03-08-2009, 06:50 PM
Andrew
Most of your recent post employs the ad hominem fallacy, thus I will only reply to your points that require clarity on my part.
1) You asked "What source do you question? You disagree with the book? You don't think the Talmud quotes are genuine? What is your point? I'm not psychic. That's forbidden by Torah remember? If you don't have the patience to explain your views, I assure you I have no patience to divine them through tea leaves or ask what your sign is."
The source in question is the one you "looked at for my research about 5years ago was called "Christianity the Talmud and Midrash", <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Midr">http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Midr</a><!-- m --> ... 718&sr=1-1.
If you're going to use a source to support your conclusion, the aforementioned questions, such as "what is the quality of your source?" is necessarily asked by any critical thinker, requiring dependable evidence. Since you used "Christianity, the Talmud and Midrash" to support your thesis, I thought you could answer my questions thereof. Apparently not.
2) You said "First, I showed you the Talmud quotes that unquestionably prove they are co-opting Gospel quotes.
You've showed me similarities between Matthew and the Talmud, all of which can be explained by more than one cause, some of which are more plausible than others. You haven't proven anything "unquestionably."
"Even the rabbis tell us plainly the compilation of the Mishnah began at leat 150 years later."
Your unstated idea must be "since Matthew surfaced first, any parallelisms between Matthew and the Talmud must have necessarily been taken from Matthew, or in other words, what came later borrowed from what came before. That's possible, but again, you have not "unquestionably" proven that to be the case. Consider the following:
" From Moses the Mishna was transmitted by oral tradition through forty "Receivers," until the time of Rabbi Judah the Holy. These Receivers were qualified by ordination to hand it on from generation to generation. Abarbanel and Maimonides disagree as to the names of these Receivers. While the temple still stood as a centre of unity to the nation, it was considered unlawful to reduce these traditions to writing. But when the Temple was burned, and the Jews were dispersed amongst other peoples, it was considered politic to form them into a written code, which should serve as a bond of union, and keep alive the spirit of patriotism. The Jewish leaders saw the effect of Constitutions and Pandects in consolidating nations???the advantage of written laws over arbitrary decisions. Numberless precedents of case law, answering to our common law, were already recorded: and the teachings of the Hebrew jurisconsults, or "Responsa prudentium," which were held to be binding on the people, had been preserved from former ages. All these traditions Rabbi Judah the Holy undertook to reduce into one digest. And this laborious work he completed about A.D. 190, or more than a century after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. Rabbi Judah was born on the day that Rabbi Akibah died. Solomon is said to have foretold the event: "One sun ariseth, and one sun goeth down" (The Talmud, Joseph Barclay)
If teachings were indeed passed on from generation to generation, father to son, from the time of Moses to the Oral Law's final codification, then it is possible that neither Talmudists nor Christians "co-opted" their literature, considering that
"the Talmud arose during the epoch when Christianity began its secession from Judaism, and when the Christians were looked upon as dissident Jews. Against that background there must have been extensive controversy between the adherents of traditional Judaism and the advocates of the new doctrine. The Talmud generally avoids polemics; but some echoes of that controversy survived in the Talmud, principally a prayer against sectarianism, the prayer Velamalshinim, as it is known in the present Jewish liturgy. This now became a cause of serious charges against Judaism, above all against its revered classic, the Talmud" (The Wisdom of the Talmud, Ben Zion Bokser)
It's likely that Jesus studied parts of the Oral Law. Was he not found in the synagogue reading, teaching therein, as was his custom (Luke 4:15-17); this could explain the parallelisms in his sermon and these Rabbis' teachings--all of which were in consistency with the Oral Law. In other words, it's plausible that both Jesus and the Talmudists worked with a common source before them.
3) You said: "You seem to think a source like Talmud is an all or nothing affair. That one needs to 100% endorse or 100% condemn it. The Talmud is not something like say "Huckleberry Finn" written by one man in one place in one time. It is a collection of hundreds of rabbis over a period of more than a thousand years and a dozen countries, carefully edited over an extremely long period of time. Some of it is great. Some of it is junk. Some of it is simply it being the product of its day."
No, I'm not convinced that given the historically recorded tension between Pharisaic Jews and early Christians, Jews would in one place condemn Jesus to live in boiling semen and in other places rip pieces off his famous sermon. That's huge inconsistency in a legal document. I deserve solid evidence before accepting your conclusion.
4) You said: "I view Acts as accurate history. And I know my Talmud and Targum sources are accurate."
