Response to a Jew with a View about Jesus

A couple of hours ago, I read a blog written by a Jew With A View arguing that "Jesus was not, indeed could not have been, the Jewish Maschiach." I wrote a response to it that is currently awaiting blogger approval. I figured since I haven't posted anything here in a while that I'd post my response. You are encourage to read the other blog first.

Howdy! I found your blog from a link somebody (you?) posted on Yahoo Answers. I've been hearing quite a bit lately about Jews complaining that Christians misrepresent their views. Although I've done quite a bit of reading about the Jewish people from around the time of the Babylonian Exile up until the second war with Rome, I know very little about modern Judaism or how it has developed since then. And, I don't even claim to be an expert on Judaism between the times I described. So it wouldn't surprise me a bit if I myself have some misconceptions. With that in mind, I have a few questions and some comments about your post on Jesus.

Jewish Maschiach is a normal mortal man - he's born, he lives, he dies. And BEFORE he dies, he must usher in world peace, rebuild the temple, redeem Israel, and redeem the world.

I think I can sort of understand why you would say the messiah has to do these things before he dies. I mean if he's dead, he can't do them, right? But the Christian claim is that Jesus was raised from the dead after he died, so he's still alive. Is there anything specific in the Tanakh that precludes the messiah from dying and rising again before fulfilling all of the roles assigned to him?

Also, it is my understanding that the eschatological messiah will reign forever. He will not have heirs. One place I get this is from Ezekiel 37:24-26, especially the part that says, "My servant David shall be their prince forever." How will the messiah do this if he's just an ordinary mortal man? Or am I mistaken to think the messiah will be king forever?

BTW, I'm citing the Christian old testament. I realize some of the books and chapters are arranged differently in the Tanakh, but I'm in a hotel room at the moment and don't have one handy, so I don't know what the corresponding reference would be in the Tanakh.

Numerous young Jewish blokes believed themselves to BE that messiah. Jesus was one of them but - Christian friends, brace yourselves - he was far from unique.

This is actually one of my reasons for believing Jesus was raised from the dead. I mean if you think about all the messianic or quasi-messianic movements in the first century, and even Simon bar Kosiba in the second century, none of those movements survived the death of their leader. When some messianic pretender died in failure, nobody continued to think they were the messiah once they were dead. The Jesus movement is unique in this sense because it's the only one that survived the death of its leader. There has to be an explanation for that.

As you said above, and as I agreed, it does make sense that if somebody dies without fulfilling the role of the messiah, then it's perfectly reasonable to think they are NOT the messiah. In fact, it's downright crazy to go on thinking they are. So why did the Jesus movement not only survive Jesus' death, but even flourish? Well, the reason given by his earliest followers is that some of them SAW him alive after he had died, which lead them to believe he had risen from the dead. This is such a powerful explanation for the origin of Christianity that the most popular theory among scholars these days is some version of the hallucination hypothesis. Not many scholars will bite the bullet and say he rose from the dead, but most seem to agree that the disciples saw SOMETHING that led them to believe Jesus had risen (check out E.P. Sanders' discussion of the resurrection appearances in The Historical Figure of Jesus). Due in part to weaknesses in the hallucination hypothesis, I think they DID see the risen Jesus.

Thus it seems logical to include that the people who first described their messiah, are sufficiently intelligent to IDENTIFY THEIR OWN MESSIAH.

But when you think about how many of those people went after Simon bar Kosiba, thinking he was the messiah, it also seems logical to conclude that those people were perfectly capable of MISIDENTIFYING their own messiah. I think almost all Jews are sufficiently intelligent to identify their own messiah once their messiah has fulfilled all of the messianic roles predicted of him. Shoot, I think even non-Jews could do that. But what we're dealing with here are people who were in the process of fulfilling prophecy without completing it, and Jews were being asked to trust these would-be messiahs that they would continue until everything was accomplished. Understandably, mistakes were made. It should be no shock that given the great number of people claiming to be some sort of messiah that there would be a great deal of skepticism on the part of most Jews to any given claim of that sort, including Jesus.

