Posts by Leolaia

posted

67
I would love for you to know my Oompa.... (from one of his closest friends)
by Robert7 in
1. jw
2. friends
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Leolaia

Thank you for sharing, that was a beautiful tribute.
199
I Want Proof Jesus Even Existed
by Farkel in
1. watchtower
2. bible
don't bother me with the josephus addendum.

i've already seen that debunked.. i am quite aware of the fact that the only evidence of jesus comes from his own followers who didn't even bother to write down his life for decades after jesus "died.

" don't know about you, but if i saw all that shit, i would have gone home and written three books about it that same day!.
Leolaia

I think that is the last time I am going to respond point-by-point. Next time I might respond to a few points if they are new, but I really said all I want to on this topic.
199
I Want Proof Jesus Even Existed
by Farkel in
1. watchtower
2. bible
don't bother me with the josephus addendum.

i've already seen that debunked.. i am quite aware of the fact that the only evidence of jesus comes from his own followers who didn't even bother to write down his life for decades after jesus "died.

" don't know about you, but if i saw all that shit, i would have gone home and written three books about it that same day!.
Leolaia

It was not that long that scholars said the bible was almost perfect. Today we have many scholars who still say Jesus did those miracles. I wont deny many of these are xian fundies but still, it shows scholars are people as well and they arent always honest. There are a lot of nutty muslim scholars, i dont believe them, but still they say many things aswell that are obviously stupid like beliving mohammad split the moon in half as it is writtein hte koran.
I don't care what fundies say...they don't follow historical methodology; neither do crank writers who have an interesting idea. History isn't anything goes. You can't throw out an internally-consistent well-supported picture of the past that explains the preponderance of the evidence for something that does a piss-poor job doing the same thing. That doesn't mean that the current picture of things is perfect, or can't be altered, not at all. It means that the new explanation has to do a better job explaining things than the current understanding.
It's like throwing out everything we know about geology and paleontology and evolution because of one anomalous fossil that might suggest humans lived at the sapome time as dinosaurs (and the fossil itself is dubious because of reasons xyz).
That's what I'm talking about.
After all taht lets forget about this appeal to authority and actually look at the items of interest.
No appeal to authority at all.....I am appealing to the body of research and knowledge that already exists that any new theory or idea that radically wants to revise history needs to explain in a better way than the older paradigm.
Are we to believe that the Romans were incapable of hiring the best minds to produce these texts. If theres anyone with deep pockets surely it must be the imperial government. THe facts are education was very much a privlege of the rich, the rich had a best of interest in cooperating w/ the Romans, to keep the status quo.
Yeah, such a massive conspiracy to simulate not just a body of literature but a body of literature that looks like it was written by many people over many years from a wide range of intellectual and social positions.....kind of like how fundies think God simulated those fossils to look just like they were millions of years old to fool those silly evolutionists. In both cases, huuuuge special pleading there. Maybe all of classical Greek literature was faked in a single monastery in the Middle Ages too. Maybe all of American literature was written by Stephen King and his buddies, and just made it look like a HUGE gamut of texts that came from many, many people from all walks of life. If you entertain such an outlandish notion, your evidence for it better be good. Otherwise, why even think such a thing?
We have a certain poster here who disagrees with Neo-Babylonian and Persian chronology and he believes there was a massive conspiracy in antiquity to fake all the chronological records to insert a century or so, even things like business documents. All the evidence that proves his chronology wrong is just dismissed a priori as faked, and the chronology is instead based on a set of anomalies and coincidences. It's the same story. It isn't about assessing the preponderance of the evidence. Rather, the preponderance of the evidence is just dismissed cavalierly. There had better be really good evidence that ALL that evidence has been faked, but it just isn't there.
So...I call "special pleading".
His book only quotes the gospels and mostly follows only jesus life. I think you have confused yourself here. The story of jesus life only appears in the gospels, we cant really count the remainder as really biographical, the mentions in paul are a joke.
No, I do think he thinks Paul was a Flavian forgery too....he had a chapter on the authorship of the NT iirc. Anyway, you logically can't have Paul being a Christian in the 50s-60s, if the Flavians didn't invent Jesus until the 70s, so....logically the whole thing was faked by the same party.
You are entitled to your opinion but first you must make your case. Youve wasted 1/4 of your reply telling us about Fomenko. Your 2nd para is very long and completely without any examples. Your opinions about how different religions form their theology are well interseting but completely ignore the Titus v Jesus parallels. I will ignore this paragraph as its without any hard facts, i dont think i can honestly say much more without getting diverted. I notice your remainder has scriptures and more details which i will attempt to comment upon.
Well, too bad then. My purpose was to explain why I found the thesis pitiful. So the big part of it was methodology, which was deeply flawed, and so that's a big part of what I wanted to talk about. I know you don't care about methodology and just want a point-by-point rebuttal of specifics in the book, which I can't really do too well because I don't have the book, and really it's beside the point for me because the problem is much deeper than just the rightness or wrongness of specific claims.
Freely ignore the points I made if you wish.
Come on you are being unfair. You very well know i was referring to the fact there were many individuals in Israel called Jesus and we cant assume that Tacitus as previous quoted was referring to THE one and only jesus, because there were no others. If anything your example shows that names are common and rarely unique especially if they are a common name in that society. jesus was a common name. Your example shows this with your examples of John. Most xians unfortunately dont realise that Jesu was a common name.
No I'm being perfectly fair. This is precisely the point I'm making about Atwill. Lots of people were named Jesus, lots of totally unrelated people. So you can't just use the name as the basis for combining or linking totally unrelated Jesuses together.
But perhaps his largest error of this sort (and overall) is finding commonality in names. He marvels that there was a "Jesus" who preached and a "Jesus" who also led rebels against Titus on the Sea of Galilee [43] -- oblivious to the point that (as we have heard so much about, related to the "James ossuary") "Jesus" was as common a name for Jews of that period as "Bob" is for men today. He makes the same error concerning "Mary" (a name held by up to a third and at least a fourth of Jewish women of this era; thus, despite Atwill, there is no oddity in two sisters having variations of that same name [88], and his argument that the Romans turned "Mary" into a "nickname for female rebels" [90] is shown erroneous). And the same error is made with "Simon." Atwill did no checking into this subject beyond the list of Biblical names in a chart from Webster's [302] and so errs badly when he declares how unlikely it is that the NT and Josephus would record so many Jewish people with the same names.
Tacitus does not refer to the name "Jesus" at all. He refers to Christians. Christians who got their start in Judea during the reign of Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was governor. Tacitus refutes Atwill. But I'm sure this can be hand-waved easily as well.
Atwill only writes about the gospels. We arent really talking about Luke. can we actually focus on the gospels first.
LOL. Luke isn't a gospel. Gotcha.
So some body used Josephus to write Luke. Its fairly possible that some romans did this. So they screwed up so what. Everybody makes mistakes. Are you stating that hte Romans didnt make mistakes.. i dont understand how this shows that the Romans didnt writ e the gospels.
It's also fairly possible that a Jew writing in Greek about events in pre-70 Judea would use something written by a Jew in Greek about events in pre-70 Judea. Explains the literary dependence without resorting to an outlandish theory.
My point in mentioning those parallels is to show what real parallels look like.
