spin

And No Robots, please, stop citing other people's words and not saying what you think. It's as if you negate yourself.


spin

No Robots

We can make statements about even fictional characters: Hamlet knows that his uncle murdered his father.

spin

Only as a shortcut for something like "Hamlet is portrayed as knowing that his uncle murdered his father" and we continue a literary discussion of the play.

Returning to a literary discussion of the text, how does one reconcile a scene of Jesus dismissing any Davidic lineage with a full Davidic lineage included in the texts of Luke and Matthew?


spin

No Robots

The constant theme in the Gospels is Christ's self-understanding opposing the misunderstanding of him by others. He never saw himself as Davidic, but his disciples did. He did not participate in the construction of genealogies after his death. The genealogies serve a purpose that was foreign to Christ's self-conception, i.e., they serve to legitimate his birth and enhance his social standing. They may even be intended to revive the notion, extinguished at his death, that he is in some sense the Messiah. But all of this is alien to a man who said:

Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?
And stretching forth his hand towards his disciples, he said: Behold my mother and my brethren.
For whosoever shall do the will of my Father, that is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother.

--Mt 12:48-50

TedM

Give me a break.:huh:


No, the Suffering Servant passage is sufficient, along with the Psalms about the body not decaying in death to keep it all in a Jewish background. Jesus may have seen himself as the Suffering Servant. That passage is Messiac in nature. If you don't like those, then the Passover Lamb sacrifice analagy does quite well. No need for mystery religions whatsoever.

Because prior to the crucifixion he was suspected of being the Messiah because of his teachings and miracles. Afterwards it was confirmed by the resurrection. IF not the Messiah then who? The resurrection would have been the deciding factor. No need for your presumed influence of mystery religions. A historical Jesus fits the picture of Jews believing he had been the Messiah a lot better than a made-up Jesus for Gentiles who is at the same time considered to have been the Jewish--though not the kind one would have expected. IOW a crucified Savior doesn't need to be the Jewish Messiah at the same time in order to impress Gentiles.

How about reading what they wrote? Do you think they wrote about Jesus as being the Messiah without knowing it?

ted

spin

You don't seem to have answered my question, other than by assuming one part of the text must have priority without explaining why and then giving a maybe. There is a textual problem here between the presentation of the central figure and what some texts say about that figure's background.

You seem to acknowledge that there is some authorial intervention into the text. How do you know where that intervention was?

I find it easier to see that the Davidic notion was early and that the image of Jesus changed. It is the most economical analysis I can see.


spin

No Robots

Let's look again at Hamlet: his self-conception is constantly at odds with the way he is conceived of by others. We see this clearly in the text. Likewise, we see the same phenomenon in the NT: Christ's self conception as revealed in his own words and deeds is constantly at odds with the way he is conceived of by others as presented in their words, deeds and authorial interventions.

spin

What else would you like broken?

Beside the bald declaration that some passage is messianic, what relevance does any of this have to do with the issue? The suffering servant passage, as anyone should know is about Israel. The sacrificial lamb analogy is anti-messianic. Still you refuse to understand that you need to understand what "messiah" indicates in the two centuries before the death of Simon bar Kochba.

What have teachings and miracles got to do with being messiah?

Resurrection aligns Jesus with mysteries not any religion of Yahweh.

It's obvious.

You don't make sense. A dead Jesus, be he crucified or fried, has nothing to do with the messiah.

Would you like to give specific references that demonstrate that Jesus was the messiah, rather than just writers labeling him that way?

No. You cited me:

I see no way of deciding if the writers knowingly projected the unfitting title onto Jesus

The operative word is "projected". You simply didn't understand what you were reading. I presented a second possibility regarding Jesus and messiahship, that of the writers knowingly projecting messiahship onto Jesus (ie they basically knew that he wasn't), rather than Jesus being the messiah.


spin

Sarai

Hello to all! I'm a newcomer to this thread (and to the boards in general)--I hope you all don't mind my jumping into the conversation. I'm Jewish and have been recently reading the NT for the first time in order to learn more about 2nd Temple history, so I find this thread very pertinent to my own pursuits. (If you happened to see my post on the other thread--please forgive me for the duplicate self-introduction! )

I didn't see where anyone on this thread has mentioned that the writers of the gospels don't appear to be Jewish, and that those gospels, as well as Paul's letters, don't appear to be targetted to a Jewish audience at all, but rather to a gentile one. If that's the case, then wouldn't the messiah they were trying to sell be more tailored to appeal to gentile-Roman sensibilities? I don't know that anyone can actually get into the heads of the gospel authors or Paul and know what they may, or may not, have believed. The most it seems one could do is to attempt to discern what they were attempting to market.

Sarai

No Robots

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.