Can we discuss Judaism without the politics?

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I’ve read only bits and pieces of this discussion. What is your main argument: that Jesus was convicted of blasphemy for claiming to be G-d? If this is indeed the reason, then what are you trying to show? Or is there some other point you are making? For the most part, Jews accept the existence of Jesus and that He was crucified. They do not accept His resurrection, nor that He is the Messiah or G-d. Given you are not proselytizing, what are you trying to prove here?
 
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Evenshlomo said:
To be quite frank, your scriptures were written generations after the fact AND are based on one witness only, who was a women who cheated on her viance claiming that G’D made her pregnant in order to safe her life!
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I think you’re really underestimating the NT as a construct.

The ‘incarnation’ story isn’t about a young girl fibbing to her fiance, it’s about the fact that, if you want to establish a particular person as being a god, you need a good miraculous birth story to go with it, one that will work in the religious supermarket that was the Ancient Middle East/Eastern Mediterranean.

The NT is a remarkable collection of works dominated by the thinking of someone one might call a religious ‘genius’ (Paul) and very little of it is wasted from a ‘marketing’ point of view.
 
Evenshlomo said:
I’m just scratching my head here because, what does one thing has to do with the other? To be quite frank, your scriptures were written generations after the fact AND are based on one witness only, who was a women who cheated on her viance claiming that G’D made her pregnant in order to safe her life! Her husband apparently accepted this story, forgave her and moved on. The Torah, however, was given in front of millions of witnesses on mount Sinai.
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Even though the Christian bible is irrelevant for me as a non-Christian, I respectfully disagree that it is based on the testimony of Jesus’ mother.

Regarding Mary, I admit I have never understood the devotion to her and the fact that Catholics call her “theotokos.” God has no mother! I think the Christians have mistranslated the Hebrew word “almah” " עַלְמָה " to mean only “virgin,” therefore, the myth of the virgin birth. (We know the messiah will be an ordinary human being, born to an ordinary mother and father.) I think the Christian theologians know “almah” it means “a young girl,” not necessarily virgin, but by the time they realized their error, they couldn’t back down. The stakes were too high for Christianity to do that. They were already using “almah” in Isaiah 7:14 to mean “virgin.” When the gospel writers incorrectly translated the word, to correct it would cause the gospels to collapse. and if the gospels collapsed, Christianity would collapse. I don’t think it was a case of Mary lying to Joseph, but of the first Christian translators not being intimately knowledgeable of Biblical Hebrew.
 
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The back-and-forth argument over the word “almah” and its meaning in context is both fascinating and tedious to me. There are arguments, counterarguments, counter-counterarguments, and so on. A lot hinges on that one word, as you suggest, so apologetics scholars on both sides of the fence have been continuously at it and still are.
 
meltzerboy2 said:
The back-and-forth argument over the word “almah” and its meaning in context is both fascinating and tedious to me. There are arguments, counterarguments, counter-counterarguments, and so on. A lot hinges on that one word, as you suggest, so apologetics scholars on both sides of the fence have been continuously at it and still are.
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And probably will continue to go at it for a long time to come. Not sure how I feel about it since I’ve settled the matter in my own mind to my own satisfaction.
 
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Some versions have Mary saying I do not know man and her reaction to Gabriel indicates that she is a virgin.
 
Start said:
Some versions have Mary saying I do not know man and her reaction to Gabriel indicates that she is a virgin.
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What is that reaction? I think even the most jaded woman would be shocked to suddenly find an angel in the room with her.
 
When the angel tells her that’s she is going to be pregnant she either says But I am a young girl or I did not have sexual relations with man (depending on the version, but I am not sure which one is the original) The verse after that also makes it look like the conception is a supernatural event. In Matthew it also states that the Child was conceived by the Holy Spirit
 
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ConstantLearner said:
When the gospel writers incorrectly translated the word, to correct it would cause the gospels to collapse.
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I never thought of it as a doctrine arising from an accident of translation, but rather as a post-facto mistranslation meant to bolster the pre-existing virgin birth story. In an attempt to find biblical precedent or a prophecy to back up the story, they zeroed in on Isaiah and decided that עלמה meant “virgin”.
 
Mary still fulfilled the prophecy since she was a young girl.
 
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Well, that’s not the problem, the problem is she couldn’t fulfill the prophecy because she did not live in the time of Ahaz, king of Judah, whom Isaiah was talking to. He said that before the youth, her son, knows how to choose between good and evil, both kings that were enemies of Ahaz (Rezin king of Aram and Pekah king of Israel) would be removed from the land. That was a good seven centuries before Mary’s time.
 
Moses613 said:
He said that before the youth, her son, knows how to choose between good and evil, both kings that were enemies of Ahaz (Rezin king of Aram and Pekah king of Israel) would be removed from the land. That was a good seven centuries before Mary’s time.
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Doesn’t that mean that they were removed before Jesus so it can still apply from that sense?
 
I guess you can read it however you want, however, the literal translation of the Hebrew phrase:
הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן
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is, “behold, the young woman has conceived (or: is with child) and is giving birth to a son”. If it were (completely out of context) talking about a conception and birth to happen centuries in the future, it should say that a young woman “shall conceive and shall give birth”.
 
With ‘proof texts’, there’s always the problem of whether the narrative relates to the ‘proof text’ by scouring the Tanakh for what might be usefully linked as ‘prophesy’ or whether the narrative was constructed in order to fit a ‘prophesy’.

The example I usually use is the form of the notional Isaiah W:X “And he shall stub his toe.”/Matthew Y:Z “And Jesus stubbed his toe.”

Did Jesus stub his toe which then led to the discovery of the ‘prophesy’ in Isaiah or was Matthew aware of a prophesy about toe-stubbing which then led to the toe-stubbing text?
 
Rabbi said:
Okay, so is someone trying to convert someone else (either to Judaism or Christianity)? Because this was not the intention of the original thread. The intention was to discuss Judaism, not arguments and debates around who’s right and who’s wrong. As we all know, both traditions are against the belief that everyone who doesn’t belong in their camp goes to hell.
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Here, here!

Perhaps some others should start another thread instead of continual derailing here…
 
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