Little Dot

Please see my post #39

Little Dot

All men belong to this illustrious family when they accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

avi

The Greek writing by Matthew, G1080, is unequivocal. Inheritance, blood, not politics/adoption, ruled the day.... Adopted children may well have been "fully equal in the rights of inheritance", but they were NOT part of the blood line. Could Matthew have used G1080, two thousand years ago, to indicate someone who was NOT engendered by live birth from the child's mother herself, but rather had been accepted into the family by adoption, having been "begat" via some other woman?

Thank you Little Dot. May I humbly inquire, as one particularly uninformed, just exactly how it is that you know "what the Jews wanted", and more importantly, how you know "what God intended"?

Can you point to a passage in the Bible to support either of these two generalities?

avi

aa5874

The extant evidence from antiquity does NOT support your assertion.

Once people of antiquity knew Jesus was human and could NOT forgive sins just like the Deified Emperors of Rome could NOT forgive Sins then the Jesus story would be considered a BLATANT lie.

It makes ZERO sense for early members of a NEW cult to KNOWINGLY lie that Jesus was the Child of a Ghost hoping to gain potential new converts who actually knew Jesus was a man and were his neighbor.

The description of Jesus as MYTH is in fundamental agreement throughout the NT.

gupwalla

I just underlined that bit so I can refer to it later. I will refer to it thusly: BLOOD RELATIVE.

The modern Jewish translation here is "steward of my house," not "slave."

Be that as it may, there is nothing in the text to indicate that Abram adopted Eliezar (who has not been mentioned before and will not be mentioned again) in any familial way. Abram is an old man with no children, so Eliezar is his default heir. As soon as God promises Abram kids of his own (which is just two verses down the page) Eliezar disappears entirely.

We know from later in the story that the bloodline heir Isaac becomes the sole heir to Abram's holdings. So by that example, Jesus would have been disinherited from his adopted Davidic lineage as soon as one of his (half) brothers was born, no?

Yes, he did, but...BLOOD RELATIVES so this doesn't support your thesis.

The part in italics is supported by your text example (but, BLOOD RELATIVE so it does not support your thesis). The part in boldface is not in your text example. You just made it up because it would support your thesis if it were true, and perhaps you thought no one would bother to look up your text citation to see if it said what you said it said (which it does not).

Um, patriarchal society, so BLOOD RELATIVE. But, we'll continue.

As soon as Hagar gets pregnant, Sarai throws her and the unborn child out of the house. Abram has a heart and takes them back in, but as soon as Isaac is born, Sarai says "Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac." (Gen 25). So while Sarai might have been prepared to accept the idea of adopting Ishmael, she never lived up to the reality -- and in fact appears not to consider Ishmael family at all as soon as her own bundle of joy arrives on the scene.

At best, you could say that Sarai took on the role of (evil) stepmother. Adoption is a bit of a stretch. Which is all beside the point, becase Abram never denies parentage -- yes, another case of BLOOD RELATIVE.

Both Bilhah and Zilpah get promoted to full wives before all is said and done. But of course the kids get full rights of heritage -- Jacob never denies that he is the father of the whole brood. Which means this is another case of BLOOD RELATIVE.

Your thesis would have been better supported by a true non-BLOOD RELATIVE example such as the filial relationship between Saul and David. It's a twisty-turny sort of story, but Saul does take the young David into his household, and after a series of comic adventures, David does inherit Saul's crown. It's one of the clearer "Caesar-like adoptions" in the bible (comic adventures and all -- maybe even especially).

PhilosopherJay

Hi Little Dot,

"Lord and Savior" is not a family relationship. I was thinking more about biological lines.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

aa5874

The very two sources, gMatthew and gLuke, that claim Jesus was the Child of a Ghost are also the same two sources that produced contradictory genealogies which did NOT include the "geneaology" of the Holy Ghost.

The author of gJohn appears to have DISCARDED the Synoptic birth naratives and claimed Jesus was GOD , the Creator and was in the Beginning.

spin

There is no doubt that adoption was common throughout the Mediterranean at the time. That is not the issue. The issue is that genealogies show bloodlines. All you need do is confirm a few adopted people in any of the biblical genealogies, but we know you won't be able to, right? That's the issue. The genealogy is about bloodline, so the original purpose of the genealogies in the gospels was for bloodline until the theology developed away from adoptionism (Jesus becoming god's son only at baptism, as appears to be the case in Mark) to born son of god, necessitating the modification of the gospels regarding the genealogies.

stephan huller

Actually spin, some of Levin's study might prove useful here:

and again at the end of a long section examining Jewish law:

The point again is that there is absolutely no basis for Jesus ever claiming to be a 'son of David' based on Jewish Law. You are free, Little Spot, to argue that Jesus wasn't Jewish, that his family lived in a religious vacuum and invented their own legal interpretations or any of the usual lunacy that goes on in this forum. But you'll have to do so by at least acknowledging the conclusions of Levin and developing your own theories from there. The obvious answer is that these ideas regarding him being an 'adopted' heir of David developed when Christianity was no longer attached to the Jewish world and was wholly aimed at pagans (c. mid to late second century CE).

Stephan

Doug Shaver

I have never seen anyone place any importance on that.

Against claims that they were written without error, some of us think it important that the gospels don't agree on certain matters of substance.