You have failed to show a single scripture from Mt, Mk, Lu or Jo that is completely flawed in the parallels of Titus campaign.
I mentioned a few examples of claimed parallels that are dubious, that pale in comparison to real parallels, that are the kind that one could easily find between two stories if one stretches things far enough and cherry picks things as parallels that don't necessarily make much internal sense. Doesn't meet the especially high burden of proof that the thesis demands.
You still seem to think I'm trying to refute Atwill.
Hey, maybe the BP oil spill never happened. Read the novel Moby Dick alongside the news reports of the oil spill....the novel when read together with the news reports creates a satire lampooning the oil companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/weekinreview/13kennedy.html?pagewanted=all (This article is all about parallels between Moby Dick and the BP disaster)
BTW, the parallels with Moby Dick are not really that close....mostly thematic. Wanna bet I can ransack my way through the pages of Moby Dick and find random words or phrases that create a wide range of coincidences with Deepwater Horizon, the Gulf, BP, Tony Hayward, etc. Kinda interesting how the oil rig punctures the oil deposit, like the whalers shoot their harpoons at the oil-bearing whale....hmmm the whale is white which is an in-joke to the fact that petroleum is black, Ahab took dangerous risks to pursue the whale, BP took dangerous risks trying to tap the oil deposit, the deposit sent an explosion that destroyed and sank Deepwater Horizon just as the whale sank the Pequod, the Pequod sank in DEEP WATER and the ship earlier sighted a ship on the HORIZON. The first mate is named Peleg which when read in connection with the Deepwater Horizon story in the Gulf of Mexico produces the in-joke peligrosa "perilous, dangerous", as what some Mexicans along the Gulf would have said about what happened, and this is confirmed proof positive in what Bildad says to him: ""Peleg! Peleg! thou thyself hast seen many a perilous time" (chapter 18). "He drilled deep down and blasted all reason out of me!" says the mainmast in chapter 38, obviously the drilling for oil in the fake "Deepwater Horizon" story is a spoof of this line. The whalers from the whaling oil companies were "mutually cutting each other on the high seas .... and all the time insulting, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's rig" (chapter 53), an obvious allusion to the competition between the petroleum companies and the criticism BP received regaring its oil rig. Hmm the word "rig" occurs a lot in Moby Dick...."Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy!" (chapter 40). "Bang it" refers to the oil rig explosion, as "rig it" indicates. "Dig it" of course is the oil drilling. "Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf" (chapter 135). The story about injured birds in the Gulf must be about this. Ahab is told that "The oil in the hold is leaking, sir" and he says "Let it leak! I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! Yet I don't stop to plug my leak, for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull" (chapter 109). Obviously the story about the oil leak parodies this, with BP not caring about the leak, not taking the risk seriously, and knowing that finding the leak so deep underwater would be very hard. "The leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy water" (chapter 54), need I go on? The BP oil spill is a fabrication. Who cares if there is supposed evidence that it happened....I've got parallels from Moby Dick! Q.E.D.
Anyway those parallels sound about as good as claiming that the story of Jesus calling fishermen to discipleship on the Sea of Galilee is paralleled by a story about a battle on the Sea of Galilee that maims and kills Jews who are trying to swim.
Again how does this make it impossible for the Romans to not have leveraged some of these compatible ideas in their creation ? it is irrelevant that other philosphies or religions were peaceful, that does not exclude the possibility. Interesting, surely, historical, yes, a case against the Romans, sorry no banana.
Cart before the horse. There's no substantive evidence that the Romans did this at all. I don't have to show it's impossible at all; the burden is on those making the claim that it did happen. And you miss the point I was making. It was Atwill who felt he had to come up with his theory in order to account for what he believed early Judaism to be, an impression that was actually quite wrong.
YOu have completely missed the point that the Romans, did know the Bible. They were not idiots
What little is recorded about the attitudes of the non-Christian Roman elite depicts them as having a very superficial knowledge of Christians (see the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan, they didn't know much about this group of people), and they loved to repeat false rumors like Christians hate all mankind, they are firebugs who tip over candles (which is kind of relevant to the scapegoating of Christians by Nero), etc.
Someone should have clued Tacitus in on this massive conspiracy to fabricate Christianity. He stupidly thought that "Judea was the origin of this evil destructive superstition" and although "repressed", it "erupted again through the city of Rome where all that is horrible and shameful floods together and is celebrated". Silly Tacitus, the Flavians didn't repress it, they CREATED it -- not in Judea but in Rome! Right under your nose!
Josephus by himself is probably more qualified about jewish than nay modern scholar, simply because he was there, and had access to material we can only dream of. Living at the time he would have seen and heard things that have been lost through time and our modern shcolars can never hope to know. TO continue on and on hardly disproves the possibility that the Romans wrote the gospels. They were educated, they had the resources.
Burden....of.....proof.....
I believe that Josephus also invented Judaism. All of it. The whole shebang. He wrote the entire OT, and also planted those Dead Sea Scrolls too. He was a smart guy, don't underestimate his intelligence. He knew how to imitate older styles of writing in order to make it look like there were manuscripts older than the first century; he used old parchments too. He was creative enough to think up all the really complex stuff in the OT that seems to take different points of view and seem for all the world like they were written by many different people. Then on the weekends, he translated all that stuff into Greek and came out with the Septuagint, but being oh so careful to make it look like the Septuagint had a lot of textual variation and translation errors. Then he was able to get all those Jews out there to stop worshipping Zeus and adopt this new Hebrew god he invented.
Pretty cool story huh? Now I don't expect to lift a finger to substantiate this. It doesn't matter how implausible this is. But it's up to you to disprove it. (And most of the evidence that would disprove this I can claim was faked anyway).
They knew which scriptures to use and promote and which to leave out. We all know that Mt badly twists many scriptures like the riding on the two donkeys and others, because he must find parallels to prove jesus in prophecy even if the references are wrong and dishonest. We have the same dishonesty in the twisting of Micah 5 which supposedly predicts the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. The gospels writers tried really hard to impress prophecy on the reader that i will agree. They tried their best, it would be hard to imagine anyone else doing better with what they had to work with.
That is in no way evidence of Flavian forgery. That is very very typical, midrash is just the thing we would expect for a genuine Jewish writing from the period. Jonah cribs all over the place from the OT; that's an example of fictional midrash (about a historical figure from Deuteronomistic History) like the gospels. 1 Enoch too (the scene in the first chapter is based heavily on Deuteronomy). The narrative in Tobit is loaded with allusions to Genesis and Job. The account of the persecution by Antiochus Epiphanes in Daniel 11-12 depicts it as a fulfillment of the Suffering Servant prophecy in Deutero-Isaiah. The Dead Sea Scrolls indulge in pesher interpretation of recent events as fulfillments of OT prophecy. The legendary stories of the rabbis in the Mishnah draw on OT material. You can see exactly the same process continuing in later Christian literature. The stories about Judas in Papias and later writers elaborate the narratives further by borrowing details and information from the OT. The Matryrdom of Polycarp cribs from Daniel 3, 6 as well as the passion narratives in order to make Polycarp imitate Jesus' death. The infancy gospels borrow narrative elements from the OT (such as Anna being based on the Hannah from the story of Samuel). So how is this different? Rather show me things that go against the grain of what one might expect for a first century Jewish writing, that might independently point to a Flavian, non-Jewish provenance. Stuff like....I don't know..... sustained linguistic interference from Latin throughout the corpus, evidence of a pagan Tendenz, etc. You can say that the Romans had the resources and could have gotten a bunch of immensely competent Jews to write something that sounds just like something that Jews would write, but that's no different from how it would be if Jews wrote it themselves on their own. It's more question-begging and again I am asked to disprove what is already patently the less parsimonious option. Parsimony counts.
