cnorman19 wrote:
This is what happens when you try to learn about Judaism by studying the New Testament…
Divine Insight wrote:
I see Jews today proclaiming authority and basically "
Cultural Ownership" of the Hebrew Scriptures dating clear back to the first 5 books of the Old Testament, what the Jews call the "Torah".
As noted in an earlier post:
cnorman19 wrote:
Here's yet another news flash, known to all Jews, but not, it appears, to you: We’ve never claimed that we do. In Jewish teaching, the fact that the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, outside of the land of Israel, was intended as a reminder that the Torah was the property of ALL humans, and not that of the Jews only.
We do, of course, lay claim to the manner in which we read and understand it, as ALL groups who use the Bible do.
But who are these modern day Jews and what linage are they claiming?
Jews are not a “race,� and they are no more a “family� than a “race,� for the simple reason that Jews have welcomed converts to the Jewish faith from the very beginning. The VERY beginning; The servants of Abraham himself are generally considered the first “converts� — he circumcised them, the oldest sign of the oldest Covenant — and there have been many since. The most famous convert in the Bible is Ruth the Moabite, who was an ancestor of King David. The obvious result would be that most Jews would have ancestory from the ancient Middle East, with some admixture of European, African and West Asian genes from the various groups among whom they lived and accepted converts.
And this has been proven in DNA studies. From
Wikipedia:
In August 2012, Dr. Harry Ostrer in his book Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, summarized his and other work in genetics of the last 20 years, and concluded that all major Jewish groups share a common Middle Eastern origin….Y DNA studies examine various paternal lineages of modern Jewish populations. Such studies tend to imply a small number of founders in an old population whose members parted and followed different migration paths.[2] In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern. For example, Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany and the French Rhine Valley. This is consistent with Jewish traditions in placing most Jewish paternal origins in the region of the Middle East.
There is also
research which confirms that the Cohanim, that is, Jews who claim to be descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses, and who historically have been identified as the Priestly line (though the Jewish religion has not had actual priests since the fall of the Temple, the lineage is still recognized and carries certain ceremonial and traditional responsibilities) — actually ARE so descended:
[This research] confirms that the current Cohen descended from a small number of paternal ancestors. In the summary of their findings the authors concluded that " Our estimates of the coalescence time also lend support to the hypothesis that the extended CMH represents a unique founding lineage of the ancient Hebrews that has been paternally inherited along with the Jewish priesthood.�
From that same site:

“…the shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City.�
In other words, the Jews are descended from the people they say they are descended from; Ancient Middle Eastern Arabs and Palestinians, with some admixture of other bloodlines from conversion among the people among whom we have lived over the centuries — exactly as would be expected, and exactly as Jewish tradition maintains.
The Christian Bible portrays a very precise picture of ancient Judaism during the Roman Occupation. It portrays the Pharisees as being in Charge of the Jewish Temples and being the Jewish "Chief Priest". They were clearly recognize by the Jewish culture well enough to be the ones who interact with the Roman Authorities.
Once again, you are not only wrong, but WILDLY wrong. From
The Jewish Virtual Library (emphasis added):
Of the various factions that emerged under Hasmonean rule, three are of particular interest: the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes.
The Pharisees
The most important of the three were the Pharisees because they are the spiritual fathers of modern Judaism.Their main distinguishing characteristic was a belief in an Oral Law that God gave to Moses at Sinai along with the Torah. The Torah, or Written Law, was akin to the U.S. Constitution in the sense that it set down a series of laws that were open to interpretation. The Pharisees believed that God also gave Moses the knowledge of what these laws meant and how they should be applied. This oral tradition was codified and written down roughly three centuries later in what is known as the Talmud.
The Pharisees also maintained that an after-life existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a messiah who would herald an era of world peace.
Pharisees were in a sense blue-collar Jews who adhered to the tenets developed after the destruction of the Temple; that is, such things as individual prayer and assembly in synagogues.
The Sadducees
The Sadducees were elitists who wanted to maintain the priestly caste, but they were also liberal in their willingness to incorporate Hellenism into their lives, something the Pharisees opposed. The Sadducees rejected the idea of the Oral Law and insisted on a literal interpretation of the Written Law; consequently, they did not believe in an after life, since it is not mentioned in the Torah. The main focus of Sadducee life was rituals associated with the Temple.
