my mother gave to me the baby book she kept in the first years after i was born.
it is fairly typical example in many ways: lists of various milestones like walking and talking, height and weight, that sort of thing.
one section has space to record the first seven years of christmas.
How is your mother now? Is she happy? I filled in other parties and celebrations in the birthday and christmas part of the books.
We are barely on speaking terms, so it is difficult for me to say. When they discovered my wife and I were celebrating Christmas, they declared we were no longer welcome in their home and we have hardly spoken since. There was a death in the family some months back, I suspect that has caused some level of reflection about the past (nearly) 40 years.
my mother gave to me the baby book she kept in the first years after i was born.
it is fairly typical example in many ways: lists of various milestones like walking and talking, height and weight, that sort of thing.
one section has space to record the first seven years of christmas.
My mother gave to me the baby book she kept in the first years after I was born. It is fairly typical example in many ways: lists of various milestones like walking and talking, height and weight, that sort of thing. One section has space to record the first seven years of Christmas.
Years 1-4 are recorded in some detail: I got so many new outfits, was/was not waiting up for Santa, did/did not cry when I got my picture made with Santa, lists of toys, all the stuff a mother would record when tracking the growth of her first son. Full, rich, detailed paragraphs.
Year five simply reads: "This year we did not celebrate Christmas because we have learned the truth about Jehovah God." No subsequent entries.
Turn to the section on birthdays, find similar entries for four years: who came to the party, what grandma bought, how well I behaved myself, how much cake I ate. Year five: "We spent the day at home."
It's quite shocking to see a family go from normal to profoundly strange in such a stark fashion.
i am just curious if you guys left jw's and now worship in some other relgion or worship in your own way?
have you sworn off organized religion ?
if you have not sworn off organized religion then i wonder what relgion seems to be the right one for you guys?
The opposite of Jehovah's Witness is Catholic. An atheist is just a bad Jehovah's Witness. I am the opposite of a Jehovah's Witness, though it took a while.
i don't have my usual resources in front of me, so i can't fact check this, but there's been something bothering me.
one of the things mentioned quite often as evidence of the wickedness and evil practices of the false religion that surrounded ancient israel is the practice of child sacrifice (baal and molech being the frontrunners as i recall).
but ...... didn't god tell abraham to kill his own son isaac as a human sacrifice?
Just wanna go on record as a big fan of the clitoris. I feel like I need to get that out there. Now you know; carry on.
i don't have my usual resources in front of me, so i can't fact check this, but there's been something bothering me.
one of the things mentioned quite often as evidence of the wickedness and evil practices of the false religion that surrounded ancient israel is the practice of child sacrifice (baal and molech being the frontrunners as i recall).
but ...... didn't god tell abraham to kill his own son isaac as a human sacrifice?
Corpusdei,
My difficulty with that is that it's takes a viewpoint that's very end-justifies-the-means (though to be fair, that viewpoint can be applied to the majority of the bible). Even though Jehovah may never have intended Abraham to kill Isaac, he still required the choice to be made. He made Abraham choose between love for his God and love for his family (a morally destitute choice that Jesus would echo his support of many years later). The ritual loses viability if Abraham knows it's a test, or that Isaac would be resurrected some time later (which removes any actual sense of sacrifice, and thus significance, from the act) which means that, as far as Abraham and especially Isaac were concerned, God has just ordered the ritual murder of a faithful follower by another faithful follower. Anyway I cut that, it points to nothing more to take away than the danger of faith at the cost of morality.
Perhaps you think it a morally destitute choice because you are so deeply influenced by Jewish and Christian morals -- that is, by this story itself. The degree to which human sacrifice was part of the generally accepted moral universe of 2500 BC cannot be overstated. All the cool tribes were doing it.
And, not to make you wrong here, I would suggest that we really have to deal with the fact that the moral code by which you condemn this story is partly the result of, well, this story. In the history of human beings, we have been sacrificing children for a much longer time than we have been thinking child sacrifice is horrifying.
I take issue with the fact that religion has hijacked morality as completely as it has. Not so very long after this event, Jehovah had his chosen people running around engaged in wholesale slaughters, killing men and murdering children (not virgin girls, though, they make good ... um.... slaves. Yea.) and one of the rationalizations was because they engaged in worship of other deities which involved filicide. Even barring that, the very significance of the sacrifice underscores the depth of the cut here - if the sacrifice of Isaac were not shocking and painful and hard, it's difficult to call it sacrifice.
