Why should we believe the Israelite mythology? as basis for our faith?

[openmind77]

Here’s the problem with your assumption about Jesus.

We know Jesus was a Jew. We know Jesus believed in the Torah (as one can see by the numerous references to it in the gospels). We know Jesus claimed to have fulfilled the things contained in the law and the prophets.

We also know in these books God did command the killing of certain nations, in fact he demanded the israelites destroy the inhabitants of the land they were entering, but they failed.

Why should we think Jesus did not believe in these stories? That he did not believe the father righteously demanded the death of certain people for their great sin? Yes Jesus gave us a new covenant but he never denied the Old covenant, at least as I see it.

Is morality dependant on God or independant from God? I think you would suggest the latter while Christians would suggest the former, God being all things good.

I doubt if Jesus would have been very successful in his ministry if he had kept on pointing out the errors in the Torah. What did you want him to do - go by line by line and mark the ones he disagreed with? It is for his followers to listen to Jesus own pronouncements/teachings and then reject anything out of the OT that contradicts his teachings. As I pointed out ‘Love your enemies’ and ‘Kill your enemies including babies’ is a clear contradiction - it is up to you to decide what you want to choose.

There is no such thing as one law is suitable at one time and another is suitable at other times for other people. If anyone tells me the God orders people to commit massacres, I simply refuse to believe it. First of all God is quite capable of taking care of anyone all by himself (through natural disasters), but I don’t believe, he would ever contradict something his Son would be saying pretty soon - so clearly the story of his ordering a massacre is just that - a made up story to justify ones own atrocities.

 

[Country_Gal]

Thank you for all the interesting debate, I’ve enjoyed reading all of your posts.

 

[IgnatianPhilo]

Now that is a theory that you are not the first to entertain, that Jesus didn’t really care about the torah but I think by extension that would necessarily lead to Jesus not caring about Judaism, a context he clearly worked in. A view I would have to disagree with. This opens up a world of questions which I do not think could be possibly answered or reconciled with the actions we know Jesus committed. For instance, why was Jesus upset with a genuine passion at the presence of money lenders at the temple? For more appearances perhaps. Why was Jesus always referring to this document and insisting he could be found therein if he didn’t actually believe it? Why did Jesus partake in the Judaism and the practices contained in torah if there are wrong things contained therein? Could it be possible that he was a devout believer in these texts? A devout worshipper of the God of Israel who delivered the Israelites from Egypt? Why would he say Abraham looked forward to this day? Elijah who killed many false prophets appeared beside him in glory (if you accept that account) and Moses who also killed when necessary appeared besides him. Why did Jesus at first reject the Greek woman who came to him begging him to heal her daughter and then only when she stated she was like a dog he then decided to heal her daughter? What was the end game of Jesus in this world view you have given him? These are the sorts of questions which really need to be begged if we are expected to believe Jesus did not believe in the torah, something his actions and teachings clearly betray.

You say that the command God gave to the Israelites to slaughter their national enemies and inherit the land promised to them is in contradiction to the teaching of Jesus. The question is how did Jesus view the issue? Like you do? That is you do not seem to think God had morally sufficient reasons for this slaughter. How do you know there was absolutely no way for there to be a sufficient cause to do this? Basically I think Jesus would ask of you “who are you to say what God should and could not do?” If God, who abides all sin and wrong doing against him with a great patience finally unleashes his wrath against a people either directly or indirectly who are you to say that he is wrong?

This ultimately comes down to where we believe good comes from, God himself or is good but an abstraction.

I would also disagree that there cannot be a certain law for a time and a different type of law later. The prophets indicate as much when God says he will make a new covenant which was not like the one he made with the fathers of Israel. We should also ask what the purpose of the law was and while I might not be able to adequately explain its purpose, the answer seems to be In the epistles of Paul.

Bottomline it seems wrong to wrench Jesus and Paul from the Judaism they both clearly had accepted. I will add a note by Judaism I do not mean modern Judaism.