The fact that jews rejected Jesus today, shows that he did not match the criteria of the prophecies but the authors used the text anyway.
Umm, wow. I don't think Jews today agree with how the Essenes interpreted OT prophecies as pertaining to their own day either, but that doesn't mean anything. It isn't a matter of "matching criteria of prophecies"; the Christians creatively drew on OT material that often weren't prophecies at all to compose both stories about Jesus as well as interpret their meaning (christological as well as soteriological). Christians similarly don't care about how rabbinical Jews used midrash to invent creative midrashic stories about the OT; they aren't rejecting those stories, they just don't care. The two belong to different religious traditions separated now for almost two thousand years.
YOu have again failed to address a single point that shows why it is impossible for the Romans to write this text.
Misplaced burden of proof.
I didn't say it was impossible. I said that it is so implausible that to think it happened that way is to disregard most of what we know about the NT. History is about assessing the preponderance of evidence and likelihoods. The burden is on you to show that this theory explains the history better than the alternative. It is inherently unlikely. So it loses out in evidentiary evaluation. You still don't realize that you have to show how this is a better explanation of the given facts in order to be taken seriously.
Maybe JCanon is right too that every single datum that points to 604 BC as the first year of Nebuchadnezzar (including the thousands of business tablets) was faked in a massive conspiracy in ancient times. It ain't bloody likely though.
You have failed to show any passage from the gospels are is a compelte fail for Titus.
Misplaced burden of proof. Etc.
You have failed to explain the pro Roman attitude and directions from Jesus.
I already did at length. Explained by both prophetic models from the OT and quietist response to political oppression. BTW, I forgot to mention in my last post that Josephus mentions two instances of non-violent passive protest against the Romans (kind of like the sit-ins in the sixties), as just around the time Jesus supposedly lived (first regarding the standards introduced during Pontius Pilate's tenure and second regarding the proposed statue of Gaius in the Jerusalem Temple). And both protests had successful results.
The texts blame the jews for JC crucifiction, which is v strange.
Why is it strange? The narrative depicts the Sanhedrin as handing Jesus over to the Roman authorities on the accusation of sedition. And incidentally the OT prophets were also persecuted by fellow Jews, think of the trials of Jeremiah. That is kind of the point made in Matthew 23:34-37. And like Jesus, Jeremiah declared that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed because of the unfaithfulness of the Jewish leaders.
cameo appearnces of jospehus embedded in character naming puns.
Yeah right.
Jesus is more concerned about protecting Roman interests than encouraging social change that would actually help the jews or poor slaves.
Funny then how "the poor" was the focus of so much of the gospel in the synoptics, and how the early Christian movement created a community that prioritized the poor.
You have spent way to much time away from the gospels, discussing jewish religious development and messianic expectations. Not once did you actually discuss anything about Titus campaign and its parallels with Jesus ministry which is what the entire theory is about.
Yeah sad, isn't it, that that is what the "entire theory" is based on. (And yes, I did discuss some of the "parallels" from what I remember from the book)
I talked so much about other stuff because, as I've said quite a few times already, there is a shitload of stuff that you have to ignore for the hypothesis to be correct. If I am going to say why I find it ridiculous, I am going to have to talk about that other stuff and methodology.
I would give you a fail because of this. Its your privlege to not reply, but if someone asks you a question, then reply to that, dont talk about other stuff even if it is interesting
LOL. IOW...."Don't try to put a lot of thought into explaining why you found an idea hard to believe (a streeeeeetch, as I put it) by getting down to the logical and methodological problems rendering that idea implausible. I don't care about that."
The easist example of the pun on Arimathea= Josephus you have completely ignored. I suppose its unanswerable which is why you avoided it.
LOL I already said it was philologically implausible and lacking any narrative connection (as I said, did Josephus offer to bury Titus in his own family tomb? what's the connection beyond the purported sound similarity).
Some scholars have noticed this resemblance, there are plenty of refs on wiki for example.
Where? Show me an actual peer-reviewed scholarly source that makes that claim.
If J of A is Josephus he doesnt have to bury Titus. Titus doesnt have to die because Jesus died. That wouldnt make sense.
That's my point! It doesn't make sense. Josephus has no analogous role to Joseph of Arimathea.
You have missed the point that, that the gospels tell a story of a peaceful messiah. The R are trying to show the jews that their messiah has come and he is telling them not to fight, but accept their lot, pay taxes etc.
Funny. On the one hand you complain I talk about all this "other stuff", yet you say I missed the point even though much of that "other stuff" was to explain the quietist political stance of the synoptics and what all that actually means within the context of Second Temple Judaism. I was addressing that very question. And I showed how that stance was not one that embraced the Roman empire but in fact expected its demise in the near future.
You also havecompeltely ignored any attempt to show that the gospels are not beneficial to the Romans.
And you have completely ignored my attempt to show that the eschatological expectation in the synoptics was that the era of Roman rule was coming to an end.
You have also completely ignored the close family connection between xianity and the flavians. no commentary about the 2nd pope being Clement, or the first cath saint being Vespasian sister or cousin(sorry cant recall exaclty the realtionship) and all the sheer volume of saints.
Which has nothing to do with the composition of the gospels unless you already accept the premise that the Flavians wrote them. It's like noting that there are a lot of Jews in business and entertainment, which is supposed to show that a cabal of Jews have conspired to control commerce and industry; similarly, there were some Flavians who were Christians, ergo, a cabal of Flavians conspired to invent Christianity. Why is it implausible that some Flavians (which was not just a family but a gens) converted to Christianity? The church at Rome was huge. The two you mentioned (Titus Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla) were husband and wife. Dio Cassius wrote about them:
"Domitian slew, along with many others, Flavius Clemens the consul, although he was a cousin and married to Flavia Domitilla, who was also a relative of the emperor's. The charge brought against them both was that of atheism (atheotès), a charge on which many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned. Some of these were put to death, and the rest were at least deprived of their property. Domitilla was merely banished to Pandateria".
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Let's see if I have this right....The Flavians invent Christianity, knowing its a joke, then two Flavians convert to this phony baloney religion, and this is somehow evidence that the Flavians invented it, so I guess they were supposed to join it cause it's a "Flavian thang"....even though as Tacitus shows the non-Christian Romans regarded it a disgusting vile superstition, but then when another Flavian became emperor he killed one of his own family members for belonging to this religion that they themselves had created and tried to promote (forget that Tacitus says that it was suppressed not promoted), and banished the other to an island who then....wait a minute!! why is a Flavian lashing out against a religion that his family tried to promote and was all about making teh Jooz looooove the Romans? Those silly Flavians!!!
31
"Melchizedek" might mean, "My king is Jupiter" or "my God is Jupiter"...
by EndofMysteries in
1. watchtower
2. bible
i just recently learned that in hebrew, zedek also means jupiter.

