TedM

Setting Paul aside, doesn't all of the early evidence we have about what the early Jewish Christian groups thought about Jesus show that they regarded him to have been a Jewish man who walked the earth?

From the Nazarenes and Ebionites, to Celsus, to the Talmud, and more, Jesus was a man.

Wouldn't the Jews have known best who Jesus was?

stephan huller

I have already responded to this in the other thread. The Jews only took a passing interest in Jesus while Jesus was alive. It was only after the rise of Christianity that anything resembling a 'position' on Jesus developed. If you are going to say that the Jews 'knew best' then you have to accept a whole bunch of bizarre narratives including a flying Jesus, Jesus the magician, the sexually perverted Jesus, Jesus getting his powers by scratching the Tetragrammaton on his thigh. A critical eye can discern that the Jews knew little or nothing about Jesus while he was alive. Take a look at the argument that Jesus was a bastard. Mamzer did not mean 'bastard' in the sense of that Bruce Chilton for instance gives it (i.e. born out of wedlock) but specifically to the child born of an adulterous or incestuous union, as defined by the laws of Leviticus 18 and 20. It is only in Yiddish that mamzer takes on the familiar meaning of 'bastard.'

In order to accept the Jewish tradition we have to get very far away from the gospel narrative. Jesus the mamzer was thus the product of an illicit affair on the part of his mother with someone named Panthera or Pandera while married to another man. Are you really prepared to defend that kind of tradition?

mountainman

All the earliest evidence about Jesus is Greek. Which Jews read Greek?

mountainman

The interpolator of Flavius Josephus altered that perception.

stephan huller

This is an idiotic statement. It is akin to assuming that all American Jews speak Hebrew.

mountainman

Codex Vaticanus was not preserved in a synagogue.

stephan huller

Get a book on Jewish inscriptions at synagogues, grave sites etc many if not most in the early Common Era were not in Hebrew or Aramaic. Most wealthy Jews could speak Greek. This helps explain why there are so many Greek words in Jewish Aramaic

aa5874

You claim there is really no such thing as history and that nothing is certain so I don't understand what you are attempting to gain by your questions.

Now, once you introduce the Church writings as evidence then you are OBLIGATED and MANDATED to show exactly what is found written in them.

The Church writings STATE that the EARLIEST believers were Jews who believed Jesus was the Child of a Ghost, the Word that was God, the Creator of heaven and earth.


It is claimed or implied by the Church writers, in Acts and even in the Pauline writings that the earliest BELIEVERS were JEWS that believed Jesus was born of the Holy Ghost, or God's Son or in the Form of God and was RAISED from the dead on the THIRD day.

Saul/Paul was a Hebrew of Hebrews and claimed he was NOT the apostle of a MAN, did NOT get his gospel from man, and taught that it was abominable to worship the CREATED instead of the Creator.

Let us deal with CERTAINTY.

Let us deal with what is ACTUALLY found in Acts of the Apostles.

Acts 2

Even before "Paul" there were at least 3000 persons in Jerusalem that believed the Jesus story based on Acts.

mountainman

Information about the Nazarenes, Ebionites and Celsus are exclusively sourced via the church history researcher Eusebius, who's job it was to represent Jesus as a man. Jesus of the Gospels does not appear in the Talmud. Apart from this Jesus only appears as an encypted name in a stack of suspiciously provenanced books, which were edited and published by Eusebius in association with many trained professional scribes in an imperially sponsored scriptorium. As such Jesus need not have been a man.

mountainman

The earliest stories of Jesus were not inscribed in stone, but were written in the Greek language - not Hebrew or Aramaic - and bound into codices. Once the Greek authors of the New Testament stories had found the Greek LXX, Jewish involvement was not required. The Greek authors of the NT literally hijacked the Greek LXX (not the Hebrew Bible) and they worked in Greek exclusively. The story of Jesus is a Greek story published for the Greeks in Greek.