The “two great laws” that Jesus gave — love God with all your heart and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself — were taken from the Torah, so you can’t credit Jesus for those.
What does seem original are the parts that virtually nobody but a few fringe cults like Mennonites observe — strict non-violence, returning good for evil, etc. Most red-blooded Christians today, in fact most people with any common sense, believe in punishing evil.
For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
His Crucifixion and Rising was everything that needed to be accomplished.
Yes. There were two types of slaves in Israel:
Debt slaves, who had be be freed after 3-6 year.
You get in debt, you work it off. Hardly evil. Many laws and customs protected them.
Prisoners of war, who were slaves until they converted to Judaism.
You lose a battle in ancient days they had two choices- kill you or enslave you. Or maybe you could be ransomed if your family had money.
Not very nice but the alternatives were worse.
You sound exactly like Trump telling the faithful that repairing sections of the border fence at taxpayer expense fulfills his promise of building a wall that Mexico will pay for.
As you quoted, Jesus said until ***everything ***is accomplished. If you had included a bit more of the passage, you would see that it’s referring to the Law AND the Prophets being fulfilled.
There is nothing in the Law or the Prophets about crucifixion and resurrection, so even if you believe they happened, they didn’t fulfill anything. However, there is a boatload in the Prophets about a Messiah who drives the invaders out of Israel, ushering in an age of universal peace and brotherhood, e.g.
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift sword against nation and they will no longer study warfare.”
or
“The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
When was any of that fulfilled?
I’m sorry to be blunt, but Christians are delusional when they say that Jesus ushered in a new age. He didn’t drive out the Romans, he was executed by them. He didn’t rule Israel in an era of peace, it was brutally destroyed even before most of the gospels were written.
The average Christian, who can’t even name the four gospels, has never read Jewish prophecy, and yet he’s so sure he knows Jesus fulfilled it. Jews, who know a little more about it, can plainly see that he didn’t.
If you want to say he’s ruling in heaven, knock yourself out, but there is no evidence of it on earth, and no visible effects of it.
None of which are liberal values? :rolleyes:
In any case, my point was that if two diametrically opposed views of the world both get support from the same book, it is not much of a guide.
As for the liberal values, some of which conservatives would probably claim also, Christianity ruled for a long time before the Enlightenment without coming up with these. I’m now reading a history of Venice, and it appears that most slaves 600 years ago or so were white, those captured in wars.
And please don’t go No True Christian on me. I’d figure those closer to Jesus and the saints like Augustine would have as least a good a view of what Jesus wanted than we do.
I’m reasonably sure that there are blessings before eating which require the washing of hands - where they come from, I don’t know. And I’m definitely not saying that Jewish law got it right. Just that one of the rare cases where it did, Jesus was against it.
And let’s not forget that the Jews living in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus were curiously unmoved by the “miraculous” events that supposedly took place. Christians did a lot better further from the scene in time and space where they could preach about things that never happened.
Many of the things Jesus supposedly did to fulfill the prophecies (like being born in Bethlehem) were retconned, and others fulfilled prophecies that didn’t even exist, like the virgin birth.
Schrodinger’s Salvation - a person is both saved and not saved, and you can’t tell until God or someone collapses the sin probability wave.
First, I would like a cite from the Bible that a foreign slave can be freed without his owner’s consent, simply by converting.
Second, you are mistaken about the source of foreign slaves. The verse I quoted in a previous post, from Lev 25, specifically says that you can just buy them from a foreign slave trader; it says nothing about war. On the contrary, God was typically displeased when the Israelites took prisoners of war, as in Numbers 31 — even though all the enemy men had been killed, Moses threw a fit when he found out the women had been spared.
According to the Torah, there are to be no male prisoners of war in the way we use the term, ever.
See Deut 20: 10-16. I’ll paraphrase:
If the Israelites threaten a distant city, and it throws open its gates and surrenders without a fight, then its citizens become slaves. But if they fight, then all the men are killed, and the women are plunder. No male POWs.
