The Bible, Secularism, and Anti-Semitism

50 Comments / 55 Comments

1. @ Michael S:
   My insider info is that G-D allows man to take charge of his/her future with hard work. The Pals are generations away from even a possible theoretical coming to grips that they need to accept the Jews rights to have a country in the Land of Israel and agree to live in peace and co-existence with the Jews. They are raised to hate the Jews and want to destroy the Jews.

   So a final status agreement is not possible. Israel with the correct leadership can take it upon itself to crush all the terrorists and their supporters. Then with the remaining Arabs can dictate terms of co-existence. This is the only way peace can come about.

   Jews with hard work and dedication rebuilt Israel after 2000 years. The miracle was the hard work and belief to get it built. That is the only way peace will come.

2. @ Bear Klein:
   Bear,

   I am interested in your “inside info” re January, 2026. That is eight years from now, and according to my doctor, I have a 50/50 chance of being in the next world by then. Also. I have a friend who’s 94, who was sure the parousia would have happened before he turned 75.

   My only yardstick of this is Ezekiel 39, which speaks of the Jews of the Modern State of Israel burning the weapons of the invading Turks for seven years. The invasion obviously hasn’t happened yet (When the Turks did occupy Israel, the Jews had not yet returned to it); so I assume the end of the age will not come for at least seven more years, i.e. July 2025 at the very earliest.

   I tried throwing astrology into the mix a while back. Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2021, has a significant alignment of stars, but I don’t know how that fits in with everything else. At some point, I expect a knock at the door in the middle of the night (more likely, a battering ram), as the government goes about rounding up “enemies of the state”, which is to say, “Christians”. It would be nice, if I could be here to take part in that.

   Shalom shalom 🙂

3. @ Michael S:

   You cannot determine a dispute IN WRITING as to who was right or wrong, as showing that the Jews and Christians were offensive to one another; a whole race against a comparatively paltry few who disagreed with them.

   Indeed it’s most unlikely that the two ever met.

   ” Fawning” is a pejorative term, whereas my disbelief in your messiah is my FRANK opinion, a quality which I thought you applauded earlier, although you used this approach as a way to follow on with an offensive comment.. Are you so “thick” that you would not realise that to be unctuously advertising and pouring out reams of a religion which caused the untold suffering and utmost cruelty to the Jewish People for nearly 2000 years, would not be objected to in SOME “frank” way.

   We live in more modest times now and and I am positively pacific in my approach to you, because for myself, I am sure you are a nice person; and sincere. I have always regarded you as such. Probably nicer than I am. But that’s by the bye. Do you always have to rub our noses in your religious maunderings….? I wouldn’t be me if I did not respond aggressively.

   I react against what I don’t like. Always have, often under unfavourable conditions. Even your insidious comment about my “extremely sensitive ego” paints me as a neurotic egotist. And I naturally resent being labelled like that because it is not true, and in my long life, have never been accused of such.
   As for Yamit, I’m sure he can look after himself.

   However…if you want to conduct a kind of semi-slanging series of exchanges, I will tell you now, that I have tangled successfully with champions, and I prefer not to engage. I think you and I should avoid commenting to one another about religion, I recall pointing this out a few months ago also. I mean between you and I only, because this being a Jewish oriented outlet, Judaism naturally comes up as a subject matter of discussion and opinion.

   I’m not religious in the accepted sense, but feel deeply about our Jewish People, the suffering of my long line of forebears and more recently of my parents, and my Judaism.

4. @ Edgar G.:
   Edgar, I apologize for offending your extremely sensitive egos. You and Yamit, of course, freely heap insult upon my Lord, Jesus, and presume this not to be insulting, yet you seem to be personally offended by using the word “fawning” to describe your… well, “fawning” after Yamit.. Perhaps there is a more PC way to say it. Mind you, we are talking about a man who routinely refers to those who don’t agree with him as “idiots”. I apologize for using that word, which I had no idea would offend you. Maybe it was a subliminal pay-back for your using the condescending word “laddie” in addressing me. I survived that, with little damage to my ego; but our subconsciouses have strange ways.

   In talking about pre-Constantinian Christians (which, by the way, Yamit insists didn’t exist), I did not say they never did anything that was offensive to Jews. In fact, I earlier referred to the Dialogue of Justin Martyr (c. 160 CE, according to Wiki, but I believe the dialogue itself was decades earlier) as an example of bad blood between the two “tribes” of humanity. In terms of SERIOUS persecution of Jews, however, the Pagan Romans and the Jews themselves each crucified thousands of Jews — something the Christians didn’t do until, perhaps, the Spanish Inquisition. Don’t try to put words in my mouth.

5. @ Michael S:

   You have it all wrong Michael, or at least only peripherally right…in spots.. I don’t know which Wiki article you got it from but it is not correct. I’m not going to tell you why, because I’m in the middle of something else , but I suppose I’ll eventually enlighten you. By the way, telling lies abut Jews, like spreading that they forced Pilate to crucify Jesus is itself a persecution, and the cause of persecution. There were Laws passed against Jews in Iberia in the early to middle 3rd century, 70-80 years before Nicea. You can read about it in Solomon Zeitlin’s 3 volume publication, where he deals with some aspects of the rise of Anti-Semitism. ..

   The definitive book on Anti-Semitism is of course, by Joshua Trachtenberg, _The Devil and The Jews…The Medieval Conception of the Jew and it;s Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism…”etc. 1943, where he very briefly discusses very early Jew-Hate, leading into the main body of the volume. I have both authors

   “The Rise and Fall of The Judean State, A Political and Social Study of the Second Commonwealth,”..Published by The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1967.

6. @ Michael S:

   I may not be always coherent, but I’m always frank, therefore your insinuation that I have a “fawning” admiration for anyone, it deeply offensive to me. It reminds me of the slithering around that a variety of Christians do when they talk about their beloved Jesus who never existed, not realising that it’s all in their minds, caused by deep-seated insecurities and superstitious fears.

   I have a respect for the depth of Yamit’s cognitive powers, and vast life experience. I don’t agree with everything he says but I do accept much because I’m convinced that he is no liar nor falsifier. You can have your opinions, and I have mine.

   I suppose your “perousia” is actually “parousia”, the correct spelling. It’s also a pile of nonsense, (being polite here and not “calling a spade a spade”..- or else I’d have used “shovel”).

   The Greek word “parousia” merely means “arrival”… often of Royalty or an important person., and in Christianity refers to the “re-arrival of Christ”…… or the “2nd coming”.

   The “2nd Coming of Christ” was a term invented by devout Christian believers who had finally become aware, often through Jewish commentary, that the wonderful things that were to have happened by the presence of their Messiah Jesus, just had NOT happened.

   Here you can refer to Yamit’s list….{{fawn a little… -you’ll like it}} Therefore we Jews and other logical and clear-minded people KNOW that a Messiah has NOT appeared.

   Christians could not accept that Jesus had not been their Messiah, and came up with the idea that it must mean there would,be a “Second Coming of Jesus” to carry out those wonderful deeds that he had not performed. (again refer to Yamit’s list). …….

   Of course the Messiah concept was purely Jewish, and never meant anything more than a normal ordinary man, but had been neatly lifted out of context and meaning, and exalted by Christianity into a Super-G-D in the person of Jesus, who could not fail.

   Sorry Michael for being so pedantic, but you really offended me by your “fawning'” comment.

   Let me conclude with a little joke that might typify my attitude.

   The English Gentleman, hearing that all Irish-folk believed they were descended from royalty, said patronisingly to Mrs. O’Reilly, .” Tell me, my good woman, from whom do you spring…” Mr’s O’Reilly bridled and retorted…”Us O’Reilly’s don’t spring from no-one…..we springs…AT ‘EM…..”

7. @ Michael S:
   BTW Yamit,

   My “babble” reference to you concerned the patent illogic of what you said. You assert that:

   1. Antisemitism arose out of the New Testament, and

   2. “It’s because [of] the theology of evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity”

   The evidence says that,

   1. Until the time of Constantine, after which Christians were DISCOURAGED from reading the New Testament, Christians did not persecute Jews. The greatest persecution of Jews in those days was by the Romans, and by the Jews themselves (thousands of them crucified at one time).

   2. SINCE the time of Constantine, the main persecutors Jews were Atheists, Lutherans, Russian & Ukrainian Orthodox and Roman Catholics. On the other hand, Anabaptists, Brethren, Calvinists, Angilcans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, etc., from which the Fundamentalist/Evangelical stream of Christianity derives, were not major persecutors of the Jews. In fact, many of them were persecuted by the same people who persecuted the Jews.

   In other words, Rafael Castro is correct.

   You therefore are completely upside-down in your thinking.

8. @ Michael S:
   Yes, You are right about one thing that the crowd who still believes in the two state solution does it out a religious faith type belief and not a evidence based belief. Like many religious it seems to have many false prophets.

   Trump has a zero based chance to get a final status agreement. My belief is based that if he is reelected his term will be until January 2026. The messiah will not come for at least two generations (insider info)!!

9. @ Edgar G.:
   Edgar, you have an interesting perspective. I have never heard such a frank, COHERENT discussion from a Jew. It amazes me, that you continue with such fawning admiration of Yamit, who babbles on like [I won’t say, out of deference to Ted Belman].

   As a Christian (as some call me; to others, I’m a heretic), I am glad that we got all the “messianic” expectations out of the way 2000 years ago. Christians are probably as divided as the Jews, about a future coming of Messiah, including the dispensationalist views of your wife’s former denomination. For those Christians, the perousia is a matter of speculation, to be argued with varying degrees of politeness by a few theologians. To Jews, on the other hand, these have been gut-level expectations, often during periods of extreme need.

   I think there’s an article posted elsewhere on Israpundit, about the Messiah-like hope of leftist Jews in things like the Oslo process. That faith still seems to hold a lot of cachet among world leaders, as they pursue a peace agreement with the terrorists they invited into Israel in 1993. I don’t know when people will finally give up on this belief; but I am fairly convinced of this: If some leader, such as Trump, or perhaps his son-in-law, manages to pull a “final status” peace deal out of a hat, he will not just get the Nobel Prize; he will be hailed as “The” Messiah, of Great Expectations.