when did this happen is unknown.

and possibibly that the planet jupiter was responsible for some catastrophes and things happening on earth during that time.
Leolaia

Here is some of what the DDD says about the god Zedeq:
"The West Semitic deity Zedek, 'Righteousness', is found in the Bible only in the personal names →Melchizedek (Gen 14:18; cf. Ps 110:4; Heb 5:6; 6:20-7:17) and Adonizedek (Josh 10:1, 3), both Canaanite kings of pre-Israelite Jerusalem. Zedek is probably to be identified with the deity known as Išar among the Amorites and Kittu in Babylonia, and thus a hypostasis or personification of the sun god Shamash's function (→Shemesh) as divine overseer of justice. The cult of Zedek appears to have been well established in pre-Israelite (Jebusite) Jerusalem. Some aspects of this cult apparently were translated into Yahwism....Most decisive is a statement by Philo of Byblos that the Phoenicians had a god named Sydyk, i.e. Zedek. Philo, who claimed to get his information from the Phoenician writer Sanchuniaton, noted that the Phoenicians numbered among their gods 'Misor and Sydyk, that is, "easy to loosen" and Righteous, they invented the use of salt'; the rendering eulutos for Misor is apparently based on an erroneous etymology, deriving the name from the root šrh 'loosen, release'....Philo goes on to say that Misor fathered Taautos (known to the Egyptians as →Thoth and to the Greeks as →Hermes), the invention of writing, and that from Sydyk came the Dioscouri (→Dioskouroi), the Cabeiri, and Corybantes, and the Samothracians. Patently, 'Misor' and 'Sydyk' correspond to Heb. mîšôr, 'justice' and tsedeq 'righteousness' .... In Mesopotamia the preservation of truth and jsutice was considered to be the particular domain of the sun god Shamash. Truth or Right was personified as the god Kittu ('Truth', 'Right' from the Akk root kânu, cf. Heb root kwn). Kittu was often invoked together with the god Misharu ('Justice'), cf. Heb. mîšôr, 'justice'. One or both of these deities were described as 'seated before Shamash', i.e. Shamash's attendant, or 'the minster of (Shamash's) right hand'. While Misharu was always considered a male deity, Kittu was identified sometimes as the daughter of Shamash, sometimes as the son of Shamash. Meanwhile at Mari, offerings were made to the divine paird Išar u d Mesar, where the same gods are listed separately but contiguously....The god Zedek is attested frequently in personal names....West Semitic personal names containing the root SDQ are attested at many sites, including El Amarna, Ugarit, Rimah, and Mari....In some cases, based upon comparative onomastic evidence, it is difficult to avoid interpreting SDQ as a theophoric element: Sidqi-epuh ('Sidqu is brilliant'), Sidqum-matar ('Sidqum is outstanding'), Ili-Sidqi ('My god is Sidqi'), and Amarna Rabi-Sidqi ('Sidqu is great'). More ambiguous are the personal names Ili-sidqum/sidqi, Ili-saduq, and Saduqi-AN....
In the Bible the god Zedek appears only in the personal names of two Canaanite kings of Jerusalem, Melchizedek (Gen 14:18) and Adonizedek (Josh 10:1, 3), fueling speculation that Jerusalem was a cult centre in pre-Israelite times. Melchizedek is identified not only as 'king of Salem' but also as 'priest of God → Most High ('el `elyon, Gen 14:18), today usually understood to mean that Melchizedek was a devotee of the god El, head of the Canaanite pantheon. Others argue, however, that Melchizedek was priest of the god Zedek. One hypothesis suggests that Zedek is to be identified with the god →Shalem, whose name is embodied in Jerusalem. Support for this hypothesis may come from the Ugaritic personal name sdqšlm, should this name mean 'Zedek-is-Shalem' rather than the more probable 'Shalem is righteous.' Shalem certainly has connections with a solar cult, aspects of which may have been incorporated into Israelite Yahwistic religion. A longstanding cult of Zedek at Jerusalem could account at least partially for the fact that even during the Israelite period Jerusalem laid special claim to such titles as 'the city of Righteousness' (Isa 1:21, 26) and 'pasture of Righteousness' (Jer 31:23; cf. 33:16)....Some have suggestd that Zadok had been a priest in the Jebusite sanctuary at Jerusalem prior to his appointment by David as one of his two principal priests and that Zadok's name indicates an original connection with the cult of Zedek...The original function of Righteousness as an aspect of the solar deity, who searches out and destroys injustice upon the face of the earth but vindicates the righteous, is only slightly veiled in Mal 3:19-20. The image concerns the dawning of the day of Yahweh, when the intense sun will consume the wicked like stubble, while for those who revere God "the sun of Righteousness (tsedaqâ) shall rise with healing in its wings". Vestigal images of a solar deity of righteousness have been suggested also for Mic 7:9, Isa 45:8, 19, and Hos 10:12. Zedek and Mišor as attendant deities of Shamash also have their reflexes in Yahwism as dual qualities of the God of Israel. Isa 11:4 says that the Spirit of Yahweh will possess the messianic king, with the result that 'he will judge the weak with Righteousness, he will defend the poor of the earth with Justice". (pp. 929-932)
31
"Melchizedek" might mean, "My king is Jupiter" or "my God is Jupiter"...
by EndofMysteries in
1. watchtower
2. bible
i just recently learned that in hebrew, zedek also means jupiter.

when did this happen is unknown.

and possibibly that the planet jupiter was responsible for some catastrophes and things happening on earth during that time.
Leolaia

Yes, the Hebrew word tsedeq (Zedeq) was the name for the planet Jupiter at least in later rabbinical sources. And Zedeq was a West Semitic deity associated with Jerusalem that Melchizedek was likely named after. I don't though see any indication that the god Zedeq was identified with Jupiter in ANE sources. It's possible though that somewhere there could have been a link.
44
Watchtower teachings on the length of human existence.
by free @ last in
1. watchtower
2. beliefs
anyone know the current wt teachings on the length of time humans have been in existence?

do they still teach that the first man and woman were created approximately 6,000 years ago?

have they made any comments on archeological findings that show paleo-indians living in the america's 10,000+ years ago?
Leolaia

Even when I was still in and totally believed the 6,000-year thing, I was still really bugged by the inconsistent way the Society accepted scientific dates. They basically followed secular dates up to about 4000 BC, at which point they just ignore anything that happened before then, or assumed the dates were just wrong, rather than claiming that the dates for 4000-2000 BC must also wrong and should be moved down chronologically. I tried to come with my own harmonization myself when I was a kid, and I thought "early man" and the Pleistocene era corresponded to the first half of the antediluvian era (squeezing many thousands of years into a few hundred years, because well "the dates are too long"), and then the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras (the latter started by Tubal-cain) spanned the latter portion (compressing more secular history into a shorter period), up to the time of the Flood which occurred just before the Early Bronze Age (around the time of the Flood layers in Shuruppak and Ur). Then the Bronze Age followed after the Flood, first with the Early Dynastic period for Sumer, and then after Sargon became king of Akkad and built the Tower of Babel, then everyone really quickly spread over the earth, and so the Egyptian Old Kingdom began just a few decades later around 2230 BC, and then I would have to do further squeezing to get Egyptian history compressed enough so that the Hyksos period would align with Joseph's career in Egypt. I put a lot of effort into that harmonization/calibration scheme between "bible chronology" and secular history. So it irked me that the Society would say, oh yeah, writing goes back to the fourth millennium BC because of these finds in Mesopotamia (proving that Adam or Noah or whomever could have written records), or Ötzi lived 5,500 years ago even though he must have died after the Flood (since it was a warm climate back then, yo), or that lead was used by Egyptians as early as 3000 BC, or the earliest law dates to 2500 BCE, etc. I think there was even an Awake! in recent years that just flat out stated that the Giza pyramids were built in 2500 BCE.
30
Who in the hell ate Abraham,s food, Angels or God?
by jam in
1. watchtower
2. beliefs
ok folks,.

