Posts by KalebOutWest

9

Does god punish children for their parents sins?

by moomanchu in

ezekiel 18: 1-4 , “the word of the lord came to me: ‘what do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of israel: “the parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”?

as surely as i live, declares the sovereign lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in israel.

for everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me.

KalebOutWest

KerryKing,

Thanks for the comments.

I am retiring beginning in February so I am considering doing something to help the JW community. I am just trying to consider which approach would work best. I don't know for sure. I will keep you posted

26

God or Satan?

by peacefulpete in

the theme of my recent comment in another thread demonstrated how in some circles the 'word/logos' had become understood to be implied within ot texts that mention an angel or destroyer (in the case of ex 12).

the comment got no response so i'll repost it now as a springboard for a further observation:.

here's another example of the extreme personification of the logos/word from the wisdom of solomon (approx.

KalebOutWest

I'm very familiar with the Wisdom of Solomon and Koine Greek. It is one of my favorite books. It is, after, all a Jewish work.

In Hebrew, when we read "the angel of the Lord" in the text, such as at Exodus 3 where Moses encounters the Burning Bush, a Jew who knows Hebrew does not read or imagines a Christian or Western personage with wings. They both read and think: "God" or "HaShem."

HaShem is simply what Jews use in their everyday speech to refer to "God," as we neither say "God" or "Lord" or "Adonai" or "Jehovah" or anything like that. We say "HaShem" which means "The Name" as the Hebrew term is actually MALAKH YHWH or REPRESENTATIVE YHWH. There are no "angels" in Jewish theology or in the Hebrew Bible, not like in Christian thought anyway.

In Koine Greek a representative or representation of something is what we call a LOGOS or "word" or "name." Sometimes you can translate the term MALAKH as LOGOS. This means that a MALAKH YHWH is not necessarily a traditional "angel" that you think of in common literature or art. It merely means that God is coming forth in a different representation or form to send a message or word.

Therefore the Burning Bush could be both an angel (or messanger) and God at the same time. It's just another way of saying God or HaShem.

At Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles with a man all night long, some mysterious person who he doesn't see. If you are like me and spent some considerable time with the Jehovah's Witnesses, you remember that they taught that this was a literal angel from heaven. But the Biblical account and Jews do not teach this (especially since we Jews are named after this event: "Israel"). The account is merely stating that Jacob is coming to learn something about himself and changing in his old age (he comes out of it "limping" and sees God's face in Esau's forgiveness as part of this revelation--Ge 32:30; 33:10). When Hosea 12:3-4 explains that Jacob's revelation is via an "angel," some Christians take the expression "literally," but it simply means a "word" or "LOGOS" from God--Jacob having some type of experience in which he sees "HaShem" and realizes he must change, wrestling with this revelation, and coming out of it as a "new person."

The "Destroyer" and "LOGOS" are one-in-the-same, according to Jewish theology. Good and evil come from God, at least at this point in Jewish history. God brings death and life, reward and punishment. There is no devil, there is no Satan.

However, this is indeed how it was possible much later for Christians to develop the basis for the Trinitarian theology built around Jesus of Nazareth.

9

Does god punish children for their parents sins?

by moomanchu in

ezekiel 18: 1-4 , “the word of the lord came to me: ‘what do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of israel: “the parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”?

as surely as i live, declares the sovereign lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in israel.

for everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me.

KalebOutWest

There are several takes on this, as you've just noted from the various posts above.

One of the reasons is that the term "God" lacks a clear, coherent definition when one asks this question. Are we talking about Jesus, as Christians define God? Are we still talking about "Jehovah God," as the Watchtower defines God? Are we speaking about the Jewish definition of God (and then which one, something like Orthodoxy or more like Spinoza's or Modeca Kaplan's non-personal take)? Are we talking about Allah of the Islamic religion? Or are we speaking about something else entirely?

