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To: Buggman; jude24; 1000 silverlings; DAVEY CROCKETT; Dr. Eckleburg; HarleyD; ladyinred; ...
Hmm . . . good question. I guess we should also toss out the histories of Josephus, since he was one of those Christ-rejecting rabbis. And the annals of Tacitus, since he was a Christ-rejecting pagan. Whoops, there goes almost all of ancient history.

No moral equivalency here.

It was not the expressed intention of Josephus to deny the reality of the coming of Israel's Christos in the person of Iesous of Nazareth.

The rabbis, in their Talmud and other writing, have done that very things. They have so perverted the word of God by masking the reality of Iesous as He is found there.

As Alfred Edersheim wrote, "He who has thirsted and quenched his thirst at the living fount of Christ's Teaching, can never again stoop to seek drink at the broken cisterns of Rabbinism." (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah)

68 posted on 09/20/2006 6:27:55 PM PDT by topcat54
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To: topcat54; jude24; 1000 silverlings; DAVEY CROCKETT; Dr. Eckleburg; HarleyD; ladyinred
I notice that you left out Tacitus in trying to avoid the "moral equivalency" there, TC. You know, the Tacitus who referred to the beliefs of the Christians as "abominations" and "a most mischievous superstition."

In any case, what then of rabbis like Hillel and Shimmei and Simeon the Just, who died before Yeshua's ministry? Should they be tarred with the same brush as those who in far latter centuries wrote bitter recriminations against a "Jesus" whose followers were persecuting them? What about Gamaliel, the teacher of Sha'ul, who spoke on behalf of the Apostles Kefa (Peter) and Yochanan (John)? What about Nachdimon ben Gurion, who is most likely the Biblical Nicodemus? Should we reject both of them as well? What about the Mishneh, which was compiled in the second century, but which contains material from much, much earlier? Should we cast away the insight it gives us into first-century Judean society?

What then do we do with perfectly valid data about what the Feastdays meant to and how they were celebrated by the first century Jews which included Yeshua and all of the Apostles? Well, if we were great fools, so full of our pride that we thought we couldn't possibly learn anything new about a Jewish Messiah through (gasp) Jewish sources, I suppose we might throw the baby out with the bathwater.

For my part, I'll go down the road that many commentators (see my previous post to Jude) have gone down before, and humble myself enough to learn something new once in a while.

70 posted on 09/20/2006 7:16:22 PM PDT by Buggman (http://brit-chadasha.blogspot.com)
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