Choosing a faith

The next time you post a message containing strange symbols, please point me to it.

Why are you harboring doubts that the God you've expressed belief in can fuel an everlasting fire? And it isn't people who bodily go to heaven or hell. It is souls. Jesus is the only person ever taken bodily into heaven. Of course the Bible equivocates quite a bit, so there's lots of room for interpretation. This is your gig. We have no secret powers for divining how you might answer. Please answer the question instead of being evasive. Please do not hand out reading assignments. Answer the question. From the Forum Guidelines:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

And you don't even provide a link.--Percy

I don't see the symbols when I send the message. The only reason that I see them is when I open posts from others that I see them on my email site.

Hi Phat.Actually I was referring to Jesus not Daniel. I think that too often we acknowledge Jesus as wholly God and wholly man but then we ignore the wholly man part of Jesus.I don't think that Jesus was that much different than you and I in most respects. It is through the Daniel 7 text that we can understand the wholly God part.I always think of Jesus in Gethsemane. He believes that He is being called to go into Jerusalem, make a messianic statement by riding a colt into Jerusalem and in general tick off everyone in authority. He know that by doing this He is almost certain to be put to death. So, quite reasonably He prays to the Father that He needn't go through with this. However ultimately through His understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, and through prayer, He believes that He is to go ahead with it and that somehow God will vindicate what it is that He was doing.So, He prays to the Father that "this cup be taken from Him" but ultimately He believes BY FAITH that this what He called to do. This actually makes sense of the Gospels when you read them holistically.Understanding it with the idea that He supernaturally knew that He would be resurrected changes everything. Just for one thing it makes the sacrifice of all those who were martyred minimize what it was that Jesus did. It is no longer the great act of the faith that we as humans are called to. I often think of being in the position that Jesus was in Gethsemane and have no doubt that it would be a short prayer and I wouldn't even come close to having the guts to do what Jesus did.In the end I simply do what I can to honour and serve the man Jesus. and the one appointed as Lord by God the father. Frankly I'm not doing a great job of it. Jesus is wholly Man and wholly God and the first born of the New Creation, or the renewal of all things.

I haven't run across any Christians who didn't think that Jesus was the Jewish messiah. However, Jesus was a messiah who different didn't teach or act in the anticipated way. Messiah was simply the man anointed by God to lead them against their enemies. So yes, from a Jewish POV Jesus didn't do what they expected of Him. Not true for the early followers of Jesus. Jesus triumphed by showing that with the worst that could be done to Him He still triumphed and showed that evil and death don't have the final word.The messianic stuff as you call it is an earthly thing with no connection to the second coming.

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I haven't run across any Christians who didn't think that Jesus was the Jewish messiah. However, Jesus was a messiah who different didn't teach or act in the anticipated way. Messiah was simply the man anointed by God to lead them against their enemies. So yes, from a Jewish POV Jesus didn't do what they expected of Him

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As is too often the case, this doesn’t address the point, Christians generally hold that Jesus will fulfil the Messianic prophecies after the Second Coming. That’s the point of it.

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Not true for the early followers of Jesus

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I disagree. I think that is EXACTLY what happened.

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The messianic stuff as you call it is an earthly thing with no connection to the second coming

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Most Christians disagree.

Not in the message you're replying to. They are, as I've pointed out many times. No. They can't. There are legitimate interpretations and egregious lies. Appeal to popularity is not a legitimate argument. How can you tell such a bold-faced lie? You get your interpretations from apologists on YouTube. And you refuse to discuss them. I didn't say I was more zealous than you. I said I understand your theology better than you do. Wrong. I work at ignoring my intuition because intuition can not be trusted. You are the poster child for bad intuition. You are the prime example of NOT being in communion. If you were in communion, how could you say such horrible things about Jesus? Thanks for the compliment. It doesn't have to be. You could take your brain out of its parking-place behind the door and USE it. Paul appointed himself as apostle to the Gentiles. Nonsense.

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Genesis6:6 And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

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And that's only the first example. It's possible to connect Santa Claus to Bigfoot too. That doesn't make it right. No, it really doesn't. All contradictions are not necessarily irony. Rubbish.That fairy tale isn't even from the Bible. It's Milton. He invited people from the street-corners and then he complained about how they were dressed. Yes, that is whiny. You're the one who is equating the king to the creator, not me. Again, I refer you to Thomas Paine, who said that we are better able to run our own lives than some goober on a throne thousands of miles away.Why don't you respond to what I say instead of just throwing the same crap at the wall over and over again? Where did you get that idea?

