Sauron

You assume that anyone would have cared enough to "blow the whistle". Given the number of would-be messiahs in Palestine at the time, your wishful assumption is unwarranted.

You also assume - again, without warrant - that people in general are going to put themselves out to investigate, or refute, everything they hear on a daily basis. Most people simply don't do that.

Pseudo-Deity

Well of course. The earliest known usage of the word "Rabbi" appears in the Mishnah which was codified around the year 200. However, Jews and Judaism have been around much longer than Rabbi's and I find it hard to believe they didn't write anything about their religion before Jesus came along.

Steven Avery

P-D, I didn't mean to put the emphasis on the word 'rabbinical'. The Targum is the significant commentary-like writing that we have before the NT, although in many places it is a more-or-less straight Hebrew-->Aramaic translation. There also are the various other writings of the DSS, however they do not get close to being scripture commentaries like you are seeking.

We simply do not have much direct Bible material from before the 1st century extant - other than the DSS and the Tanach itself. We have later writings like the Talmud that make claims to an earlier source and can in fact be helpful, even on Messianic issues. Even with the Targumim there are various dates offered for various Targum - my view is that the Isaiah Targum is from early days. However the Targum does not, as far as I know, do much special with Isaiah 7 different than the Hebrew Bible itself.

Shalom,
Praxaluh

Toto

Jews might have written a lot that has not survived. They got wiped out in the first century because they stood up to the world's largest superpower.

And then most of what has survived from the first century was what Christian scribes saw fit to copy and save. Since most Jews lived in Christian dominated societies, Jewish literature was often censored to be acceptable to Christians.

Clouseau

Or rather, to 'Christians', to whom the astonishing paucity of Christian material surviving must be charged.

Steven Avery

Again I would suggest a Daniel Gruber book. "Rabbi Akiba's Messiah: The Origins of Rabbinic Authority". He goes into the first centuries in some depth. Also "Nazarene Jewish Christianity" by Ray Pritz.

The simple facts of the birkat ha-minim, Talmud pasages and Toldet Yeshu supply the evidence you want, on top of the records of the early church writers.

Even Paul Tobin, skeptic, writes.

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/nazarenes.html#b
"By AD90 the Nazarenes were excluded from the synagogues by their congregational prayers which refers to the Nazarenes as minim (Hebrew for heretic)."

The use of the word minim in the congregational prayer cursing the Nazarenes is important here. For it means that the Jews looked upon the Nazarenes as heretics. A heretic, by definition is someone who still remain within the faith, but believes in elements not acceptable to the orthodox. Thus the Jews never considered the Nazarenes as a separate faith altogether.

So really your demand request for evidence of Jewish concern about the Nazarene/Christian beliefs and sect is simply a lack of familiarity with the topic or a skeptic diversion. However that is standard fare here.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Steven Avery

You have largely fast forwarded more than a millennium to the thorny issue of some Talmud passages (which folks pretty much accept that we still have anyway) and wrongly extrapolated from that to a wide-ranging inability for Jewish scribes to copy from the 1st century on !

Please present your evidence that Christian scribes were generally the ones copying and saving Jewish material (as you imply above) such as the massive volumes of the Talmud and extra-Talmudic writings, including all the various Midrashim, or the rabbinics like Saadia Gaon, Rashi, Kimchi and others or the Karaite material.

Thanks.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Godless Dave

Why spend pages and pages recording who begat whom?

Toto

prax - I refer to the fact that Christian scribes gave us Josephus and Philo, some of our most important sources of information on 1st c. Judaism.

It's not a question of Jewish scribes being unable to copy manuscripts. It's a question of what gets saved and what is politically acceptable for people who are looking over their shoulder for the next pogrom.

Sauron

Ah.

Then people like Clouseau are wrong when they try to say "If the Isaiah 53 prophecy was being misinterpreted by the early christians, then the Jews would have spoken up and corrected them.'

If we have little or not material from the period in question, then we can't know if they spoke up, or not. It's impossible to say what they did (or didn't) do at that time. There simply isn't any data from the period.

Checkmate.