Nope, it is quite impossible. At first, I was arguing baised on the words of only one of the books of the torah. Now, you have given me the ability to argue about the actual books around at the time, and that makes my answer so much easier.
No, a jew living at the time could not have reasonabley believe that this Bar Kochba guy you keep talking about was any more of a Savior then Simon Magnus. Period.
Why, you might ask? Because, as I keep on saying, he did not fullfill the terms of the propachy. The story doesn’t talk about some guy who (suposedly) fullfilled the first three parts of the requirements, died, and failed to fufill the rest during the lifetime of the witnesses, but that is exactly what a person living at the time would see.
I would love to, but I used up all my good insults on that guy, the one who is dead now,(His name has slipped my mind. He was against gay rights) and when Jim Jeffords broke up the Singing Senators(Note: I realize it sounds like a parody, but it is as real a band as the one Dave Barry (lead guitarist) and Stephen King (vocals) play in, the Rock Bottom Remainders
I know full-well this is an off the cuff remark, but
in post 119, Bricker figured he could refute my claim that a jew who accepts jesus is not a jew, but a christian.
A hijack requires two people, and bricker took my off-the-cuff remark and ran with it.
I am hand waving? All your arguments have been refuted, by means of statements to which you have no comeback. In past threads you have assumed things as being true, then when people despute you, you have claimed they are simply wrong. When others have chaleged that point, you go off on an end run in which you try to explaine the logic behind your statements that doesn’t actually hold up. Have you actually read my refutations, or do you just assume that all logic leads to jesus, and ignore any facts to the contrary.
Now, I am dissmissing your laims, but that is do to the fact yours have no basis in logic, but instead seemingley rooted in a false belief that, as you have said, “Theoretically, a Jew could say that he accepts Jesus Christ as the Messiah,” Do you have any arguemnets to back up anything else, or any more past statements you want me to clarify?
When I say “at the time” I am referring to the time in which Bar Kochba was alive. The person seeing would NOT see anyone who died before fulfilling the requirements.
I’d like to explore your absolute dismissal of any reasonable Jew accepting Shimeon ben Kosiba a bit more.
You’ve studied Torah, you’ve said… do you recongize the Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph’s contributions in this area? You know – the guy who created the exegetical method upon which the entire freakin’ Mishnah is based?
So am I.I have asked this before, and once again, you are not answering the question. ::While looking at bricker’s eyes for any signs of dilated irises:: “Are.You.On.Drugs?”
We’re talking about the same thing. I supose I haven’t spelled things out clearly enough. Lets say that at the time of the bible, the story of jesus was largely true. If you are a somewhat healthy person living at the time with no interest in following this weird new rabbi, what you would no about him is that he claims to fullfill prophacies. However, you have only hearsay to prove the first few, and he has not fullfilled what he claims he can do, such as rebuild the temple, and bring all jews back to jerusalem. Then one day, you here he has been executed. Why didn’t you go to see him taken to the cross, be cause you can’t be expected to witness every single time the state executes a political prisoner. You have the option to go to the place of execution and actually see his dead body. Later, you here a claim that he has come backl from the dead, but as you haven’t seen him, and the prophacey has not been fufilled, you don’t care, and…wait, what?
No. There is no reason. He has to have been a desendant of King David’s to have been the guy people are looking for. Besides all the reasons I have all ready mentioned, he is not a descendant of David’s since his father “was god” and not a jewish male related to david. Now, no jew would be considered reasonable to hop on the band wagon of some new preacher who claims to he will fullfill the prophacy, because the torah takes a “wait and see” viewpoint. As he does not fullfill all the requirements, he is not the messiah.
Then ask a real question, would you?
No, I don’t. Any other questions?
Oh, you want to know why I don’t? Because he tries to explain away contradictions. While some of his explination are perfectly valid, not all are, and so I do not recognize the claim that his words have any worth in determining what “god” meant when he said certain horrifing things.
I think you (Bricker) overestimate the importance of Akiva. He was important, yes, but he was by no means a final authority on Torah, Talmud or anything else and was seen as a radical eccentric rather than reasonable in his own time. While he did accept bar Kokhba as the Kwisatz Ha… Moschiach, he was unique among the learned men of his times and was actually told (something to the effect of) “grass will be growing in your jawbones and the Messiah still will not have come”. Whether he was reasonable or sane is not a given point.
To be fair, Sen. Santorum has probably never read A LOT of books. When you spend as much time not reading as I bet he does, it’s hard to find time to look over the Bible.
This has NOTHING TO DO WITH JESUS. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Forget Jesus. I’m asking you if a reasonable Jew, living at the time Bar Kochba was living, could have believed that Bar Kochba was the moshiach. Nowhere does this mention, refer to, impinge upon, or imply Jesus.
