bacht

That's an interesting question. In its present form I think we'd have to say that it's a Catholic document, but the autograph texts could have come from Jewish hands (or some of the texts).

As far as content I think most Jews would disavow the New Testament on theological grounds, though I guess there were some who accepted Jesus as a prophet. The rejection of the Torah is a pretty clear dividing line, or would have been in pre-modern times.

Steven Carr

Hidden Messiah's? Messiah's who never actually existed?

And linking to PDF's of gibberish is not a convincing argument that this meal is historical - the one where Jesus knew he was about to be secretly betrayed and killed, and that his 'handful of followers' would not be killed, but needed constant memory jogs to remind them of who exactly they had been following for the past 3 years.

No Robots

That's like saying that, in their present form, the Elgin marbles are British, not Greek.

Well, let's here what an actual Jewish scholar has to say:

When this old tradition confronts us in this manner, then the Gospel, which was originally something Jewish, becomes a book—and certainly not a minor work—within Jewish literature. This is not because, or not only because, it contains sentences which also appear in the same or a similar form in the Jewish works of that time. Nor is it such—in fact, it is even less so—because the Hebrew or Aramaic breaks again and again through the word forms and sentence formations of the Greek translation. Rather it is a Jewish book because—by all means and entirely because—the pure air of which it is full and which it breathes is that of the Holy Scriptures; because a Jewish spirit, and none other, lives in it; because Jewish faith and Jewish hope, Jewish suffering and Jewish distress, Jewish knowledge and Jewish expectations, and these alone, resound through it—a Jewish book in the midst of Jewish books. Judaism may not pass it by, nor mistake it, nor wish to give up all claims here. Here, too, Judaism should comprehend and take note of what is its own.--"The Gospel as a document of history". In Judaism and Christianity / Leo Baeck. Philadelphia : Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958. p. 101-102.

No Robots

Here is a short summary, then:

Daube, "He That Cometh", follows Eisler: Jesus' declaration over the bread presupposes the prior identification (by pre-Christian Jews) of the so-called [afikomen], a piece of unleavened bread broken off and set aside at the opening of the service, with the Messiah. When Jesus said 'this is my body/self he was saying, 'I am the Messiah.' The statement was one of self-revelation (cf. Lk 24.35), not self-sacrifice: death need not have been in view at all.--A critical and exegetical commentary on the gospel according to Saint Matthew / William David Davies, Dale C. Allison, p. 468.

Kapyong

Gday,

This is completely and utterly false of course.

Consider Earl Doherty's work - it's one of the most detailed examinations of the NT one could find. 800 pages of NT examination.

In fact -
Mythicism denial shares with traditional Christian scholarship a pathological resistance to objectively examining the New Testament and its central figure in their context. Mythicism denial is the last stand of the losing HJicism.


K.

No Robots

Earl Doherty's position is that the Christ myth "was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Middle Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus." (Emphasis added). It is more of the usual de-Judaizing of the New Testament:

Like the dog in the fable, who, seeing his own picture reflected in the water, casts off the piece of meat in his mouth in order to seize upon that held by his supposed rival in the water, so do all these famous scholars cast away whatever is Jewish in Jesus and the New Testament, in order to make the Christ of their own fancy rise who has nothing in him of the Jew. They see not that Apollo and the Muses, whose kinship they claim rather than that of Sinai's God and the Hebrew covenant people, have nothing in common with the man of Golgotha.--"The Attitude of Christian scholars toward Jewish literature" / Kaufmann Kohler. In Studies, addresses, and personal papers, p. 417.

mountainman

The New Testament is greek literature. The "Song of Hiawatha" is not Ojibway literature, but English. The evidence on the table discloses greek codices and fragments, it does not in any way exhibit Hebrew codices and fragments. It is therefore a mistake to claim the new testament as Jewish literature, when it is clearly a Greek literary phenomenom.

Lugubert

Is it just "symbolic" when Catholics (v. transubstantiation) and Lutherans (v. consubstantiation) assert that they literally ingest the meat and blood of Christ?

discordant

Where does this leave Philo?

mountainman

Philo used Greek not Hebrew, and appears to be a Hellenised Jewish source with no knowledge of the new testament or Jesus, that was later "Christianized".