You are right about the bricks. You are wrong abut the Tanach being the gospel of Jesus. You are also wrong about it deteriorating. Conservative Christians are Israel's best friend.
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The Pauline Paradox
- Thread starter Ben Avraham
- Start date
You are right about the bricks. You are wrong abut the Tanach being the gospel of Jesus. You are also wrong about it deteriorating. Conservative Christians are Israel's best friend.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
You're overly simplifying Paul. The whole gospel of grace idea really comes from Augustus. It was also promoted by Luther, who was under Augustine thought. They read Paul as a Christian, and thus lost much of his message.
Paul hardly focuses on Jesus dying. He mentions it for sure, but its always in a larger context. Paul, especially in 1 Corinthians, speaks quite a bit about the Kingdom of G-d, and how it will soon replace the Kingdom of Earth. It's largely the same message that Jesus was teaching. An apocalyptic message.
The big difference between Paul and Jesus is the audience. Yes, Jesus says that one must keep the commandments. Jesus was talking to Jews though. The commandments are for Jews. Paul wasn't talking to Jews. That is why he said they don't have to follow the commandment, because Gentiles don't have to follow the commandments. For a Jew, following the commandments was still important for him.
Again, they are talking to two audiences, and thus that is why the message is different.
I didn't say anything about Paul being a prophet. I also never mentioned 2 Peter.
Paul teaching about the Jerusalem sect, and having approval isn't just from Paul. Acts agrees. So him being his own witness doesn't work here. More so, Paul wasn't being his own witness anyway. He was relating a story, a story that could be checked quite easily, a story his follower would have known anyway.
Also, John 5:31 isn't saying that someone can't say something without another person being their to verify it. John 5:31 is talking about a very specific ordeal. More in the vein of a court situation. You need to read verses in their context.
Paul never taught Christianity. Paul was a Jew, who took a Jewish message to Gentiles. He wasn't saying he was writing the Word of G-d. So you can't fault him on that. Revelations doesn't talk about Paul, so it doesn't even pay to go there.
As for Galatians 1:8, just to begin, you need to read things in context. Taking one verse, out of context, and claiming it means something really doesn't hold up. Paul here is not saying that those who speak differently than him are accursed. The message Paul is delivering is not his own, which is why he uses we, but one from G-d, or Christ.
When he talks about the angel, he referring to the practice of some Jewish preachers who claimed their messages came from an angel from heaven. It was actually a common claim. Paul's point was that his message came from G-d, or Christ. He was speaking out against people who wanted to prefer the gospel of Christ, or confuse people.
Did I say anything about something being holy? Why must you try to attack my beliefs, which you don't have any idea what they are, in order to try to discredit me? You have absolutely no idea what my beliefs are, but you're trying to discredit me based on that ignorance. If you can't keep the personal attacks out of this, there is no reason to continue to respond, as it is clear that you have no real want to actually have a discussion.
Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
You say above that Paul was not talking to the Jews. Whom was he talking to in the synagogues of the Jews? All his life, from his first station in Damascus and until his last in Rome, he never left the Jews in peace. (Acts 9:1,2 and 28:17) Perhaps did he think that the synagogue of the Jews was a good place to go after the Gentiles? Kind of weird, don't you think so? The point is that he never decided to go to the Gentiles because he was never assigned to the Gentiles. If you read Acts 15:7 Peter confessed that he, Peter, was the one assigned for the Gentiles. Paul was present at that Council in Jerusalem and did not say a word. If you ask me, he was embarrassed to have lied all along that he was the apostle of the Gentiles.
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Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
HaShem have mercy on us and keep us far away from our "best friends!" When Hitler had his concordat ready to be signed by Pope Pius XI and blindly observed by Pope Pius XII, the Protestants in general including our "best friends" had added a prayer to their liturgy in their churches for the success of the Third Reich which, besides the war itself, it was about the Final Solution of the Jewish People in Europe.
Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
Oh! Really! So, I am wrong about the Tanach being the gospel of Jesus! Tell me, was Jesus a Jew or was he not? Is the Tanach the gospel of the Jews or it is not? As the NT was the gospel of Paul and of all Christians, the Tanach was the gospel of Jesus and of all Jews. Agree with me or you still don't?