While not acknowledged by Watchtower theology, the Hebrew Bible does have an evolutionary development of YHWH similar to a character development in a modern novel. The God of Abraham is not the same "God" in the Torah as He is in the Prophets or after the Babylonian Exile. This is recognized even in the Talmud. The reason is that the Jews developed their theology about God via revelation, whether that revelation was developed by the hands of man or you believe it was divine (or a combination of the two).

Regardless, the take is always the same: YHWH is discovered (or discovers the Hebrew people), and is one God among many that the Jews worship. The Jews lose the northern part of their territory to foreigners and then end up having their king and capital exiled into the land of Babylon.

They search for a reason for why this is so. Their religious priests tell them it is because they should have been worshiping YHWH and only YHWH instead of the pantheon of deities that they had been serving. So they reconstruct their religious and cultural observances into a liturgy praising YHWH, claiming that they had sinned against Him and must repent in hope that they would be released from exile and returned to their land.

And they were. This reconstruction seemed to work--for a while. This new theology, namely that God sends down punishment upon people and nations for the sins they and their ancestors commit seemed to be true, until the Hasmonean dynasty of 100 years fell.

And after that the Second Temple fell. And after that the Bar Kokhba Revolt was a disaster. And then there was the Diaspora, and the Crusades and pogroms and the Spanish and Mexican Inquisitions, and finally the Holocaust.

It was at the Holocaust that the Jews finally abandoned this theology. God does not punish any nation or children for the sins of their fathers. It was not merely the evils visited on the Jews that made the Jewish people consider this. When the Jews were liberated from the camps after WWII those that lost the war were faced with even worse terrors. Consider the horrors of the two nuclear weapons dropped on Japan to end the war. Did God do this to save the Jews? The answer was that the Jewish theology that YHWH punishes his children was flawed from the very beginning.

While I cannot answer why some Christians not only still hold onto to these views and even cherish them like Jehovah's Witnesses do, you sometimes have to move pass the texts you revere as holy in order to cherish them as holy, otherwise you do a disservice to them and others. Our desire to define an Ineffable God is impossible. We cannot define that which cannot be defined. Moses cannot give God a name. God is the one who names Moses.

408

Is Jesus the Creator?

by Sea Breeze in

that's what the word says.

.

colossians 1:16. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him..

KalebOutWest

There are walls of text on this topic in this thread.

It's the JW in people, and I think a bit of hope too. It can stick to us like stepping on gum even after leaving for many years.

For instance I thought I was getting through to people (i.e., my own content was getting read) only to find out that SeaBreeze would comment a page later that I never mentioned a certain subject that I had just mentioned. I'm the fool, not SeaBreeze.

Walls of text? People are preaching to themselves. Not the choir. Not to you. Not to me. Themselves. You leave a cult not believing things--you still might not believe. You might not want to be convinced. You might want to keep on not believing.

It is how we were taught in Watchtower Land. Preach long and hard, with lots of needless quotes and blurbs that make it sound like you know your stuff because if you drown your subject with lots of citations then it sounds academic (right)? After all, who needs to put any critical thinking methodology in a post?

Nope, just more and more cut and paste, cut and paste. Walls and walls of it. We're preaching to make ourselves feel good people.

Prove the Trinity? Why ask if you already believe? (Remember kiddies, you don't practice proving you're not in a cult in the Theocractical Ministry School...unless there's a good reason for it.)

408

Is Jesus the Creator?

by Sea Breeze in

that's what the word says.

.

colossians 1:16. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him..

KalebOutWest

SeaBreeze:

I just mentioned the Essenes a moment ago, on the previous page in a reply to aqwsed:

The Essenes, the Sadduces and, yes the Pharisees --all those religious Jewish sects, saw their end in 70 CE with the fall of Herod's Temple.

You write:

Your views on how Christianity began to have a new era of prophets with the advent of Christian faith is not supported in New Testament scripture.

My views?

What you do not realize is that I almost never post my personal views or opinions on here. Being a professional educator for both Christians and Jews at both a Temple and a church, I teach from academic curriculum, and it is from this that I have pulled my information from.

It comes from the academics and scholars of the Jewish Publication Society, the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic Bible Association, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism.

I do not publish my personal convictions unless I directly express something in the post.

