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Old 05-19-2013, 07:47 PM   #1
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Default Jewish Origins of the Holy Spirit

Could the Holy Ghost be Jewish?

The origins of the Holy Spirit came up recently. This articles traces the third part of the Trinity to the Jewish ru'aḥ ha-kodesh (literally, "spirit of holiness") via Philo.
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Old 05-19-2013, 07:52 PM   #2
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The word appears in the Catholic OT, the so-called deuterocanonicals. I always supposed it meant the holy spirit of Yhwh, his divine presence, later taken by the Catholics to become one of the persons of the Christian God.
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Old 05-19-2013, 09:01 PM   #3
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They touched on it a hair in this article that is vague and brief.

pneuma is a multi use word besides wind and spirit. They viewed it also as a substance.


The Holy Spirit is a term that evolved through Judaism before the Hellenist perverted it in the NT

Perspicuo did a decent job and accurate description.
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Old 05-20-2013, 02:16 AM   #4
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There's even three instances of ruach qodesh in the Tanach - Psalms 51 and twice in Isaiah 63. These may have something with the idea of prophecy to do - although at least the first in Isaiah is rather obscure and weird.

Of course, even if the holy spirit does have a jewish origin, the important thing is the rich edifice of doctrine about it in Christianity - it seems that there's much less in ways of that in 2nd temple judaism. How much of it can really be traced back to palestinian or even hellenistic judaism and how much of it is more firmly rooted in non-jewish hellenism?
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Old 05-20-2013, 05:23 AM   #5
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Sophia? Sex changing spirits - didn't we discuss this years ago here?
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Old 05-20-2013, 05:30 AM   #6
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David Hendy in Noise comments that for possibly over a million years, humans when meeting echoes thought spirits were whispering back to them. Prehistoric cave and rock art is consistently in acoustically interesting places.

The other major part of sensory experience was wind and breath and gales and storms. God's breath is a logical conclusion when one has no scientific basis to make conclusions. God's breath and God's word are also logical conclusions.

Formal structures of trinities maybe is a development of Roman political systems.

Maybe we should look closely at technologies and political thinking that is around when we find religious beliefs. Maybe god being defeated by iron chariots is actually critically important for BCH.
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Old 05-20-2013, 07:24 AM   #7
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That article originally cited about the Holy Spirit sparked this reaction from Forward columnist J J Goldberg http://blogs.forward.com/jj-goldberg...7QtkM.facebook
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Old 05-20-2013, 07:56 AM   #8
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Early Christianity was a different understanding of Judaism (a sect of Judaism) attending the Synagogue as just one more of many undistinguishable members.

One curse was added to the Amidah in about 90 AD and that curse against the Minuth resulted in the parting of the ways: Christianity ceased to be associated with Judaism and orthodox rabbis warned against the heretics among them.

Later the breakaway sect and Judaism became bitter opponents of each other: the Christians attacking the Judaizers in their ranks and Judaism labelling Christians as idolaters and therefore much worse than Islam.


Christian Jewish rabbis developed Christianity in endless discussion with Gnostics and gentile philosophers from the second century onwards.
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Old 05-20-2013, 08:52 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stephan huller View Post
That article originally cited about the Holy Spirit sparked this reaction from Forward columnist J J Goldberg http://blogs.forward.com/jj-goldberg...-via-kabbalah/
Quote:
Actually, rabbinic Judaism has something very much like the Trinity in its thinking about God. It’s called the Sefirot, the Kabbalah’s 10 Emanations or Manifestations of God’s presence. And no, it wasn’t a Jewish concept that found its way into Christianity. Aderaba (on the contrary), it’s a Christian idea that found its way into the heart of normative Judaism.

There’s a very respectable school of Jewish scholarship that sees the influence of the Trinity on Judaism in the Sefirot. I first learned about it in a graduate seminar with the late intellectual historian Amos Funkenstein. He taught that the Sefirot actually emerged in the early Middle Ages as a sort of Jewish retort to the Trinity, a case of rabbinic one-upsmanship: You got, what, three faces of God? Hey, we got 10. Badda-bing. I think Prof. Funkenstein had a more elegant way of phrasing it, if memory serves. But that was the idea.

...
This is a rather disjointed response.

"10 emanations" sounds much more like Gnosticism that one-upping the trinity.

It is influence from (heretical) Christianity, but it doesn't seem to have a lot to do with the Holy Spirit.
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Old 05-20-2013, 09:19 AM   #10
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Iskander, the only problem with your claim is that there is NO EVIDENCE in rabbinic sources of any kind that the institution of the blessing concerning the heretics involved any "Christians" of any kind in Palestine. The minim were all sorts of Jews, usually Saduccees (with Samaritans included) but not a single mention of any "Jewish Christians." The attribution of Christians in this case is a very modern claim most often adopted in error even by Orthodox Jews (who you can even find posting online).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Iskander View Post
Early Christianity was a different understanding of Judaism (a sect of Judaism) attending the Synagogue as just one more of many undistinguishable members.

One curse was added to the Amidah in about 90 AD and that curse against the Minuth resulted in the parting of the ways: Christianity ceased to be associated with Judaism and orthodox rabbis warned against the heretics among them.

Later the breakaway sect and Judaism became bitter opponents of each other: the Christians attacking the Judaizers in their ranks and Judaism labelling Christians as idolaters and therefore much worse than Islam.


Christian Jewish rabbis developed Christianity in endless discussion with Gnostics and gentile philosophers from the second century onwards.
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