10. @ Bear Klein:

    BEAR- I’m well aware of the 13 Principles of Faith by Maimonides, and he too was strongly disagreed with for his outspoken beliefs, by a variety of other aspiring Sages. It all dwindled because of his undoubted preeminence which came through with his Responsa. But he lived in a Diaspora, and the only hope for a Jewish Renaissance in Israel, fulfilling all the Divine promises that from time to time were uttered by a variety of prophets, was the advent of a Moshiach who would bring about these things. A sort of long-lost Heavenly Bliss on Earth. Life in long-ago Israel had been given an aura of magical peace and golden prosperity, Not the least, would be the restoration of the Davidic Monarchy, and the descent from Heaven of a Golden Temple….. (a sort of hodge-podge of “Dorothy” wishes…)

    {{The Great Rabbenu Gershon of Maintz was also excommunicated by many of his opponents, but the quality and commonsense of his decisions became apparent to all}}

    The Ezekiel dry bones passage was much debated over, despite it’s obvious allegorical meaning that Israel would be resurrected as a People. Other than this Ezekiel passage there is very little else about it,in the Torah.

    That didn’t stop some fool from deciding that all the dead would be LITERALLY resurrected, and then they went into generations-long spasms of brain fever trying to figure out if it would only apply to Jews or to all humankind, whether they’d be clothed, or naked, whether back to the conditions of the Gan Ayden or what or which or whatever. They were all caught up in a cycle of lunacy, and mysticism, including Kaballah, which is just another form of craziness.

    Let me repeat so that it sinks in….The concept of an all perfect LEADER who would bring about miraculous restorations of the Jewish People to a Utopian existence in Israel, an miraculously build the holy Temple again, was a comparatively recent belief in Jewish History.

    This Moshiach hasn’t arrived yet, for the very simple reason that it’s only a concept that turned into a belief, , invented by the Sages, and not a reality.
    *************************************
    A Messiah was just a person who had been anointed with shemen, as were all kings and High Priests. They were ALL Moshichim. It was a normal procedure, goodness knows where it came from, and I don’t care about it’s origins. It was some sort of primitive mark of distinction, perhaps the way the early primitives believed that the Creator had poured out his semen to create mankind. (Shemen…Semen…???)

    The ceremony of using “chrism” in a variety of Christian ceremonies undoubtedly descends from the Ancient Israel practice of “anointing”. Also it was continued through the Middle Ages to induct Kings , Emperors rulers etc, They were all “anointed”…..

    Frazer’s “Golden Bough” (a wonderful book) gives many examples of such beliefs.
    *************************************************************************************************
    ANOTHER REMINDER

    The concept of a Moshiach as WE know it, was comparatively LATE in origin. I repeat LATE, in Jewish History. This is all factual and cannot be refuted, A combination of despair at the continuous persecution, and misfortunes of the People, as well as Jewish mysticism, all combined to try to find out…”Where did we go wrong”..and there was a constant poring over every single word and phrase in the Torah to derive it’s exact meaning for the People, and especially where G-D’s Promises were concerned. There was a series of obscure comments, which, by self persuasion, were hit on as meaning…not actually what they said, but what could be implied from them…and they became the foundation of the belief that G-D would send a leader to bring the People back to the Promised Land, in Glory and wealth, and success and everything good, because everything to do with G-D was good.

    So WE created our Moshiach, with the careful Rabbinic provisos that he would have certain qualities, and he would bring about certain things which would prove conclusively that he was indeed this expected person. ,

    Yamit kindly laid out above, the list of requirements and deeds that PROVE a Moshiach. A quick glance through them will show the imaginative impossibilities if success.

11. Chabad site writes the following,

    One of the principles of Jewish faith enumerated by Maimonides is that one day there will arise a dynamic Jewish leader, a direct descendant of the Davidic dynasty, who will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and gather Jews from all over the world and bring them back to the Land of Israel.

    All the nations of the world will recognize Moshiach to be a world leader, and will accept his dominion. In the messianic era there will be world peace, no more wars nor famine, and, in general, a high standard of living.

    All mankind will worship one G?d, and live a more spiritual and moral way of life. The Jewish nation will be preoccupied with learning Torah and fathoming its secrets.

    The coming of Moshiach will complete G?d’s purpose in creation: for man to make an abode for G?d in the lower worlds—that is, to reveal the inherent spirituality in the material world.

    https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/108400/jewish/The-End-of-Days.htm

12. @ yamit82:
    Very wordy, Yamit. Which point, exactly, do you think I should respond to?

13. @ yamit82:

    Yes I know. Between my fingers and my brain sometimes I get letters reversed. I have to go over everything before posting, and missed that one. As you see the “u” was in the wrong place. It bothers me. Also, this computer key pads are not big enough and I often have 2 adjoining letters instead of just the correct one. As well as some keys needing different pressures to make sure they print. A damned nuisance. Likely something stuck underneath, but I don’t want to fiddle with them. I recall keys coming off and I had the devil of a job replacing them.

14. @ yamit82:

    Yes, me too. I used to have a continual stream of Mormons calling to my home, and each time I asked them pertinent questions, they always had to return to their bosses and get a “higher-up” to debate with me. Eventually even these exalted beings left me alone.

15. @ Edgar G.:

    Maybe but know Judaism is not predicated on Messiah As Rabbi Joseph Albo wrote if Judaism is a tree the messiah is not even a twig….. I personally don’t believe in such a concept and really could care less……. I do enjoy jousting with christians who do though. 😉

16. @ Edgar G.:

    Septuagint

17. @ yamit82:

    I never said that there was any mention of a Messiah in the Torah, but an accruing belief by Sages in desperation, debating on the obscure, often allegorical Torah passages whose real meanings had been lost centuries before. A sort of mumbling in the whiskers..!

    As for everything else, I agree with you.

18. Yamit, Constantine died as a Pagan, and was never converted to Christianity. I have a volume which describes the several endings of a series on Emperors including Constantine, Very much like the passing of all great rulers in history, right down to the present day. When possible, their last moments are closely observed and witnessed by councillors, doctors, ministers of religion. They are required to sign sworn statements. This is to make the succession solid and prove he was not poisoned etc..

    The meticulous account of Constantine’s passing are extant. For days his sleeping chamber was filled with a variety of those would-be witnesses. The mob likely hastened his end as well as the loathsome doses he was forced to take..

    It is well documented that he was in a complete paralytic coma for the last 30 hours of his life. A friar or monk of some sort was mumbling prayers by his head for much of this time urging him to convert.. at the final moment of death it was this monk who proclaimed that Constantine had, with his last breath, acknowledged Christ. When questioned closely it turned out that whilst he was drawing his last breath, the monk said he saw his eyelid quiver in acknowledgement that he had converted on his deathbed. It was this farce, which gave rise to Constantine dying as a deathbed convert.

    The one about 312, is merely the story that as he approached battle at the Milvian Bridge across the Tiber, with his Maxentius the Emperor, he is supposed to have seen a vision of the sun shaped as a cross. We all know that this happens to everyone and is the effect of sun shining directly into the eyes and showing rays shooting out in several directions. Nothing miracluous.

    it was not made at the time but only later by Eusebius, reputedly the greatest religious forger and i”interpolations” expert in history. Eusebius is also believed to have invented the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus.

    Constantine later said that he won by diving intervention, but did not attribute it to any of the multitude of gods known in Rome at that time. He himself was a god as a representative of Sol Invictus, the Sun God, whom he also worshipped.

    His Triumphal Arch suggests divine intervention but all the symbols representing gods are Pagan. There is no Christian symbol at all. So just another good deed performed by our old pal Eusebius who tried to turn Josephus into “one of the brethern”…..

19. @ Edgar G.:

    There is no direct reference to the MESSIAH in the Tanach…. references speak about a messianic age. Where does the Jewish concept of Messiah come from? One of the central themes of Biblical prophecy is the promise of a future age of perfection characterized by universal peace and recognition of God. (Isaiah 2:1-4; Zephaniah 3:9; Hosea 2:20-22; Amos 9:13-15; Isaiah 32:15-18, 60:15-18; Micah 4:1-4; Zechariah 8:23, 14:9; Jeremiah 31:33-34)

    Many of these prophetic passages speak of a descendant of King David who will rule Israel during the age of perfection. (Isaiah 11:1-9; Jeremiah 23:5-6, 30:7-10, 33:14-16; Ezekiel 34:11-31, 37:21-28; Hosea 3:4-5)

    Since every King is a Messiah, by convention, we refer to this future anointed king as The Messiah. The above is the only description in the Bible of a Davidic descendant who is to come in the future. We will recognize the Messiah by seeing who the King of Israel is at the time of complete universal perfection.

    What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish? The Bible says that he will:

    A. Build the Third Temple (Ezekiel 37:26-28).

    B. Gather all Jews back to the Land of Israel (Isaiah 43:5-6).

    C. Usher in an era of world peace, and end all hatred, oppression, suffering and disease. As it says: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall man learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)

    D. Spread universal knowledge of the God of Israel, which will unite humanity as one. As it says: “God will be King over all the world—on that day, God will be One and His Name will be One” (Zechariah 14:9).

    Persian King Cyrus was called Messiah in Jewish scriptures

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Wiawe2Pyzws

20. @ Edgar G.:

    Different sources taken from old posts of mine here on Israpundit

21. @ Michael S:

    The idea of resurrection in one form or another is not original to Yeshu and christianity but existed in Judaism and almost all pagan fertility rites and myths.

22. @ Michael S:

    Didn’t say what they believe today is the root cause which is as I have posted the NT itself.

23. @ yamit82:

    Yamit, if all this came from your own mind, it is breathtaking, but if, as I suspect, it has been copied and pasted from something of Mangasarian (whom I mentioned the other day) or Drews, or others, whose names escape me for the moment. It makes no difference as I agree wholeheartedly with the focal point of the epistle, although not with come of it’s components.

