told people not to pay taxes?”

    It doesn’t say that.

    “He came out of a blood-loss induced coma?”

    There was no ‘coma’ to come out of; the man was DEAD, Sir. Dead as Marley’s ghost. Dead as a doornail. Dead as in Elvis-has-left-the-building dead. “Into Your hands I commit my spirit.” And he was gone.

    The duty soldier thrust a lance into his ribcage to be sure he was dead. What issued forth was blood and “water.”

    This is to say:

    — the pericardial fluid (pale, transparent yellow; hence, “water”) — which reduces friction in the double-walled pericardial sac (which holds the heart) by lubricating the epicardial surface, thus allowing the 2 layers of serous membrane to glide over each other w/ each heartbeat — had separated out, because the heart had stopped & blood circulation was ended, a sure sign of decease.

    JC had left a body which could no longer sustain life.

    Whereupon the Adversary came for him, and in taking him into his own abode took unto himself the one soul to which he had no lawful right.

  47. @ mrg3105:

    “This may be a little too obvious, but the only confirmation of conception is the pregnancy and subsequent birth.”

    “What IS obvious is that this is all sheer speculation. There may be a place for that, but ONLY if offered in addition to — not as a substitute for — examining primary sources.

    1. Have you actually read the gospel narrative as written?
    2. Have you access to a differing contemporaneous account of the same story?”

    “What I wrote is not speculation, but out of the Talmud.”

    What you wrote could’ve come directly from His lips to your ears for all I care. If you offer the discourse w/o answering “Yes” to at least one of the two above questions, then what you wrote might as WELL be speculation because by itself it doesn’t address the specifics of the case-in-point.

    “The subject of conception and birth is fairly well examined in th eTalmud without the reference to xtianity.”

    Ditto what I just said.