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TRINITARIAN challenge to Protestant Christians
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Re: TRINITARIAN challenge to Protestant Christians
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Thomas
Re: To Thomas
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Thu, 13-Dec-07 16:10:02
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My Recent Posts
"If Jesus met Abraham in Genesis 18, why aren't the gospels clear on this, or any of the early church fathers in their writings? This is pure speculation on your part."
The reason why the Gospels don't spell out this detail is in John 21:25 (the last verse). It wasn't necessary for the message of the NT or the faith of the believer, and there was no purpose in making the NT huge by adding unnecessary details. If one believes the NT, then Jesus met Abraham and it isn't so important where it happened. As I see it, Genesis 18 is a most likely place where it happened, since the NT point of view is that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. There are Christian theologians who believe that Melchizedek was Jesus preincarnate, but I don't hold that view myself.
My main focus on this can be summarized in one sentence: The NT viewpoint is consistent with the Tanach, but if you don't want to believe that viewpoint, nothing I say will change your mind.
Medini gives a good quote that I agree shows that Philo would not accept a complex unity of God, which Josephus' quote did not make clear. In that case, if Josephus was not simply glossing over that, then this would show that, among Jews after Jesus Christ, they had an agreement that God could not be a complex unity. To me, this would mean that they did not consider the writers of the NT to be Jews, since John 1:1 directly contradicts that God is a simple unity. This brings us back to the claim I made earlier, that Jews who disagree are not considered Jews anymore, which conveniently keeps unity.
I am disappointed in Chaim, that he would read things into my statements to the effect that I think that all Jews who don't believe in Jesus wanted to kill the apostles, or that only unbelieving Jews would try to kill anyone. Even the "horrible" NT has Gamaliel sticking up for the apostles, even though he was not a disciple of Jesus, so why would a NT believer like me think such a thing? If you look hard enough for anti-Jewishness, you will find it even where there isn't any.
The NT facts are: A large group of Jews wanted to kill Jesus because they believed that he blasphemed by claiming to be the Son of God. They did not succeed until Jesus gave himself up, to submit to Roman execution. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Sadduccees took the lead in trying to squelch the teaching of Jesus' resurrection, but were joined by some zealous Pharisees like Saul, who still believed that the teaching of Jesus undermined the Torah. Sometimes they succeeded in killing the followers of Jesus, many times they failed. Later, persecution from the Jews stopped, exactly when Saul became a believer in Jesus (Acts 9:31). This happened in spite of the clear teaching of Peter that Jesus is Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36) and Paul that Jesus is God manifest in the flesh (I Timothy 3:16). Normally, I would have agreed with Chaim that an error in the concept of the nature of God would have riled up a religious Jew more than anything, but when I read how riled up that group got over Paul preaching to the gentiles, I don't see how a human being could be more riled up and still survive (Acts 22:22-23). However, according to the NT, the unbelieving Jews did settle down even as the NT writers continued to teach the complexity of the Godhead.
None of this should be construed to indicate any assumptions on my part about how a particular Jew of whatever persuasion might behave. If you have another opinion because you do not believe the NT, I don't know what more to say except that maybe G-d will give you a light from heaven one of these days.
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