    For instance, it is known that the Septaguint was already being used by the end of the 3rd cent. BCE. and that it had been written in old Koine Greek which had originated in Alexandria. Philo, many of whose writings survive, referred to it, and he lived from before the end of BCE to about the year 50-60 CE. he is known to have castigated the Alexandrian Jews for losing their Hebrew language.. . Your version requires many experts with different styles, who could write a complete Torah in a form of Greek originating in one certain city, and in the style of 5-600 years earlier.

    The very late concept of the Moshiach come about because of the despair of the people suffering under the Greek (and later Roman) occupiers and oppressors, due to some old Sages trying to find some way to show that G-d would keep His Promise and save our people. They hit on some obscure and obviously allegoric phrases whose meaning has been long centuries lost, and decided that they referred to a FUTURE leader would be sent who would save the Jews. As time went on more and more miraculous future events were piled onto the advent of this saviour.

    In fact they didn’t know anything, and were arguing and debating fruitlessly for generations, and the Moshiach concept was the product of this feverish, hopeful but totally imaginary expected future events. On one particular they kept their feet on the ground where they established a set of qualifying rules that HAD to be fulfilled to prove the aspirant as genuine. All the candidates failed these conditions, and fell by the wayside. The greatest was Ben Cosiba, renamed by R. Akiva as Bar Cochba, the most fraudulent Shabtai Tzvi. 1,600 years later.

    There is no doubt amongst honest scholars, that indeed “Christianity is a lie built on a mountain of deceptions” and that when the “facts” are looked at, even by the most critical Christian scholars, they always use “rose-coloured glasses”…… When it comes to Jesus, completely unknown in his supposed time period, basically a fictitious person manufactured from a collection of ancient myths, the “miracles”, (suspiciously similar to those of earlier mythical and known beings), attributed to him did not qualify, as none of the neccessary results proving the Moshiach were achieved.

    The unknown writers of the collection of letters and accounts that became the New Testament, just didn’t understand anything about Judaism, nor much about the topography of Israel, and anything peripherally Jewish they obtained, likely came from some of the huge host of pagan “G-D Fearers, who at that time thronged into the synagogues to hear -and absorb-the well received, unique message of the Jews.

    At one time it was thought that the Maccabiim , in the person of Shimon, or Yonatan was the expected Moshiach, but others believed that they had committed great sins by combining the High Priesthood and Kingship into one person where until then the High Priest had always been a direct descendant of Zadok, and the King, of Solomon and Batsheva..

    There was even debate as to whether Shulamit the Queen could be the Moshiach, but a woman was ruled out.

    It’s obvious that the whole Moshiach concept is the product of desperate, rambling, unworldly minds frantically seeking a way out for their devoted belief in G-d, and his promise to Israel His “Bachur”. These was hard and primitive times, with desperation always knocking at the door.

    Anyway, your post was a terrific collection of just about everything, and absorbing reading. But I know that nothing will deflect Michael from his obsession with religion, about which I was surprised to find that he is not as Christologically fixated as I’d thought. (I could be misunderstanding here). He delves into the beginning of religious myths from Mesopotamia, citing Marduk and others so he has put a considerable amount of research into his favourite topic.

    Anyway, Constantine was a “Rayl Boyo” (as the Irish say) and his only concern was that his unwieldy Empire be more properly supervised, and was prepared to take any steps for this to be achieved, so much of what you write..could have been.

24. @ Michael S:

    “He is said to have been converted to the faith in AD 312, although this has not been corroborated.

    At the time only around ten per cent of the Roman empire’s population was Christian.??? No historical evidence only speculation by those who bought into the original myth… The majority of the ruling elite worshipped the old gods of Rome. SHOW ME ANY RELIABLE SOURCE OUTSIDE OF THE NT THAT PROVES THAT CHRISTIANITY EXISTED BEFORE CONSTANTINE. A- I hold that your Yeshu is a myth who never existed in fact as a real historical character and certainly not as depicted in the NT, B-That the god worshiped by christians is not the same God of the Jews,

    You want origins of Jew hatred look no further from your diety and the book you revere as holy (:P)

    ” Jesus purportedly declared to a gathering of Jews — who had described themselves as the Children of Abraham and regarded Jesus as a mere mortal — that they were really the Children of Satan (“‘You belong to your Father, the Devil, and you want to carry out your Father’s desire; He was a Murderer from the Beginning, not holding to the Truth; for, there is no Truth in Him; when He lies, He speaks his native language; for, He is a Liar and the Father of Lies. Yet because I tell the Truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of Sin? — if I am telling the Truth, why don’t you believe me? He who belongs to God hears what God says; the reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.’” (John 8:44-47)), which declaration was later repackaged by the evangelist John in his First Epistle (“Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the Antichrist — denying the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.” (1 John 2:22-23)); And, most infamously, the “New Testament” incites Christians to the most virulent form of Jew-hatred through its imposition upon the Jewish people of full and exclusive responsibility for the alleged hunting, capture, torture and execution of Jesus by means of:

    (a) declaring: “After this, Jesus went about in Galilee; he would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him.” (John 7:1); “So from that day on they [the Jewish leadership] plotted to take his [Jesus’] life.” (John 11:53); and “But the Pharisees [i.e., the Jews who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees] went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus” (Matthew 12:14); and “As soon as the [Jewish] chief priests and their [Jewish] officials saw him [Jesus], they shouted, ‘Crucify! Crucify!’” (John 19:6); and

    (b) ultimately fabricating the infamous self-damning public declaration which it attributes and attaches to the Jewish people — collectively and in perpetuity — in response to the purported assertion by Roman governor Pontius Pilate that Jesus was not guilty of any crime against the Roman Empire and that, consequently, Rome’s soul would remain pure in the event of Jesus’ murder by Rome at the insistence of the Jewish people, to wit: “And all of the [Jewish] people said [in response to Pilate’s assertion of Jesus’ innocence], ‘His [Jesus’] blood shall be upon us and upon our descendants.’” (Matthew 27:25).

    Yet, in an effort to further inflame Jew-hatred among Christians, the “New Testament” subsequently accuses the Jewish leadership of attempting to orchestrate a vast conspiracy in order to conceal from the populace the purported final proof of the Truth of Christianity, namely, Jesus’ alleged postmortem resurrection, by declaring: “When the [Jewish] chief priests had met with the [Jewish] elders and devised a plan, they gave the [Roman] soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, ‘You are to say, “His [Jesus’] disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.” If this report gets to the [Roman] governor [Pontius Pilate], we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.’ So the [Roman] soldiers took the money, and did as they were instructed; and this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very Day.” (Mathew 28:12-15).

    Moreover, Paul — nascent Christianity’s preeminent and seminal evangelist in the immediate period after the purported lifetime of Jesus — further propagated the blood libel of Deicide and implicitly advocated genocide against the Jewish people in his purported letter to the Christian residents of Thessalonica, Macedonia (modern-day Thessaloniki, Greece), declaring:

    “For you, brothers, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus. You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the Prophets, and also drove us out. They [the Jews] displease God and are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the [pagan] Gentiles, so that they [the pagan Gentiles] may be saved [by becoming Christians]. In this way they [the Jews] always heap up their Sins to the limit. The Wrath of God has come upon them [the Jews] at last.” (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16)

    Furthermore, according to the “Acts of the Apostles” portion of the “New Testament”, Paul frequently and directly accused the Jewish people of Deicide, e.g.:

    “‘Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by Miracles, Wonders and Signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s Deliberate Plan and Foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.’” (Acts 2:22-23)

    “‘The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His Servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the Author of Life, but God raised him from the dead.’” (Acts 3:13-15)

    “‘The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead, whom you killed by hanging him on a cross.’” (Acts 5:30)

    Yet, despite all of the foregoing, in an enigmatic but prescient statement to a Gentile follower, which reaffirms the exclusive Truth of Scriptural Judaism, Jesus purportedly declared:

    “‘… You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know; for Salvation is from the Jews.’” (John 4:22).

    Jesus purportedly declared the objective criteria by which his true followers would be identified (“He that believes and is baptized will be saved, but he that does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those that believe: in my name they will cast out demons, they will speak with tongues, and with their hands they will pick up [poisonous] snakes, and if they drink anything deadly it will not hurt them at all. They will lay hands upon the sick and they [the sick] will recover.” (Mark 16:16-18)).

    And, most infamously, the “New Testament” incites Christians to the most virulent form of Jew-hatred through its imposition upon the Jewish people of full and exclusive responsibility for the alleged hunting, capture, torture and execution of Jesus by means of:

    (a) declaring: “After this, Jesus went about in Galilee; he would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him.” (John 7:1); “So from that day on they [the Jewish leadership] plotted to take his [Jesus’] life.” (John 11:53); and “But the Pharisees [i.e., the Jews who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees] went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus” (Matthew 12:14); and “As soon as the [Jewish] chief priests and their [Jewish] officials saw him [Jesus], they shouted, ‘Crucify! Crucify!’” (John 19:6); and

    (b) ultimately fabricating the infamous self-damning public declaration which it attributes and attaches to the Jewish people — collectively and in perpetuity — in response to the purported assertion by Roman governor Pontius Pilate that Jesus was not guilty of any crime against the Roman Empire and that, consequently, Rome’s soul would remain pure in the event of Jesus’ murder by Rome at the insistence of the Jewish people, to wit: “And all of the [Jewish] people said [in response to Pilate’s assertion of Jesus’ innocence], ‘His [Jesus’] blood shall be upon us and upon our descendants.’” (Matthew 27:25).

    Yet, in an effort to further inflame Jew-hatred among Christians, the “New Testament” subsequently accuses the Jewish leadership of attempting to orchestrate a vast conspiracy in order to conceal from the populace the purported final proof of the Truth of Christianity, namely, Jesus’ alleged postmortem resurrection, by declaring: “When the [Jewish] chief priests had met with the [Jewish] elders and devised a plan, they gave the [Roman] soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, ‘You are to say, “His [Jesus’] disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.” If this report gets to the [Roman] governor [Pontius Pilate], we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.’ So the [Roman] soldiers took the money, and did as they were instructed; and this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very Day.” (Mathew 28:12-15).