gen.18;1-8 the lord appeared to him by the oak tree.. gen.18:5 he fetch a morsel of bread for his guest.. gen.18;6 sarah makes meal, knead it and made cakes.. gen.18:7 abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender.

and good.. gen.18:8 he set it before them and he stood by them under.
Leolaia

There is a similar story in Canaanite myth of the god Kothar-wa-Hasis visiting the formerly childless sage Danel (likely the same figure from antiquity mentioned in Ezekiel 14:14, 20, 28:3) to present his young son Aqhat (= Actaeon from Boeotian myth) with a bow, and Danel and his wife Dantiy slaughtered a lamb and prepared a feast for their divine guest (KTU 1.17). Later on, Aqhat's bow was coveted by the huntress Anat who ended him killing him by sending animal henchmen to murder him and retrieve the bow. Ovid preserved a pair of stories from Greek mythology with strong similarities to ch. 18-19 of Genesis. First the three gods Zeus, Hermes (son of Zeus, the "messenger"), and Poseidon (brother of Zeus), disguised as men, visited an elderly childless Boeotian named Hyrieus who welcomes them with hospitality and gives them a feast. After the meal, the three gods told him that he would became father to a son, and nine months later the giant Orion was born to him from the ground ( Fasti 5.493; cf. Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 25, Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 195 , Astronomica 2.34). Then on another occasion Zeus and Hermes, again disguised as ordinary men, visit a town in Tyana seeking a place to sleep for the night, and they found "all the doors bolted and no word of kindness given, so wicked were the people of that land"; finally they found shelter at the home of Philemon and Baucis, who paid them hospitality while not realizing they were gods. Then the gods told the couple that they must flee, for they had come to destroy the town, and they instructed the couple to flee to the nearby mountains and not look back until they reached the top, and they then destroyed the city with a flood (Metamorphoses, 611-724). The story is also alluded to in the NT; the people of Lycaonia identified Paul and Barnabas as Zeus and Hermes, declaring: "The gods have come down to us in human form" (Acts 14:11-13).
The parallels imo are strong enough to suggest the possibility that the Hebrew stories drew on similar folklore, in this case localized in Hebron concerning the traditional ancestor of the Israelite and Edomite peoples (Hebron had an Edomite and Judean population), and there are further possible links. The town of Hebron, with its Abraham-linked sites of Mamre and Machpelah, was an longstanding sacred center in pre-Israelite/Canaanite times (going back to the third millennium BC) with a cult centered on the ancient terebinths, associated also with the Abraham tradition (Genesis 13:18, 14:13, 18:1, 23:1). Even as late as Byzantine times, Hebron was the site of an annual summer festival called Terebinthus that venerated the tree, Abraham, and the three visitors (Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.4-54). Hermes and Dionysius were two of the gods (syncretized to native Semitic gods) worshipped by the Edomites of Hebron during this period (Hebron was the center of the viticulture industry of district). The terebinth veneration likely stemmed from the pre-exilic Asherah cult, considering that the Hebrew word for terebinth, 'elah, is identical to the word for "goddess" and was a common epithet for Asherah. According to Josephus, the terebinth at Mamre was considered the most ancient tree in the world and its name was Ogyges (Antiquitates 1.186, Bellum Judaicae 4.533). Curiously, this is the same name of the founder of Boeotia in Greek mythology (who survived the Flood with his wife Thebes), and it is generally recognized that the name is of West Semitic origin (from 'agag "to burn, flame", which was used as a common Amalekite name in the OT). Michael Astour found a very high concentration of West Semitic (Phoenician?) names associated with cities, rivers, and mythological figures of Boeotia, suggesting historical links with the Levant. The connection is explicit in Boeotian legend: the mythical Cadmus (< qedmosh "east"), who founded the Boeotian city of Thebes (< tebah "ark", named after the wife of Ogyges) after slaying the dragon whose blood formed the river Ismenos (< the Phoenician god Eshmun) a.k.a. Ladon (= the name of the dragon slain by Heracles < the dragon Lotan/Leviathan), was a Phoenician who settled in Greece and introduced the Phoenician alphabet. There was certainly contact between Mycenaean Greeks and West Semitic peoples in the period following the LBA collapse when the Sea Peoples settled in the Levant including the Peleshet (= Philistines), the Ekwesh (= the Achaeans), and the Danuna (= the Danaeans, cf. the tribe of Dan adjecent to Philistia). This increases the possibility that the Boeotian legend about the visit of Zeus, Hermes, and Poseidon to Hyrieus is not just coincidentally similar to the Hebron tradition but in fact has a West Semitic origin (or....was the influence in the other direction?). Is it also coincidental that Hermes was venerated in Roman-era Hebron, Hermes was a messenger god, and the biblical story concerned three divine mal'akîm "messengers"? Possibly, though the Boeotian story about Hyrieus is a good parallel to the Abraham story of the divine visitors.
The Boeotian myth of the giant Orion (possibly derived from 'or "light" and cf. the Ugaritic name Aryn), the son of Hyrieus of Boeotia, also has a possible similarity with the story of Danel and Aqhat (which also probably inspired the myth of Actaeon); Orion became a hunter who hunted with the goddess Artemis (= Anat) and she later killed him either by arrows from her own bow or by sending a scorpion to kill him. This bears some resemblence to the story about Actaeon (whose name may have a philological connection with Aqhat), son of the priestly herdsman Aristaeus and Autonoe in Boeotia, who was a hunter but was murdered by Artemis after seeing her naked, who transforms him into a stag whereupon he was torn apart by hounds. The birth of Orion from the ground bears at least a superficial similarity with the metaphor in Isaiah 51:1-2 of the offspring of Abraham and Sarah being hewn from rock, and it is interesting that the other sacred site at Hebron, the cave of Machpelah, was also associated with the Abraham tradition. And there was a robust tradition of the three giants of Hebron, attested in Joshua 15:14 and elsewhere. So even though there was no clear connection between any of these various motifs (e.g. the Ogyges of Boeotia probably had no connection with the Ogyges of Hebron other than sharing the same name), taken together there may be enough to suggest that behind the text there possibly lies a rich traditional background to the Abraham stories set in Hebron.
199
I Want Proof Jesus Even Existed
by Farkel in
1. watchtower
2. bible
don't bother me with the josephus addendum.

i've already seen that debunked.. i am quite aware of the fact that the only evidence of jesus comes from his own followers who didn't even bother to write down his life for decades after jesus "died.