Desert Snake
Veteran Member
The Jewish Tanach wasn't compiled in the time of Jesus's presence in Israel.
Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
The Jewish Tanach was compiled about 400 years before Jesus was born. At the time of Jesus, he could open the Tanach anywhere and deliver a Shabbat sermon in any Synagogue. Every time Jesus referred to the Word of God, he had the Tanach in his mind. How about the NT? He never even dreamed it would ever rise. You can have an idea of what I have in mind right now.
Desert Snake
Veteran Member
Jesus wouldn't have used Rabbinical interpretation. The group that you seem to be claiming to represent, is who Jesus was constantly arguing with. Hence, all of this is pretty much moot. Yes, Jesus knew the Scripture; He also used it to rebuke those Pharisees, etc,
I'm not sure why you are claiming to represent that group, anyway, because your theology differs from it.
/you don't have a literal satan etc
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You just read Act 4:13 and agreed with me that they were uneducated.Actually, you now agree with me that they were not illiterate.
Be honest. You are an educated man. Don't tell me you don't know the difference between uneducated and illiterate. In my last post I explained what uneducated meant for them.
John wrote one which is the favorite gospel of most Christians and Peter wrote 2 books.
Faith in spiritual matters is not logical. It is illogical to the natural man that Jesus walked on water. That can ony b e accepted by faith.
You have the quote backwards---Where knowledge ends, faith begins.
Wrong again. What we can see does not need to be accepted by faith. God tells us not only to get knowledge but to gain understanding with it(Pr 4:5).
Then why did he go around teaching? Foolish statements make the speaker foolish
Congratulations on having the ability to look into man's heart and tell that they are truly a Christian.
Do you know that I am the world's best Bible scholar? I also sell land in Florida to sell. If you don't want land, I have a bridge in Brooklyn at a bargain price.
Many will say to Me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name in in Your name cast out demons and in your name perform many miracles? And then I will declare to them, " I never knew you, depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness." Mt 7:22-23
The gospel of the Tanach is very different than the gospel of Jesus. The way of salvation, maybe the Bibles most important doctrine, is the just the opposite in the OT and the NT.
The NT is not the gospel of Paul. It is the gospel of Jesus, the Christ.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
So what we have is Acts, and the Pauline Epistles. Why should we take the account in Acts as the end all on this subject? Why should we trust Acts, which was written by an unknown author, who didn't know Paul, who tells us that he compiled his story from a variety of other sources (making him at best second or third hand), and disagrees with our first hand account?
Acts: 9 has nothing to do with this discussion. It describes a time before Paul was preaching. It was a time in which he was persecuting those who followed Jesus. So it really has little relevance here. It also predates the time in which Paul was assigned to be the apostle to the Gentiles. Really then, it's out of context.
Acts 28:17, you also took out of context. Paul was in Rome, under house arrest. We are told by Paul, in his letters to the Romans, that he is going to Rome basically as a jumping off point to a larger mission. He is asking the Jewish Christians there to receive him for the time being, so he can begin a larger trip. In Acts, what we see is that Paul is under arrest, and while the Romans wanted to let him go free, the local Jews didn't approve of that. Which is why he calls on local leaders of the Jews in order to argue his case.
What we are told is that the local Jewish leaders had not received any negative news about him, and thus, had been left in peace. After that, we are told that he lived in Rome for two years, and welcomed those who came to him. Again, leaving Jews in peace.
So what you've done is taken two verses out of context. The first one is talking not about Jews, but those who followed Jesus. The second one talks about him addressing Jewish leaders to plead his case, and that they had received no ill words of him.
And really, going to the synagogues to address Gentiles wouldn't have been all that weird. There was a group of people called G-d-fearers, who were Gentiles that followed parts of Judaism, and worshipped G-d. Those gentiles would be the ones most open to the Jesus movement, as it was a Jewish movement, but didn't require one to be a Jew in order to fully be accepted into it.
More so, you ignore everything in between. For instance, in Chapter 15, we see that Paul is welcomed by the church in Jerusalem, which was Jewish, and we are told that Paul spends his time witnessing to Gentiles. In verse 25, we are even told that the Jerusalem sect, again made of Jews, accepted the mission of Paul to the Gentiles, and in fact sent some of their own to go with him.
If we look at Paul, we see that he tells his followers that he is the apostle to the Gentiles. We know that the receivers of his letters were Gentiles. So we can safely assume that Paul primarily spoke to Gentiles, as the letters we have of his are primarily addressed to Gentiles.
The NT was never the Gospel of Paul. The Gospels and many of the books weren't written until after Paul was dead. For Paul, a Jew, he would have relied on Hebrew Scripture, and in fact, throughout his works, we can see him referencing Hebrew scripture.
Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
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Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
What do you mean, that Jesus was a Christian? Jesus never even dreamed that Christianity would ever rise. The way of salvation according to the gospel of Jesus which was the Tanach was taught by Jesus himself when he said we must listen to "Moses" aka the Law. (Luke 16:29-31) If you can't read the Tanach, at least focus when you read the gospel of Paul aka the NT. Luke 16:29-31 is in the NT if I am to remind you of.
Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
Does one have to look deeply into men's hearts to see how anti-Jewish they can be? Books tell us about their wrongdoings through pogroms, blood libels, Crusades, Inquisition and last but not least, the Holocaust.
He was much more than a Christian. He is the source of Christianity.
Wow, you are really gifted. First you can look into the hearts of men and tell if they are a Chrisians and now you can look into the heart of Jesus and tell us what he never dreamed. Remarkable.
I read the O.T. more than I do the NT. Again you show you lack understanding of the passage you quoted,. Of course we should listen to Moses, but he never preached the gospel. He told us about God's law and the law does not save anyone, it tells us what sin is so we can try to avoid sinning.
Now go read how Abram became righteous and make that the standard of the gospel.
You have to look into a person heart to know if they are a Christian. Therefore you can't blame things like the inquisitions on Christians.
Titus 1:16 - They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless or any good deed.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
Not really. It may be part of the NT, but being Christian doesn't mean that I have to have trust in it. I don't think the Bible is literally true, or the literal word of G-d, which allows me to treat it as a collection of books, and those books individually. I treat the books as I would any other historical work. The idea of taking the Bible literally true, at least among Christians, is a relatively new idea that started around the 1900s, as a way to fight back against the critical scholarship what was going at that time.
Not really. Three issues here. First, while we don't have any NT works preceding Paul, that doesn't mean all that much. Paul wasn't writing scripture. Paul was writing letters. He was corresponding to others. He had no idea his works would be collected and kept. And not all of his works were. We are missing at least three letters from Paul, that we know of as he referenced them, and we are missing all the letters addressed to Paul. So we are only seeing one side of the conversation.
So we know Paul wrote more, and we can assume others wrote as well. We can assume that because the author of Luke/Acts tells us this. He states clearly that he is compiling various written and oral records in order to compile his work. So we know there was other literature as well. The big thing though is that we are talking about an oral society. The vast majority of the population was illiterate. So they passed on information orally. While Paul may be the first source we have today, it doesn't mean he was the first that we had. In fact, Paul even tells us that he relied on some oral sources as well.
Second, the NT wasn't taken from the letters of Paul. There is absolutely no evidence for that. It is somewhat possible that maybe the author of Luke/Acts used Paul's letters as a source, but he also used many other sources, and at times, contradicts what Paul said. The Gospels show no awareness of Paul though, and Paul doesn't even deal with the vast majority of what is in the Gospels, so it wouldn't make sense for them to borrow from Paul. Many of the author NT writers also seem unaware of Paul, or add to the conversation things that Paul never mentioned. So no, nothing really was written from the Letters of Paul.
Third, Acts isn't the only work that says that Jesus was the son of G-d. The Gospels beat them to that. More so, I don't accept that Jesus was literally the son of G-d, so I can dismiss it.
There were Jewish-Christians. They were Jews who followed Jesus. Scholars readily accept that as we can look at people like James, the brother of Jesus, a Jew, or Peter, a Jew, or Paul, a Jew, who followed Jesus. We have evidence of such groups existing until at least the fourth century.
