But that happened after Muhammad and the revelation of the Qur’an.
If the cave origins of the Koran are accepted on blind faith, and hypercritical analysis is applied to the Bible alone, then I see your point. My point is that the strands that make up the Koran show signs of the same eclectism as the Bible does. We can therefore at least contemplate the possibility of politics in play here, since we have already established ourselves as people open to that kind of thing happening in the compilation of the Torah.
That was your opening statement here, was it not?
That of course is comparing apples to oranges. It is the Martyrdom of the Imam Husayn which to Shi’ite Muslims, at least, has the same significance as the Passion of Christ.
What happens when Arabs take over the Middle East and form an empire is closer to what Christianity experiences after Constantine’s conversion.
The martydom of the Iman is not part of the Koran. It is therefore tangential to the origins of Islam, and really only involves a part of the Islamic world.
The conversion of Constantine happened long after Orthdoxy was an established Christian religion. Arabs sweeping out of the desert to establish an empire in the blink of an eye happened concurrent with the establishment of Islam as the official faith of the new empire.
The Passion of the Christ is central to who Orthodoxy understands Jesus to be. Without that, there is but a magician fashioning birds out of clay.
If by that you mean that the Septuagint Bible had translated the Hebrew word for young girls as virgin, yes that is true. But most Jews take this verse to be a reference to Hezekiah.
No, what I mean by the Septuagint is that this is the Bible of Christianity and the diaspora Jews at the time of Jesus, and not the Tanak, which belongs more to the Judaism that emerged post-Temple. Christianity and the pharasaic Judaism of today are both outgrowths of the eclectic and diverse expessions of the Hebrew faith that existed among the Jews at the time.
Can you name some? Other than Christians, of course.
and other than Muslims too of course.
So in effect, what you are asking is for me to name some Jews, who reject Jesus as Messiah, and yet accepted that Jesus was born of a Virgin.
All the apostles and Paul, considered themselves to be Jews.
This was a Jewish tradition, Jewish people contemplating Jewish Scripture. Those Jews that accepted these verses as prophetic and pointing to Jesus, accepted this as a more ultimate fulfillment of the original prophecy. Those that rejected Christ, rejected that kind of understanding as well.
But it was not people outside of the tradition involved in bringing forth the prophecy. It was Jews themselves.
And the thing about Jews is that they disagree with each other.
I
f by that you mean Matthew attempts to connect virtually every event in Christ’s life to some verse in the Bible that much is true. But to a Jew nearly all of these allusions would seem strained. “Out of Egypt I have called my son” for instance is a reference to the Exodus. “Rachel crying for her children” is a reference to the Babylonian Captivity not some massacre of innocents for which we have no evidence ever took place.
Christians today understand the original context, much as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Paul too understood their Bibles. It was their Bibles after all. They did not see the Bible as inadequate, or corrupted, or in some way wanting, but they understood the Bible to be Sacred in every way. Those Jews that reject Christ of course see the propjhcies as strained. Those open to the gospel of Christ become awestruck as the initimate associations become revealed more and more fully to them.
The point is not whether or not you believe. The point is that Christianity references directly to the faith of the Bible.
And the Bible that was used was the Septuagint for a large sector of the Jews of that time, and not the Tanak. It would be a mistake to think too that the Masoertic texts is somehow more authentic than the Septuagint, for the Dead Sea Scrolls have often translated better into Septuagint understanding than Masoretic. There are variances in the texts from a very early date.
I agree. And the same thing is true of Jewish and Christian influences on Islam.
Muslims as a rule consider themselves to be following the original and uncorrupted version of the faith. They might be disappointed to learn that their understanding comes via diffusion rather than direct contemplation of the faith once delivered.
Yes, the Essenes were clearly dualistic in a rather gnostic way.
Their understanding was derived directly from Jewish tradition nevertheless.
Only when mistranslated into Greek.
Clearly, the Septuagint uses a different original source than the later Masoretic texts.
They have the guidance of their own scripture, but I’ll grant you the Qur’an would be much better understood if it were read with some knowledge of the stories as they appear in the Bible.
Of course they would be. It is rather ludicrous to develop of understanding an Adam or Jesus without the original source for the story. Muslims are not a Biblical people. They have the names of the Biblical characters, without in any way seeing how the fullest possible meaning of these characters.
What are you talking about? The Qur’an was revealed before the Arab conquests.
You accept that on faith.
Must I?