But besides that, the people in the first century who we are talking about did not write the scriptures having to do with the messiah. Those scriptures were written hundreds of years earlier. They, just like us, had to interpret those scriptures. And they did not all interpret them the same. There was a quite a bit of variety in messianic expectation. Some Jews, namely the Essenes, actually expected two messiahs--a king and a priest. While you can certainly make generalizations about what first century Jews expected of the messiah, there is too much diversity to claim that they were all in a position to recognize their own messiah before that messiah had finished fulfilling all the messianic prophecies.

when Christians study the 'old testament' many of them assume they are reading the 'jewish bible'. Well, newflash: they're not!

Are you arguing just that Christian translations are inaccurate, or are you claiming that the content is actually different?

The OT is just a MIStranslation of a translation of the actual Jewish bible - the Tanakh.

Unless I have misunderstood you, this is just not accurate. Most modern versions of the Christian old testament are not translations of translations. They are translations of the original Hebrew and Aramaic taken from the best manuscript evidence and textual criticism available, and these translations are done by people who are experts in the Hebrew language. I'm not a Hebrew scholar myself, but if there are disagreements between Hebrew scholars on how certain passages should be translated, then it's debatable at worst.

Why would you use the passage in Isaiah 7:14 to support your claim that the Christian old testament is a mistranslation and then turn right around and cite what you think is the correct translations from so many versions of the Christian old testament? These citations you yourself give prove just the opposite of what you're claiming.

As you probably know, the reason many English translations have said "virgin" instead of "young woman" is because that is how the Hebrew word was translated into Greek in the Septuigint. Do you think the Septuigint was translated by Christians or Jews?

The Jewish G-d NEVER takes human form - and certainly doesn't pop in to planet earth to quickly impregnate young Jewish chicks!!!

But does this actually contradict anything in the Tanakh? Is it impossible for God to do these things? Unless there is something in the Tanakh that would preclude God from ever doing these things, then this strikes me as being a weak argument. I mean the Tanakh was not written in a day. A person who accepted only the first five books might very well reject anything else in the following books just because it didn't happen in the first five books. In fact, that's exactly why the Sadducees of Jesus' time disagreed with the Pharisees on the issue of resurrection. There was no resurrection in the Torah, and the Sadducees placed no authority on the writings and the prophets where there WAS resurrection. It's easy to imagine somebody saying, "God doesn't cause giant fish to swallow people! That's nowhere in the Torah!" But if there's nothing in the Torah that specifically precludes God from ever doing that, then you have a very weak argument against it.

The issue of whether Jesus is God is completely different from the issue of whether Jesus is the messiah. If Jesus is the messiah, then Christianity is true even if he is not God. In fact, there are a few Christian sects who are quite adamant in pointing out that Jesus is not God. So even if you can prove that Jesus is not God, this doesn't even touch the issue of whether Jesus is the messiah. It's just a different subject. It's worth debating over, I'll agree, but it's irrelevent to the question of whether Jesus is the messiah, which seems to be the main subject of your post.

But let me say something about it anyway. From what I understand (and please correct me if it's a misunderstanding), the primary reason Jews reject the notion that Jesus is God is because the Tanakh explicitly says that God is not a man. But, from what I understand, that text was written in the present tense, and if so, then it is something any Christian could agree with wholeheartedly. It was written well before the incarnation. Now, given that nothing is impossible for God, except perhaps some logically incoherent state of affairs such as knowing what he doesn't know, lifting what he can't lift, etc., it does seem at least possible for God to create a human body and to animate it himself. I don't know the Jewish view on substance dualism, but if any Jews hold to substance dualism and believe that people are both physical bodies and spirits that animate the bodies, and if God is a spirit, what reason is there to suppose that God could not animate a physical body if he chose to? Or, if you allow that he COULD, what reason is there to suppose that he never WOULD? There are many things God is recorded to have done that we might've consider odd until he actually did it--turning people into pillars of salt, drowning the world, causing a prophet to be swallowed by a fish and then spit out alive, requiring animal sacrifices, circumcision, etc. The fact that something is very strange and unexpected is not much of a reason to claim that God would never do it.

