Friday, November 03, 2017

"the Lord hath need of him" - Dead Sea Scroll-Revealed Truth


The Tokyo Station


Dead Sea Scroll-Revealed Truth

What is a miracle like?

After WWII, Judaists returned to Palestine, and in 1948 the United Nations approved the establishment of the nation Israel.  Then, the Dead Sea scrolls came to appear.

Some of those scrolls were written in the era when Christ Jesus was alive or preaching.  It is a miracle God performed to, probably, commemorate the establishment of Israel.  So, we have to take the incident more seriously.  There must be some linkage between Christ Jesus and the Dead Sea scrolls or Qumran.  So, there are some scholars who have investigated the relationship between the scrolls and Christianity:
The worldviews of early Christians and the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls were also starkly different. VanderKam explains, “A group that set a goal of spreading its religious message to all peoples to the ends of the earth had a very different understanding of God’s plan than ones who seem to have done no proselytizing and had no interest in bringing the nations into the fold.” 
Nevertheless, there are some similarities between the two groups and their writings, which make for interesting comparisons. For example, a list of miracles appears in both Luke 7:21–22 of the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scroll known as the Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521). In Luke 7, Jesus gives these miracles to the disciples of John the Baptist as proof that he is the messiah. In the Messianic Apocalypse, which was written approximately 150 years before Luke’s Gospel, the Lord is the one who will perform these miracles. The source for both of these lists is Isaiah chapters 35 and 61. While not all of the same miracles appear in Luke 7 and the Messianic Apocalypse, the miracles that do appear in both are listed in the same order (see chart).
dss-chart

The curious thing is that not all of these miracles, such as “raising the dead,” appear in the passages from Isaiah, which were the source material for the lists—the prophecies being fulfilled. Yet the miracle of “raising the dead” appears in both Luke 7 and the Messianic Apocalypse right before bringing “good news to the poor.” Rather than suggesting that the writer of Luke 7 copied from—or was even aware of—the Messianic Apocalypse, this similarity suggests that both groups shared certain “interpretive and theological traditions on which writers in both communities drew.”
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/dead-sea-scrolls/the-dead-sea-scrolls-and-the-new-testament/

Judaism today or after the Jewish-Roman war was different from Judaism before the war.  And, what was practiced by Christ Jesus was a kind of Judaism before the Jewish-Roman war.  Or we should find what Judaism was before the war or around the first century from the Christian Bible.  What we read in the Gospels must be a state of Judaism before the Jewish-Roman war.  So, there is no wonder that Luke shares some descriptions with some Dead Seas scroll.

The Dead Dead Seas scrolls tell us that Christ Jesus was a Judaist; what He preached was a kind of Judaism; and His miracles were those of Judaism at the time.  It means that Christ Jesus was not Christ Jesus in today's Christianity but a prophet or the Messiah in Judaism before the Jewish-Roman war.  Accordingly, Christ Jesus must not have said that He was God or must no have allowed His followers to call Him God.

Christianity of today must be something different from what Christ Jesus preached and practiced before the Jewish-Roman war.


**** **** ****


Mar 11:2 And saith unto them, Go your way into the village over against you: and as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find a colt tied, whereon never man sat; loose him, and bring him.
Mar 11:3 And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord hath need of him; and straightway he will send him hither.
Mar 11:4 And they went their way, and found the colt tied by the door without in a place where two ways met; and they loose him.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

"not fall on the ground without your Father" - Discuss If Christ Jesus is God



Ueno Park, Tokyo

Discuss If Christ Jesus is God

Christ Jesus did not come to this world to tell that He was God.  It was about 300 years later that Christians in the Roman Empire decided that Christ Jesus was God before the Roman emperor.

Since then, namely in the fourth century, those who could not accept the creed were outcast by the Vatican.  Accordingly, the gap between Christianity and Judaism was so expanded that it became impossible for the two religions to accept each other.  Christianity prevailed in Europe with the Vatican holding this creed, so that minority Judaists had to face oppression and persecution at any time, since the underlying ideology of the Vatican condemned those who did not accept Christ Jesus as God.

No matter if some didn't observe the words and teachings of Christ Jesus, he could be regarded as a Christian only if he didn't protest against Vatican's ideology that Christ Jesus was God.  No matter if Judaists lived in accordance with the words or teachings or the spirit of Christ Jesus, they were never respected by the Vatican.

On the other hand, most of Judaists believed that the words and the teachings of Christ Jesus were written in their Bible or the Old Testament.  They thought that what was unique with Christ Jesus was his performing miracles, some of which however looked dubious or nonsense to Judaists.  They admitted that Christ Jesus was a great teacher, but they thought that He could not be God.

In the Gospels, the authors used the word Jews so often.  It is strange that people around Christ Jesus were mostly Jewish people.  They should have simply used the word people but not Jews.  However, Gospel authors used the word Jews, in a sense, as if opponents or enemies of Christ Jesus were Jewish people.

It is true that Christ Jesus could not turn a majority of Jewish people in Palestine and Jerusalem into His followers or Christians, although He spent three years in His preaching.  If He had been God, a majority of the Jewish people should have admitted that He was God.  So it is not easy to deny the judgement of Judaists that Christ Jesus could not be God.

Anyway, 300 years later, Christian leaders decided officially that Christ Jesus was God.  But as time went by, the Vatican and other Christian leaders did not discuss or stress the creed.  They came to accept non-Jewish people who admitted authority of the Vatican or other churches if they didn't protest against the creed.  Christianity became a kind of mere facade.

So it is recommended for Christians and other people, including Judaists, to discuss again the issue, whether Christ Jesus was God or not.  Or whether it is right for people to regard Christ Jesus as God, since people might have no ability to judge whether or not Christ Jesus was God.  It is because if people have been doing a wrong thing about God, it should be corrected as soon as possible.

Simply, who knows if Christ Jesus is God?


**** **** ****



Mat 10:29 Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.
Mat 10:30 But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Mat 10:31 Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.