Begging the Question
Most of your recent post employs the ad hominem fallacy, thus I will only reply to your points that require clarity on my part.
1) You asked "What source do you question? You disagree with the book? You don't think the Talmud quotes are genuine? What is your point? I'm not psychic. That's forbidden by Torah remember? If you don't have the patience to explain your views, I assure you I have no patience to divine them through tea leaves or ask what your sign is."
The source in question is the one you "looked at for my research about 5years ago was called "Christianity the Talmud and Midrash", <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Midr">http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Midr</a><!-- m --> ... 718&sr=1-1.
If you're going to use a source to support your conclusion, the aforementioned questions, such as "what is the quality of your source?" is necessarily asked by any critical thinker, requiring dependable evidence. Since you used "Christianity, the Talmud and Midrash" to support your thesis, I thought you could answer my questions thereof. Apparently not.
2) You said "First, I showed you the Talmud quotes that unquestionably prove they are co-opting Gospel quotes.
You've showed me similarities between Matthew and the Talmud, all of which can be explained by more than one cause, some of which are more plausible than others. You haven't proven anything "unquestionably."
"Even the rabbis tell us plainly the compilation of the Mishnah began at leat 150 years later."
Your unstated idea must be "since Matthew surfaced first, any parallelisms between Matthew and the Talmud must have necessarily been taken from Matthew, or in other words, what came later borrowed from what came before. That's possible, but again, you have not "unquestionably" proven that to be the case. Consider the following:
" From Moses the Mishna was transmitted by oral tradition through forty "Receivers," until the time of Rabbi Judah the Holy. These Receivers were qualified by ordination to hand it on from generation to generation. Abarbanel and Maimonides disagree as to the names of these Receivers. While the temple still stood as a centre of unity to the nation, it was considered unlawful to reduce these traditions to writing. But when the Temple was burned, and the Jews were dispersed amongst other peoples, it was considered politic to form them into a written code, which should serve as a bond of union, and keep alive the spirit of patriotism. The Jewish leaders saw the effect of Constitutions and Pandects in consolidating nations???the advantage of written laws over arbitrary decisions. Numberless precedents of case law, answering to our common law, were already recorded: and the teachings of the Hebrew jurisconsults, or "Responsa prudentium," which were held to be binding on the people, had been preserved from former ages. All these traditions Rabbi Judah the Holy undertook to reduce into one digest. And this laborious work he completed about A.D. 190, or more than a century after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. Rabbi Judah was born on the day that Rabbi Akibah died. Solomon is said to have foretold the event: "One sun ariseth, and one sun goeth down" (The Talmud, Joseph Barclay)
If teachings were indeed passed on from generation to generation, father to son, from the time of Moses to the Oral Law's final codification, then it is possible that neither Talmudists nor Christians "co-opted" their literature, considering that
"the Talmud arose during the epoch when Christianity began its secession from Judaism, and when the Christians were looked upon as dissident Jews. Against that background there must have been extensive controversy between the adherents of traditional Judaism and the advocates of the new doctrine. The Talmud generally avoids polemics; but some echoes of that controversy survived in the Talmud, principally a prayer against sectarianism, the prayer Velamalshinim, as it is known in the present Jewish liturgy. This now became a cause of serious charges against Judaism, above all against its revered classic, the Talmud" (The Wisdom of the Talmud, Ben Zion Bokser)
It's likely that Jesus studied parts of the Oral Law. Was he not found in the synagogue reading, teaching therein, as was his custom (Luke 4:15-17); this could explain the parallelisms in his sermon and these Rabbis' teachings--all of which were in consistency with the Oral Law. In other words, it's plausible that both Jesus and the Talmudists worked with a common source before them.
3) You said: "You seem to think a source like Talmud is an all or nothing affair. That one needs to 100% endorse or 100% condemn it. The Talmud is not something like say "Huckleberry Finn" written by one man in one place in one time. It is a collection of hundreds of rabbis over a period of more than a thousand years and a dozen countries, carefully edited over an extremely long period of time. Some of it is great. Some of it is junk. Some of it is simply it being the product of its day."
No, I'm not convinced that given the historically recorded tension between Pharisaic Jews and early Christians, Jews would in one place condemn Jesus to live in boiling semen and in other places rip pieces off his famous sermon. That's huge inconsistency in a legal document. I deserve solid evidence before accepting your conclusion.
4) You said: "I view Acts as accurate history. And I know my Talmud and Targum sources are accurate."
Begging the Question