You said that the Jewish messiah must "reject doing miracles." What do you base that on?

Some Jews probably doubt he ever existed at all - remember, Jesus is not mentioned by any of the contemporary writers of his own time.

Of course he was. Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, and he was personally acquainted with Jesus' brother, James.

I have much more to say about Jesus, but really just wanted to respond to what you had said. I've planned for a long time now to write a series of blogs on the historical developement of messianic expectation and how Jesus fit into it. If only I had more time! I would love to get your response to it.

I hope I haven't come across as antagonistic or condescending. You're disagreeing with me on a subject I'm very interested in, and the intelligent and articulate way you expressed your views gave me too much temptation to respond. As Oscar Wilde said, the best way to deal with temptation is to give in to it.

Please forgive any misunderstandings I've had or misrepresentations. Keep in mind that I'm only a Christian. :-)

Phantom arguments

If you're easily annoyed by fake English accents, then don't watch this video.

blogging from my car

I can't write stuff down while I'm driving, so lately I've been using my flip video camera to help me remember stuff. Usually, I just put "to do" stuff on there, but recently I came up with some blog ideas. I was just going to use the video clip to remind me of what I would blog about later, but I figured I'd just go ahead and post the video as is. This is what it's like when a thought first comes to me before I figure out how I want to write about it.

The same god with different attributes, or different gods altogether?

I got a flip video camera from Amazon and thought it might be neat to try v-logging. Here's my first attempt:



It's a little choppy in places because when I recorded it, it was almost 13 minutes, and then I discovered that Youtube limits you to 10 minutes. I had to chop some stuff out in places to get it down to size. Mostly, I just chopped out a few irrelevent asides and places where I said, "but uh..." too much.

In the future, I'm going to try to get some friends to submit to interviews and do a talk show. I thought that might be fun.

You might want to know a little about this flip video camcorder. It's pretty cool. It really is as easy to use as they say it is. The video quality is pretty good, too. The only thing is that you have to diminish the video quality quite a bit to get the file small enough to put on the internet. But it comes with an AV cable, so you can plug the camera right into the TV and play straight off the camera.

There are a few things I don't like about it. It doesn't have a screw hole to use with a tripod, so if I want to record myself, I have to prop it up on something. The Ultra version has one, though, and it's about $30 more.

With most of the videos I recorded, whenever I'd try to import them into Windows Movie Maker, it would freeze up and shut down, so I couldn't edit my videos. I'm using Windows XP on my desktop. I tried it on my laptop, which uses Windows Vista, and the problem there was that when I tried to import the video, it would import the audio portion of it, but not the video portion. I tried to download several different codecs and finally found one that fixed my problem. Now I can edit videos just fine on my laptop. It's just that I'd rather use my desktop. But I can use a jump drive to transfer the files.

The software that comes with the camera is pretty useless. I don't know why it's even on there. But you can get the files off the camera as if it were a flash drive, so no biggy.

Does widespread disagreement on morality mean that there are no objective morals or that nobody knows what they are?

In my last post, I quoted what a friend wrote to me recently. I'm about to post the bulk of my response, but lemme quote him again to remind you of what he said:

I think part of my skepticism on objective morality comes from seeing all the different variations and disagreement that people have on what constitutes it, and observing no real methodology for verifying whose claims are right and whose are wrong; it seems all people can do is just insist more strongly that their morality is the correct one.

Now this is what I said:

*****
I can certainly sympathize with nihilists or moral relativists, especially having toyed with the ideas myself when younger. I used to ask myself, "Does anything really matter?" Nothing matters unless there's somebody it matters to. So if nobody existed, then nothing would matter. Does it matter, then, that we exist at all? It seemed to me that life was completely meaningless, which I found to be a liberating idea. I don't think I was a completely full blow nihilist, though, because I didn't really think through all the consequences, especially in regard to morality.

