I have always wondered what the accounts of ‘The Lord’ raining fire down on this group or that group, or borrowed mythology, or the rantings of some seemingly insane '‘prophets’, had to do with anything.
Are there any Christian denominations that have jettisoned the Old Testament as scripture and maybe just use it as historical reference?
I doubt it.
Christians need the OT to validate Jesus being the messiah.
The OT tells of a long-awaited messiah. Christians believe that Jesus is that messiah. Without the OT to tell what was expected of a messiah, Jesus “messiahship” would have no meaning.
Zev Steinhardt
I’d say no. There were gnostic groups, though, that distinguished the G-d of the OT from the G-d of the NT, saying that the OT G-d was evil, and the NT G-d good.
I’m going to have to go look for it, but I thought someone mentioned in the last six weeks a Christian denomination that does not view the OT as the word of God, either because it has (in their view) been superseded or because they believed that Jesus brought the Truth and the earlier Scriptures were just ideas people had before he got here.
Ironically, one of the earliest prompts for the creation of the New Testament was a person, Marcion (ca. 150), who did believe that the Jews had been rejected and that the OT was to be ignored. When he compiled a list of worthwhile books he deliberately eliminated the OT, all the Gospels except Luke (from which he excised the first couple of chapters), and the Letter to the Hebrews. Other Christians began compiling lists of the works that they felt were inspired to include those works and those lists eventually developed into the New Testament.
Jettisoning the OT would be like chucking the original Star Trek. If that happened, the TNG episode where Scotty returns would make no sense! “It’s green” would just be a stupid joke, and not a clever inside gag.
I had a secretary many years ago that said her church did not use the OT. I never asked her the name of her church. I agree with Zev in that Christianity needs the OT, however the main reason I would give is to establish “original sin”, because without that there would be no need to be “saved”. In fact, I read on a deist site about a Revolutionary War leader, whose cousin was a minister. The cousin told him that without “original sin” you could dispense with Christianity. After several weeks this leader wrote his cousin and said that after much consideration he was afraid Christianity would have to go. :eek:
Kniz, the Abraham story/account is just as important for Christians as the original sin story. So are many others.
Well I was told once by a Jewish co-worker, that when read in Hebrew, the so-called Messianic Prophecies that Christians rely on just don’t work. Only when translated to English can one torture an interpretation which seems to point to Jesus.
As far as Original Sin goes, where is the Biblical basis for such a thing? This doctrine was cooked up by theologists like Aquinas, who based part of his theology of Original Sin on Romans 5:12, which in St. Jerome’s Vulgate contains a mistranslation.
Original sin comes from Adam and Eve disobeying God and eating the fruit of knowledge. Without the concept of original sin there would be no need for Jesus to come and save us from our sins. I am Sparticus, give me a similar equation between the Abraham story/account and Christian docrine. Are you speaking of the entire story of Abraham or just the story of Isaac? In any case tell how it relates to Christianity.
Ya mean Jack Chick is wrong?! Oh, Lordy!
Where in the Bible is the idea that Adam & Eve’s sin accrues to all of Mankind?
So non-English speakers rely on English versions of the Bible to support the Christian theology? Latin and Greek speakers during the early Christian period said, “Well, it’ll all make sense when a new language comes along in a thousand years”?
I think you’re overstating your point.
It can probably be found somewhere in the Book of Revelations. :rolleyes:
I may be overstating my point, yes. Lee Strobel states in “The Case For Christ” that there are hundreds of Messianic Prophecies to be found in the OT. I really don’t think that this is Christian Theology, as it seems to be only Fundamentalists, predominantly English-speaking, finding all these ‘prophecies’.
only if you classify all conservative Christians as Fundamentalists- it had been that ALL Christians- Catholic, Orthodox & Reformational- held that the Hebrew Scriptures prophesy of Jesus (the BIG three being the Suffering Servant passages of Isaiah- esp 53; David’s lament in Psalm 22 ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’; and Daniel 9- the prophecy of 70 ‘weeks’ to the coming of Messiah & then the fall of Jerusalem). Non-supernaturalist “Christians”, disbelieving in predictive prophecy,
ignore the prophecies.
Btw, RE Original Sin- the Hebrew Scriptures do speak of being conceived & born sinful but it doesn’t make a big deal of OS- the
equivalent in Judaic thought is that each person has both a good inclination & an evil one. Alas, Augustinian/Calvinist C’nity denies the good one exists or subjects it to the evil one. Eastern Orthodox C’nity does not emphasize OS in such a way.