Who is Bar Kochba again? As I have said, while I have read the torah, I am now longer a worshipper anymore, so when you said that name, I figured you where using yet another title that “Jews” for jesus" use for jesus, when trying to get converts. Let me do a quick googling of the name, and… Ah, he was a military general. A very sucessful one, too. Well, for the same reason Jesus could not have been the messiah, (He didn’t fulfill all the prophacies), nether did this guy. A jew living at the time would have to see all the signs before sidding with him. Those such as Akiva who did were fooling themselves, and were ignoring the words of the torah. I does not take one or two parts to be qualified, but all of them. Why would you even think he is even on the radar? So what if Akiva sided with him? Remember the parenthesis above?.
P.S. You have, as you said, not reacted to Sampiro’s post except to wait for me. Freaky. In the public forum, normally, people who hold an opinion are asked to defend it. Why not do so with Sampiro?
Well, in that case, my responce is then to ask you to read his post, but imagine added emphasis, and a stronger amount of scoffing at Akiva.
I figured it was something like that… I couldn’t quite get why you kept returning to, “Hey, his father was God, not a descendant of David,” when I had stopped talking about Jesus three examples ago. But that explains it. I would have made the distinction more clear, and even given a bit of background, but you had said earlier that you had studied Torah in depth, so I figured you’d be instantly familiar with the name and history.
Now we return to the “reasonable Jew” standard. I offered up the Bar Kochba example because Akiva was no ordinary schlub. He is regarded as one of the sages; his method of associating each traditional practice with a mitzvah is what built the Mishnah.
Akiva was mistaken, no question about it, in his belief that Bar Kochba was the moshiach. But was it completely unreasonable to at least adopt it as a working theory? I mean, here’s a guy that’s led the Jews in re-occupying Jerusalem, re-started sacrifices at the Temple (or at least at the place where Temple stood), started to rebuild the Temple, created a government, appointed a Sanhedrin, coined money. Is it absolutely unreasonable for an observer to look at this and say, “Hey, this might be the moshiach?”
Sampiro knew who I was talking about. I wanted to clear up the confusion with you before responding to him, because if I continued to discuss Bar Kochba with him with you still thinking I was referring to Jesus, there would have been much (more) confusion.
Now that we’re all back on the same happy page just prior to the year 135, we can continue, and my answer above is responsive to Sampiro as well as you.
No, as I recall, what I said was that I read the entirety of the torah, when I wanted to find proof that it really did contain as much nonsense as I thought it did. That was years ago. Also, I had studied the torah, but that was before I found fault with it. Remembering the gist of what you were told growing up in no way translates to my being “instantly familiar with the name and history.” Just because however I dislike christianity, however, I have studied jewish anti-misonary techniques, so that should one approche me, I can easily refute them. As they often user hebrew words in describing christian concepts, to draw in those who haven’t read the torah and do not know the real details, I figured you were using another word for Jesus.
[/QUOTE]
Now we return to the “reasonable Jew” standard. I offered up the Bar Kochba example because Akiva was no ordinary schlub. He is regarded as one of the sages; his method of associating each traditional practice with a mitzvah is what built the Mishnah.
[/QUOTE]
An appeal to authority, AND putting down Josephus Six-Pack? That is really too much. You know, when talking about the legitamacy of my pet subject (The Mass. gay marriage ruling) with you, I felt like using the fact that your armchair quarterback comments bore no resembulance to any arguement used to unseat the finding of the courts, but were I to do that, at least I would have labeled it clearly in the arguement as such.
[/QUOTE]
That is not what you have been asking. This all stated out as a discussion on wether or not some guy raised jewish, who still desired to be called jewish could “accept jesus” Akiva’s belief that this guy was the messiah would have been either based on insanity, (Note that insane people can still be perfectley lucid), or he was willingly suspending judgement on the qualifications for a savior.
Personally I see absolutely no point in continuing the thread. It’s already moved from a Pennsylvania Republican to a 2nd century Israeli zealot with many stops all around and in between. How long before it gets to Middle Earth?
Not only that, he doesn’t even bother to return phone calls!
As I understand it, Liberal’s willing to define the word “extraordinary” as being made of infinite-stretch rubber in order to avoid admitting that his statement is incorrect. “Extraordinary” apparantly means whatever you want it to mean for a given situtation, neither more nor less.