Bring your argument here, in your own words.

That's correct. You managed to find one guy with a different perspective on it. Nothing from everybody that I have read suggests that as a possibility to be the case.Here is the first part again.

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Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed.

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You seem to want to read Jewish apocryphal writing as plain language, yet here you want to read something that is in plain language as meaning something altogether different. By the time of Jerome the Gospels had long been established as Gospels so he is clearly referring to the Gospel of Matthew. Sure, it is John's theology that explains the views of the early Christians as that sort out the meaning that they could glean from Jesus' teachings and also of His resurrection.

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You managed to find one guy with a different perspective on it. Nothing from everybody that I have read suggests that as a possibility to be the case.

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Maybe you’re reading the wrong guys,Wikipedia on Jerome

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You seem to want to read Jewish apocryphal writing as plain language, yet here you want to read something that is in plain language as meaning something altogether different.

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False on both counts.

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By the time of Jerome the Gospels had long been established as Gospels so he is clearly referring to the Gospel of Matthew

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So the quote from Wikipedia above - apparently the Nazoreans believed the Gospel of the Hebrews to be “the true Gospel of Matthew”.You’re assuming a certainty of identification which is not there.

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Sure, it is John's theology that explains the views of the early Christians as that sort out the meaning that they could glean from Jesus' teachings and also of His resurrection.

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But your original claim was that the phrase itself was all that was needed. Which is rather obviously not supported by quoting theology which makes a similar claim for other reasons.

We do have the writings of the early church fathers plus Tacitus the Roman historian who wrote this:

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Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa,

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​ Actually we have a pretty good idea of who wrote them. Richard Bauckham a Cambridge scholar wrote a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses with over 600 pages going into the autorship of the Gospels. I own it and have read it.Yes, there are contradictions in some details. Different people will often remember details differently.There is external evidence from early material as well as by the rise of Christianity.As you know I contend that the Gospels were all written within 30 years with the possible exception of John. We have already had multiple posts on that in this thread.And of course you know the "Sermon on the Mount" never happened do you?

I dunno GDR, this stuff just makes me feel tired and frustrated. Maybe I'll attempt a futile answer to what you say here but more likely I won't - because, well, it's futile.The point I'm trying to make is that there is no real historicity for Jesus, let alone the miraculous stuff he's supposed to have done and how he saved the world an' all. Sure, there's acres of shelf space for Christian scholars and apologists but there's virtually no peer reviewed history. There should be so much that it's beyond all doubt, but there's virtually none.Jesus, if real, would be the most important guy that ever lived. But there's no factual evidence of him actually even existing! It's bizarre. We shouldn't even be able to have this discussion, it should be obvious to everyone. But it's not, simply because he left no historical footprint, just an enormous mythology.There's virtual universal acceptance that Paul existed (even though a lot of his stuff is forged) but not Jesus. Why? How? It would have been so easy for there to be real evidence but it doesn't exist. And yet it was supposed to be so important.

Do you mean in the email notification for replies? And you see the strange symbols in their quotes of what you said? If I have that right, can you forward one of these emails to admin?

Like you, I don't have any first hand knowledge of the bible, other than having read it. I get my information from historians. It's mainstream scholarship that the Sermon on the Mount wasn't said by Jesus, it's a complex literary creation based on previous texts. This is a summary -"The Sermon on the Mount relies on the Septuagint Greek version of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, so it doesn’t go back to a Hebrew or Aramaic source. Matthew also redacts other Greek scriptures like “turn the other cheek” taken from Isaiah 50:6-9. The sermon has a literary structure so it didn’t originate in oral tradition, and it deals with issues that would have come up after Jesus died, so it didn’t originate with him. The sermon also assumes the temple doesn’t exist, so it had to have been written after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. It also addresses the rabbinical argument that followed the destruction of the temple."ie Matthew made it up.The analysis of written rather than oral structure comes from this peer reviewed paper. I wish you luck with it.https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/jbl/1987_allison.pdf

It figures you would quote Richard Carrier. Richard Carrier is a hack sent by satan to discredit the Jesus of the Bible. But of course, you will always believe the guy with academic credentials over any believer. I can't say that I blame you, given your respect for evidence and scholarly appraisal. The question that you might ask yourself honestly is this:
"If for some reason the human race fails itself once again and we find ourselves in trouble collectively once again, are you willing to take another hard look at what believers claim to "see" or will you despise them all the more and double down on scholarly assessment to get us out of the mess we created? I won't ever be able to convince you. I can't.