jgreen44

godwithus,

Try looking at this from another angle. There are two different Paul's in the NT, the anti-Law Paul of the epistles and the pro-Law Paul of Acts. These two different Pauls represent two dominant strains of Christianity, Marcionism and Catholicism. If the pro-Law writings of Acts were composed in reaction to Marcionism then, in fact, some pro-Jewish sentiments in the NT are later than anti-Jewish sentiments in the NT.

Tyson: Marcion and Luke-Acts: a defining struggle (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Sheshbazzar

As an example of this consider the modern 'Classic' hit movie 'Grease'. The sorry excuse of a sequel 'Grease 2' changed far too many characters and offered almost no continuity of plot line other than it was located at the Rydell High popularised in the original. And was thereby doomed from the beginning.
Fifty years from now, it is likely that the original 'Grease' starring a young John Travolta and Olivia Newton John, as "Danny and Sandy! will still be fondly recalled, whereas the utterly forgettable 'Michael and Stephanie" will only elicit a Huh???

Contrast that against the relational tactics employed in such successful sequels to 'Back to the Future', or 'Star Trek The Next Generation'.
The mass audience demands continuity of plot lies when introducing sequels of old favorites.

And back then religion was not only a belief system, but was the general public's chief medium of entertainment.

Writers attempting to introduce major scrip innovations and changes were doomed to produce forgotten flops.
Whereas the savvy writers knew how to 'connect' with previous popular and well recieved productions in ways that would continue to engage and intrigue their audiences, producing the 'Hit' NT writings that are still selling in the millions of copies a year.


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show_no_mercy

Israel != Jews.

Israel is simply the "nation" that god favors most. These passages argue that god does not favor the Jews any more.

Godwithus

Those passages are no different then the extreme criticism against Israel we find in the writings of the Hebrew Prophets...but they also believe that the latter end of Israel was Salvation.


Paul warned the Greeks in Romans 10-11 not to be highminded towards the Jews, or not to boast against them...reminding the Greeks of the OT predictions that National Israel will be saved "as it is written". Very unlikely that a antisemitic Greek Church would have wrote a text condemning their own doctrine.


Therefore the NT has to pre-date Replacement Theology. And seeing that the authors are said to have been Jews..it makes sense to credit the original Apostles as the authors of the NT within their life time. I believe scholars do not want to admit this...indeed look at the problems you guys are having trying to reconcile these major contradictions.

Godwithus

After the time of Marcion, Replacement Theology was well established in the Greek Church...especially within Catholicism. So to write pro-Israel sentiments that they are still the Chosen Nation would certainly not have been written by Catholics just to get at Marcion. Jews were considered the greatest enemies of the Church..even more so then Marcion. So your logic here fails to provide an adequate explanation.

Sheshbazzar

The 'vineyard' parable does not begin with the NT writers.
YHWH's displeasure with the keepers of His 'vineyard' is a well established OT theme.
In other words, YHWH Himelf had long ago determined that the 'vineyard' keepers, the Jews, would be punished and kicked out, from having control of His 'vineyard'.

The 'Greek' writers of The NT had no hand in the composition of Isaiah, or Jeremiah, the 'replacement theology' was a product of an already long accepted Jewish prophecy.

Gentile NT writers did not need to invent it, because it was already there and a unavoidable integral element of the ancient plot line.

And this understanding and view would have been wholly concurred with by the NT's messianic Jews.

Godwithus

Yeah, but heres what the Greek Church omits in their doctrine...the OT also promises that God would bring the Jews back into the Vineyard. The others in the parable of Jesus are not Gentiles but Jewish believers...which agrees with Paul's writings that National Israel will be saved "as it is written" and because the "call and gifts of God [to the Jews} are irrevocable."


Surely a Greek Church who believed Israel was obsolete would not have written that.





In short, Gentiles believers are grafted into Israel,a nation that remains the Chosen nation of God...because his call to Israel is unchangeable. Can anyone imagine a Greek Jew hating Church writing this? I cant.


Ephesians 2



The Greeks would not have written that as they considered Israel to have been replaced...not Gentiles grafted into the nation of Israel. This places too much importance on Israel, rather than on the Gentile Church..so the authors who wrote this must have been the original Apostles...who were Jews.

Sheshbazzar

Of course the 'Greeks' and other Gentiles of the 2nd through 4th centuries did not write the basics of this stuff, all they could do, was to somewhat crudely by means of late interpolations, try to bend it to fit the requirements of their invented theology.

The original Apostles are only characters created for the needs of the packaging and selling a cohesive and entertaining story. The SCRIPT.
Miraculous events, scenes, and conversations that are related in the Gospel stories are - literary compositions- and never actually took place in the physical world, outside of the composition of written midrash and the composed Gospel writings.

Certainly these writings well served their intended political and religious purposes, but are not factual accounts of real events.
They served as the effective catalyst in the implementation of an expected and desired social change by the long disenfranchised 'little' and 'poor' people.


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bacht

Here's one answer to your question:

The casual reader will surely conclude that Bauer spends altogether too much time on the Caesars and not enough on Christian origins, but the whole point of the book is that the Christ figure is not so much the historical incarnation of the divine Spirit as the literary incarnation of the Zeitgeist. Bauer seeks to show how Christianity emerged at the beginning of the second century as the synthesis of world-weary Cynic-Stoic introspective piety with the Jewish belief in monotheism and divine Law. For Bauer the most important individual catalyst for Christian emergence was not Jesus (whom Mark created) but Seneca, many of whose maxims and ideals appear unaltered at the heart of the New Testament. It was Seneca who delineated what would come to be known as the Christian ethic. And the origin of the Jesus Christ fiction was Seneca's prediction that one day a human embodiment of the ideal should appear in the flesh. All this received a boost from the Platonic-Stoic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, whose ideas in turn are writ large in the Gospel of John. In Bauer's reconstruction, it is only as an element of the Hellenistic Roman mix that Judaism played a role at all in the formation of Christianity.

Robert M. Price's review of Christ and the Caesars: The Origin of Christianity from Romanized Greek Culture by Bruno Bauer

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.c...st_caesars.htm

Jaybees

If I'm not mistaken, Paul doesn't mention the gospels--which, considering he was so actively proselityzing he undoubtedly would have wanted to use all the ammunition available to support his efforts. So it does seem they were written after his works, though there may have been oral traditions circulating that covered much of what's contained in the gospels.