But as I've said before, there are lots of things we assume we know but that can't be proved--memory knowledge, the trustworthiness of our physical senses, causation, you know, all the basic things Hume talked about. But although I can't prove any of these things, when I'm perfectly honest with myself, I don't really doubt these things either. I simply reflect inwardly and find myself believing.

The disagreements people have about morality do cause me to be skeptical that we perceive morality clearly, but they don't cause me to doubt that there is any morality to be perceived. And there are several reasons for that.

First, five people who all participated in the same event may disagree when they try to remember the details of the event later. That doesn't cause them to doubt the event happened. And it doesn't mean they can't get a general idea of what happened that's accurate. The same can be said about sensory perceptions. People are often mistaken about them. They experience hallucinations, mirages, dreams, etc. People often make mistakes in causal inferences. A common fallacy in logic is the fallacy of false cause, where a person sees A and B always happening together and falsly assume one is the cause of the other when, in reality, C is the cause of both. There are all kinds of examples of how our ordinary common sense perception of the world can be mistaken, but they don't cause us to doubt their general reliability.

Second, people have agreed far more than they have disagreed on morality. That's evident in the fact that cultural anthropologists (who usually subscribe to some form of relativism) have an explanation for the wide-spread agreement. They say the reason for the wide-spread agreement is that people have the same basic needs. We're all social animals, and there are certain morals that are more conducive to survival. Natural selection is what causes such wide-spread agreement on morals. Such an explanation wouldn't be necessary if it weren't true that people agreed far more than they disagree on morals.

Third, although people may disagree on the content of morality, everybody everywhere at all times have always demanded from others and expected from themselves to give a moral justification for their actions. It's universal. The idea of "justifying your actions," is what most (maybe all) morality is based on. So the idea of moral justification is natural and universal. It's built into us. It's just the way we are. One particular justification that seems to be universal is the idea that ought implies can. Everybody everywhere agrees that inability to act is a moral justification for not acting. A person can have no moral obligation to walk, for example, if they are physically incapable of walking. Fourth, whenever we run into somebody who doesn't seem to make a distinction between right and wrong--who doesn't grasp the concept of moral justification--who doesn't see a difference between a brutal murder and a fun night of star-gazing--we consider those people to be mentally ill.

Fifth, a lot of what seem to be moral differences aren't really moral differences when you look more closely at them. The next time you run into somebody who seems to have a very different point of view than you do on some issue of morality, just ask them why they hold that position. Usually, for every "moral rule" we have, there's a reason we have it, and the reason is always some broader moral principle. When you ask people why they think certain things are right or wrong, you usually find out that they are working from principles you agree with. The reason they arrive at a different conclusion is either because they are working from different facts or their process of reasoning is different (and possibly flawed).

Sixth, when I look at moral debates, I don't see what you see. You said there's no way to resolve moral conflicts except for one person to express their view more strongly than the other. Instead, I see people reasoning with each other. One will say, "Such and such action violates such and such principle." The other person will say, "No, it doesn't violate that principle." So while they disagree on whether the action is moral or not, they're still working from the same moral principle, and there's room for debate. Abortion is a good example. Both sides agree that it is prima facie wrong to take the life of an innocent human being. They just disagree on whether the unborn are human beings or persons at all. (I'm speaking broadly here; I realize there are more nuanced arguments.) I even remember watching the video of Osama Bin Laden right after 9/11. Most people thought it was wrong because they killed innocent people without justification. But Osama kept saying over and over in that video, "They were not innocent. They were not innocent." Maybe he was wrong to say they were not innocent, but clearly the difference in morality didn't go as deep as one might think.

Part 1: Good moral relativists and bad moral objectivists

Part 2: If theologians disagreement, how can we know our interpretation is right?

If theologians disagree, how can we know our interpretation is right?

I'm going to post some more of the message I sent to my friend. He said:

I think part of my skepticism on objective morality comes from seeing all the different variations and disagreement that people have on what constitutes it, and observing no real methodology for verifying whose claims are right and whose are wrong; it seems all people can do is just insist more strongly that their morality is the correct one.

I'm going to save the bulk of my response for the next blog entry. I separated this out because it's sort of a different subject. It was part of my response, though.

