No Robots

Wrong. The earliest example of testimony that Jews held Jesus was a man is the New Testament. You should read it sometime with Jewish eyes.

stephan huller

If you want to find 'authentic Judaism' look to the Karaites. If you want to find the closest thing to what Hebrews likely originally believed in the Common Era, used the Samaritans as a foil against the nonsense that emerges from rabbinic texts.

It is utterly stunning for instance to see how little interest rabbinic texts take in the person of Moses. How is this possible? Answer - modern Judaism is a tangential faith that survives precisely because it is not bound by the beliefs of the faith of its ancestors. It is always redefining itself. Had Jews not adapted themselves to the new realities of the modern world they would have gone the way of the Samaritans and Karaites - i.e. a marginalized (albeit authentic) religious forms.

stephan huller

I grow tired of arguing with someone who has never read any of the ancient sources. The Jewish author of the demegories cited by Celsus goes through a gospel which is 'proto-Matthew' (= an earlier form of the canonical text) and acknowledges - line by line, passage by passage - that these first century Christians who held that Jesus was born to a virgin, had Chaldeans follow a star, who Herod tried to kill by massacring the firstborn etc held that Jesus was a God not a man. Learn to read and don't argue with someone who knows more than you do.

Don't embrace Judaism and its opinions about the Christians until you actually know what you are talking about. You're Canadian. You should be smarter than this (although some of my Canadian relatives aren't the brightest)

BTW speaking of former Canadian associates, a stripper from the Brass Rail in Toronto tracked me down through my blog. Apparently I didn't father any bastards but as it turns out she has done remarkably well. Lives now in Bermuda. Who says that all dancers end up as crack addicts in the gutter? Another example of the misinformed prejudice of moralism.

Also apparently an ex-girlfriend (or 'associate') of mine is married to a producer of Jay-Z and Drake. Who'd have thought?

No Robots

The Karaites seem to hold the standard Jewish view of Christ:

Some of the Karaites say that Jesus was a good man and that his way was the way of Zadok, Anan and others; and that the Rabbanites conspired against him and killed him just as they sought to kill Anan also, without success.--a/-Qirqisani quoted in Karaite Judaism and historical understanding / Fred Astren, p. 119.

Looks like you're on outlier among the outliers.

stephan huller

Oh lord. I am talking about biblical exegesis. yeshu was a hidden power from heaven (hab 3:14). No one met Jesus save for simon peter

No Robots

Your phantom-Matthew ultimately does the same as the canonical Matthew, ie. makes Christ out to be a man, despite all the mythologizing that goes on about him. No doubt theomorphizing began early. Paul is certainly guilty of this. And the Jewish criticism of this tendency began early. But Judaizing views of Christ were made anathema from the Council of Nicea. They persisted, however, from Arianism to Unitarianism, and are set to assume their rightful authority over this subject.

stephan huller

Please stop wasting my time. You haven't read Against Celsus. The Christians who used proto-Matthew held that Jesus was a God rather than a human being and Philo (or whoever this Jewish authority was) argued against them to establish that he 'must have been human.' Yet even this text was written after the destruction of the temple.

No Robots

Oh, lord, indeed.

stephan huller

Your knowledge of all things related to Christianity is utterly superficial. The bottom line is that the only figure whoever 'saw' Jesus was Simon Peter. The sources are universally in agreement that the Gospel of Mark - the first gospel - was indirectly developed from this single source. If there were so many witnesses to the historical Jesus why didn't Mark use them writing in a much later period?

The earliest gospel version of the Gospel of Mark was used by the Marcionites (Philosophumena 7:18). It clearly presented Jesus as a divine being who embodied a similar concept as the Empedoclean philia (love, friendship). This gospel was expanded by the tradition behind Matthew 'to answer objections' (cf. Against Celsus book 1). Nevertheless even the first people using this text denied that Jesus was human. He was seen to be fully divine. Then in the middle of the second century things changed. The Jewish authorities started to attack the divinity of Christ as early as the end of the first century.

No Robots

If you feel I'm wasting your time, please stop replying to me.


How would you know that?

And as I said, there is no question that theomorphizing began early in the Christian community. There is sufficient literary evidence, however, to indicate that this was a process of mythologizing a man.