Well, I didn’t precisely read it cover to cover, I started with Genesis and Matthew, and would read a chunk of the OT and a smaller chunk of the NT until I read the whole thing. Actually, I’ve read the Bible through twice, and plan to do it again. I just have this weird idea that since huge chunks of my religion (Byzantine Catholic) are based on this collection of seventy-three smallish books, I ought to, oh, I don’t know, have a decent working knowledge of what’s in it.
I actually know a few Catholics who actually manage to go through the Bible once a year (something I don’t think I’ll ever manage), and several more who study the Scriptures daily, and no doubt will manage to read everything but the military statistics and architectural details of the Temple at least once in their lifetimes.
Gotcha. Well, I’m not remotely in the camp of the Jews For Jesus folks. I very nearly converted to Judaism once upon a time, I have studied it in depth - if my current career doesn’t work out, I could prep kids for Bar Mitzvah ceremonies. And, shocking though this may be to my brothers and sisters in Christ, I don’t think there’s any particular need to go about converting Jews to Christianity. And I CERTAINLY feel that the tactics you describe above - the “trickery” used by the Christian missionary groups that target Jews for conversion - are reprehensible.
When I started using ‘moshiach’ instead of ‘Messiah’ in our discussion, it was for a very specific reason: I wanted to draw a clear line between the Jewish concept of a man, a human being, who fulfills the prophecies, and the Christian concept of a “God-man,” a divine being. I wanted to explore whether a reasonable Jew could believe in the historical existence of Jesus, as a man, and conclude at the time of his life that he was the prophesized moshiach.
I realize now that this claim does seem uncomfortably close to the Jews-for-J tactic. But I hope you’ll note the key difference: so far as I’m aware, the Jews-for-J folks never deny the divinity of Christ. They allege that Christ, as the son of God, is what the Jews were waiting for.
In sharp contrast, I was offering a hypothetical in which:
[ul]
[li] By purely natural means, a guy called Jesus is born to two human parents[/li][li] He becomes a cult leader and rallies many Jews to his teachings[/li][li] At some point after our hypothetical ends, the Romans kill him, and[/li][li] Being a purely natural person, once dead, he stays dead (not really relevant to our hypo but I thought I’d mention it to further distinguish my case)[/li][/ul]
So my question was: under those circumstances, could a reasonable Jew, at the time, before Jesus takes the Big Dirt Nap, think to himself, “Hey, this guy might be the one?” in the same way that Akiva thought Bar Kochba might be the one?
And you kept refuting that by, among other things, saying that Jesus was supposed to be the son of God, and therefore not descended from David… which was of course not true in my hypothetical.
(Side note: I would really, REALLY, really appreciate feedback from readers: is there a better way I could make this point, that I’m not seeing?)
It’s not an invalid appeal to authority, although the difference is subtle. I’m not citing his authority for the idea that Bar Kochba was the moschaich. We all agree that he was wrong. I’m offering him as an example of a man who made a reasonable, yet wrong, call at the time.
You may adopt whatever practices you wish, Scott, but in general I’ve found it’s useful to keep disagreements from one thread in that thread. What I felt about the Massachussetts courts’ rulings is not, so far as I can tell, remotely relevant here.
Look.
While I did say “accept Jesus” I immediately FOLLOWED IT by a rather substantial disclaimer. I agree, and always have, that no one who “accepts Jesus” in the sense of agreeing that Jesus was a divine being can reasonably be called a religious Jew. But that was never what I proposed, although it’s what you have been valiantly arguing against now for days.
Since I now see that, at first blush, my argument might have seemed very much like a Jews-for-Jesus type trick, I’m willing to understand how, up until this point, there was legitimate confusion on what I was saying. But I believe I have made my point crystal clear now.
Ok, Bricker, I am in a hurry right now, so I will just make this one short. As I have already said, to be the mosh-mus-you know-who I-mean, even if I can’t spell it, a person has to fullfill all the requirements to be savior. Untill then, they are assumed to be some guy with a bunch of magic tricks.
Now, you are tring to make a case for someone jewish to accept a savior, baised on current knowlege. Can’t be done. “Accepting a savior” has a very specific theological meaning in christianity. In judaism, it does not. You accept a sacior, in the same way a reasonable man would accept the existance of space aliens. First-hand knowledge. Once, and only once a person has fulfilled all the requirrements, then, and only then can they accept a savior. Basically, the diffrence is that christians value faith, while jews value knowlege. I have not read up on the case, but Akiva would have had to have been driffting away from the basics of jewish theology to claim the guy was a savior. A good general, yes, but not a savior.
P.S. You have been using words, such as jesus’s hebrew name in a way diffrent from how it is used 90% of the time? Arghhhhhhh. ::Holds head in hands::
So what if Akiva sided with him? Remember the parenthesis above?.