" don't know about you, but if i saw all that shit, i would have gone home and written three books about it that same day!.
Leolaia

I am aware that there were many Jesus'; how is that relevant to this discussion? Is there mention of a number of Jesus' who were executed by Pilate?
It's amazing how many Johns there are in American government history.
John Adams and John Quincy Adams? Sounds like he is a duplicate of the other. John Hancock? John Tyler and John F. Kennedy? How curious that a president who got assassinated was named John, and then two other Johns (John Wilkes Booth and John Hinckley) were assassins or potential assasssins of other presidents. Oh, and another John (John Lennon) was assassinated in New York even though he wasn't a president, but he was pretty famous. What are the odds that so many people mentioned in American history textbooks are named John?
199
I Want Proof Jesus Even Existed
by Farkel in
1. watchtower
2. bible
don't bother me with the josephus addendum.

i've already seen that debunked.. i am quite aware of the fact that the only evidence of jesus comes from his own followers who didn't even bother to write down his life for decades after jesus "died.

" don't know about you, but if i saw all that shit, i would have gone home and written three books about it that same day!.
Leolaia

Okay, so to pick up from last night, I mentioned Fomenko in order to make a methodological point because he uses a very similar approach as Atwill. Both regard the narrative of Jesus as hoaxed from a later personage and find the parallels as too coincidental to be a product of chance. Atwill regards the model of Jesus to be primarily Titus (although he draws parallels from Vespasian and others) while Fomenko finds the prototype to be an twelfth century AD Byzantine emperor (although he also draws parallels from other personages). Both are highly implausible for the same reasons. Historical reconstruction is not haphazard but is guided by principles of parsimony, internal consistency, and accounting for a preponderance of the evidence. In order for Fomenko to be right, you would have to dismiss an enormous amount of historical sources and facts, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence he provides just doesn't meet the burden of proof, not by a long shot. It is pretty much the same with Atwill. In order for Atwill to be right, you would have to dismiss all historical sources on early Christianity as frauds, and pretty much throw out all of critical scholarship on the NT in order to maintain his ideas on authorship (all the gospels, and indeed all the NT coming from the same small circle), provenance, date, and genre (the whole thing, or least the gospels, being satire). That is a lot of evidence to account for, but it is hand-waved simply in favor of a set of parallels that just do not meet such a high burden of proof. You asked why I found Atwill to be a real stretch, and that's essentially it in a nutshell. His hypothesis has little descriptive or explanatory adequacy, it is inherently unlikely, and it is poorly supported with evidence. It advances a conspiracy theory that is constructed around anomalies and claimed coincidences and sustained through question-begging, which is not valid historical methodology.
For example, there is an enormous amount of conceptual, stylistic, and linguistic diversity in the NT (and indeed across all early Christian writings). The same is the case with writings of Second Temple Judaism, or the Old Testament, or the Greek philosophers, or the early church fathers. Such polyphony normally shows that the different texts comes from many different hands, representing different viewpoints and intellectual backgrounds, coming from a range of different provenances over a stretch of time (with later writers engaging with earlier writings). Not so with Atwill. He ascribes the gospels and Josephus, and indeed the entirety of the NT, as coming from the same author, or small circle of authors. That is inherently implausible, in light of all the research on the diversity in both early Judaism and Christianity, and he either ignores the heterogeneity or asserts that it is manufactured as part of the deception (a good example of question-begging, with the premise being used to dismiss contrary evidence). He claims for instance that the narrative contradictions in the gospels were intentionally placed so that the intelligent reader should read the gospels together as a combined story, but this does not work at all; the differences in the nativity and appearance narratives, for instance, cannot be reconciled harmonistically. They represent different authorial aims, different literary approaches, different source traditions, different theological perceptives. In order for his thesis to "work", you have a presume a whole bunch of ideas that just aren't supported by the evidence. There is a huge body of research on the genre of the gospels and their constituent parts and how they fit together with pre-Christian Jewish/OT literature, and while parables often were satirical (in order to make moral points), there is no basis for classifying the gospels as a whole as satire — much less as a "joke" played on the audience. That isn't established through normal exegesis through the study of the construction of the narrative; it is derived eisegetically by using the premise of Flavian authorship (+ associated conspiracy theory) as the interpretive rubric for uncovering the "hidden meaning". I remember seeing this a lot in the book. He puts a satirical spin on a given pericope, not from its literary construction, but from his imposed premise or proposed parallel with Josephus. You can read pretty much any story as a humorous satire if you took such an approach. When I wrote about the book of Jonah as satire, it was based entirely on its literary features and how the characters behaved contrary to type. Instead Atwill says things like pericope X creates a satire when you combine it with "parallel" Y from Josephus. And similarly, he regarded certain stories in Josephus as fictions lampooning the fictional Jesus on pretty much the same grounds. This is classic eisegesis. The Society for instance doesn't interpret prophetic texts through normal exegetical analysis; it uses its own organizational history (or rather an idealized conception of it), or twentieth-century history, as the rubric for interpreting Revelation or Ezekiel or Daniel, such that it discovers that the biblical prophets were "really" talking about such things as the 1918 crisis in the Watchtower Society, or conventions in the 1920s. Similarly, Atwill uses Josephus' account of the Jewish War as the interpretive rubric for discovering what the gospels are "really" talking about. I don't find such analysis convincing or persuasive.
On the matter of parallels, it must be pointed out that there are some real parallels that he discusses. These are the parallels between Josephus and Luke-Acts which are distinctive (i.e. detailed, unusual, involving similar wording), which have been noted by scholars for a very long time, and which indicate a special relationship between Luke-Acts in particular and Josephus. That is usually explained as due to the fact that the author of Luke-Acts, being a historiographer, had read Josephus and drew details for background information. The idea that both had common authorship is implausible on many grounds, including the fact that the author of Luke-Acts bungled quite a few historical details from Josephus. Then there are parallels that are plausible but do not necessarily indicate any relationship between Josephus and the gospels, but rather result from the fact that both draw on similar material. So both refer to the calamity of the war as an unparalled misfortune "since the beginninng of the world", but this is a case of both being dependent on Daniel 12:1, which was the obvious OT prophecy relevant to the events of AD 66-70 (with the then-current interpretation of Daniel identifying the kingdom desolating the Temple as Rome). But the other parallels that he discusses, the ones that only he has ever discovered, are very different from these. They are the kind of arbitrary coincidental similarities one could cherry-pick between any two stories set in the same location, provided one stretches things enough to make things fit. I recall the first example he mentions is the call to discipleship at the Sea of Galilee in order to make fishermen into "fishers of men", and that is likened to a battle Titus fought at the Sea of Galilee pursuing Jews till they drowned and cut off their heads or hands as they swam. Do I really have to explain why that is an incredible stretch to me? The only way to even see that as a parallel is to presume the premise that the parallel is supposed to be evidence of. Fishing was the primary industry of the Sea of Galilee, the call to discipleship was directed to people who fished for a living, there is nothing unusual or distinctive about the Markan pericope, whereas there is nothing in the Josephan story about fishing unless one takes a really strained, particular way of reading the narrative, with no similar wording, no unexpected features in common. Fish was mentioned in an aside in the preceding paragraph, but that was in a general description of the Sea of Galilee, where obviously it is a relevant