 

[openmind77]

Now that is a theory that you are not the first to entertain, that Jesus didn’t really care about the torah but I think by extension that would necessarily lead to Jesus not caring about Judaism, a context he clearly worked in. A view I would have to disagree with. This opens up a world of questions which I do not think could be possibly answered or reconciled with the actions we know Jesus committed. For instance, why was Jesus upset with a genuine passion at the presence of money lenders at the temple? For more appearances perhaps. Why was Jesus always referring to this document and insisting he could be found therein if he didn’t actually believe it? Why did Jesus partake in the Judaism and the practices contained in torah if there are wrong things contained therein? Could it be possible that he was a devout believer in these texts? A devout worshipper of the God of Israel who delivered the Israelites from Egypt? Why would he say Abraham looked forward to this day? Elijah who killed many false prophets appeared beside him in glory (if you accept that account) and Moses who also killed when necessary appeared besides him. Why did Jesus at first reject the Greek woman who came to him begging him to heal her daughter and then only when she stated she was like a dog he then decided to heal her daughter? What was the end game of Jesus in this world view you have given him? These are the sorts of questions which really need to be begged if we are expected to believe Jesus did not believe in the torah, something his actions and teachings clearly betray.

You say that the command God gave to the Israelites to slaughter their national enemies and inherit the land promised to them is in contradiction to the teaching of Jesus. The question is how did Jesus view the issue? Like you do? That is you do not seem to think God had morally sufficient reasons for this slaughter. How do you know there was absolutely no way for there to be a sufficient cause to do this? Basically I think Jesus would ask of you “who are you to say what God should and could not do?” If God, who abides all sin and wrong doing against him with a great patience finally unleashes his wrath against a people either directly or indirectly who are you to say that he is wrong?

This ultimately comes down to where we believe good comes from, God himself or is good but an abstraction.

I would also disagree that there cannot be a certain law for a time and a different type of law later. The prophets indicate as much when God says he will make a new covenant which was not like the one he made with the fathers of Israel. We should also ask what the purpose of the law was and while I might not be able to adequately explain its purpose, the answer seems to be In the epistles of Paul.

Bottomline it seems wrong to wrench Jesus and Paul from the Judaism they both clearly had accepted. I will add a note by Judaism I do not mean modern Judaism.

I don’t believe that God asked anybody to slaughter men, women, children and babies - so the question of whether ‘God had morally sufficient reasons for this slaughter’ does not even arise. In any case there are never any moral reasons for slaughtering people including women/children/babies. Everything else is just trying to rationalize crimes against humanity. I don’t have anything against Judaism - there was no need for Jesus to reject the entire religion because of these stories. I believe all religions are valid paths to God, there is no reason reject the one you are born to. I am just saying these stories in the OT are just that - stories.

 

[IgnatianPhilo]

I don’t believe that God asked anybody to slaughter men, women, children and babies - so the question of whether ‘God had morally sufficient reasons for this slaughter’ does not even arise. In any case there are never any moral reasons for slaughtering people including women/children/babies. Everything else is just trying to rationalize crimes against humanity. I don’t have anything against Judaism - there was no need for Jesus to reject the entire religion because of these stories. I believe all religions are valid paths to God, there is no reason reject the one you are born to. I am just saying these stories in the OT are just that - stories.

I must go by what I see, a Jesus not isolated from the judaism of his time but an essential part and challenge to the Judaism of his time. I do not see in Christ the radical rejection of the Old testament as something not important, or that it never really happened, I see Christ himself demonstrating this time and time again with the examples I gave. The Jewish Jesus seeps through the New testament.

But I would ask why doesn’t God have the right to destroy anyone he so desires to accomplish a specific purpose which will end up doing more good than evil? Does man have the right to say to God that he is unjust? Take in mind we are talking about the Christian concept of God, a God whom is all goodness, Justice and ultimately all wrath lies in.

Now I was not born into Christianity, rather I was born into a secular house which still takes little time to consider anything towards God. But if these are just stories, if the Old testament as a whole has to be rejected, then the Christian faith has to be rejected. Christianity is not built on a ground isolated from the bible, central to Christianity is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, the law of Moses, and the teachings of the prophets. To do away with the law of Moses is to do away with Christ’s purpose and to ignore the history is Israel is just as dangerous as ignoring the history of the church today. I’m not saying you have to accept this, nor am I forcing you to, but we have to argue critically here if we are going to talk on this subject at all. Your conclusion would have us reject Jesus or at least the Jesus we see in the gospels, in which we would have to do as Thomas Jefferson did and what Marcion did and cut out all the Jewish parts and miracles till we have a sanitized version of Jesus appropriate for modern sensibilities.

If we are engaged even in an amateurish but still fairly critical discussion of the topic at hand, I suggest such a notion is like removing all the parts of Plato’s republic which offend our modern sensibilities and coming up with a respectable Socrates. That is, a Socrates who does not advocate what essentially boils down to a communist state in which everything is controlled for the good of the masses and one is born into a certain class for the rest of his life. I contend we can only understand Jesus and who he actually was if we see him as accepting the Judaism (at least in a general sense) of his day and that would involve a recounting of Israel’s story summed up in the feasts of Passover and at the center of it all, the temple.

 

[openmind77]

… stuff … But if these are just stories, if the Old testament as a whole has to be rejected, then the Christian faith has to be rejected. …more stuff…

Nothing as a whole needs to be rejected. However, most of the stories need to be taken with a big grain of salt.

You should read some of the stories in Hindu texts - you need plenty of salt (but there are no massacres) - this is off-topic though.

 

[IgnatianPhilo]

Nothing as a whole needs to be rejected. However, most of the stories need to be taken with a big grain of salt.

You should read some of the stories in Hindu texts - you need plenty of salt (but there are no massacres) - this is off-topic though.

Hinduism is then clearly different from Christianity in that regard then. Christianity, Jesus, atonement cannot work in isolation, it simply doesn’t make sense. What do we then believe, that a man who came to the jews was risen from the dead not in fulfillment of everything which came before him, but rather as a totally distinct event which in of itself is meaningful? If we begin to take the old testament as a grain of salt we will soon find ourselves looking at the new testament in such a way. I can’t really believe a man rose from the dead, that’s just crazy, or how about; I can’t really believe a man did many miraculous signs and wonders, that’s just so irrational.

One can find spiritual understanding from these texts, but if one is going to reject a core narrative which I believe Jesus drew firmly upon, ie the Jewish narrative, the nation of Israel narrative one has to justify oneself. To get a proper grasp of this look at the early patristics, often in their explanations of Christ they didn’t just draw on Christ alone but the entirety of salvation history. Iraneaus in the apostolic preaching relies mostly on the Old testament in order to depict the life of Christ and begins that book not with the incarnation but creation and following the bible goes chronologically to Jesus Christ. Athanasius did the same thing in the Incarnation of the son of God, declaring that creation went bad and God would not abide his creation going stale, so he intervened with prophets and promises and then finally his son.

The sort of reading you introduce really does destroy Christianity, although that was not your intent.

 

[esieffe]

Jesus (God) chose to come to Earth and teach from the Jewish Scriptures.

He didn’t come to Elaborate Buddha’s teachings. He didn’t come and teach from the Bhagavad Gita.

He taught from the Old Testament.

So I say that’s why.

I have to agree. My boss is a Jewish Carpenter not a Hindu one.

 

[esieffe]

.
It means that even while fighting him, you do it without hate or vindictiveness and you fight while avoiding unnecessary bloodshed, cruelty and suffering.

Intention is an important factor in the Catholic Church, and should be in Christianity as a whole. You make a very important and valid point here. I am quite sure Stalin killed more people than Hitler, but Hitler is the “evil standard” if you will, due to the zeal and glee with which the third Reich tortured and executed it’s enemies.

If we have to shoot someone breaking into our home in the middle of the night, and we are truly fearful for our lives, we more than likely will not be charged with a crime. If on the other hand, an intruder breaks in and we torture him for a few days before calling the police, than most certainly we will go to jail, and rightly so.

 

[openmind77]

Hinduism is then clearly different from Christianity in that regard then. Christianity, Jesus, atonement cannot work in isolation, it simply doesn’t make sense. What do we then believe, that a man who came to the jews was risen from the dead not in fulfillment of everything which came before him, but rather as a totally distinct event which in of itself is meaningful? If we begin to take the old testament as a grain of salt we will soon find ourselves looking at the new testament in such a way. I can’t really believe a man rose from the dead, that’s just crazy, or how about; I can’t really believe a man did many miraculous signs and wonders, that’s just so irrational.

One can find spiritual understanding from these texts, but if one is going to reject a core narrative which I believe Jesus drew firmly upon, ie the Jewish narrative, the nation of Israel narrative one has to justify oneself. To get a proper grasp of this look at the early patristics, often in their explanations of Christ they didn’t just draw on Christ alone but the entirety of salvation history. Iraneaus in the apostolic preaching relies mostly on the Old testament in order to depict the life of Christ and begins that book not with the incarnation but creation and following the bible goes chronologically to Jesus Christ. Athanasius did the same thing in the Incarnation of the son of God, declaring that creation went bad and God would not abide his creation going stale, so he intervened with prophets and promises and then finally his son.

The sort of reading you introduce really does destroy Christianity, although that was not your intent.

I believe all this will be cleared up when the Christ Returns - should happen in the next few years. We will know then exactly which narrative he wants us to follow and which one he wants us to perhaps gloss over.

 

[livingwordunity]

This is the book that I recommend for this subject:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[vsedriver]

I don’t believe that God asked anybody to slaughter men, women, children and babies - so the question of whether ‘God had morally sufficient reasons for this slaughter’ does not even arise. In any case there are never any moral reasons for slaughtering people including women/children/babies. Everything else is just trying to rationalize crimes against humanity. I don’t have anything against Judaism - there was no need for Jesus to reject the entire religion because of these stories. I believe all religions are valid paths to God, there is no reason reject the one you are born to. I am just saying these stories in the OT are just that - stories.

you are judging God’s actions based on human behavior. God the father was protecting his chosen people. these people were a threat to the Israelites. Yes, God could have mass slaughtered these people himself the way he did with Noah’s flood. But he promised he would never destroy the world that way again. The chosen people had to learn to live and survive in the real world. God brought us into the world and God can take us out. We may not understand all he does but that doesn’t make him evil.

 

[Servant19]

I doubt if Jesus would have been very successful in his ministry if he had kept on pointing out the errors in the Torah. What did you want him to do - go by line by line and mark the ones he disagreed with? It is for his followers to listen to Jesus own pronouncements/teachings and then reject anything out of the OT that contradicts his teachings. As I pointed out ‘Love your enemies’ and ‘Kill your enemies including babies’ is a clear contradiction - it is up to you to decide what you want to choose.

There is no such thing as one law is suitable at one time and another is suitable at other times for other people. If anyone tells me the God orders people to commit massacres, I simply refuse to believe it. First of all God is quite capable of taking care of anyone all by himself (through natural disasters), but I don’t believe, he would ever contradict something his Son would be saying pretty soon - so clearly the story of his ordering a massacre is just that - a made up story to justify ones own atrocities.

I think God is perfectly capable of contradicting Himself if He so wishes.

If you, as a parent, are trying to educate your child, you would, when the child is very young, tell them “Never cross the road”.

At some point you will tell them to “cross the road with care”

At another point you won’t even know when they are crossing the road or not, they have matured enough to not require that specific instruction any more. Different instructions and guidance is necessary.

So it is with God. Mankind is like a human being. Collectively, mankind goes through childhood, adolescence, maturity and adulthood.

God’s guidance is perfectly measured to the needs and capacities of the “body of mankind”, He is the All-Knowing Physician

The All-Knowing Physician hath His finger on the pulse of mankind. He perceiveth the disease, and prescribeth, in His unerring wisdom, the remedy. Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.

We can well perceive how the whole human race is encompassed with great, with incalculable afflictions. We see it languishing on its bed of sickness, sore-tried and disillusioned. They that are intoxicated by self-conceit have interposed themselves between it and the Divine and infallible Physician. Witness how they have entangled all men, themselves included, in the mesh of their devices. They can neither discover the cause of the disease, nor have they any knowledge of the remedy. They have conceived the straight to be crooked, and have imagined their friend an enemy.

Incline your ears to the sweet melody of this Prisoner. Arise, and lift up your voices, that haply they that are fast asleep may be awakened. Say: O ye who are as dead! The Hand of Divine bounty proffereth unto you the Water of Life. Hasten and drink your fill. Whoso hath been re-born in this Day, shall never die; whoso remaineth dead, shall never live.

• Baha’u’llah

.

 

[openmind77]

I think God is perfectly capable of contradicting Himself if He so wishes.

If you, as a parent, are trying to educate your child, you would, when the child is very young, tell them “Never cross the road”.

At some point you will tell them to “cross the road with care”

At another point you won’t even know when they are crossing the road or not, they have matured enough to not require that specific instruction any more. Different instructions and guidance is necessary.

So it is with God. Mankind is like a human being. Collectively, mankind goes through childhood, adolescence, maturity and adulthood.

God’s guidance is perfectly measured to the needs and capacities of the “body of mankind”, He is the All-Knowing Physician

.

I guess ‘Father’ knows best

 

[Servant19]

I guess ‘Father’ knows best

Actually, God knows best

.

 

[petra22]

I must go by what I see, a Jesus not isolated from the judaism of his time but an essential part and challenge to the Judaism of his time. I do not see in Christ the radical rejection of the Old testament as something not important, or that it never really happened, I see Christ himself demonstrating this time and time again with the examples I gave. The Jewish Jesus seeps through the New testament.

But I would ask why doesn’t God have the right to destroy anyone he so desires to accomplish a specific purpose which will end up doing more good than evil? Does man have the right to say to God that he is unjust? Take in mind we are talking about the Christian concept of God, a God whom is all goodness, Justice and ultimately all wrath lies in.

Now I was not born into Christianity, rather I was born into a secular house which still takes little time to consider anything towards God. But if these are just stories, if the Old testament as a whole has to be rejected, then the Christian faith has to be rejected. Christianity is not built on a ground isolated from the bible, central to Christianity is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, the law of Moses, and the teachings of the prophets. To do away with the law of Moses is to do away with Christ’s purpose and to ignore the history is Israel is just as dangerous as ignoring the history of the church today. I’m not saying you have to accept this, nor am I forcing you to, but we have to argue critically here if we are going to talk on this subject at all. Your conclusion would have us reject Jesus or at least the Jesus we see in the gospels, in which we would have to do as Thomas Jefferson did and what Marcion did and cut out all the Jewish parts and miracles till we have a sanitized version of Jesus appropriate for modern sensibilities.

If we are engaged even in an amateurish but still fairly critical discussion of the topic at hand, I suggest such a notion is like removing all the parts of Plato’s republic which offend our modern sensibilities and coming up with a respectable Socrates. That is, a Socrates who does not advocate what essentially boils down to a communist state in which everything is controlled for the good of the masses and one is born into a certain class for the rest of his life. I contend we can only understand Jesus and who he actually was if we see him as accepting the Judaism (at least in a general sense) of his day and that would involve a recounting of Israel’s story summed up in the feasts of Passover and at the center of it all, the temple.

I like this train of thought…

 

[Ontheway]

I must go by what I see, a Jesus not isolated from the judaism of his time but an essential part and challenge to the Judaism of his time. I do not see in Christ the radical rejection of the Old testament as something not important, or that it never really happened, I see Christ himself demonstrating this time and time again with the examples I gave. The Jewish Jesus seeps through the New testament.

.

However, when Jesus appeared and began to preach, His message was that of peace and not war; of forgiveness and not retribution; of the kingdom of God and not the kingdom of Israel. The Jews of that time were waiting for a messiah who would restore the Old Testament kingdom, a political entity. They wanted a militant messiah. Instead Jesus preached forgiveness of sins and the Kingdom of God, both of which were rejected by the Jews.

His very life and message, HIs messianic role are a negation of the tribal history of Israel.

Hence the New Covenant.

As to the question of whether He was a Jew and if He followed God’s message found in the Old testament, the answer is obviously - yes.

 

[chimo]

You are quite right - the people of that time were uncivilized or as you put it ’ very irresponsible, undisciplined and naughty “children”’. What better way for these people to justify their actions than to commit atrocities and then claim that God ordered them to do so. You are suggesting that God wanted those women and children who were murdered, dead and having no better way to accomplish this, ordered the Israelites to do it for him.

What stops a similar claim from a group today (say in Afghanistan) that says that God has been talking to them quite a bit recently and ordering them to commit some atrocities. Do you think we should take such a possibility into account (that God indeed has been talking them) before condemning them?

If God indeed wants some people dead, I am sure he can accomplish it without making an already violent people into mass murderers.

I don’t think we should discuss the story of Genesis with Adam and Eve which apparently happened 6000 year ago - that discussion has been beaten to death already.

I do not think God wants anyone dead. The fact is unless there were circumstances from the Old Testament which God needed to iron out we would have been in a worse position. The OT is not about a God who orders people dead. It is about giving life back to humanity. The problem was how to do this. Since God called on the Jewish people to be more in a relationship with Him this has meant that certain conditions must come forth. The plan for God to come to redeem mankind would involve suffering, much suffering. Even God was not immune to suffering as Jesus, the Son of God has shown us. Even the Church understood this as the Church suffered tremendously throughout the ages, The fact is and it seems to be more understood than any other teaching that the way to life must be through the route of the Cross. It was the message of the Cross that most of humanity could not relate to and even come to understand and here we see this in the OT.

You cannot teach this (the Cross) to humanity unless you show it to them. This was the important message which Jesus had given for us. Humanity would not have learned about how to love just by speaking about it or on its own. How can God teach what real love, His love is to humanity? The answer came in the person of His Son who showed us the way. More precisely it was the Cross. God could never get Adam and Eve to understand that. That was the risk God knew He would take when He created humanity. You can tell them all you want to tell them but it would not be enough. You have to show it to them. So finally God did in the person of His Son. It is quite interesting that even though the Son of God had come to show us this love, humanity is still at war with itself. I wonder how much does God need to reveal for humanity to get it. The cost of His Son even though it was a great cost did not give the whole of humanity the answers to their search, for in truth humanity does not understand how to put that Cross into action.

Humanity is in fact at war with the Cross. They do not want to love within the same measure Jesus offered. That is why the Cross gets persecuted. This persecution does not mean it comes from outside the Church for Christians themselves have persecuted Christians. Many Christians do not get the message of the Cross to be lived out in their lives. Even they fight it. Instead of seeing too much what is in the OT look now to the NT and the present time for in truth it is the other way around as people are at war with themselves because they do not receive what the Cross can be for them. It takes great courage and determination to love in the same measure of Jesus. This type of love is what God wanted for humanity to accept and humanity for many other reasons we have seen through its history will want to judge God and the Cross which is so hard to accept.

 

[Mike_SoCal]

I know some would dismiss certain OT stories as mythology.

I have found the OT to be incredibly historically accurate where it can be proven.
I firmly believe in Biblical philosophy regarding Man’s nature and Biblical theology.

As odd as the stories of Adam, Babel, Jonah, etc. are at first glance, they too have provable truth in them. Genetic studies of modern man points to a single man and woman as our original progenitors. The flood or floods have occurred in large parts of the world, settlements have been found under ocean water in India and the Middle East. The most likely place for the Garden of Eden is the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

I’ve studied modern evolution theory and find it flawed. The theory is constantly being adjusted and rewritten since Darwin to account for the lack of evidence. Evolution theory has to start with life evolving from dissolved minerals and organic material. That belief takes some faith. The whole dinosaur family tree has been rewritten in the last 10 years.

Human philosophy and wisdom are foolishness in the eyes of God. This certainly seems true just looking at the state of our world today. Until someone can prove the Bible is not factual on some of these fantastic stories I’ll go on believing it over anything our great human minds can conjure.