They were simply Jews who believed that Jesus was the messiah, and thus followed him. Not at all like Jews-for-Baal, as Baal was a different god. Jesus wasn't seen as a god, but as the messiah.
There is nothing to suggest that. He didn't have an anti-Jewish gospel, he was a Jew himself, and was proud of that fact. And there is no evidence that the Jewish leaders left him, or that he fell into a miserable life. Acts leaves it off with little information, but does tell us that over the two years, he was visited by Jews and had conversations with them.
Again, two different audiences. Paul had a message for Gentiles, actually he took the message of Jesus to the Gentiles. Jesus spoke to Jews. I've said that all along.
As for the Jewish leaders, the source that we have, one that you have quoted numerous times, as in Acts, tells us that the Jewish leaders had no problems with Paul, and met with him from time to time. It doesn't say anything about being disappointed in him, or that they hoped to meet a Rabbi from Jerusalem. In fact, if we look at Paul's letter to the Romans, we can clearly see that he introduced himself before ever traveling to Rome. So they would have known who they were meeting.
You have no evidence for that. First of all, Acts tells us that Paul was the ringleader of the Nazarenes, not Peter. Second, we know almost nothing about the Nazarenes, as they are only briefly mentioned. To state anything else is simply making things up.
The Gentiles were still Gentiles. They never adopted Judaism. They were never circumcised, they didn't follow Jewish law.
As for overturning Nazarene Synagogues, again, no evidence at all. There is no evidence for that claim, especially when we are told that Paul, from the get go, was the leader of the Nazarenes.
You're taking Acts 9:26 out of a historical context. This is shortly after Paul had converted, as in, just previously, he was persecuting those of the Jesus movement. So yes, at first he was rejected because they were afraid Paul was trying to persecute them.
If you read the very next verses, we are told that he won them over, and was invited to meet with them. That after they learned what he was preaching, and learned more about him, they were receptive to him. You need to take things in context.
There is no evidence that Silas was a Nazarene, and again, we are told that Paul was the leader of the Nazarenes. That is almost the only thing we know about the Nazarenes. To say more about them is making things up.
There is no evidence about what you said about Paul trashing the gospel, or the Noahide laws, or the such. You're adding things that aren't there.
I can quote it actually. Galatians 2:8 tells us, from Paul's own words, that he was called to go to the Gentiles. Acts 9:15 tells us that Paul was called to speak to the Gentiles. Galatians 1:15-16 Paul states that he goes to Gentiles, as in those he is talking to. Basically every letter he has is addressed to Gentiles (besides Romans, where he is talking to a church he has never been to before, and asking them just to receive him).
No. Paul was a Jew. He was a Jew until he died. He never founded Christianity (it simply states that the term Christian was first used in Antioch. It does not state that Paul started the movement). In fact, Paul couldn't start a movement that was already started.
He never lost his Jewish identity. He continues to speak of it throughout his ministry. I suggest maybe you read Paul to see that, instead of reading Acts.
Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
Once again. "There were no Jewish-Christians or Christian-Jews." The Jews who followed Jesus were not Christians because Christianity did not exist during Jesus' lifetime. Jesus never even dreamed that Christianity would ever rise. He never saw Paul or a single Christian in his short life. The Jews who followed Jesus were either members of the Sect of the Nazarenes or associated to it as some of the Pharisees. (Acts 15:5-7)
To use a Jew as Jesus was and turn him into a Greek demigod in order to promote a Hellenistic religion, that's an anti-Jewish gospel with the intent on Replacement Theology. Read Mat. 1:18. A demigod was a Greek concept of the son of a god with an earthly woman. In the case of Jesus, God with Mary.
Jesus did speak to Jews all his life but never with a single Christian as they did not exist at his time. Besides, Jesus never spoke to Paul.
Ben Avraham
Well-Known Member
Do you mean to imply that the Popes had nothing to do with the Inquisition? Read about the history of the Inquisition. They were the sole organizers of their murderous atrocities to force Jews to become Christians. The Jews who fought back their attempts would end up in the public squares of the Inquisition to be burn to death for all to watch.