I am not personally or emotionally invested in what I write like it appears some of you might be. The statements I post are based on scholarship and academic critical methodology as one would learn in a religious class, Christian or Jewish.

Look at aqwsed--just typing away like some poor meshuggeneh who was hit on the head. Pumping out info like a Watchtower. Deeply invested.

What do I believe? I have not told you. It's not posted.

408

Is Jesus the Creator?

by Sea Breeze in

that's what the word says.

.

colossians 1:16. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him..

KalebOutWest

Aqwsed--

You are arguing with yourself, not me. I was pointing out something else.

I posted a simple reply that Judaism, as in Jewry, does not accept the Trinity in contrast to your claim that it was compatible with Jewish monotheism.

It is not merely Kaplan or Spinoza (which are modern examples on one side of the Jewish spectrum) but even in Emet Ve-Emunah the 1988 Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism it is affirmed:

"Belief in a trinitarian God, or in a capricious, amoral God can never be consistent with Jewish tradition and history."--Emet Ve-Emunah: God In the Word: "God," page 17.

This despite the various other views of God in the Jewish spectrum, the leadership council of Conservative Judaism rejected Trinitarian theology due to this being the historical view among Jews.

No disrespect to the Trinity itself. It is indeed the central theological core to Christianity today. It explains the Ineffable God to billions in the Person of Jesus Christ who many Christians believe was spoken of by the Jewish prophets.

This isn't formally accepted by Judaism, but this doesn't mean you might not find some interfaith families (marriages between a Christian and Jew) who participate in both religious practices and celebrations, raising children this way. How they make this work and whether these individuals accept or believe in the Trinity is likely something you would have to ask each individual, as I am sure it varies. But I know Jews from these type of families who observe both Christmas and Hanukkah, Easter and Passover, Lent and Yom Kippur, etc.

Acts chapter 21 shows the early Church in Jerusalem consisting of Jews who observed the Law. Acts chapter 10 contains the famous vision where Peter tells God he only eats kosher. And Paul and Peter have that famous argument in Galatians chapter 2 due to Peter deciding to observe kosher rules when Jewish Christians from Jerusalem arrive but being lax about thus around the Gentiles and how Paul thinks this behavior of inconsistencies is wrong. But Paul observes the Law on a regular basis himself, likely because there is no other way to live as we all have our culture as his is based on the Mosaic Law.

So it is not an impossibility that even outside of the Messianic Jewish community (as these are neither accepted by Jews at large nor Christians) there are Jews from interfaith families who believe in the Trinity. But you would have to ask. We don't know which religious theology reigns in each individual.

I was writing in my posts about the official status of the Jewish theological spectrum. That is a bit more complex and very different.

408

Is Jesus the Creator?

by Sea Breeze in

that's what the word says.

.

colossians 1:16. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him..

KalebOutWest

Sea Breeze--

I will cut you some slack because you are neither Jewish nor went to Hebrew school nor have studied in Israel (or perhaps been).

The Essenes, the Sadduces and, yes the Pharisees --all those religious Jewish sects, saw their end in 70 CE with the fall of Herod's Temple. In fact, Judaism was something different when the Jews returned to Jerusalem (along with the Jewish Christians) prior to the Second Jewish Revolt and Simon Bar Kokhba was anointed nasi or "Messiah" which eventually led to the fatal Bar Kokba Revolt in 136 CE and the Jews getting kicked out of Jerusalem (again). There were no Pharisees around at that time.

While it is true that the religious core and practices of the Pharisees make up most of modern Orthodox Judaism today, this is not to say that the Jews of today are Pharisees. Events in Jewish history that Christianity and Western society do not know about, such as the Emancipation, the Enlightenment, the Reform Movement, and Mordcai Kaplan's revolutionary publication Judaism As a Civilization changed everything--not to mention the Zionist movement and literal return to Israel.

There is even a Secular Humanist Jewish religion that has become a major, very major branch of Judaism today. With some 46% of practicing Jews in traditional denominations being either atheists or agnostics according to a Pew Research Center survey taken at the beginning of the 21st century, the JPS is officially releasing the Humanist Jewish Society's next liturgical book this coming January. These are definitely not Pharisees by any means of the word, whatsoever.

As I cannot say I know anything about your Dr Ken, I can say I know about Jewish prophets and the idea of John the Baptist running a "school of prophets." Jewish prophets were "canonized" similarly to the way the Roman Catholic Church canonizes saints. It was a lengthy process, and it did not happen until the prophet had passed and their oracles had proven true.

Take Isaiah, for instance. During his lifetime, Isaiah is said to have walked about naked preaching destruction and damnation to the Jewish people, saying God basically hated them for the lifestyle they were living. Do you think people believed him? It was the custom for most prophets to have disciples, called "sons of the prophets" who worked as scribes for the prophets. After Isaiah died, these disciples saw many of his oracles come to past and continued his work in his name (and this is why we call some of the writings of Isaiah called "Second, Third," and maybe even "Fourth Isaiah" because these are the "sons" or generation of disciples after Isaiah's death who are writing oracles in the style of the original prophet).

Because Isaiah proved to be a real prophet to Israel, the Jewish sages canonized him (the person, not the book). The book itself later became part of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a simplified explanation, but it is more or less how the process worked (though it could take generations and much debate).

The Talmud lists 48 male prophets and 7 female prophetesses in Judaism. According to the Jewish sages, the era of prophets ended with Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi with Malachi being the last prophet. This makes John the Baptist disqualified from being a prophet and impossible for him to run a "school of the prophets." The age had ended.

Like in the Catholic Church, the Jewish community as a whole has to decide what is what and when, not Christians. Jews decide who the authorities are in their communities and who speaks for them and who does not.

However, Christianity does believe that a new era of prophets began at this time. Ephesians 2:20 states that Christians are built on the foundation of the "apostles and the prophets," meaning the Christian prophets, not the prophets of the Jews, just as it does the Christian apostles. For instance, early Christian writers, like Clement of Alexandria and Theophilus of Antioch, believed the Sibylline Oracles were genuine prophecies and that the sibyl was a prophetess on par with the Old Testament prophets that prophesied of Christ. Even though this is not the only example of the type of prophets from those early years, the sibyl is even depicted in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel murals alongside prophets of the Old Testament. The point is that there were obviously some people with gifts that in the early days of Christianity placed them on par with the Apostles and even seemed to be replacements or similar to the Old Testament prophets to the Christian community.

But as far as the Jewish community goes, those days had ended. The era of Jewish prophets had ended well before Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist were ever born.

408

Is Jesus the Creator?

by Sea Breeze in

that's what the word says.

.

colossians 1:16. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him..

KalebOutWest

Aqwsed is correct in stating that Philo's writings are but a small and limited view--Jewish Hellenistic thought that was of the realm of a few Jews at the time of Philo--and don't represent how Christians developed their views.

Christians believed they were being visited by God Incarnate, which Jewish writers also attest to.

The only point where some Jews may differ in opinion is that the Trinity does indeed contradict current Jewish monotheism since Judaism teaches that their God has no attributes, is Ineffable, and for many Jews (if not most) is not a personal God. The Trinity relies on attributes, does away with the ineffable and, unlike that taught by such influential teachers as Spinoza and Kaplan, is made up of three Persons. You may therefore have a definite problem with these.

408

Is Jesus the Creator?

by Sea Breeze in

that's what the word says.

.

colossians 1:16. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him..

KalebOutWest

In defense of peacefulpete, there really is nothing wrong with the answer pete provided. It is not the main reason, but it isn't incorrect. (Consider it a "besides," as some call it.)

Think of it this way, as I think we can all relate to what it used to be when we were all self-centered in the world of Jehovah's Witnesses:

Now that we are out of the Watchtower, we realize that nothing we did, no publication we released or any event we engaged in was really noticed by anybody. For example: remember those super-big Yankee Stadium conventions that Jehovah's Witnesses held once and were supposedly history-making that "the entire world took note of"? Nobody really knows about about those. Nobody cares. Conventions where? Who? What? They meant nothing to the world.