I doubt that violence and the sacred can be separated. But that's another thread. You are correct to note that the Jewish conquest of the Promised Land is pretty hard to read with Christian eyes. They weren't Christians, of course, which it my point.
i don't have my usual resources in front of me, so i can't fact check this, but there's been something bothering me.
one of the things mentioned quite often as evidence of the wickedness and evil practices of the false religion that surrounded ancient israel is the practice of child sacrifice (baal and molech being the frontrunners as i recall).
but ...... didn't god tell abraham to kill his own son isaac as a human sacrifice?
I would suggest that the thing to take away from the story is precisely that human sacrifice is not how YHWH expects things to work. That is, within the context of the time and place, one might expect that the god you follow would expect sacrifice of humans from time to time. There are plenty of narratives that end with the boy being slain -- we would have heard this one before, if you will. So Abraham, who lived within his own time, ultimately met this command, considering it to be the sort of unpleasant thing that sometimes gods demand.
It's a shocking story, of course, but it is shocking to us mostly because we are so far removed from explicit human sacrifice. I suggest that, were you alive at the time, the shock would be that Abraham's god actually backed off the command to sacrifice. That ain't how the story was supposed to go.
its amazing how things seemed logical when you heard them.
consider the case of eve.
we always here how truly terrible a sin (most likely the unforgivable sin) because she was perfect and given one command.
You're forgetting (4) they never fracking listen! sense.
That's the sense in which I take it. Makes it real.
i asked a jw last week the following question, "is revelation 5:11-14 a worship act to the lamb or an act of obeisance?.
revelation 5:11-14 nwt states and i saw, and i heard a voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice: the lamb that was slaughtered is worthy to receive the power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.
because it's an act of worship and it is not allow in your kingdom hall.
Obviously McGrath does not say that "worship of Jesus was not an issue for Trypho". The point is why was it an issue. McGrath argues that it was an issue for Trypho because he did not view a crucified man as a worthy object of worship. And of course neither does McGrath "prove that Christians didn't even worship God", that's a false characterisation of his argument, again taken from Hurtado's response.
Well, I read McGrath's viewpoint on Revelation independently and I came to the same conclusion Hurtado did. From what I recall, McGrath set out to establish sacrificial worship as the sine qua non of real worship and, finding that Christians did not make such sacrifices to Jesus, considered this evidence against the hypothesis that the early Christians worshiped Jesus in any real way. If McGrath takes exception to this viewpoint, I guess that's his right. Still, I think a few minutes looking around at some literature on this question (the Revelation one, I mean) would lead to works like Bauckham and others who, combined with a pretty straightforward reading of the book, make it pretty clear what is supposed to be going on there.
As for Hurtado's wider work on what the earliest Christians actually did and how those actions fit in the context of the religious actions of the time, I think he's made a pretty good case. We really do observe a pattern of inclusive worship of Jesus with God in a way unlike any comparable examples within Jewish society. It is this worship that is seen in the shocking scenes within Revelation where the Lamb is obviously worshiped with God -- these scenes are as blasphemous to Jews now as they were back then, and they represent a significant departure from anything seen before in any Jewish context.
i asked a jw last week the following question, "is revelation 5:11-14 a worship act to the lamb or an act of obeisance?.
revelation 5:11-14 nwt states and i saw, and i heard a voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice: the lamb that was slaughtered is worthy to receive the power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.
because it's an act of worship and it is not allow in your kingdom hall.
My reading of Dunn's book does not bear this out. Dunn does argue that the Christology of Revelation stands apart (which he attributes to its being a visionary book rather than its lateness) but he does not argue for the worship of Jesus in the gospel of John. Can you cite which part of Dunn's books leads you to that conclusion? On the contrary Dunn argues that the divine status of Jesus is very much qualified in the gospel of John, making arguments which are strikingly similar to the arguments JWs have traditionally made:
Well, it looks like we agree that Dunn finds Revelation to be talking about worship of Jesus in some real sense. As for Dunn's thinking on the gospel of John, I'd have to dig it up -- I researched it about a year ago in a different context. It is conceivable that I am mistaken, but I will see what I can turn up.