Christian docrine is not necessarily dependant on verses in the Bible. here is just one example of the docrine I am referring to:
or this second example:
[Quote]
Creation had originally been perfect, but Adam fell and mankind has since been in bondage to sin; but through Christ, the second Adam or Last man, the world or mankind are being restored to their original perfection. Thus in the Christian doctrine of man the central theme is that Christ is the Creator’s proper (=own) Man.’[2]
To make this scheme more intelligible, Paul had to emphasise both the parallels and the contrasts between Adam and Christ, peace be upon both of them. Adam was first made in the image of God, but
Christ is the true and final image of God. Adam’s disobedience plunged mankind into ruin, but Christ’s obedience restored mankind. Adam brought wrath and guilt upon mankind, Christ has brought
grace and acquittal.
—The OT tells of a long-awaited messiah.—
That’s not how the Jews see it. The idea of singular messiah who is promised from the beggining and is personally important is largely a Christian re-interpretation (which, as you can see in Paul, is at times rather tortured). The Jews expected a promised messiah (not a “the” messiah) to deal with the particular theological situation that arose with the Roman occupation. But who the messiah was wasn’t important: it was the things he was supposed to accomplish. Since Jesus didn’t accomplish any of them, Jewish theologians are a little confused as to why anyone thinks they should herald him as the messiah. When you were supposed to return Israel to its former temple/state glory, riding on two asses (due to a mistranslation) and being called Emmanuel by your narrators (but no one else) isn’t all that impressive, especially considering that the people who wrote the stories were familiar with the texts they thought they were drawing prophecies from. The vast majority of the messianic theology at the time leading up to Jesus wasn’t even part of Scripture to begin with: it came later, more informally.
Original Sin: An Atheist Evolutionist Got it Right
“Original Sin” and its relation to evolutionary theory was discussed by an outspoken evolutionist, Richard Bozarth, in the American Atheist magazine. The following excerpts come from “The Meaning of Evolution” (September 1979, p. 30):
“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death, so then death spread to all men inasmuch as all sinned”). But the Greek word translated here by the phrase “inasmuch as” is eph’hô, which in Latin was translated, not quite literally, as in quo; Augustine then took it to mean “in whom,” referring to Adam. In other words, Augustine would have read Paul to say that death spread throughout the whole human race because we always sin “in” Adam. But this is not Paul’s meaning, for if it had been he would have chosen the Greek phrase en hô. In this passage death seems to be a later consequence of personal sin: in other words, according to this interpretation of the Greek, Paul here seems to imply that our individual deaths are the result of our own personal sinfulness, not of Adam’s primordial sin.
garcolga, I’m giving you Christian doctrine as generally accepted today, not worrying about how it got that way and certainly not related to my own personal belief. 
The notion of Jesus as Messiah goes back to (or is documented in Christianity by) the letters of Paul, in which he uses the Greek word [symbol]cristos[/symbol] (christos) to identify Jesus. Christos means “anointed” just as the Hebrew word rendered in English as messiah or (meshiach from the Yiddish) means “anointed.”
As has been pointed out previously in several threads on this board, there are a number of discrepancies between what occurred during the life of Jesus and the actual “messianic” prohecies found in Jewish Scripture. This is not the result of tortured English translations. Paul established (or spread) the idea that Jesus was Messiah and the evangelists later selected certain passages to reinforce the idea. The notion of Jesus as Messiah dates to the oldest traditions of Christianity–and have been dismissed by Jewish scholars as incorrect for as long.
Bozarth has been fighting Fundamentalist Christians too long. Christianity does not need special creation to embrace the idea of Original Sin. Two easy rebuttals to his view:
Certainly there are many Christians who are accurately described by Bozarth’s statement, but his failure to qualify which Christians he is describing introduces the error of overgeneralization to his observation.
As to the Doctrine of Original Sin: The concept of sin proceeding from the first man was present in the Jewish community at the time of Jesus (although it was not a specific teaching). Various references to the notion show up in Christian Scripture, in the Patristic writings, and in the Jewish Book of Esdras (a non-Scriptural apocryphal work of the first century). Augustine of Hippo, in the 4th century, (not Thomas Aquinas in the 13th) is generally credited (or blamed) for producing the first coherent expression of a doctrine of original sin, that was later adopted by the church, but the idea that man “inherited” a sinful nature dates back at least to the first century and was not restricted to Christian theology.