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To: Buggman

Why are you still calling him Saul? He took a new name upon his baptism.


96 posted on 01/03/2006 1:59:04 PM PST by Pyro7480 (Sancte Joseph, terror daemonum, ora pro nobis!)
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To: Pyro7480
That's a nice Christian myth that has nothing to do with reality. Sha'ul was baptized in Acts 9:18; he is still called Sha'ul right through chapter 13. The change had nothing to do with discarding his Jewish heritage (as proven by Acts 21 on), but simply that he was dealing more and more with Gentile audiences and therefore was more and more using his Greek name--even today, it's not uncommon for a Jew to have their birth-name and a more "Gentilized" name that they go by publicly. For example, my own rabbi, who is in fact a born Jew, is both Cameron and Gavri'el.

I choose to use Sha'ul's Hebrew name, as I do all the Apostles, to emphasize the fact that he was a Jew by birth and culture, with a Jewish way of thinking, not a Greek. This is doubly important in the case of Sha'ul, who was not only Jewish, but had learned at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel of the School of Hillel, still revered today as one of the greatest of Jewish sages.

The Gospel--that God was born into the world in the person of Yeshua, lived a sinless life, died to pay the price of our sins, and rose again on the third day just as He will raise all who put their trust in Him--is such that it can be communicated and understood in every language and culture. However, it's original culture is Jewish, and when we lose sight of the fact that we are the recipients of a culturally-contextualized message and start to think that our Western culture is the "original" Gospel context, we start to misunderstand it.

For example, by imposing a Platonic ideal of virginity on a Jewish marriage, or by misunderstanding a type (the Eucharist, baptism) for the spiritual reality underlying the type, or thinking that "binding and loosing" (i.e., the authority to make halakah, rulings on how to apply the Torah) gives one the authority to change the day of the Sabbath.

Or thinking that we have the right to interfere and "mediate" a dispute between the Palestinians and the physical seed of Abraham, isaac, and Jacob, to whom God has forever given the land of Israel--other than to get firmly on the side of those to whom the lease is given.

101 posted on 01/03/2006 2:28:47 PM PST by Buggman (L'chaim b'Yeshua HaMashiach!)
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To: Pyro7480

Btw, I'm still waiting to hear on what basis I'm supposed to be condemning Sha'ul.


103 posted on 01/03/2006 2:29:37 PM PST by Buggman (L'chaim b'Yeshua HaMashiach!)
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