The Sadducees disappeared around 70 A.D., after the destruction of the Second Temple. None of the writings of the Sadducees has survived, so the little we know about them comes from their Pharisaic opponents.
The
Sadducees were in charge of the Temple, not the Pharisees. They were, by the common people, considered
traitors in that they were collaborators with Roman occupiers — or, as you put it, “the ones who interact with the Roman authorities.�
But the "Modern Day Jews" want no part of being associated with those pharisees and Jewish Chief Priest who were in charge of the Jewish Temples.
Nonsense, and for two reasons. First, it’s right there in black and white, known to every Jew: the Pharisees were the spiritual and intellectual ancestors of modern Judaism, which is sometimes called “Pharisaic Judaism� even today ; and the Chief Priests were Sadducees, not Pharisees. The New Testament has garbled these facts of Jewish history to the point where it does not even note that Jesus was a Pharisee himself, opposed to the Sadducees and their corrupt Temple group. Remember his throwing the moneychangers out of the Temple?
The Pharisees believed in studying in their local villages, in buildings called
synagogues, and to a large degree, they ignored the Temple rites and rituals. Jesus
spoke in synagogues. He was a Pharisee himself — but the NT doesn’t seem to know that.
This has been discussed on this forum before: see
here.
One must remember that the NT — ALL of it — was written under the influence of Paul of Tarsus. His letters are the oldest documents in the NT, predating the Gospels, all of which were written by Paul’s followers.
Paul may not even have been Jewish — but even if he was, he was drastically out of touch with the Judaism of his time. I’ve written on that elsewhere, but for the moment, one example will do: To Paul, the Law — the Torah — was a burden, something that brings death and not life, something under which humans suffer and face condemnation. In the context of the Jewish religion of his or any other time, that’s ludicrous. Pick a Psalm; the Law is “a guide to our path and a lamp to our feet,� God’s most precious gift, which Jews treasured above all others.
Paul was culturally more Greek than Jewish, which of course is why Christianity has more to do with Greek religion than Jewish. The GREEK gods has literal sons and daughters, remember? Zeus and Hercules, and however many more (Zeus was a randy old goat, in the myths)? Paul spoke to Greek audiences, since the Jews rejected his teachings, and therefore most Christians, even in the first century, were Greeks and Romans, and not Jews.
This is what happens when you read the New Testament to find out about Judaism (and it’s not like I’ve never told you that before). That would be roughly like reading the writings of the Ku Klux Klan to find out about the Civil Rights movement. By the time the NT was written, the Jews were the
enemy — Matthew 27:25 is the most notorious example, but there are many others.
So who do they lay claim as their ancient lineage of Judaism?
The Jews of the ancient Near East, as has been proven by DNA research (see above).
They certainly can't lay claim to being followers of Jesus.
Of course not. Glad you got THAT right, at least. But that makes one wonder — why on Earth would you look to followers of Jesus to learn about Jews?
Moreover, Jesus himself was protesting against Orthodox Judaism.
No. He was protesting against the Sadducees and their corruption and collaboration with the Romans.
Not only that but the information we have concerning Jesus has Jesus supporting every jot and tittle of the Jewish Law which Modern Jews refuse to take literally.
And as I’ve pointed out in another post, that’s nonsense too. Jesus himself did not read the Torah literally, and did not preach a literal obedience to its commands —
as proven in that same chapter, Matthew 5, where the “jot and tittle� remark is found.
Do you even know what that means? The “jot and tittle,� in Greek, refer to small diacritical markings in Hebrew that denote vowels, since Hebrew has none. Jesus was saying that the written Torah will always remain the same; he was NOT saying that it must all be followed mechanically and literally, as shown by his remarks immediately after that one.
So if they can't lay claim to having a lineage to Jesus, and they refuse to have lineage to the Pharisees, (a form of Orthodox Judaism that no Modern Day Jew would support)…
Nonsense, as already proven.
…then who exactly do they claim as their lineage to these ancient times?
I don't see where they have a well-defined group to identify with even back to the days of Jesus much less beyond that to the days of the Torah.
So where is there any merit in their claim to have cultural lineage clear back to the Torah?
Who are these people?