What I wrote here is about how I handled a problem that I've heard a lot of Christians complain about. I thought somebody might find it useful.

*******
I will admit, though, that broad disagreement sometimes does cause me to throw up my hands and say, "Nobody really knows." That's usually my first impression on subjects I haven't studied that much myself. I'm not saying you haven't studied morality that much, because I'm sure you have. I'm just talking about myself.

I remember when I first started getting interested in Christianity and theology. I looked at all the different denominations, and all the different interpretations of the Bible, and I thought it was hopeless for me to read the Bible and arrive at the truth--what it really means. I prayed that God would reveal the truth to me, but I didn't have any faith that God would answer that prayer because I figured most theologians had probably prayed the same thing, and yet they all disagreed with each other. Why should I be any different? The truth is, I experienced quite a bit of anxiety about it.

But the more I studied the Bible, the more I began to develope opinions that I thought were justified. I felt more strongly about some things than about other things, and there are still some things I have no opinion on. Since a lot of my views are based on what seem to me to be sound arguments, and those who disagree with me base their views on what seem to me to be bad arguments, I no longer have anxiety over the mere fact that a lot of people disagree. I readily admit that I could be wrong about some things, and I'm quite certain that I'm wrong on at least a few things, but I don't feel any anxiety about it just because there are what seem to me to be good reasons to think what I do.

I feel the same way about morality. While disagreements do sometimes cause me to be skeptical that anybody can really know the right thing to do in a situation, there are at least a few of what I think are clear case examples of moral wrong or moral right, and the mere fact that some people have disagreed with me doesn't shake my confidence in the least.

Part 1: Good moral relativists and bad moral objectivists

Part 3: Does widespread disagreement on morality mean that there are no objective morals or that nobody knows what they are?

Good moral relativists and bad moral objectivists

A friend of mine who does not believe in objective moral values sent me a message today and said:

Btw... ever notice how the academics and philosophers who tout moral relativism are, for the most part, pretty harmless people? They might assert nihilistic ideas in published scholarship and in discussions, but in their actual behavior, most of them follow the same moral norms as the rest of us (going back to your idea that it's good that nihilists are inconsistent). Meanwhile, members of Muslim terrorist groups murder and torture civilians like it's going out of style, and they're all CERTAIN that an objective morality exists and that they are following the correct one.

He didn't seem to offer this as an argument against moral objectivism. I got the impression that he just found it ironic. But some people have used this observation as an argument against objective morals, so I wanted to post my response to it. This is what I said:

It is ironic that most moral relativists are fairly decent people, and that most terrorists are moral objectivists. But it's only ironic if you assume that moral objectivism is true. The reason is because only under moral objectivism can you say that relativists are "decent" and terrorists are "bad." It's only ironic if the way relativists typically live really is "good," and the way terrorists behave really is "bad." Think about it. Suppose terrorist really think the way they behave is good, and the relativists are evil because they aren't joining in. They might just as well say, "Well this is exactly what we should expect. We moral objectists are good, but moral relativists are clearly shirking their duty, and they're bad." The only reason you and I see any irony is because we think the terrorists' morality is mistaken. But it can only be mistaken if there is a correct morality. And we both think the morality of the terrorists is mistaken, and the morality of most relativists is correct. That's why we both see irony. It's ironic that the relativists would be correct about morals, and the objectivists would be incorrect.

There was more about morality in those messages, so I might post some of that, too, since I haven't been blogging much and need something to keep this blog active.

Part 2: If theologians disagree, how can we know our interpretation is right?

Part 3: Does widespread disagreement on morality meant that there are no objective morals or that nobody knows what they are?

What if Voldemort became real?

As all us Harry Potter fans know, Voldemort is not a real person. As a fictional character, he's evil and blameworthy within the story, but not in real life. But suppose J.K. Rowling had the power to bring Voldemort to real life. And suppose that if she did so, the real Voldemort would be exactly like he is in the books. He'd be just as mean and nasty and evil. Would he be morally blameable for his actions?