I don’t think that’s right. Suicide is the desire to end ones life. Here it’s the desire to save the life of another.
Let me try…using my own words.
The first statement was, “Biblical prophecies are written after the events.” i.e., they aren’t really prophecies. (I predict John F. Kennedy will be assassinated.)
Your reply was, “Is this true? All the prophecies listed in the Old Testament were all written after the events of Jesus?”
But that doesn’t follow at all. The original statement could include the claim that the prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians was written after the destruction of Jerusalem…but still long before the events of Jesus.
That is the gigantic middle ground you left out.
The claim is that all the prophecies in the Old Testament were written after those events…not that they were all written after the time of Jesus.
Wouldn’t the double meaning of the English word “maiden” be a more accurate translation? In the sense that in those societies a young unmarried woman better be a virgin, or else?
Every trench I dug in the military had a hole to kick a grenade into.
Essentially, he built the grenade (starting with the creation) and then threw it. Given that then it is suicide… But being GOD should grant at least Superman or equivalent levels of ability, so if you can’t die then it doesn’t really count. And it doesn’t matter if at the time he was unsure of this because prior to assuming human form he knew what the outcome was.
When I was a kid being raised Roman Catholic, the sinful version was called “The sin of despair”
Giving one’s life would be considered different.
We should also note that the prophecy in question comes from the Book of Isaiah. This was written ~300 years after Isaiah’s death. As we already noted with Balaam, quite a lot can change in that time, and so we must question where exactly this prophecy came from. It is awfully specific for something which is that old and, if we’re honest, it’s just as unlikely that Isaiah was as much a prophet of Yahweh as Balaam was. There’s no extra-Biblical evidence of Jewish monotheism prior to ~600BC.
Let’s also look at the whole paragraphs from the work in question, not just single partial sentences.
[Quote=Book of Isaiah]
A Rebellious Nation
2 Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth!
For the Lord has spoken:
“I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
3 The ox knows its master,
the donkey its owner’s manger,
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.”
4 Woe to the sinful nation,
a people whose guilt is great,
a brood of evildoers,
children given to corruption!
They have forsaken the Lord;
they have spurned the Holy One of Israel
and turned their backs on him.
5 Why should you be beaten anymore?
Why do you persist in rebellion?
Your whole head is injured,
your whole heart afflicted.
6 From the sole of your foot to the top of your head
there is no soundness—
only wounds and welts
and open sores,
not cleansed or bandaged
or soothed with olive oil.
7 Your country is desolate,
your cities burned with fire;
your fields are being stripped by foreigners
right before you,
laid waste as when overthrown by strangers.
8 Daughter Zion is left
like a shelter in a vineyard,
like a hut in a cucumber field,
like a city under siege.
9 Unless the Lord Almighty
had left us some survivors,
we would have become like Sodom,
we would have been like Gomorrah.
[…]
Then Isaiah said, “Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? 14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you[c] a sign: The virgin[d] will conceive and give birth to a son, and[e] will call him Immanuel.[f] 15 He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, 16 for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. 17 The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria.”
[/quote]
Right off the bat, who the hell is Immanuel? Did Mary have a different son with God than just Jesus? There is no known actual Immanuel in Jewish history that anyone had sought to pair with this character. The Wikipedia suggests that it could be a reference to Hezekiah. Personally, I would suggest Josiah.
Josiah is the monarch who seems to have initiated the process of converting the realm to monotheism and having the OT written. As monarch, he is the son of God’s nation (also true for Hezekiah) which, as we see from earlier in the chapter is referred to as Daughter Zion - which has birthed many people, though they turned against her. Given that the whole of chapter 5 previous to this was talking about God’s land and we see the land being called a “her” before this, is there any good reason to disclude the land as being the “alma” in question?
Josiah’s reign comes right after the end of the Babylonian Captivity, which is the time period where the King of Assyria - Cyrus the Great - orders that the Jews rebuild the Temple.
Remember, we’ve already seen that ancient prophets were being rewritten to support monotheism. We also see Josiah’s high priest “finding” Deuteronomy - supposedly the lost weird if Good, given to Moses, but which textual analysis shows was written in the 6th century, some ~800 years later than the Bible chronology indicates.
We’re not looking at the work of a group of honest, politically unmotivated writers. They are creating a set of works which support the single, united monarchy of Israel, the single God who rules through him, and the ally (Cyrus) by whose favor he is able to rule the land. Isaiah discourages rebellion (against the Assyrians, probably) and lays all sorts of favors on Cyrus, the nation’s benefactor.
We see in Isaiah 10:5 on that the Persians - Zoroastrians at the time - have been sent into the “godless” (e.g. polytheistic) nation, as an example of the greatness of the one, monotheistic deity - presumably called both Yahweh and Ahura Mazda.
In 10:13, we note that the King of Assyria had removed the borders of all the nations. Indeed, Cyrus conquered and joined together all of the middle Eastern countries (excluding Egypt - but the process may have still been ongoing at the time Isaiah was written, so they wouldn’t have known that he wouldn’t make it all the way).