fact about the region. The kind of fish that Josephus mentions in this geographical description, korakinoi, is then taken to be another parallel to the "fishers of men" story because it supposedly sounds like a town that was near the Sea of Galilee, Khorazin. There is no linguistic connection between the names (yeah I know, any sound similarity no matter now philologically implausible is defacto evidence of relationship for you), there is no conceptual connection beyond the supposed sound similarity (the korakini fish in Josephus do not have any similar role in the narrative as the reference to Chorazin in the gospels), and the biblical reference to Chorazin isn't even in the "fishers of men" pericope, or the Markan narrative at all, it comes from a different gospel. In short, this is all very different from the solid parallels that result from actual intertextual relationships between texts. There isn't any internal consistency; sometimes it is Titus who is paralleled to Jesus, other times its Vespasian, other times it's any number of other "Jesuses" (one of the most popular names of the era) mentioned by Josephus. The vast number of narrative elements or the overall narrative construction isn't paralleled, just the few things that happened to coincidentally match, as they would in any comparison between texts (just as one could find words that sound alike in any two languages randomly compared) provided they are lengthy and detailed enough (and Josephus' account of the Jewish revolt is very detailed and lengthy). Why not compare Jesus to Saladin who also had a big battle in the same area of Galilee? Saladin fought against the Crusaders at the same hill that was the site of the Sermon on the Mount....aha! We have ourselves a parallel....obviously the Sermon on the Mount is a satire of Saladin's routing of the Crusaders, and the Beatitudes when interpreted in light of Saladin's victories is an obvious joke directed at the Crusaders who should have been the "meek" or they would have "inherited the earth" rather than lost the Kingdom of Jerusalem to Titus', er I mean, Saladin's forces (just like Titus, Saladin then besieged and conquered Jerusalem after his campaign in Galilee). It's easy to come up with meaningless "parallels" like these. Joseph of Arimathea being modeled on Josephus rests on only a superficial sound resemblence that isn't convincing (Harimathea < Hebrew Ha-Ramathaim, not bar-Matityahu), not on any substantive narrative connection; Josephus did not offer to bury Titus in his Jerusalem tomb, or anything vaguely resembling the Joseph character of the gospels. Nor was Mary, mother of Jesus, described in the gospels as accompanying Jesus as the Last Supper, eating and drinking of the bread and wine. As parallels go, even if we accept these as parallels at all, they are embarassingly weak. Compare any of this with the intertextual parallels of the gospel narratives with the OT, where we can clearly see direct influence, importation of language and wording, consistency (e.g. the Matthean birth narrative drawing systematically on the story of Moses in its very construction, the Markan temptation narrative drawing on the Torah traditions about Israel in the wilderness, the passion narratives drawing on OT sacrificial imagery, etc.). Anyway, I know we have very different views on what constitutes a valid parallel. I recall last May how you continued to consider "elder" as actually having a religious connection with the deity name "El" despite the fact that there absolutely no historical connection between the two, just a superficial resemblence in English. I don't think we are going to agree on this matter at all so we will have to agree to disagree.
I want to move on to another aspect of the book that is indicative of the author's unscholarly approach.....his highly simplified incorrect view of Second Temple Judaism. This is what caused him to develop his hypothesis because he could not fit the Jesus of the gospels into his understanding of Judaism and messianism as it existed in first century Judea. He could not imagine how Judaism could have developed both the Sicarii and a peace-loving Jesus, and he found Jesus' stance towards the Roman empire as implausible for a prophet and messianic claimant (as the concept of the messiah was necessarily of a waring, military figure). He is sorely wrong on both counts. There were a plethora of different messianic concepts in the first century, from a Davidic kingly messiah, to an Aaronid priestly messiah, to a messiah who would proclaim good news to the poor and heal the wounded (4QMessianic Apocalypse), to a messiah who would judge the living and the dead, etc. And Jesus' ethic of non-retaliation ("turn the other cheek", "love your enemies"), as a halakhic interpretation of OT laws on lex talionis, is NOT foreign at all to the Judaism that spans from the OT to the second century AD:
Leviticus 19:18: " Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself".
Proverbs 20:22, 24:17, 29, 25:21: "Do not say, 'I'll pay you back for this wrong,' instead wait for Yahweh and he will avenge you.... Do not gloat when your enemy falls.... Do not say, 'I'll do to them as they have done to me; I’ll pay them back for what they did' .... If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. ".
Isaiah 50:6: " I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard".
Lamentations 3:30: " Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him".
Sirach 28:1-5: "The Lord is taking note of your sins, and if you take vengeance on someone, the Lord will take vengeance on you. But if you forgive someone who has wronged you, your sins will be forgiven when you pray. You yourself are a sinner, and if you won't forgive another person, you have no right to pray that the Lord will forgive your sins. If you cannot get rid of your anger, you have no hope of forgiveness".
1QS 10:18-19: "I shall not repay anyone the reward of evil, I will pursue him with goodness, for to God belongs the judgment of every living thing".
Epistle of Aristeas, 227-232: "It is a man's duty to be generous toward those who are amicably disposed to us. My belief is that we must also show liberal charity to our opponents....You do well if you bring all men into friendship with yourself....One can be free from sorrow by pursuing righteousness, doing no harm to anyone, and helping everyone".
Philo, De Virtutibus 116: "Even if any beasts of burden belonging to the enemy while bearing burdens are oppressed by the weight, and fall down beneath them, he commands that the people should not pass them by, but that they should lighten their burdens and raise them up, teaching them thus by remote examples not to be delighted at the unexpected misfortunes even of those who hate them, knowing that to rejoice in the disasters of others is a malignant and odious passion .... because the one feeling causes grief at the good fortune of another, and the other excites joy at the misfortunes of one's neighbour".
Testament of Gad 6:3-7: "Love one another from the heart, and if a man sins against you, speak to him in peace, after having cast away the poison of hatred .... keep silent lest you provoke him, for the one who denies may repent so as to not offend you again and he may even honor you and fear and be at peace with you, but if he is shameless and persists in his wrongdoing, even so forgive him from the heart, and leave to God the avenging".
Testament of Benjamin 4:2-3: "The good man has not a dark eye, for he shows mercy to all men, even though they are sinners, even though they devise to do him harm, by doing good he overcomes the evil, because he is shielded by the good".
2 Baruch 52:6: "Enjoy yourselves in the suffering which you suffer now. For why do you look for the decline of your enemies?"
2 Enoch 50:2-4: "Live in patience and meekness for the number of your days, so that you may inherit the endless age that is coming. And every assault and every wound and burn and every evil word, if they happen to you on account of the Lord, endure them. Being able to pay them back, do not pay them back, do not repay them to your neighbor, because it is the Lord who repays".
Yoma 23a: "Has it not been taught: Concerning those who are insulted but do not insult others [in revenge], who hear themselves reproached without replying, who [perform good] work out of love of the Lord and rejoice in their sufferings, Scripture says: But they that love Him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might? — [That means,] indeed, that he keeps it in his heart [though without taking action].
b. Gittin 36b: "They who suffer insults but do not inflict them, who hear themselves reviled and do not answer back, who perform [religious precepts] from love and rejoice in chastisement, of such the Scripture says, And they that love him are like the sun when he goes forth in his might".
b. Shabbat 88b: "Those who are insulted but do not insult, hear themselves reviled without answering, act through love and rejoice in suffering, of them the scripture says, But they who love him are as the sun when he goes forth in his might".
m. 'Abot 1:12, 2:15: "Hillel said: Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and bringing them close to the Torah....Rabbi Eliezer said: Let the honor of your fellow be as dear to you as your own. Be not easily moved to anger".
