EarlDoherty

Ah, Vinnie, haven't seen you here for a while. "Speculatory objections"? That, and the excuses you offer for the passage in question are typical apologetic devices that would be amusing if they weren't so pathetic. Actually, they're both. For those of us who like to address issues like this on some kind of rational basis, your dismissive attitude doesn't cut it. If all one need do is offer "speculatory apologetic responses" we wouldn't be able to discuss anything where biblical criticism is concerned.

The sort of thing you offer makes any statement by the religious believer, whether about the bible or anything else, unfalsifiable. No negative point against the belief in question can have any force since "God is mysterious", or "he let's the chips fall where they may," or "he doesn't have to conform to our rules of logic or natural expectation" and so on. Responses like yours not only waste our time, they are designed to keep already muddy waters muddy, and deflect efforts to bring some light to the matter.

There is no denying that Jeremiah made a very dramatic and comprehensive statement about what the Jews could expect from God in the future, a new covenant following the disastrous Exile, and it had nothing to say about Jesus or his sacrificial redeeming death. In fact, like many of the "silences" I have analyzed and offered in the epistles, Jeremiah's statement is "exclusionary". He makes no room for a Son and states things in such a way as to exclude him. Apologetic excuses for why God would do or allow this, deliberately letting his people be deceived, or deprived of information leading to ignorance for which they were to be punished and abandoned by him in the future, especially in a 'book' which is allegedly designed to forecast Jesus, is to render that God some kind of demented incorrigible that all the theodicy of the world can't redeem.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

Vinnie

I am busy with full time school and full time work so I have trouble finding as much time to spend here as I would like to. I pop in here and there though

Not to state the obvious, but I thought one skeptical problem with theological statements is that they are unfalsifiable. Wasn't that the whole chip o nthe shoulder of all them logical positivists?

Everything apologeticI offered in response is part of a consistent package-Christian world view and some of them are more plausible than you would give them credit for. The skeptic in me would like to doubt the author of the text knew anything about a future son but other than my speculatory doubt I have nothing conlusive to offer. All I have are a priori assumptions influencing my interpretation. For example, I am immediately skeptical of any claims that supposedly knew the future before it happened. As a good skeptic however, I even question my skepticism and assumptions. It turns out that most of us know far less than we think. Socrates was right.

None the less, if you believe God authored the bible, the hermenuetic I offered is considered sound by exegetes. If you don't it is not. Therein lies the difficulty.

Sometimes when looking at muddy waters we shouldn't force transparency into them that doesn't necessarily belong there. Call the waters opaque and leave it at that.

Please note that my response here would be the same to a believer who suggests that "this is clear evidence of divine propehcy". It is no such thing and what you believe before you read the text determines how you will interpret it. In essence, your exegesis is a reconstruction of your worldview and this makes the text an extension of your own self. You will probably even view it on a subconscious level as reinforcing evidence for your views, in effect, self-perpetuating your own mythological motion machine.

Vinnie

gstafleu

Isn't this more about how what Christianity calls "the fall of man," can, in the (or some) Jewish view be abated by living according to "the law"? That might make it a bit problematic as a pointer to the "new covenant" in the sense that e.g. in Pauline Christianity the law is made secondary to belief in the Christ (if it is not abolished altogether, but that may be putting it too strongly).

Gerard Stafleu

Malachi151

I think according to Paul the need to follow the law was abolished altogether.

gstafleu

Still, whence the idea? Let me make a proposal from an unexpected corner .

Reversal of themes is a valid form of derivation. In other words if the usual theme is that A always does something to B, and we then suddenly see B doing it to A, it is valid to posit a derivation via reversal. In fact it might make quite a strong impression in a man-bites-dog (if not man-bites-god ) of kind of way.

Sacrificing a human to a god was a not unusual thing, even for the Hebrews. Think for example of the almost-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. Abraham doesn't seem to think that God's request for the sacrifice is particularly strange. After God tells him to sacrifice his son, we read: "Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac." Off he goes, no further questions asked. Later in history, human sacrifice was abolished and replaced by animal sacrifice.

The reversal in theme we see with the passion is that instead of the people sacrificing one of theirs to God, God now sacrifices one of his (if not himself) to the people. He does this to expunge the fall of man. This fall itself was a bit of a theme reversal as well, given that in most mythology the discovery of sex is seen as a good thing instead of a bad thing. The re-reversal of the passion now puts us back at square one, so to speak.

So we can see connections between the idea of the passion and Hebrew mythology. Nevertheless the idea is quite unjewish: the ultra-transcendent God deigning to in some form descend to earth is in itself unthinkable (at least in the time when Christianity originated), let alone the idea that anything divine should be sacrificed: that would be a heresy that transcends all heresies: you cannot even say the guy's name, and now we're going to sacrifice him? So while we can see a connection, positing a direct derivation doesn't make much sense: the best we can do is a derivation via a fundamental reversal of a central idea of the originating mythology.

I suspect that the idea of the passion was taken from the rather ubiquitous rising and dying gods who resided in the vicinity, and that this idea, as per my above reasoning, could be fitted into Hebrew mythology via a theme reversal (I don't mean a conscious editorial decision by this, just that there was a god-human-sacrifice relationship which could have helped in making the idea acceptable). This then resulted in a much needed modification of the mythology where (a) life was no longer a constant guilt trip and (b) contact between the god and the people was reestablished, thus making the god into something useful again.

Now whether this is correct or not, we can notice that so far nobody has been able to come up with a straightforward derivation of the passion from the OT. Nor has anybody been able to point out how the "bread=body, eat it" theme of the Eucharist can be derived from the OT. That means that the two most central themes of Christianity, to wit the central mythological theme of the passion and the central ritual theme of the Eucharist, can apparently not (easily) be derived from the OT. Which in turn means that just looking for Christianity's origins in the OT misses some rather central points.

Gerard Stafleu

Gerard Stafleu

Malachi151

Yep Gerard, I think I already mentioned this (story of Abraham) earlier in the thread

Rick Sumner

Particularly interesting is that not only is he the first to "notice" them (at least to the extent that he does), he notices them everywhere. He's written on Acts, The Acts of Andrew, and the Gospel of Mark. How many tries does he get?

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

Really? Why does Paul then hope his followers are found "blameless?" (1Cor.2.8, Phil.2.15)? Why is he concerned with offering the same axiom we find elsewhere about what the "whole Torah" is (Rom.13.8-10)? Why is he so proud of his own blamelessness (Phil.3.6)? Why is the benefit of the circumcision "much in every way"? (Rom.3.1-2)? Why is he so convinced, by the time he wrote Romans, that it was ethnic Israel, and not the Gentiles, that God's eschatological plan of salvation was for (Rom.11.1)?

I think it's a trickier question than it seems.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

aa5874

Saul/Paul appeared to be confused about the Law, he constantly contradicted himself.

Romans 2:12 "For as many as haved sinned without the law shall also perish without the law.....'

Romans 3:15.....'for where there is no law, there is no transgression.'

Saul/Paul was just a chameleon.

Kharakov

2:12 "All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. "

Looks different when you quote the whole statement. It means something along the lines of "If you sin without being under the law, you also die without being held to the law. If you sin while being under the law, you will be judged by the law." Don't take my word for it though.

And your other quote was just wrong:
Romans 3:15 "Their feet are swift to shed blood; "

Although, even if it was correct, it wouldn't contradict the other thing you quoted.