    Moreover, Paul — nascent Christianity’s preeminent and seminal evangelist in the immediate period after the purported lifetime of Jesus — further propagated the blood libel of Deicide and implicitly advocated genocide against the Jewish people in his purported letter to the Christian residents of Thessalonica, Macedonia (modern-day Thessaloniki, Greece), declaring:

    “For you, brothers, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus. You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the Prophets, and also drove us out. They [the Jews] displease God and are hostile to all men in their effort to keep us from speaking to the [pagan] Gentiles, so that they [the pagan Gentiles] may be saved [by becoming Christians]. In this way they [the Jews] always heap up their Sins to the limit. The Wrath of God has come upon them [the Jews] at last.” (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16)

    Furthermore, according to the “Acts of the Apostles” portion of the “New Testament”, Paul frequently and directly accused the Jewish people of Deicide, e.g.:

    “‘Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by Miracles, Wonders and Signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s Deliberate Plan and Foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.’” (Acts 2:22-23)

    “‘The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His Servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the Author of Life, but God raised him from the dead.’” (Acts 3:13-15)

    “‘The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead, whom you killed by hanging him on a cross.’” (Acts 5:30)

    Yet, despite all of the foregoing, in an enigmatic but prescient statement to a Gentile follower, which reaffirms the exclusive Truth of Scriptural Judaism, Jesus purportedly declared:

    “‘… You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know; for Salvation is from the Jews.’” (John 4:22).

    It is obvious from the “Gospels” portion of the “New Testament” (consisting of the four often-conflicting narratives of Jesus’ purported life and death rendered by purported authors Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) that Jesus was purportedly sent by his Heavenly Father to minister to the Jewish people rather than to the pagan Gentile peoples of the Roman Empire. As the “New Testament” relates: “These twelve [apostles] Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Do not go among the [pagan] Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, preach this message: “The Kingdom of Heaven is near.”‘” (Matthew 10:5-7); and: “He [Jesus] answered [to his apostles], ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’” (Matthew 15:24). This being the case, why does the “New Testament” falsely place the guilt for the alleged hunting, capture, torture and execution of Jesus upon “the lost sheep of Israel” rather than upon the Roman Empire? After all, Judea was a captive province of imperial Rome, and was subject to the latter’s authority in all matters. The notion that the subjugated Jewish people were able to impose upon the Roman governor of Judea their alleged will to murder an innocent man is patently ludicrous.

    Nonetheless, before the “Gospels” had become finalized, it became clear to the leaders of early Christianity that the paucity of Jewish converts to the new religion would soon relegate Christianity to obscurity unless it welcomed pagan Gentiles in addition to Jews. Since the target Gentile population most available to early Christian evangelists was that of the Roman Empire, the first generation of Christian evangelists realized that condemning the Roman Empire and (via the doctrine of collective guilt), consequently, all residents of the Empire for the Crime of Deicide was likely to make a dangerous enemy of the former and was unlikely to convince many of the latter to convert to the new religion.

    However, in the Jews, the leaders of early Christianity found a people that, conveniently, were already despised by both the Roman Empire as well as the early Church. The Roman Empire hated the Jewish people due to their stubborn — and, in the view of Rome, incomprehensible — refusal to regard Rome’s subjugation of Judea as a victory of Rome’s gods over the God of Israel. Moreover, the Jews’ refusal to accept their defeat as the defeat of their God was so subversive to Rome’s goal of uncontested imperial rule that it rightly feared the spread of this rejectionist doctrine to the other conquered peoples of the Empire. In fact, as the early Church was well aware, Rome’s enmity towards and ideological fear of the Jewish people had already manifested itself in Roman-occupied Alexandria, Egypt via the creation of the first known Jewish ghetto in 38 C.E. (Common Era). For its part, the early Church hated the Jewish people due to their refusal (in other than insignificant numbers) to convert to Christianity.

    Consequently, concocting a new religion in which the Jews — collectively and in perpetuity — were the perfidious villains would serve two goals, namely, (a) making Christianity more palatable to the Gentile peoples of the Roman Empire and (b) taking revenge upon the Jewish people for their rejection of the new religion.

    Proof of this deliberate shift in conversionary strategy is found in the “New Testament” itself:

    “As [the evangelists] Paul and Barnabas were leaving the synagogue, the [Jewish] people invited them to speak further about these things [i.e., the tenets of Christianity] on the next Sabbath. When the congregation was dismissed, many of the Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who talked with them and urged them to continue in the Grace of God. On the next Sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the Word of the Lord [about Christianity]. When the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy. They began to contradict what Paul was saying and heaped abuse on him. Then Paul and Barnabas answered them boldly: ‘We had to speak the Word of God [about Christianity] to you first. Since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of Eternal Life, we now turn to the [pagan] Gentiles.’” (Acts 13:42-46)

    Moreover, in order to further endear nascent Christianity to the Greek-speaking Gentile peoples of the Roman Empire, the “New Testament” bestowed upon Jesus’ first apostle, Simon, the honorific Greek-language name “Petros” (which, in the English-language, is rendered as the name “Peter”, meaning: “Rock”) (see Matthew 4:18-20; Luke 5:1-11; and John 1:35-42).

    Furthermore, Jesus’ purported repudiation of the Torah laws of Kashrut in Mark 7:18-19 was clearly intended by the early Church to make Christianity less rigorous for, and consequently more appealing to, the Gentile peoples of the Roman Empire. That this repudiation was a retroactive addition to the “Gospel of Mark” is evidenced by the fact that Peter, despite being the preeminent apostle of Jesus during the latter’s purported lifetime, had no knowledge of it (see Acts 10:9-15).

    Finally, perhaps the most definitive proof that early Christianity ultimately came to view the Roman Empire rather than the Jewish people as its primary conversionary target is to be found in the fact that — although the purported words of Jesus, as memorialized in the “New Testament”, were spoken in the Hebrew language and/or in the Aramaic language (being the main languages spoken by the Jewish people in the Land of Israel during the purported lifetime of Jesus) — the authors of the “New Testament” nonetheless chose to issue their conversionary missive in the Greek language (being the primary language of the Gentile peoples residing in the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolian districts of the Roman Empire as well as being an official language of the Empire).

    Unfortunately, with deadly historical consequences for the Jewish people, in tandem with its message of Divine Love for those who accept Jesus as their Savior, a message of hatred and contempt for Jews inheres in the “New Testament”.

25. @ yamit82:
    Hi, Yamit. You said,

    “By the Bible’s own standard, Jesus is a false prophet and should be ignored… He made a prediction about his return to Earth that didn’t come true. Why don’t Christians believe their Bible on this?”

    I haven’t read any predictions by Jesus that turned out to be false. Many, of course, concern things to come. As for what “Christians” believe, consider that I have been cast out of my Christian fellowship as a “heretic” with “devilish doctrines”, and as having “The spirit of Antichrist”. I don’t think I’m the proper address for discussions of what “Christians believe”.

26. Hi, Yamit.

    You got my ears to ringing, when you mentioned “Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity”:

    “A plausible explanation for how and why Jews became so hated by believers in the Jesus-god of love-your-neighbor-as-yourself. It’s not because the Jews killed Christ as the Gospels – mainly that of John – say. It’s because the theology of evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity holds that Jews know perfectly well that Jesus Christ was the Messiah but they deny him anyway.”

    The Evangelicals and Fundamentalists date back largely to the 1800s. Fundamentalism was a reaction to modern Liberal Christianity; and the main tenets of Evangelicalism can be traced to men like John Nelson Darby (18 November 1800 – 29 April 1882).

    Antisemitism existed LONG before the advent of Evangelicals and Fundamentalists; so it would be wrong to say they were the root cause of it.

27. @ yamit82:
    Hi, Yamit. You said,

    “please keep in mind that the Hebrew word ‘shamayim’ is used to describe both the place where Elijah was taken up AND the place where Yahweh lives (see, e.g., Psalm 2:4, Psalm 11:4, Psalm 14:2). In Exodus 24:10 when Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel “saw the God of Israel,” they saw him walking in “the sky” (Hebrew = shamayim).”

    I will keep this in mind. Since Elijah didn’t die, however, this might not have any bearing on discussions of the “afterlife”.

28. @ yamit82:
    Hi, Yamit

    You assert that Christianity was invented by Constantine. How can I accept something so absurd? Constantine was called upon, during his reign, to convene a council to mediate a squabble between Christian leaders; but then, I’m referring to the Constantine of reality, the one talked about by Edward Gibbon.

29. @ Edgar G.:
    Hello again, Edgar.

    “Well you’ve said a lot”

    I’m glad we’re roughly matching each other in word count. That may indicate some two-way discussion.

    I. Is Life Meaningless?

    “You live your life whilst you’re alive, and not otherwise.”

    Is that a word teaser, for the philosophers? We both know that a person’s body ceases to function at some point. The question at hand, in our dialog, is whether “we” cease to exist when our bodies cease to function.

    Jesus (or Pseudo-Jesus, if you prefer) said that our life continues after death, as our eternal “soul”. This is part of my own personal worldview, because (1) it is plainly said in the New Testament, and (2) I have had a subjective experience with a person who has died physically, yet continues to live, namely, Jesus himself. I don’t expect others to hold this view; and indeed, the fact that Jesus had to spell it out, as he did, shows that the matter was one of speculation in his day. Even so, belief in an afterlife was not unique to Jesus; it was held certainly by the Egyptians, as evidenced by the pyramids, as well as by other cultures; and the Jews of Moses’ time were no strangers to these beliefs. I went on to give anectdotal evidence that belief in the resurrection has a very real effect on one’s life i his mortal body.

    II. You said,

    “The reason that Jewish People are much concerned about handing down memories to their descendants, is, I believe that no one likes or wants to go through a whole life as if it meant nothing to anybody.”

    I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, and expanded on it: If our lives mean nothing to other humans, this could be cause for dismay. In my own case, though, I expect all humans to eventually forget that I ever existed; but this is a moot point, because I expect all human life on earth to cease in about a thousand years — making concern about what others do or do not think a meaningless exercise.

    III. You went on to say, “How can life be meaningless, it means what you make it to mean.”

    You seem to be saying, that the real meaning of life depends on your personal opinion. Again, it seems you’re presenting a poser for the philosophers, of whom I am not one (I am a retired chemist). In my amateur opinion, I believe that life is full of meaning; but only because is was designed and created by God, to express His intentions. Apart from that, it has no objective meaning of consequence; because life, and the universe that sustains it, is doomed by the laws of physics to ultimate annihilation.

    IV. You talked a lot, about the difficulty of becoming naturalized as a Roman Citizen. If this is in reference to the Apostle Paul, it is a moot point:

    Romans 21:
    [27] Then the chief captain came, and said unto him, Tell me, art thou a Roman? He said, Yea.
    [28] And the chief captain answered, With a great sum obtained I this freedom. And Paul said, But I was free born.

    V. I see that we both keep 3AM schedules. It’s our privilege, being retired.

    Shalom shalom 🙂

30. @ Michael S:

    By the Bible’s own standard, Jesus is a false prophet and should be ignored.

    He made a prediction about his return to Earth that didn’t come true. Why don’t Christians believe their Bible on this?

31. @ Michael S:

    THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE

32. Ancient Hebrew Thought

33. A Short History of the Hebrew Language

34. ANTISEMITISM did not exist in countries and cultures that were not christian or Muslin or influenced by those two replacement supersessionist faiths.

35. @ Felix Quigley:

    A plausible explanation for how and why Jews became so hated by believers in the Jesus-god of love-your-neighbor-as-yourself. It’s not because the Jews killed Christ as the Gospels – mainly that of John – say. It’s because the theology of evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity holds that Jews know perfectly well that Jesus Christ was the Messiah but they deny him anyway. And how else can this be seen but as a deliberate act of choosing evil? “Who else could do such a thing but Satan and his servants?” Is how the Christian anti-Semitic mindset. Consequently “Only in a Christian country can Holocaust Revisionism [the idea that the Nazis never tried to exterminate the Jews] be taken seriously. Because only Christians could believe that Jews are so wholly evil and so supernaturally-empowered by evil forces that they could successfully perpetrate the monumental conspiracy that would be necessary to get people to believe such a thing if it weren’t true. And even of those people who accept the reality of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, only a Christian could believe that innocent and harmless Jews were dispatched to hell while the Nazis who killed them were forgiven by God and admitted to heaven.

    Freethinkers should remember. If you want to know what someone really thinks of you, look at what they’re willing to believe about you.

36. @ Michael S:

    please keep in mind that the Hebrew word ‘shamayim’ is used to describe both the place where Elijah was taken up AND the place where Yahweh lives (see, e.g., Psalm 2:4, Psalm 11:4, Psalm 14:2). In Exodus 24:10 when Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel “saw the God of Israel,” they saw him walking in “the sky” (Hebrew = shamayim).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdrVvcvvY34

37. It has been said that the christianity cult is “a lie built on a mountain of deceptions”. There are so many interwoven lies in the fabric of the cult’s teachings that it’s hard to know where to begin, but ultimately they can all be traced back the book that christians call the “holy bible” (even though there is little about it that can be called “holy” without some risk of terminological inexactitude).

    The christianity cult first appeared in the early part of the 4th century CE. That remark may well raise some eyebrows, because it differs markedly from what you have almost certainly always believed to be the case. All the history books say the earliest christians were 1st century Hebrews, don’t they? Well they would say that, though: this is what the churches want everyone to think. And never forget, the churches controlled all publishing and printing for centuries: even into the early 20th century in some countries. But, like so much else about christianity, it just ain’t true.

    Until Constantine l, there was no single religion in the Roman empire. The temples of the mythological Roman gods still stood in Rome and their priests still practised their ceremonials there, but in other parts of the empire all the local cults still operated and, despite the official Roman opposition to them, in practice even the Roman soldiers stationed in different parts of the empire (many of whom were locally-recruited mercenaries anyway) had their own Romanised versions of the local cults. Surprising as it may seem (especially to christians), the Hebrew religious tradition was only widespread, established “religion” that existed at that time. There were Hebrews everywhere, a result of the two major deportations we suffered in the course of our history – first at the hands of the Babylonians in 597 and 586 BCE, and then at the hands of the Romans themselves in 68 CE. But the Hebrew tradition was totally unsuited to Constantine’s purpose, because it has no fear elements at all, just One kind, merciful and loving God.

    The Hebrew culture did, however, provide Constantine with a useful basis for his new religion. People everywhere knew that the Hebrews existed and had a collection of ancient Books, written in their own language, which were believed to contain God’s Own Message to humanity, received directly from God Himself – but since nobody else could actually read or understand the Hebrews’ language, and because the Hebrews generally kept very much to themselves, nobody else knew very much if anything about what those Books were about. Constantine gleefully took advantage of this. He assembled a committee of Byzantine theological scholars and ordered them to make a translation of the Hebrews’ Scriptures into Greek (the language of scholarship at that time), which – together with some new, supplementary writings that the committee would compose themselves – were to form the basis of the new “religion”. To give his new Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures greater authority, Constantine passed it off as the legendary “Septuaginta” translation

    The christian churches have always claimed that the “gospels” are eyewitness accounts of actual events, written by men who were there at the time and saw it all happen – and that three of the four (Matthew, Mark, and John) were themselves Hebrews. This is never questioned by christians, but it simply isn’t true. It cannot be. There is massive evidence within the writings themselves that not one of them could possibly have been written by a Hebrew. IEqually false is the claim that these documents were originally written in Aramaic (the common vernacular throughout the Middle East in the 1st century CE) and only later translated into Greek, the original Aramaic source-texts then somehow being “lost”. This last assertion is preposterous: quite apart from the internal evidence that the writers didn’t even speak Aramaic, if the earliest christians were at the same time practising Hebrews, as is claimed, would they really first have translated the source-documents of their new “faith” into the hated pagan Greek language, and then allowed the original texts in their own language to be “lost”? This was never done with any of the Books of the Hebrew Scriptures – why then should it have been done with the “new testament” documents? We Hebrews are (and have always been) fanatical about preserving our Holy Books: this claim simply does not hold water. Furthermore, no trace has ever been found of any copies of the “gospels” in Aramaic, and the earliest copies in Greek that have ever been unearthed date from no earlier than Constantine’s time. All the evidence points to their having been composed, in Greek, around 325 CE, and by non-Hebrews.

    To be effective as a tool for control, the new religion needed substantial “fear” elements. Constantine’s committee adopted the pagan Graeco-Roman concept of “Hades” or the “Underworld” (which had previously been conceived as the “resting-place” of the souls of the departed) and turned them into a place of torment were “unbelievers” were condemned to spend the rest of eternity enduring unspeakable suffering; this was to be presided over by the most fearsome of all demons, who was given the title of the “Prosecuting Angel” of God’s Divine Court, the “satan”, which is mentioned in the Scriptures in only two places: once in the writings of Z’charyah (Zechariah) in the “Book of the Twelve Prophets”, and again in the Parable of Iyyov (Job). Ridiculous stories were invented about “Satan” (the title now having been turned into a personal name), based on a totally deceitful misrepresentation of Isaiah 14:12, claiming that he had originally been an Angel but had “rebelled against God” and had been “cast out from Heaven”, creating a new domain for himself called “hell” to be the “place of torment” I mentioned before, with which God apparently colludes by sending “unbelievers” there.

    The deception was almost complete, but there was still one element missing – the good guy, the only one who could “save” you from unspeakable eternal suffering in “hell” at the hands of “Satan”. Who else but God’s own begotten son! Once again, Constantine’s team took advantage of the little about Hebrew culture and beliefs that was generally known by the common people, while playing on the general ignorance of what it was all really about. Everyone knew that the Hebrews had been promised in the Scriptures that one day God would send them a “messiah” who would re-establish the ancient Monarchy and reign over them as their King. But nobody knew what the word “messiah” really meant. The term “messiah” (which derives from the Hebrew mashiy’ah), together with its literal Greek translation ??????? (christos), were incorporated into the new religion with a newly-invented “meaning” assigned to them: they now became the title (and the Greek form, written capitalised, eventually came to be seen as the surname) of “God’s son”. Involved and totally implausible stories – the “gospels” – were composed about this character, backed up every step of the way by “proof-texts” quoted from the “old testament”, showing how God’s Own Prophets had prophesied every detail of “his” life. But there is just one small problem: every one of these “proof-texts” is a phony, artificially manufactured deception accomplished by a combination of false translation, often using just part of what the Prophet had said, and taking the passages “quoted” totally out of context. There are numerous examples of this – five in just the first two chapters of “Matthew” alone (1:22-23, 2:5-6, 2:15, 2:17-18, 2:23).

    Having created his new religion, Constantine was now ready to foist the deception upon his unsuspecting subjects. But he still had one problem to overcome. There were Hebrews everywhere all over his empire, and they were not likely to take kindly to his new religion, which relied so heavily on the distortion and wholesale falsification of everything they held Holy. Constantine was a pragmatic man and knew he couldn’t possibly exterminate them all (it had been tried several times before, but miraculously they always seemed to survive) and, in truth, he didn’t want to anyway. The Hebrews were useful people: they tended to be artisans, craftsmen and professionals, the kind of people who made significant contributions to his taxation revenue and they were – in the main – honest, law-abiding, peaceful and inoffensive people. But he foresaw that they were going to be a big problem when he tried to launch his new religion; they could not be silenced, but they could be discredited. To achieve this, the stories in the “gospels” were written in such a way as to depict the Hebrews of the 1st century as thoroughly disreputable people: crude, uncultured, cruel, turning on their own “king” and baying for his blood, and with wicked and corrupt leaders. That did the trick: after all, who was going to listen to the very people whose hands were covered with God’s own blood? It’s a sad fact that the roots of all modern antisemitism (i.e. hatred of Hebrews) can be traced directly back to christianity’s “gospels”.