Evangelical scholars who have promoted a very high Christology early in the NT, with Hurtado at the forefront, have enjoyed the ascendancy in recent decades, without always necessarily making explicit the very conservative assumptions that lay behind their readings. In particular Hurtado has suggested that the reality of the resurrection event itself, for the early Christian community, is what prompted what he describes as the mutation in monotheism within the early chuch to include worship of Jesus alongside God. With scholars such as Dunn and McGrath injecting a bit of realism in the discussion of the early Christian view of Jesus, Hurtado's binitarian/"Jesus devotion" paradigm may yet prove to be the last hurrah for Evangelical scholarship on this matter.
I don't think that the contrast between those who "inject realism" with those who think the Resurrection really happened is particularly useful. At the same time, if Hurtado suggests that the reality of the Resurrection is the cause for the religious mutation that acknowledged Jesus as God, then it hardly seems fair to turn around and claim he doesn't make his assumptions explicit. In any case, I don't think that Hurtado's argument requires the Resurrection to be a literal event; he makes what is essentially an historical argument about what Christians did, not what Jesus did.
Do I gather from this line of argument that you follow Hurtado's blog too? Because that is essentially the line of attack Hurtado pursued regarding McGrath's book. It's worth noting that Dunn does not seem to share your scathing assessment of McGrath because he cites him extensively and with apparent approval. There is also a great deal more to McGrath's discussion of the Revelation than simply the point about the language of sacrificial cultic worship. But on that point McGrath and Dunn actually make the same obsevation with regard to latreia andlatreuein: that it is only used of worship of God and never of Christ. A point which Hurtado still fails to address.
Actually, I anticipated Hurtado's observation by some weeks in a different conversation (this one with a JW who quoted McGrath approvingly). I did not know before reading Hurtado's interaction with McGrath that McGrath also thinks the worship of Jesus was not an issue for Trypho in his interaction with St. Justin Martyr. I mean, get real, right? I'm certain there is more to McGrath's argument, but the sacrifice thing pretty much ends the conversation for me, I'm afraid. As a general rule, once you prove that Christians didn't even worship God, we've got what we need.
i asked a jw last week the following question, "is revelation 5:11-14 a worship act to the lamb or an act of obeisance?.
revelation 5:11-14 nwt states and i saw, and i heard a voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice: the lamb that was slaughtered is worthy to receive the power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.
because it's an act of worship and it is not allow in your kingdom hall.
Couple quick notes, if I may.
BeDuhn is mostly famous for his enthusiastic defense of the NWT, claiming it is the least biased translation available. Such a viewpoint doesn't make him wrong when he makes statements about Greek grammar, but, well, it make me question his sense. The number of scholars who have the slightest respect for the JW's NWT, counting BeDuhn, makes one. The number of scholars of biblical languages who have the slightest respect for the NWT, counting BeDuhn, makes zero.
J.D.G. Dunn is a really good scholar who says that the earliest Christians did not worship Jesus -- by early, he refers to the period of Paul, within a couple decades of Jesus' death. Dunn sees the development of real worship of Jesus as a later development -- by later, he means around the time of the gospel of John and Revelation, near the end of the first century. Dunn holds Revelation to be quite obviously a book that places Jesus as one who is worshiped the same way God is; he holds this viewpoint regarding books like John, as well.
I don't think it is fair to suggest, as someone here did, that Hurtado is something like a "last hurrah" for the idea that high Christology is a late development. I think the opposite is more accurate; scholarship seems to be moving away from the idea that it was a late development (post-first century). Indeed, even guys like Dunn place the development well within the NT period.
Please don't get me started on McGrath. Let me just offer the suggestion that his reading of Revelation is pretty exotic. Part of his argument is that the early Christians did not worship Jesus because worship, in the context of the time, required sacrifice and Christians never sacrificed to Jesus. Thus, according to him, these scenes in Revelation where the entire universe falls to "worship" God and the Lamb can't be seen as worship, really. Of course, Christians didn't actually have cultic sacrifices at all, suggesting that McGrath's reasoning might prove that they didn't worship anybody, God included. Perhaps we could agree that is a bridge too far.
Interesting discussion. I think the correct answer is that at least Dunn is correct: by the time of Revelation, the intent of the author was to convey real worship of Jesus.
S.
(p.s.: Hi, Ann)