That’s for distant cities, and I don’t know if that rule was ever used.
For cities in Canaan, i.e. the Promised Land, the rule is simpler: kill everything that breathes — men, women, children, and babies. No POWs.
Worth mentioning that a version of “The Golden Rule” appears throughout recorded history in many, many civilisations, cultures and religions. It is not specifically “Christian” although it may be referred to in the bible.
I don’t know any other version that publicly notates the verses with their translation comments.
Thank you for the correction. I was muddling the choice of manuscript with the accuracy of the translation.
I’ve never heard the term before and with a quick skim of Wikipedia I don’t see anything similar to my beliefs.
Who knew 2000-year-old health codes might not be up to date on science? :eek:
Your interpretation is baffling.
Let me paraphrase the story without religious overtones.
You think that the point of the story is that Jack wants Phil to the follow Koala rule. But that interpretation doesn’t explain why Jack doesn’t follow the Dingo rule, and leave Jack also open to accusations of hypocrisy.
A better interpretation is Jack is pointing out to Phil that following the literal rules is not the goal. Phil is still a hypocrite, but Jack is not because Jack is not advocating blind adherence to the rules.
That’s nice…but it has absolutely nothing to do with the concerns I raise. It’s as if I told you I didn’t want to buy your car because it wont pass the DEQ test, and you respond that you like the fact that the seats are two-toned.
It’s absolutely relevant. It’s as if you told me you didn’t want to buy my car because it wont pass the DEQ test, and I respond that I like the fact that I have all the test results and don’t know of any other cars with published test results.
You did not address the fact that almost all of their “acclaimed” translators and scholars came from the same religious seminary, and that their “translation” supported the previously established teachings of that seminary. That fact that you liked the way the info is put together has absolutely nothing to do with the accuracy of the information itself.
Back when I was a senior warden for the local Episcopal Church I spent a lot of time looking through various Bibles with our parish priest, and one of the sources I used was this Bible research site. When I got to the NET Bible, this page(along with others from different sites) convinced me and the priest that we wouldn’t be using that particular translation.
They have published their notes on their translation choices. That gives everyone the means to check their translation. So instead of checking translation accuracy by reading a vague preface about translation approach or trying to second-guess the individuals’ motives, we actually read why they made the choices they did. As far as I know, no other version has done that.
It seems odd that you complain about Bible translations, but when a particular version is suggested, you don’t want to use it because it’s not a good translation. Pick a specific verse (from any version, I don’t care) and tell us why you think that instance is a good or bad translation. You think the NET version is not accurate, so it should be easy for you to find an example of poor translation–and their own notes will give us a starting point to evaluate the quality of the translation.
Did you take a look at my cites?
I skimmed it. It calls out specific verses. Do you care to pick one?
If the fact that these translations came from people picked for what they already believed and not for their academic credentials(except for the fact that they all came from the same school-what a coincidence!) and/or previous accredited works, and the fact that what they came up with matched up with what their school already believed in, then I don’t know what it would take to convince you that your preference of the NET over the KJV makes no sense. The link I provided does much more than just “call out specific verses”-It also calls to account the scholarship and purpose of this translation. The translations I have trouble with are the ones listed in that article(which is why I posted the link in the first place) and, since the author of that piece is more eloquent and learned then I am, I will stand aside and let you pick out one the examples he gave and tell us what is wrong with his analysis of any particular example.
A) Prodigal Son asks for his share of the inheritance. In effect, during that era, is wishing his father dead. Fairly disobedient. Also ends up sleeping with pigs, which to a Jew in that time is a decent sized no-no.
B) Jesus, IMO, is pointing out the silliness of the Pharisee’s literalism (as he’s embarking on a ministry of the spirit of the law is more important than it’s letter). Similar to how some today would tell a Christian fundamentalist today that if you want to discriminate against gays because of provisions in Leviticus, then you better stone them to death.