Now let's apply this to the Trinity and why we Jews don't believe in the concept. It has to do with the historical Jesus of Nazareth. According to secular history and that of my people the Jews, Jesus, son of Joseph, the rabbi from Nazareth did indeed exist. The only difference is that for us Jews, Jesus was like a Watchtower religion event occuring in our Jewish world--we didn't notice much of anything while he was happening.

In fact, we Jews had a different messianic concept than what Christians eventually developed due to what happened when Jesus redefined his followers expectation when he died on the Cross (and redefine those expectation, Jesus did--but that is a different story I won't go into here and now).

The Jewish messianic concept developed when the Hasmonean dynasty failed due to falling into the hands of the Herods, and the Herods betraying the Hasmoneans by selling them out to the Romans who overtook our land in exchange of putting the Herods onto the throne. The Jews, always looking for a divine reason why national tragedy occurs blamed this one on the fact that the Hasomean kings were all Levites instead of Judeans. The Mosaic Law and other texts state that rulership should be in the hands of the House of David, and thus a "reason" for God's "punishment" was seen in the Roman oppression.

The only way out was that God would send a deliverer, Jews thought, a Davidic king anointed to as prince to save the people and remove the yoke of oppression. Thus the hope of a restored kingdom, like the one the Hasmoneans had tried to build, but with a son of David as ruler. (This was newly discovered and retrofitted from re-reading the Biblical texts to fit into the new Roman oppression. There are no Hebrew Scriptures that mention a figure called "the Messiah.")

But this prince would be more like Judah Maccabee of the Hasmoneans than the peaceful, love preaching rabbi of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth. According to the Jewish sages, it would be by violent war and a heavy rod that this messianic figure was believed to restore the independence the Hasmoneans had lost to the Herods. Who was this figure?

The Jews believed this prince was to be Simon Bar Kokhba who was anointed as nasi or "prince" by the high prince after the Romans allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem after the First Jewish Revolt. Due to a fatal mistake of interpreting Ezekiel's Temple prophecy as literal and claiming that the Messiah would come only when there was a need to rebuild it in fulfillment of this particular oracle, the Second Jewish or Bar Kokhba Revolt ended the Diaspora in 136 CE. Bar Kokhba was killed, Jews were slaughtered again, and Jews did not see their holy land again until after the Holocaust.

This caused a practical end to the Messianic hope in Judaism. While it became a part of Maimonides 13 articles of Faith, Judaism as a whole, which is not dogmatic, never universally adopted them. The Reform Movement, for example, the first Jewish denomination, denied any belief in a Messiah. Reconstructionist Jews do not believe in a personal Messiah either.

Eventually, the Messiah became a personal hope generally shared among some Orthodox groups, though again not universal among each and every Jew.

The reason Jews do not believe in the Trinity is because Christians have a different view on the Messiah altogether. They see the Messiah as a spiritually salvific figure and one with God. Except for mostly Unitarians and Jehovah's Witnesses, accepting Jesus as the Messiah means to accept Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity. And this is the main reason Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah.

There isn't anything bad about Jesus to Jews, personally speaking. A rabbi who teaches Torah and tells Jews to stop teaching personal traditions and who performs miracles with the power of God as well as stands for justice--what is wrong with that? He even rises from the dead! The only wrong thing is that Christians say he is God.

So this is why the Jews don't believe in the Trinity. God is also not so much of a person or perhaps even that much of an entity in Judaism. In Christianity, the Bible's descriptions of God being a personal God are literal because Jesus said so. Therefore this makes the Trinity more of a reality for Christians.

408

Is Jesus the Creator?

by Sea Breeze in

that's what the word says.

.

colossians 1:16. for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him..

KalebOutWest

aqwsed:

I don't know why you addressed your post to me.

I stopped caring about this subject the moment I wrote my postscript.

I neither bothered to read what you wrote nor am coming back to read anything for some time. My vacation begins now. Airplane mode begins in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...