    None of the prophets in the Scriptures ever foretold the coming of a “messiah”. But they did prophesy that one day God will give back to Yisraél what He took away from us in the year 586BCE: our Temple, our sovereignty and independence, and our Monarchy. There are numerous prophecies about the king who will reign in the happy days when this comes about. According to the prophets, he will be a deeply religious man, one of great humility (so humble in fact that he will shun all publicity and won’t even make speeches in public—Y’shayahu 42:2, “he will not shout, and he will not raise his voice nor let it be heard outdoors”). He will reunite Yisraél, bringing back all those who are scattered in exile all over the World, and he will reign over us in justice and righteousness, encouraging the full observance of the Torah’s laws and ensuring that those laws are kept. All other nations on Earth and their rulers will recognise his authority, and all strife and fighting in the World will end: “The Temple Mount will be the chief of all hills and all the nations will stream to it… many nations will set out saying ‘Come, let’s go up to Adonai’s mountain, to the Temple of Yisraél’s God; He will teach us His ways and we will follow His paths’—because then teaching will emanate from Tziyyon [and] Adonai’s words from Y’rushalayim… [the king-messiah] will arbitrate between the nations and settle all their disputes, and they will beat their swords into scythes and their spears into shears—never again will any nation take up arms against another and no-one will even study military tactics any more” (Y’shayahu 2:2-4, Michah 4:1-3).

    That king, we are assured, will satisfy all the requirements of Torah Law, one of which is that he must be the son of a man who is the son of a man who was the son of a man who was… who was the son of King David’s son Sh’lomoh. At his coronation he will doubtless be “crowned” in the same manner as the ancient Hebrew kings, that is, the shemen mish’hat kodesh (the oil of anointment of holiness, which Mosheh was commanded to make personally according to the formula given in Sh’mot 30:22-33) will be smeared on him, so he will be a ???????? (a mashiyah? or “messiah”) in the most literal sense, and because of this he has come to be known as the “king-messiah” in Hebrew parlance and literature.

    The great 12th century Hebrew scholar R’ Mosheh ben Maimon, who produced the first systematic and structured encyclopædia of Hebrew Law (the Mishneh Torah) devotes the last two chapters of the volume dealing with “Kings and their Wars” to this future king, the “king-messiah”.

    christians who claim Scripture has to be read “with the heart” are completely missing the point: in the Scriptures, the expression “the heart” doesn’t mean “the emotions”, rather it means using your brain—your intellect—in other words, thinking and reasoning rationally and logically. What they need to do is what God commanded Yisraél to do in D’varim 10:16—”circumcise” their “hearts’ foreskins”. To “circumcise” means to cut away something that is unwanted or undesirable, and the “heart’s foreskin” is the unwanted and undesirable part of their mind that inclines them to “believe” that God has a “son”, leading them to worship their three worthless idols (papa, junior, and casper “the friendly ghost”).

38. @ Michael S:

    Well you’ve said a lot, but much is meaningless to me. How can life be meaningless, it means what you make it to mean. You live your life whilst you’re alive, and not otherwise. What Jesus said, -and even if he ever existed -is very open to question, (and Christianity is regarded by most experts to have been founded by Paul). There are also questions whether Paul ever existed. If he did, there is absolutely NO doubt but that he told many lies. For example he lived in Tarsus, in the middle of nowhere, about 2,000 miles from Rome, as must have his family maybe for generations. How would such a low level peasant, a tentmaker, be a Roman citizen. supposedly inherited from his father. He wasn’t a Roman, nor were any of his family. It needed to be recorded that having done such great deeds that the Senate conferred citizenship on them. In those days, any conferred citizenship expired with the death of each Emperor, unless renewed by the new one. The whole story has to be a farce. Do you know that Herod, rescued Julius Caesar, when trapped in Egypt, and helped Octavian and other Romans with food, shelter, armies and etc for maybe 20+ years, before he was granted a limited citizenship.

    You should read up on Roman citizenship sometime and the near impossibility of acquiring it unless you were one of the old noble families. Of the huge mass of people actually living in Rome for generations, most of them were not citizens, and those who were, had only a very limited set of “rights”. It’s actually an interesting study. I went into it many years ago originally because it struck me that Paul could not have been a citizen. In later generations it was gained more easily by foreigners, but NOT THEN.

    The benefit of being here is being here. Only historical figures are remembered if recorded properly. And many are forgotten also and re-discovered hundreds of years later whe someone discovers a musty old book in a forgotten basement. So what can we hope for except to be rembered by those who know us in our lifetime.

    If you say the site “purports” that means that the info is very likely false, or just the belief of that limited cult or group. But I promise I’ll look it up . It’s 3 a.m. here now so I’m off for the night.

39. @ Edgar G.:
    Hi, Edgar

    I just found a website that purports to talk about Jewish doctrines of the resurrection:

    https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jewish-resurrection-of-the-dead/

    I’ll let you look it over, and comment if you wish. The New Testament view of these matters is pretty clear: Jesus said,

    Matt. 10:
    [28] And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

    Concerning the resurrection, much is said, including:

    2 Cor. 5:
    [1] For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
    [2] For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven:
    [3] If so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked.
    [4] For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.

    As for being remembered, my hopes aren’t too high. For some 24 years, from 1972 to 1996, I was part of a great movement, the “Jesus Movement”, involving probably hundreds of thousands of people. I took part in much of that movement’s activities on the North Coast of California, affecting lives across the globe. A few years back, a brother wrote a detailed history of that movement. Was my name mentioned? Never. There are some good photos of those days, some including nearly all of the people I lived with at one time. Was I in the photo? No — I was off-site, working to earn the money to keep the others fed. Even our very large group, counting churches in over 50 communities at one time, has largely disappeared.

    We have so many memorials and memorial days, so many crosses in Flanders’ fields. In Australia, we used to rise together in the RSL club to salute the Aussie flag and remember the veterans, saying,

    “We shall remember them, lest we forget. God save the Queen.”

    I said that, along with the others; but how many ANZAC war dead do I know the name of? None.

    Without a resurrection of the dead, life really is meaningless. Is that PROOF of the resurrection? No. IF the resurrection is true, then EVERYTHING has meaning: the creation of the universe, our births, the fact that we are presently communicating with each other. If there is no resurrection, what’s the point of it all? It’s as The Preacher says,

    Qoh.12
    [1] Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them…
    [5]… because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:

    I have a friend, who has many aches and pains, including bone-on-bone arthritis in his knees. When I ask him how he’s doing, he says,

    “I’ve got aches and pains; but it’s nothing the resurrection can’t fix!”… at which he smiles, and goes merrily about his business.

    I have another friend, who died at the fairly young age of 59. He was riding his bicycle to work, when his circulatory system suddenly burst. Before he went, he used to talk to me about what he planned to do in the hereafter. He said he actually wanted to meet Moses, and the other Bible characters, and ask them in detail about how it was, for instance, to see Yam Suf part.

    I have another friend, who went in my place on a tree-planting job, 44 years ago. The truck went off the road, and he quickly died, along with two others. Just a few hours before leaving for the job, he recorded some music, including a song,

    “I’ll be so glad when I get back home” He’s centered in the picture:

    http://www.radianceministry.com/images/btm.gif

    Soon, he will also be forgotten, along with his music. I was spared, I suppose, so I can say these things to you. By God’s grace, I hope to join him “back home”. Then his life will have meaning, and mine too. Otherwise, we are vapors, dissipating into the mist.

    I didn’t plan to preach here. Once I got going, though, I thought,

    “What can I say, that will have more benefit than these words? Should I carp about antisemitism? argue about the canonicity of apocryphal books? Talk yet again about the coming Turkish attack on Israel? What’s the point of any of that, if we’re all to be forgotten?

    Shalom shalom 🙂

40. @ Michael S:

    I’ve looked up what monogeny (or monogenesis) actually should mean. It represents descent from a single pair…..(like Adam and Eve), or all language from a single source…..so perhaps your oblique reference to it meaning Jesus is not actually correct….unless you believe that Mary mated with a spirit.. in the way that many “miracle-workers” are reputed to have been born.

    Was it Appolonius of Tyana, born maybe around -10 BCE, whose miracles are remarkably similar to those attributed to Jesus, whose mother was impregnated by a stream of gold observed entering through her ear….!!!…..??

    I seem to recall that he may have been that guy…. and lived to be nearly 90 years old.

41. @ Michael S:

    Yes, you’re right about the “Pax Vobiscum” which “blessing” was a set cant for every flea-bitten illiterate friar and monk all through the Early and Middle Ages. In Ireland, have seen priests of some sort swinging around some sort of container of water and dipping a rod or something in and shaking it at the people.

    The reason that Jewish People are much concerned about handing down memories to their descendants, is, I believe that no one likes or wants to go through a whole life as if it meant nothing to anybody. My dear late Mother said, almost at her very end, “children don’t forget me;”…… A mother like mine could never be forgotten by anyone as long as they lived -family or even bare acquaintences.

    I had Yahrzeit for my dear Mother just last Wednesday, beginning Tuesday evening. 49 years departed but still right here with me as if it was yesterday.

42. @ Edgar G.:
    Hi, Edgar

    I don’t know what I said, that it came across as “holy water”. Sorry I got you in the eye. If I were really trying, I would have gotten a “holy ice cube” and dropped it down the back of your shirt, just for fun 🙂

    When it comes to talking about eternal life and such things, I’m not too interested in what the rabbis and bishops have to say on the matter. I’m not talking about high-level thinking here, but about our collective subconscious. Here is how one religious group handles the matter of dying:

    https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/elephants-mourning-video-animal-grief/

    What were those elephants thinking, as they filed past the corpse to pay their last respects? Were they taking “smell readings”? I don’t think so; because I saw other elephants in a nature show, paying similar respect in the season following the death, stopping at the dry, bleached bones on a return migration.

    Those elephants were not connecting with smells; they were connecting with memories. Whatever Jews think about the continuation of the soul in the hereafter, they seem very concerned about the continuation of memories down here. The bottom line is a desire for immortality, which I think is universal. The pharaohs built their pyramids, the Jews have their Jahrzeits, and US Presidents try to leave a legacy. These are all examples of mortal beings showing concern about their spiritual existence beyond the grave.