Did Jesus build the Temple? No. Did he unite the nations? No. Was he the King of Assyria: Definetely not. Can you think of anywhere in Jesus’s life that he had anything to do with Assyria? You could possibly argue that one of the Magi could have been, but then why don’t we see three kings in Isaiah? And, as already said (though I haven’t cited anything in this thread) the whole story about Bethlehem is bunk anyways.
While the Wikipedia and I disagree on the identity of Immanuel, we both agree and I don’t think there’s really much ambiguity - for the time that the work was written - that the King of Assyria in question is Cyrus the Great.
And we should note that the word “Messiah” in Ancient Hebrew simply means “leader”. I think we can all agree that there are usually multiple leaders in the land. My land, for example, has a mayor and a governor and a president. In the period that the Book of Isaiah was written, the were at least Josiah and Cyrus, and if we allow the book to cover the whole period from when Isaiah actually lived to when the Book of Isaiah was written, there’s a lot of leaders that the book could, potentially, be referring to each time it uses the word “leader”. You would really need to read the whole thing for sufficient context - and brush up on your 9th to 6th century Middle Eastern history - to really fill in who any particular instance of the word is referring to.
But, certainly the work is not talking about Jesus. I would vote that other than a few bits of poetic license, it’s a fairly straightforward overview of the 7th and 6th centuries, as written in the mid-6th century. But even if we exclude that possibility, if you actually read the whole damn thing, not just selectively pull out a few context-free partial statements, it’s pretty clear that Jesus didn’t fulfill any part of the text. He may well have been born to a young woman. That’s pretty true of most folk.
I should also note that Josiah attained the throne quite young, so it would make sense to reference his birth and youth.
(Apologies for typos in the previous post. I’m writing on my phone.)
Oh yes, another of the prophets who seems rather questionable is Elijah. One of the acts of Elijah that the Bible recounts is how God ordered him to go and anoint Hazael king of Aram Damascus.
However, the Tel Dan Stele is generally believed that have been commissioned by Hazael and made around ~800 BC has this particular line:
This being a reference to Ba’al Hadad.
OK. Thanks for sharing your own words.
Suicide isn’t the desire to end one’s life. I haven’t committed suicide if I decide I’d like to kill myself, then change my mind and don’t. It isn’t the desire; it’s the taking.
I find this very interesting. I suppose the question from this would be; if we imagine someone’s taken drugs that result in a rapturous good humour, and in their happy delirium jump in front of a train because that’s how they become a unicorn… would we call that suicide?
And, beyond that, I would argue that our soldier diving on a grenade is in despair; he doesn’t believe there’s any way out for his buddies other than to sacrifice his own life. That’s not really a happy situation.
For the sake of argument, I also found another interesting point on this subject from a religious perspective; that the “sinful” part of suicide is that one’s life belongs to God, and thus it is wrong for us to end it just as it would be wrong to destroy something belonging to a friend. With that view, Jesus’s death may have been suicide, but not sinful, because that death was God’s plan.
So thinking about sinning is o.k.?
IANA Christian. But my guess would be that thinking about murder is not the sin of murder. It may be the sin of thinking about murder. If that’s a sin.
Mathew 5:21 and on would suggest otherwise.
[QUOTE=JESUS]
21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister**[c] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’[d] is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
[/QUOTE]
And he repeats the same concept with adultry, etc
I don’t think that cite is problematic to my thinking on that. It refers to judgement for each sin, but it doesn’t say that it’s the same judgement or the same crime.
Comparing the rest of the chapter equates ‘thinking it == doing it’
[QUOTE=JESUS]
Adultery
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’[e] 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
Divorce
31 “It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’[f] 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
[/QUOTE]
I wouldn’t say it was exactly suicide, more like martydom.
Marty! You’ve got to go with me, Marty! Back to 33 AD!
from January (I missed this at the time) in reply to me:
I didn’t mean he didn’t perceive the risk, that it could go down that way. And a time must have come when he began to realize things were shaping up in that direction. What I meant was that I don’t think he went into it from the outset expecting this outcome.
I don’t know if Jesus even temporarily died.
Most Christian belief is that Jesus and God are the same being. So if Jesus genuinely died for three days then God was also dead for those three days. Creation had three days in which God did not exist.
Leaving aside the theological implications of that, there’s scriptural evidence that refutes this idea. The Bible says that after Jesus “died” there were earthquakes and other signs to mark his passage. These are evidence that God still existed while Jesus was “dead”. And if God and Jesus are the same being then Jesus still existed even if his body was dead.
There’s also the resurrection. God obviously had to still exist after the crucifixion in order to resurrect Jesus on the third day. If God and Jesus were truly dead they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves back from the dead. So it’s clear that God and Jesus still existed in some form during the three days when Jesus was “dead”.