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21

Exactly. Now go explain that to Zev back on the Jews for Jesus thread. No Davidic lineage indeed!

22

Here is that e-mail that I received. I am not endorsing the veracity of the following text, though I am including the e-mail address of its creator. Well, it was a valid e-mail address all those years ago…

23

Yer pal,
Satan

I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
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4434 cigarettes not smoked, saving $554.27.
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24

Unfortunately, Satan, no one has e-mailed me a copy of the Talmud that I can conveniently cut-and-paste into this thread.

Suffice it to say, we religious believers do not walk around “knowing our scriptures are contradictory” yet illogically believing both contradictory statements to be true. We have seen the apparent contradictions, we have seen the explanations of why they are not truly contradictory, and we are confident that these explanations are true.

jmullaney:

I’ve got a better idea. Let’s see if the Rabbis of the Talmud, who explained the resolution of these other contradictions (the Old Testament ones at least), had resolved the contradiction between JC claiming to be the Messiah yet not fulfilling what they understood to be the Messianic prophecies. Well, what do you know…their way of resolving it was to say that they didn’t believe JC was divine or Messianic in any way. Ah well… :wink:

Chaim Mattis Keller

25

Fine, fine. You can get a bunch of Talmudic scholars to show that Jesus was not messiah. This is not a huge surprise to me.

It is also not a huge surprise to me either that you could get a slew of Christian Biblical scholars to take on those assertions and “prove” that Christ was Jesus and you guys are misguided.

Care for me to find some websites whih “logically” explain that Christians are right and you deluded? No, because you’ve seen the arguments, and counter them. And they counter those. And so on, ad infinitum.

As I said, the simple answer to the question about how “clearly and accurately the contradictions have been explained,” a Christian thinks the New Testament is divinely inspired, there is a trinity, and Christ has come. You don’t feel that is the case, even though both religions come from the same source!

I find my need to clarify that just because you are happy with what Orthodox Jewish scholars hav concluded does NOT mean that the contradictions are not there, only that you are part of a group which has explained them to your satisfaction.

After all, you felt the need to comment that my opinion was only my opinion, remember? Well, your opinion is only your opinion too, you know.

Yer pal,
Satan

I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
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26

I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but Joseph’s father is of little importance in this, since according to the Bible (IIRC) Joseph had no blood relation to Jesus. Thus Jesus had one grandfather (Mary’s father).

27

… which makes you wonder why both Matthew and Luke spent so much time rattling off Joseph’s ancestry.

28

I don’t feel like researching it right now, but in the gospels, the Greek texts in several places refers to Joseph as Jesus’ father, or refers to Joseph and Mary collectively as “his parents.” When translated to English, the translators changed these passages to say things like “Joseph and his [Jesus’] mother,” to protect the concept of the virgin birth. And of course, there is the oft cited fact that the word for “virgin” in “a virgin shall conceive and bare a child…” might be more accurately translated “young woman,” since there does exist a more specific word for virgin. For more on this, and a LOT more, see http://members.aol.com/ckbloomfld

29

Tzel:

There are also a couple more Biblical verses that deny the virgin birth. John 1:45 is the most famous. But John 6:42 is a good one as well. I realize that neither of these passages has the author speaking, but the first one is by the disciple Philip. If Philip doesn’t know of the virgin birth, how do Matthew and Luke, the latter of whom isn’t even a disciple? (It’s also interesting to note that nowhere does John correct either “misstatement,” which you think he would be interesting in doing if he were concerned with accuracy.)

The epistles of Paul also contain two denials of the virgin birth, where Paul calls Jesus the “seed of David.”

All but the most conservative Biblical scholars have accepted that the infancy stories in Matthew and Luke are not historically accurate, but were rather fanciful tales cooked up decades after Jesus’ death to glorify his life and demystify the missing first thirty years of his life. Ditto for the two geneaologies, which were created to make Jesus into a descendant of David. It’s highly unlikely that the illiterate son of a carpenter would have geneaological records dating back two dozen generations.

Visit http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contradictions.html for a whole truckload of Biblical contradictions!

30

Opus1 wrote:

gasp Jesus was illiterate? Say it ain’t so!