    I was doing an internet surf once, to see what I could find about the origins of “religion”. I think the earliest traces of what could be considered “religion” were a study of how prehistoric people dealt with their dead. When a warrior was buried with his battle axe, for instance, it was probably not because none of the living would have any use for it. More likely, it was an expression of caring for the deceased in the afterlife.

    An interesting burial ritual, going back to Neanderthals, involved powdering a corpse with red ochre.

    http://www.pnas.org/content/109/6/1889

    This practice was amazingly widespread, over space and time. Why red ochre? My amateur, gut interpretation is that the redness restored the corpse to a life-like appearance. It didn’t bring the dead back to life, a la Ezekiel 37 (and example of the Jewish belief in a resurrection of the dead); but it gives a sense of the thinking of those people.

    An early expression of religion in the Middle East, is the appearance of teraphim. These first appear as having been fashioned from actual corpses, often of children. At first, perhaps, one of our prehistoric fellow-sojourners may have simply wanted to keep a loved one close to him, to preserve his/her memory. After a while, though, teraphim were set on pedestals and expected to “speak” to worshipers.

    When a human or animal is faced with mortal danger, a “fight or flight” response often kicks in. Adrenaline floods the body, giving the person the ability to perform sometimes super-human feats of strength in such times. There is a third response, however, which does not involve adrenaline: It is faith. This is the response that has allowed countless martyrs and others over the centuries, to calmly face death, while others scream in horror in anticipation of the same fate.

    I’d better park my “Rambler” there.

    Oh… I get it! Dominus vobiscum! Was that the “holy water”? “Pax dominus vobiscum” was the Latin analogy of “Shalom aleichem”. I said it in jest, considering the subject matter. Sorry I got you wet.

    Shalom shalom 🙂

43. @ Michael S:

    Hey, you just got some of that Holy Water you scattered around at the very end..right in my eye. I don’t intend that this should be a discussion on religion. I am not qualified, but you should note that the Torah and Rabbinic belief in the hereafter, says very little and none of it deeply eschatological ( which came and went periodically). There is no expectation such as there is in Christianity. We live our lives and have our expectations whilst on earth, not in some imaginary Heaven, not yet with 72 “virgins”..

    Yet, Michael, with all that…. I HAVE to mention that in our Yiskor prayers for our departed loved ones, there is the wish and hope that they are in “Gan Ayden” and am not able to reconcile this with the well documented lack of afterlife Heavenly Bliss as is is in other faiths.

    I don’t take my info from Wiki, but from accredited authorities that I either possess, or have read in the past. Am I to understand that you actually believe in the “Virgin Birth”, or did you just mention it in passing. I’m not clear on your collection of interrogation marks, but don’t need to proceed further along this path. You and I know that it was a deliberate mistranslation, twisting it into supporting an already entrenched belief. Just as was the so-called Testimonium Flavianum..thought to have been “interpolated” by one of the most productive Biblical forgers and inventors on record..Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea..

    As for the pre-Nicene differences between Christianity and Judaism. Although likely just the tip of a greater divide, the letters, claims and counter-claims you mention were just personal disputes between two scholars who wanted to “duke it out”..each for his own side. .

    {{For really nasty polemics of Jews on Christianity, you MUST read David Berger’s (Rabbi) translation and foreword of the medieval “Nizzahon Vetus”. It will open your eyes as it did mine, at the temerity, and intrepidity of the persecuted Jews whose lives were on a knife edge every minute of every day. They pulled NO punches. and showed that Judaism was alive, well and kicking hard, all through those perilous times., every Jew a potential martyr}}.

    There were similar disputes between Christians and Pagan philosophers,, for example “Contra Celsus”, which, I think involved Origen against Celsus.

    I highly recommend you read some of M. M. Mangasarian. “The Truth about Jesus; is he a Myth…” I found it ….well… read it first and then YOU tell ME.

    As for the Jews V the Pagans , the Jews were highly respected by pagans, and when first encountered by the Greeks sometime in the 4th or 5th cent BCE was referred to as “A Nation of Philosophers”.. They later flocked to synagogues being attracted to the unique belief, as as Jewish missionaries began spreading their message. They would listen and absorb, practicing what they could, and thereby bringing about the Noachide Rules debated on and issued by the Jewish Sages.

    I’ve always believed that the Christian proliferation, was amongst Noachides , and not Jews. To the untutored god-fearers, there was little or no difference between what the Jews showed them and what the Christians taught,. and it’s not hard to feel that by becoming Jesus lovers, they thought they were becoming Jews.

    Before they found out the difference, Christianity was too well entrenched.

    Anyway, once again…..I’M OUT….OUT….!!! Don’t forget M.M. Mangasarian…

44. @ Edgar G.:
    Good Morning, Edgar

    It looks as though I’ve gotten a few hours of sleep. I guess I’m up for the day. Concerning the “Roman Creed”, the Wikipedia article I referenced said,

    “The Apostles’ Creed is Trinitarian in structure with sections affirming belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ His Son and the Holy Spirit. The Apostles’ Creed was based on Christian theological understanding of the Canonical gospels, the letters of the New Testament and to a lesser extent the Old Testament. Its basis appears to be the old Roman Creed known also as the Old Roman Symbol.

    “Because of the early origin of its original form, it does not address some Christological issues defined in the Nicene and other Christian Creeds. It thus says nothing explicitly about the divinity of either Jesus or the Holy Spirit. This makes it acceptable to many Arians and Unitarians. Nor does it address many other theological questions which became objects of dispute centuries later.”

    So, yes, the Roman Creed did pre-date the Apostle’s Creed; but they were very similar. I quoted (in part) the latter, because it is still used by the majority of Christian denominations — including the Roman Catholic Church. Like the Roman Creed, it says nothing about any presumed divinity of Jesus, of Mary being, literally, the mother of God, of Mary’s sinlessness and virgin birth, etc. As I said, except for the misunderstanding of the Greek word ????????, it accords well with what is actually written in the NT.

    Cocerning “????????” (“monogeny”, Strongs Dictionary #G3439, it would be best rendered as “one of a kind”, or “unique” — which, I suppose, could be taken by many people to mean many things. I personally understand it to reconcile with the rest of scripture, in that as the promised Messiah, Jesus was born with a unique calling. Its translation in the Apostle’s Creed as “only-begotten” carries the impression that (1) God only had one son, Jesus (not true, since the “sons of God” are mentioned in Job), or that (2) God somehow had physical sex with Mary (a Pagan idea).

    So much for the early creeds. I brought them up, because they represent the earliest character of the Church, before the First Council of Nicea

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

    in 325 CE. Before that time, there were certainly differences between Jews and Christians (viz The Dialogue of Justin Martyr with Trypho, c. 160 CE); but these were based on distinctions actually in the Bible. After the Council of Nicea any purported Biblical justifications for the split were warped beyond recognition by the brutal dogmatism of the Orthodox Church.

    I said that from this time on, the “Jew vs. Christian” conflict became tribal. Tribalism was alive and bad before this time, with peoples distinguishing themselves by their ancestry, their language and their gods. The bad news for the Jews, was that this new “Christian Tribe”, which literally considered itself to be one big family, included the majority of the Western World.

    I have to get ready for a Bible study with some friends at an Assisted Living center, so I’ll wrap this up quickly. You had said something to the effect that, as a nonbeliever, you were not affected by Biblical doctrines concerning the hereafter. I will leave you here, noting that the human psyche is trickier than that: Everyone, whatever he thinks he believes, has a very definite picture in his mind of what constitutes reality. That picture was largely spelled out for him by his cultural inheritance, being merely tweaked by his personal experiences. One important aspect of this world-view, is an unspoken belief in immortality, mortal danger and salvation — all generated by our instinct for self-preservation. You can say you don’t believe in Biblical views concerning the hereafter, especially Christian views; but you cannot escape having some view on the subject; and that view is highly unlikely to differ from the Pagan-Jewish-Christian motif held by society. I’m not talking about doctrines you espouse; I’m talking about what people actually perceive in their minds as “reality”.

    Back to the main point, Jews (and everyone else) have always had tribal tiffs with other peoples. What makes the antisemitism of the past 1700 years so awful, is the fact that the majority of mankind is antisemitic.

    Dominus vobiscum 😉

45. @ Michael S:

    What you’re talking about only became the Apostle’s Creed sometime between about 350 and 400. The first recorded mention is supposed to have been in a letter from Bishop Ambrose to one of the Popes, in about 390. Before that the Old Roman Creed was used, and was a lot longer than the version you note down. At least this is what I’ve garnered from several different sources, other than Wiki. Matters were in such flux during that lengthy period that it is hardly possible to know exactly what was meant by what. The documents which have come down to modern times are perhaps revisions 50 times over, depending on which Bishop had the greatest reputation, and what he believed, and in which area of the Mediterranean he lived. I myself have seen so many misprints and mistranslations, not to mention that in my old Geneva Bible, the Puritan Bible, the kind which travelled on the Mayflower, they altered the translation, and said of Adam and Eve that “they made for themselves breeches from fig leaves”. The translators were too modest to say they were completely unclothed.

    This is the famous “Breeches Bible”of which you may have heard, and a rare copy of which I own. The frontispiece was printed by the king’s Printer Robert Barker, and dated 1615. The Barker Family were the pre-eminent printers for many years then, and printed the King James Version. just 4 years before mine.

    Of course Barker was not responsible for printing all of my Geneva Bible, perhaps no more than the frontispiece. And this might have been a kind of attempted disguise to have the King’s Printer at the front of the volume.. . In those days, Bibles were “assembled” before handing over to the boobinders. In other words, there were different printers for some of the many different books of the Bible. King James was very jealous of “his” Bible, with which he actually had very little to do apart from bestowing his name to it, and arguing with churchmen.

    The Geneva Bible which was the most popular, and all other bibles were proscribed by the King, so as to make the James Version the most popular. So other versions, and single books which made up the bible were mostly printed abroad, in Geneva or Zurich and other places, then smuggled into England, because of the demand. I’m not certain but I believe that it was decreed as a capital offence.

    There were “The Bishops Bible, The Great \bible, Coverdale’s Bible, (William Tyndale’s famous translation from the original Hebrew, the first translation into English). which assembly was completed by Coverdale…(Tyndale spent many years under torture and eventually died in prison. James wasn’t a nice man.)

