Decypher

I'm not sure about that.


Jesus seems to have been talking to "the people".

xaxxat

So, how many generations have passed since that promise was made?


:wave::wave::wave::wave::wave::wave::wave:

John Kesler

For convenience, here is Matthew 10 again:
What is the linguistic justification for assuming that the pronoun "you" in Matthew 10:23 ceases to refer to the twelve disciples and jumps ahead thousands of years to speak about "144,000...Jewish witnesses"?

gregor

Good luck discussing anything with arnoldo or sugarbear . . . the laundry lists of fallacies and gordian knots of logic tire me.

You might ask them why the generation of 200 C.E. thought that was the last generation (ref. 2 Pet. 3).

jaymack2

I'm wondering how many people DO believe Jesus said that. Because it IS a statement that goes out on a limb, and risks ridicule, it makes me wonder why the early church left that statement in the gospel, since there must have been quite a few early Christians who lost their faith when it didn't come true. Imagine when the last apostle dies, and people start saying, "Wait a minute, didn't Jesus say these guys wouldn't die before He came again? Well, what's going on here?" I'm a skeptic, and I believe there definitely were scribal alterations and deletions of the texts, based on the needs of the early church. But why was an embarrassing statement like this left in the text, even after it didn't come true? Is it possible that the leaders were convinced Jesus really did say this, and they didn't want to change his words? Just wondering what everybody else thinks.

juergen

Who eats little boys.

mountainman

Lets assume christianity was underground until it was liberated
by the military supremacist, and its imperial sponsor Constantine,
and that few had read this rubbish until he published the first
bound Bible Codex c.331 CE. It is now 2008 CE, a duration of
1677 years. Life was brutishly short back then, but if we allow
20 years for each generation that makes things more like this:

:wave: You have included 72 images in your message. You are limited to using 10 images so please go back and correct the problem and then continue again. :wave::wave:

Hey, the system does not take 84 smiling generations!


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Toto

The moderators request a cease fire in the waving smilie wars.

Please stop using that blasted thingie.

Thank you

Decypher

The view of E.P. Sanders:

"The second of the problems mentioned above -- if Jesus expected God to change the world, he was wrong -- is by no means novel. It arose very early in Christianity. This is the most substantial issue in the earliest surviving Christian document, Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. There, we learn, Paul's converts were shaken by the fact that some members of the congregation had died; they expected the Lord to return while they were all still alive. Paul assured them that the (few) dead Christians would be raised so that they could participate in the coming kingdom along with those who were still alive when the Lord returned. The question of just how soon the great event would occur appears in other books of the New Testament. A saying in the synoptics (discussed more fully below) promises that 'some standing here' will still be alive when the Son of Man comes. In the appendix to the Gospel of John (ch. 21), however, Jesus is depicted as discussing an anonymous disciple, called 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', with Peter: 'If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?' The author then explains, 'So, the rumour spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?"' (John 21.21-3).

The history of these adjustments to the view that God would do something dramatic while Jesus' contemporaries were still alive is fairly easy to reconstruct. Jesus originally said that the Son of Man would come in the immediate future, while his hearers were alive... Then, when people started dying, they [the followers of Jesus] said that some would still be alive. When almost the entire first generation was dead, they maintained that one disciple would still be alive. Then he died, and it became necessary to claim that Jesus had not actually promised even this one disciple that he would live to see the great day. By the time we reach one of the latest books of the New Testament, 2 Peter, the return of the Lord has been postponed even further: some people scoff and say, 'Where is the promise of his coming?' But remember, 'with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day' (2 Peter 3.3-8). The Lord is not really slow, but rather keeps time by a different calendar.

In the decades after Jesus' death, then, the Christians had to revise their first expectations again and again. This makes it very probable that the expectation originated with Jesus. We make sense of these pieces of evidence if we think that Jesus himself told his followers that the Son of Man would come while they still lived. The fact that this expectation was difficult for Christians in the first century helps prove that Jesus held it himself. We also note that Christianity survived this early discovery that Jesus had made a mistake very well."

E.P. Sanders (1993) The Historical Figure of Jesus, Penguin.

mountainman

This fact and this proof referred to above have absolutely
no basis in the ancient historical record of the first century.
The first century is totally silent on the existence of christ
and of anything whatsoever christian.

So long as you realise your facts and proof relate to conjecture
we will all get along just fine.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown