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To: Vicomte13
But the Jews had no canon, and the Septuagint translation was the only one made for general use when there was still a high priest sitting in the Temple in Jerusalem.

When Jesus say: " till heaven and earth pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled."  Was he referring to Hebrew or Greek text?

jot or tittle: "Jot" refers to yôd, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet; "tittle" is a slight serif on a Hebrew letter that distinguishes it from another, similarly formed letter.

505 posted on 11/30/2005 12:48:07 PM PST by gscc
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506 posted on 11/30/2005 12:50:35 PM PST by trisham (Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.)
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To: gscc; Kolokotronis

Kolokotronis, please tell us what Jesus' words were in the original Greek that have been translated "jot nor tittle" in the King James Bible.

The more important words here is not "jot nor tittle", its the single word "Law".
To Jews, the Old Testament is not "The Law".
The Torah is The Law.
Quite unlike Protestant Christians, Jews do not place equal authority on every word and every text in the Bible.
The Torah, the first five books, THAT is "The Law". THAT has greater authority than everything else.

The rest, that's all good and inspirational, but The Law is the Torah.

(Catholics make this distinction, to a degree, with the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, standing and singing "Allelujia!" three times, and crossing themselves thrice when the Gospel is read by the ordained minister; by contrast, the other readings are often done by a lay reader, and heard sitting.

So, what did Jesus say here?

He said that the Law, which is to say The Torah, was fixed by God for all time. None of it would pass away until all was fulfilled. He was not referring to 1 and 2 Kings, nor to the Psalms, nor to Joshua. He was not referring to "The Old Testament". He was referring to the Pentateuch, and only the Pentateuch. Because THAT, and only that, was "The Law" to the Jews circa 32 AD.

And every synagogue then, as now, had its own Hebrew scroll of THAT, the Torah. That's what was studied and focused upon. Jews in the Temple day were not Protestants. They were much more like Catholics, with the High Priest as Pope (with the authority to set law) and the Sanhedrin as the Curia, to decide matters in dispute. There were ordained priests, and there were the equivalent of brothers. There were also the equivalent of nuns, women who had taken the Nazirite vow. (The Proto-Gospel of James that Mary, mother of Jesus, had herself been committed to the Temple as a Temple virgin in her childhood, but that is another story.)

It is not surprising that we discover, in Paul's letter to Timothy, that the new Christian ministers were set up, and followed many of the forms, of the Jewish priesthood that they all knew, just as it's not surprising that the earliest Protestant sects: Lutherans and Anglicans, look very, very Catholic in their structure and forms.

So, every Jew, whether Pharisee or Saduccee or Essene or non-partisan - and even the Samaritans (who, very Protestant-like, took textualism to a whole new level in Samaria by rejecting all other traditions, written or Templar, EXCEPT the Torah) - had a common reference point in the Hebrew scroll of the Torah, which graced all synagogues, and was and is The Law.

Jesus was referring to 5 books of the Bible, the part that are The Law, and nothing else.


513 posted on 11/30/2005 1:19:28 PM PST by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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