Clouseau

No refutations contemporary with Christ and the apostolic church are on record. As you say, most Jews stayed as they were, yet there is no contemporary record of their intellectual justification for doing so.

He was not a contemporary of Christ, though. Now had the Jews of 150 years earlier come up with the arguments that Celsus used, there would be better grounds for objection to Christian views. But those Jews were literally left speechless.

Most Gentiles did not accept it. There is no reason to suppose that Jews were any more liable to accept Christianity than Gentiles. Their religion, condemned by Jesus as a great distortion of the original, was as much a hindrance as it was a help to them.

I accept the record of Acts, and can see no reason to doubt its accuracy. Also, Paul condemned the Jews who attempted to circumcise Gentile Christians, and he himself had committed grave violence against Christians, so the Jews had both motive and precedent. It was probably only Lex Romana, and the increasing disaffection that Jews had with the Romans, that prevented greater, more sustained Jewish persecution of Christians.

The aforementioned absence of coherent opposition to the apostles. The only extant testimony is from the NT. Take, for instance, the response to Peter and John before the Sanhedrin, who 'commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus'. No rationale; no appeal to Scripture, no command from Scripture, no complaint that Jesus did not fulfil Scripture, so his cause must therefore be eschewed completely. These were those who sat in the seat of Moses, but Moses and the Prophets had nothing with which to controvert the two men. Then there is the case of Stephen, who gave the Jews a potted history of their nation, and the only response was a hail of stones. (Now if Luke was telling tall tales, it is odd indeed that the Jews did not refute him, and Acts has not been buried among history's list of apocryphal failures.)

Paul, too, had only trumped up charges to deal with. When before the Sanhedrin, the Jews could not agree among themselves about him.

'Some of the teachers of the law who were Pharisees stood up and argued vigorously. "We find nothing wrong with this man," they said. "What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?"' Acts 23:9 NIV

And again, violence was incipient:

'The dispute became so violent that the commander was afraid Paul would be torn to pieces by them. He ordered the troops to go down and take him away from them by force and bring him into the barracks.' Acts 23:9-10 NIV

It seems unlikely that Luke could have got away with writing about both Jews and Romans inaccurately.

stuart shepherd

Some new wrinkles....

King Rezin of Aram, and King Pekah of Israel, march against King Ahaz, king of Judah[Jerusalem].
God, through his prophet, Isaiah, says that the two kings, Rezin and Pekah, will not prevail against King Ahaz and Jerusalem. {Is 7:7}

Isaiah 7:10-13 (King James Version)
10Moreover the LORD spake again unto Ahaz, saying,

11Ask thee a sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above.

12But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD.

13And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also?

Since King Ahaz refused to ask God for a sign to confirm God's word that the two kings would not be successful against Ahaz and the kingdom of Judah, Isaiah tells Ahaz........

Isaiah 7:14 (King James Version)
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Isaiah 7:14 (New American Standard Bible)
"Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel.

Matthew 1:23 (King James Version)
Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

Isaiah 7:14 Jewish Publication Society
Assuredly, my Lord will give you a sign of his own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel.

The translations are all a little different.
Is it a virgin....or the young woman?
Will she conceive....or is she with child?

It seems ridiculous to me for a child[Jesus] born 700 years later to be a sign to king Ahaz that God's word is true that the two kings would not prevail against King Ahaz and the kingdom of Judah. When Jesus was born King Ahaz had been dead 600 years and the kingdoms of the two kings had been destroyed by Assyria hundreds of years before.

But lets look at the next verses.....
Isaiah 7:15-16 (King James Version)
15Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.

16For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings.

This child cannot possibly be Jesus. According to Christian theology, Jesus is God in the flesh. This child has to grow old enough to be able to understand and choose the good over evil. Surely the man-God Jesus knows good from evil from the beginning.

stuart shepherd

Jack the Bodiless

Clouseau, you are referring to works of fiction that were not penned until decades after the time of Jesus.