If you discount and dismiss the traditions and even the
written records of the Jewish people themselves — and there are very many, virtually all of them still extant — you might end up anywhere, depending on your own prejudices, assumptions, and agenda. That has apparently been the case with your own “analysis� here. It’s so wrong it’s laughable — and quite literally, too; my initial reaction on reading this post was a hearty belly laugh. The Pharisees were in charge of the Temple? Really? That’s like saying that Martin Luther King was head of the FBI.
They can only have been a more modern day uprising. And therefore they cannot lay claim to being able to speak to the issue of what "ancient Jews" might have actually believed.
Again, obvious nonsense — based on nothing at all but your own misinformation, ignorance of Jewish history and documents, and your own apparent desire to discredit and demean the Jewish religion.
They certainly have no business trying to lay claim to the Torah as "Their Scriptures" like as if they have some special connection to those ancient cultures.
Except that our people wrote them, which no one disputes; that our people have revered and studied them for centuries, leaving hundreds of volumes of detailed commentary and discussion, which no other culture has; and that all that study and commentary continues and is constantly added to, to this day.
The Modern Day Jews aren't anymore closely related to those ancient Jews than most other people. And certainly not in terms of how they believed. It's pretty clear from the actual writings in the ancient scriptures that the authors of those scriptures believed they spoke for some God. They either believed it, or fraudulently claimed it to be sure because that's what's actually written in those scriptures.
As has been established elsewhere, the concept of a traditional and binding
interpretation of the Torah was there from the very beginning, and is in fact required and supported by the Torah documents themselves. The idea that the Torah came, indirectly to be sure, from God is NOT in conflict with the idea that those documents and commands must be understood and applied, not only in their own time, but for all times to come. Claiming “fraud� is more than a little extreme, and certainly isn’t justified by your
willfully ignorant “analysis� and prejudices.
The Modern Jews apparently don't like what is literally written in the ancient scriptures and would prefer to imagine alternative "non-literal interpretations".
A straight-up falsehood, proven to be a pejorative distortion earlier.
But where is there evidence for any lineage back to any actual ancient groups that felt that way?
The Talmud. The Responsa. The commentaries of Nachmanides, Rashi, Maimonides, and many others. It’s all there, dating back to the first century CE and earlier — and if you count the rest of the Hebrew Bible, which constantly refers back to the Torah, there is your “evidence� dating back to before the Babylonian Exile and the destruction of the FIRST Temple.
All of which is apparently very easy to dismiss and ignore, especially when you have no idea that it even exists.
Even Jesus demanded that every jot and tittle of the scriptures must stand until heaven and earth pass.
See above.
The Pharisees were also pretty obviously quite hard-nosed about demanding that laws be upheld. So much so that they called for the crucifixion of Jesus on charges of blaspheme or apostasy.
No, that would be the Sadducees — the chief priests and “scribes� of the Temple. That’s about as basic as it gets, in CHRISTIAN history. Truly astonishing that you could be THAT wrong.
So who do the modern day Jews claim as their ancestral group?
And why wasn't that group even mentioned in Christian theology?
Where are the records that document how this unknown group actually believed?
See above, for all of it.
Honestly, DI, the more you pontificate and fulminate about the history of Judaism and the Jews, the more ignorant you prove yourself to be, and the more ridiculous you look. Maybe you should stop trying to peddle this nonsense. There are people here who know better, and there are many more than one.
I personally don't see where the modern day Jews even have a claim to any direct linage to their own past in terms of this specific religions paradigm.
If they can't claim the Pharisees, and they can't claim Jesus, then who's left to claim? Some lesser-known obscure group?
If that's the case, then where is there any merit in claiming a strong lineage clear back to the days of the Torah. Obviously if modern day Jews were nothing more than a lesser-known off-shoot of the Orthodox Judaism of the Pharisees then they can't lay claim to being strong enough to reach clear back to the Torah in terms of scriptural "authority".
Question for Debate:
Who exactly do the Modern Day Jews claim to be decedents of in terms of claiming the rights to "Religious Scriptural Authority".
My position is that they have no credible claim that can be dated back to the Torah. In fact, I can't see where they have any credible claims dating back even to the time of Jesus.
See above. MY position is that this is all pure fantasy, based on nothing at all — more or less as usual. Except that that is more than a mere "position" -- it's a provable, and now proven, FACT.
You're just digging that hole deeper and deeper, and this is the deepest hole yet. You're not going to be able to ignore this ridiculous post and pretend you've never said any of this, as you have so many others here.
Maybe it's time to stop. Ya think?