    So, assuming I wanted to buy a bible, I could chose which books I wanted in it, buying them, perhaps from several different booksellers depending on who had what for sale at the time (they were not easy to come by), then bring my selections to the Bookbinder where the covers would be made according to my design, perhaps with my coat of arms, or other decorations. The Geneva Bible was often in a plain set of covers, for various reasons.

    Why my bible is rare is because it has everything in it, the Torah, New Testament , the Complete Apocrypha, 2 Thesauruses, (or Thesaurii…??) all the psalms set to musical notes and more. Plus an index.. . Parts of it were printed as far back as 1578. There is one book which was printed in 1623, obviously added later after original assembly.

    Now here is an example of my rambling on. I have no idea how I came to talk about bibles when I began with the Old Roman Creed, but …there you are…

    My signature tune should be “The Moonshiner”..you know the old song which begins “I’m a Rambler, I’m a Gambler, I’m a Long Way From Home…..” except that I don’t gamble or drink, especially “moonshine”.

46. Hi, Edgar

    It’s late here, and I have an engagement in the morning, so I’ll just touch on a few things.

    First of all, thank you for entering into a civil discussion on these matters — something very reare nowadays, in both religion and politics.

    1. The “younger gods”: ANET 60, Tablet 4, speaks of Anu as the Creator deity; but the hero of the Creation Epic, namely Marduk, attains to the rank of Anu and becomes the most important deity. Uranus, the Sky god of the Greeks (who was curiously both the husband and son of Gaea) was the father of Zeus, who became the chief Greek God. In Orthodox Christianity, God is curiously both the son and creator of the Virgin Mary.

    Beginning with the reign of Constantine, whose mother Helen had become a Christian, church leaders began attacking one another in official fora. The disputes were always petty and personal; but they were adjudicated before emperors with grave consequenses; and the arguments these men used against one another were Christological — concerning the deity of Jesus. Ultimately, Jesus became, like Marduk and Zeus, the principal gods while God Himself became nebulous and faded into the background.

    Before the period of the councils, Christian doctrine was derived from the Bible and codified in the Apostles’ Creed:

    “I believe in God, the Father almighty,
    creator of heaven and earth.
    I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
    who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
    born of the Virgin Mary,
    suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, died, and was buried…”

    — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles%27_Creed

    Note that this creed described “God” as the Father only, and spoke separately of Christ, or Messiah. It agrees with the Bible (except for the “only” son bit, which is from a mistranslation). The various “Godhead” formulations pronounced at the various councils, on the other hand, did not have a basis in scripture, but carried the weight of authority and the danger of expulsion from the church, exile and death. From this time forth, Christians who were already ignorant of the scriptures found it healthy not to remedy their ignorance; but instead, they simply did what they were told to do and say.

    With these things happening in Christendom, the Christian-Jewish divide was no longer a subject of serious enquiry into the Bible: It became, as I said, a matter of tribalism: The Jews were one tribe, and the Christians another, “born enemies”. After the Reformation, as more and more Christians gained access to the scriptures, groups such as the English Separatists (from whence came the Pilgrims) started developing a scriptural, non-tribal view of the Jews.

    Thank you for your expression of sympathy. I need to get to sleep.

    Shalom shalom 🙂

47. @ Michael S:

    On the contrary, I see that we are dealing with a person’s view of reality, and not a book, because people live in the real world subject to real everyday stresses and tasks, and do not live in a book -Bible or not. Except of course for the very devout, and the curious, who neatly manage to combine both.

    I do not believe that people who do not believe in the Bible regard themselves as having a deep personal stake in it, and to suggest this to them would evoke merely a laugh.

    I don’t quite understand your reference to “younger gods”. In Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome they had multitudes of gods, to the end that Roman Emperors became automatically deified. Occasionally they pronounced themselves as gods without the Senate or peoples’ declarations. And you know all about Caligula and his horse (god).

    Your mention of the Church Councils in the 4th and 5th centuries exhibiting this is mystifying to me, or perhaps I just don’t catch your drift. The Council of Nicea in 325, was presided over by Constantine, although not a Christian, and, like some earlier emperors worshipped Sol Invictus, even being regarded as an emanation of the Sun God,

    His real reason for calling the Council was to utilise the more disciplined Christians to be officials for his increasingly unruly empire, although ostensibly to discuss the Arian position that Jesus and G-D were separate entities, and that Jesus was not divine..

    At that time, the New Testament, was more a varied collection of books and letters, and not yet a Bible. Having been translated from original tongues and copied and re-translated already several times, even at that early date,it may have been no longer really possible to know exactly what the original writers intended.

    You are aware that there was a large variety of very different interpretations of what the Christian faith was, and the discussions became more disputative and rancorous. It is reported that several “bishops” were murdered during hot arguments there. Until that time, it was basically primitive Christianity, still developing, and many Jewish customs and laws were still followed; the Sabbath, and Passover, for instance to a late date. Amongst farmers, for instance, Jews were held in special reverence, and it was common, before planting season, to ask a Jew to pray over the fields and bless the coming abundant harvest.

    This Council put Mary in some exalted position there, although not a goddess. You no doubt are well aware of all this, and as I am not a Bible scholar would not argue with you on any doctrinal point.

    At this point you are describing the metamorphosis of the Greek, Roman and Mesopotamian gods into Christianity, (I think) but I can’t see any particular period where G-D receded into the background, except as centuries passed, by a sort of osmosis where, amongst many, Jesus took that place, and Catholic clergy, the only ones officially allowed to disseminate supposed lore, actually became more powerful than Kings and princes. To me that was the oddest part of what I believe is pure unwarranted superstition.

    I’m writing all this, not because I want to enter into a discussion with you about religion, but because you felt you were rambling on beyond the interest of anyone, Well, as someone who also does his share of “rambling on…and on..” I post this only in sympathy with you.

    So….Edgar G. ..OUT….!!

48. @ Felix Quigley:
    Felix,

    Feel free to discuss the Bible with me anytime. I have tried in the past to discuss it with Christians, Jews and nonbelievers; but the results have been disappointing. There is no such thing as an “open mind” on these matters: You’re dealing with a person’s view not of a book, but of reality — including his / her own eternal fate. Everyone has a deep, personal stake in the Bible, whether he believes it or not.

    I think Rafael Castro, Edgar G. and you are all correct: the stature of the Jews is proportional, in the eyes of the beholder, to the beholder’s exposure to and understanding of Torah. This may be as true among Jews (many of whom are “self-hating”), as it is among Christians and others.

    I doubt that any serious discussion of the Bible will ensue here. As for my wife and I, we read and discuss the Bible every day, usually choosing a passage of scripture at random. Recently, we have also been reading passages from Ancient Near East in Translation, a compendium of remnants of the earliest texts from the Fertile Crescent.

    During the time of Avraham Avinu, the stories of Marduk and Gilgamesh, among others, were probably better known than the Bible is today; so they could be seen as forming a template for the things Moses said. Abraham and his pagan relatives were both exposed to the same events; but they didn’t interpret them the same way. Abraham was convinced there was only one God, an intelligent Creator of everything, with an All-Wise object in mind. The pagans, for some reason, could not accept this.

    I notice that in the Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman views of reality, the “Creator God” receded into the background, replaced by a heroic, younger generation of gods. In Christianity, this same phenomenon was the focal point of the 4th and 5th Century CE Church councils. Up until that time, the dominant doctrine was contained in the Apostles’ Creed, which was clearly monotheistic, and described God and Messiah as two distinct and different entities. With the councils, a big mish-mash occurred, with Jesus becoming part of a collective “Godhead” and lower deities being re-cast as “saints”. God Himself, as with the Pagans, receded into the background. At the same time, the various councils became so acrimonious, accompanied by anathemas and expulsions, that the average Ghristian was loath to go anywhere near the Bible, either “Old Testament” or “New”. This corresponded to the onset of the Dark Ages, a time of general illiteracy.

    It’s curious, that this period also corresponded to a time during which Jews and Christians were viewed not from a scriptural or ideological viewpoint, but as a matter of “tribalism”: Christians were correct, simply because they were “us”; and Jews were wrong, simply because they were “them”. No scriptures needed to be resorted to at all.

    I notice that lately in the US, as the validity of the Bible has been viciously attacked by those on the “Left”, the “Left” has also become tribal in its thinking: One needn’t have any knowledge of the issues at hand, to have implacable opinions about the opposing political camp; and in fact, hardly anyone on the left (save Quigley, of course) seems to have the slightest understanding about real issues such as Big Government, Secure Borders, Equality, etc. It’s all about, as one contributor pointed out, which “Victim Group” one belongs to.

    I’ve rambled on, beyond any possibility of readers being interested.

    Shalom shalom 🙂

49. Yes study the Bible but if you open it up for discussion be ready also to open your minds otherwise don’t bother…it would be a farce and insult to the Jews.

50. YOu know, he might be right, More knowledge of the Torah amongst Gentiles would tend to increase respect for the People whose History and relationship with the Creator it is.

    One thing the writer is not exactly correct in is that although the Puritans gave more cosiferation to the Jews, it was not enough to allow them to come back legally into England. To this day there is no legal document allowing or inviting Jews back into England, after having been expelled in 1290.

    The whole prosperity of England was based on the wool they assiduously garnered from huge flocks of sheep, and their business dealings were mainly with Flanders. Well many of the major business people in Flanders were Jews. Actually Cromwell advised and was supportive of inviting the Jews back to England, and the Protectorate or Governors had a meeting about it. Cromwell was voted down. So that was that….. for a while.

    What happened then was that with the huge amount of business done by the Jews, it was neccessary for them to have warehouses along the Thames, and they would come over on a very temporary basis. These visits became longer and so one. Eventually a couple brought their wives and families also for visits,very quietly. It grew from there, until they stayed permanently, living very modestly and without any show.

    And that, folks is how the Jews returned to England. They were originally Sephardim, from Spain and Portugal, settled in Flanders, prospered there, and then to England. The Ashkenazim, came much later when the Russian pogroms got too much to bear.