Why didn't the Jews at the time of Jesus refute the claims of the gospels?

Simple. The 4 canonical gospels did not exist at that time. There was nothing to refute!

In particular: "Matthew's" mangling of the Hebrew scriptures lay decades in the future.

Clouseau

See Jeremiah 51.

What kind of scholarship is this?

Yawn.

The context does the precise reverse. The supplies of existing good things are cut off; it is not that they never commenced. So 'young (still nubile) wife' and 'husband' are much the best renderings. The word refers to age rather than status of any sort.

Jack the Bodiless

That's Jeremiah's failed prophecy of the destruction of (ancient) Babylon. Isaiah also makes this blunder. They both failed to anticipate that the Medes (the anticipated agents of this destruction) would themselves fall to the Persians, who would then go on to take Babylon without a fight and keep it intact.

No reference to Revelation's "future Babylon" here.
It's called "reading the Bible". You're referring to a passage that laments conditions in the exile and "prophesies" its end. There is no prophecy of future suffering here.
This is well-known.
...Except that "betulah" actually means "virgin" You're still ignoring all the relevant scholarship (like the fact that "betulim" actually means "virginity"). And wasn't the dead guy once "an existing thing"?

Clouseau

So there was prophecy about Babylon. (I will ignore the pseudo-scholarship that is so fashionable.)

It's called 'reading modern Jewish get-outs'.



That's just circularity. Or 'stamping one's foot'.

Toto

Clouseau - there are no contemporary Jewish critics of Jesus, if you define contemporary as the first half of the first century. But then there are no contemporary surviving documents of Jesus from that era at all - no Roman records, no literary mentions, no gospels, nothing. If you are going to infer anything from this silence, it is more likely that Jesus did not exist than that the Jews did not have any response to his charges.

If Acts were actual history, one would assume that everyone would be following Paul, astounded by his eloquece and minor miracles. But we just have no record of that.

Sauron

1. Insufficient records exist from that time to demonstrate *anything* about what the Jews thought - therefore, no conclusions can be drawn;

2. You have yet to show that anybody cared enough to bother to try and refute it;

Except that:
1. Jews had the OT and knew it well - the gentiles didn;t
2. Jews were looking for a messiah - the gentiles weren't.

You might want to take five seconds to think through such poorly reasoned claims through before posting them.

1. What you "accept" is irrelevant. What we're looking for is evidence.
2. If you 'd like to claim it is accurate, then by all means demonstrate it.

Irrelevant, since you are still quoting your belief without citing any evidence.


Which has already been addressed. Let's do it again:

1. Insufficient records exist from that time to demonstrate *anything* about what the Jews thought - therefore, no conclusions can be drawn;

2. You have yet to show that anybody cared enough to bother to try and refute it;

Your argument is a great, circular attempt to assume the NT into evidence without ever having to prove it. Did you *actually* think that would work here?

Sauron

Saw it. Your claim below:

Ancient Babylon, for instance, is a figure for a future 'Babylon'.

is bullshit. The reference in Jer 51 is not to a future Babylon; it was to the existing Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar is even mentioned several times:

JER 51:54 A sound of a cry cometh from Babylon, and great destruction from the land of the Chaldeans:

Better than your guesswork, apparently. :rolling:

If you have any proof of such a massacre, by all means enlighten us. I would advise against it, however; you are way in over your head at the moment, and struggling to keep up with the list of existing claims you need to support.

Clouseau

There don't have to be contemporary records. There do have to be records of apostolic contemporaries who opposed Christianity with argumentation. Granted, the destruction of Judaea in 135 must have removed many records, but, after a century, the diaspora could and surely would have had records of Jewish refutation of Christianity, and there would have been some mention of it in Roman histories also, especially as the Empire had a very keen interest in discouraging Christianity.

Not everyone appreciates eloquence, or even miracles of healing, if the message means that one has to give up one's bad old ways.