Jesus' orientation towards the Roman Empire in the synoptic gospels follows a very strong prophetic tradition from the OT; it is hardly foreign to genuine Jewish thought. The situation in the early sixth century BC was very similar to that of first century Judea: Judah was in the grip of an aggressive military empire and the government was pursuing a course of rebellion against Babylonian hegemony. Jeremiah felt this was suicidal and urged the people to accept the Babylonian yoke: "Yahweh declares, 'If any nation will bow its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will let that nation remain in its own land to till it and live there.' I gave the same message to Zedekiah king of Judah. I said, 'Bow your neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon; serve him and his people and you will live. Why will you and your people die by the sword, famine and plague with which Yahweh has threatened any nation that will not serve the king of Babylon?' " (Jeremiah 27:11-13). And like Jesus, Jeremiah was sharply critical of the religious elites of his day and he called on the people to repent. Nor was he pro-Babylonian; his political stance was aimed at the survival of the nation under hegemony and he prophesized that God will punish Babylon eventually for its deeds. Another even more pertinent model can be found in Daniel. In the Seleucid period, Judea was oppressed by Syria and Egypt alternatively during the Syrian Wars, and by the 160s BC the king of Syria invaded Jerusalem, robbed the Temple and razed part of Jerusalem, assassinated the high priest, and later had his mysarch defile the Temple by installing the abomination of desolation and banning sacrifice and Torah observance. This sparked the armed military resistance movement by Judas Maccabeus which fought, ultimately successfully, against Syrian hegemony. But this was not the only response to the persecution. The authors of Daniel took a rather negative view toward armed resistance. The Hebrew author viewed the Maccabeans as only "a little help" (Daniel 11:34) and referred negatively to a similar armed resistance during the wars of Antiochus III: " Those who are violent among your own people will rebel in order to fulfill the vision, but without success" (v. 14). But the authors of Daniel were not simply pacifist; they subscribed to political quietism. They believed that the people should let God bring about the needed change in affairs. The Aramaic author wrote in ch. 2 that "the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, which will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end" (v. 44), but it will come "not by human hands" (v. 34, 45). Similarly, in ch. 7, the hegemony of the Seleucid empire would continue until God himself convenes a court and takes away power from the kingdom and destroys it completely forever (v. 26), handing over "the sovereignty, power and greatness of all the kingdoms under heaven to the holy people of the Most High" (v. 27). This is a direct model to the poltical orientation of the Jesus of the synoptics, who is similarly quietist. As one can readily see in other examples of the Jewish ethic of non-relatiation, it came with the implied expectation that vengeance would be left to God. " Wait for Yahweh and he will avenge you" (Proverbs 20:22), " to God belongs the judgment of every living thing" (1QS 10:18), "leave to God the avenging" (Testament of Gad 6:7), "it is the Lord himself who repays" (2 Enoch 50:4). Jesus taught in the synoptics that God would repay according to one's deeds; "everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment" (Matthew 12:36), "He will reward each person according to what they have done" (16:27). In Luke 20:41-43, he cites Psalm 110:1 to show that the "son of David" waits for God to take action against his enemies: "The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet". The Son waits until the time the Father has chosen to bring about Judgment Day (Matthew 24:36, Mark 13:32). Until then, the focus is on repentance and reform (in order so people may attain righteousness) in order to gather people into the kingdom of God which Jesus as the messiah has brought to the earth via his ministry (Matthew 4:19, 5:20, 7:21, 11:12, 12:28, 13:24, 37-43, etc.). The concepts of the kingdom and the Son of Man judging the world at Judgment Day are derived from Daniel, pertaining to the eschatological kingdom that replaces the present political order. The "fourth kingdom" of Daniel, responsible for the persecution of God's people and the defiling of the Temple, is the kingdom in power that is destroyed and wiped out when God's kingdom is given to the holy people (ch. 7). The synoptic gospels clearly identify that kingdom with Rome, which was the standard Jewish interpretation once Judea came under Roman rule. Thus the "great tribulation" at the close of the fourth kingdom, with its installation of the abomination of desolation (ch. 11-12), is identified by the synoptic writers with the events of AD 66-70. The Markan Olivet discourse places virtually no delay between this and the coming of the Son of Man in judgment ("in those days"), while Matthew, written later, inserts a short delay ("immediately after those days"). But in both cases, it is absolutely clear via the allusions to Daniel, that Jesus does NOT describe the Jewish revolt and destruction of the Temple as instituting a new era of Roman rule. It is the exact opposite. The era of the of the "fourth kingdom" (Rome) was about to come to a close. The final king of the final Gentile kingdom instituted the abomination of desolation in the Temple for only a short duration which ends with the destruction of the desolator (Daniel, ch. 9, 11), which then is followed by the resurrection to judgment (ch. 12). The Lukan version of the discourse makes this explicit: " Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled" (21:24). What comes to an end is the period of Gentile domination over Jerusalem. Then the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven, which (via Enochic messianic development in the Book of Parables) alludes to the judgment scene in ch. 7 of Daniel, whereupon the kingdoms are judged and replaced by God's kingdom when the "one like a son of man" comes on the clouds and sits on his throne. That is the scene in ch. 25 of Matthew: " When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne; a ll the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats" (v. 31-32). So it is false to claim that the Jesus of the gospels is a cheerleader for Rome and exists in order to get Jews to look upon Rome as their rightful ruler. The eschatological perspective rather is that Rome's days have almost drawn to a close, and that it would be Jesus himself — in the guise of the heavenly Son of Man — who would accomplish what Daniel prophesied about the demise of the "fourth kingdom". But Jesus must wait until the time of God's choosing, and until then, he subversively establishes his kingdom in the midst of the Roman empire through his ministry, like adding leaven to dough (Matthew 13:33). The revolutionaries were not representative of Judaism as a whole, but rather, were typical mainly of the fourth philosophy, Zealotism, whereas Jesus much more closely resembles the political profile of the Essenes. The Essenes were non-revolutionary, quietist, and in the case of the Qumran sect focused on developing a community of believers who would be the saved and constitute the chosen of the future kingdom. They would take part in the final battle of good and evil (1QM), but they were not doing anything to bring that about at the time of their choosing. The Essenes, like Jesus, were harshly critical of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And they expected that the rule of Rome (the Kittim) would soon come to an end (1QpHab, 1QM). The sectarian Essene community was organized much like the early communal Christian community described in Acts. And on and on. The role of Jesus doesn't look anything like the imagined parallels with Vespasian and Titus, but it does resemble closely the Teacher of Righteousness who founded the specific Qumran sect of Essenism, who "teaches the law to his council and to all those volunteering to join the chosen of God observing the law in the council of the community, those who willk be saved from the Day of Judgment" (1QpMicah 10:6-9), who "will judge his enemies" (11:4), "to whom God has made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets" (1QpHab 7:4-5), "whom God installed to found the congregation of his chosen ones of the truth for him and straightened out his path in truth" (4Q171 3:15-17), etc.
Anyway, those are some thoughts. And please don't think this is any sort of actual rebuttal of the book; it has been years since I read it and I am not really interested in giving a point-by-point rebuttal, nor do I think it needs rebutting. You asked what my opinion was of the thesis, and why I thought it was a streeeetch, and so these are the reasons why. And I'm not really interested in having more to say that what I've written here (which I spent a few hours putting together).
28
C t Russell and jellyfish case
by Jaime l de Aragon in
1. watchtower
2. beliefs
c t russell and jellyfish case.

then he said, "i am like a jellyfish.

i float around here and there.
Leolaia

not children, but teenagers
Where is the age indicated?