The Mystery of Jesus Christ. (Page 71)

Zanjan: They didn't need to know a lot about Jesus because He manifested Himself to them.

ghostgeek: Let's figure out what we're talking about. I'm saying that the evangelist who wrote Mark's Gospel had but one source of information: Paul's Epistles. Further, being somewhat light on detail when it comes to Jesus' life and ministry, I'm saying that these letters would have had to be supplemented by a fertile imagination if the gospel was going to hit the best-seller lists. All pretty simple as far as I'm concerned.

Others, and this may include you, Zanjan, not liking where this train of thought leads, have conjectured that traditions concerning Jesus were transmitted orally. OK, that's not inconceivable but it does beg a simple question. Where's the evidence that this actually happened?

ghostgeek: It seems reasonable to suppose, if Jesus and his disciples were something more than figment's of Mark's imagination, that they would have been Aramaic speakers. Yet Mark's Gospel is written in Greek. So how did Aramaic oral traditions metamorphose into this Pagan tongue?

Zanjan: If Mark wrote Mark's Gospel, he had 13 sources of live information.

I just gave you evidence that illiterate people were memorizing verses by song long before Jesus came along. History documents a list of ancient professions and a little bit about them.

I recall singing my first song in a foreign language at about 6 years old. I had it down perfectly but didn't understand a word of it. Like birds, the mimic in us all is entirely instinctive.

You'll find that Mnemonics was invented around 450 B.C but that's for devices other than singing. Children wouldn't use those techniques.

Greek was the main language of the region at the time, also more complex than Latin. Every scribe would need to know it.....also, the money changers. People came to Jerusalem from far away lands not just because it was a major trading center but to visit the Temple as well.

If one is going to send letters to diverse ethnic groups best to use the universally spoken tongue, not your tribal dialect. I'm quite sure Jesus was bilingual, possibly multi-lingual - He was more than smart and very sociable.

ghostgeek: Eh? Whoever wrote Mark's Gospel would have had thirteen stiffs, not live ones. Those lads would have been in their dotage even if Vespasian hadn't come along and kicked the crap out of them. And as for them singing like larks, they were proles who knew only one thing: how to catch fish!

ghostgeek: And why bring up scribes when we're supposing that these traditions about Jesus were carried down the years by word of mouth?

Zanjan: Because people claim the errors in the Bible were later due to the fault of scribes -more precisely, the translations.

Zanjan: Fishermen are hunters - they don't go after the inedible or poor quality fish. They have to go to different places using different methods to net the most prized. The ancients fished at night because their nets were made of linen - fish would have seen them.

The Sea of Galilee, has 18 species of fish, only 10 are good for eating. At the height of the fishing season tons of sardines are caught every night.

That's not the catch the Apostles were looking for - not the common fare.
They were after the big fish. No, not the Israeli catfish - that snake-like species didn't have scales so they were "unclean"; Jews were forbidden to eat them.
Take this as a metaphor if you like.

ghostgeek: What I ponder over is why there's Paul's letters, then nothing until after the Jewish revolt. Why were quills scratching away after that war but not before?

ghostgeek: To me it seems that conflict had a profound effect, and not just on the Jews. I'm thinking that without it Christianity as it exists today would never have been born.

Zanjan: Like the others, Paul died. They ran out of Apostles. They only added John's visions; for some reason, they believed those were real. I don't know why. Christians can't interpret prophecies and they're always saying every seer who lived after Christ is a false prophet.

ghostgeek: Yes, I guess they did run short of apostles after a while, not that anybody seems to know what happened to them. So did any of them make it to 70 AD? Well, given that it wasn't just James that was stoned in 62 AD, and Vespasian was a little rough at times, I'd say it was unlikely there were any around by the time Mark, or whatever he called himself, first dipped his quill in his ink-pot.

ghostgeek: I've been reading the introduction to a commentary on Mark's Gospel and one thing's made itself known to me like a stinking kipper. The assumption that there was a tradition concerning Jesus in need of being transmitted to the future. No one ever scratches their bonce and wonders if what Paul tells us about the lad was all that was known. On the contrary, all the eggheads sit around dreaming up reasons why Paul may not have wanted, or been able, to pass on more of the putative Jesus tradition.

ghostgeek: As for interpreting prophecies, didn't those Church Fathers mangle the Old Testament so as to make it match their beliefs?

Zanjan: Re. your previous posts, the early church was too young to have any traditions of its own. Those take numerous generations to accumulate.....hundreds of years.

Early Christians knew the meaning of Old Testament prophecies that referred directly to Jesus; we know because the Apostles or Jesus cited them. Followers didn't come up with that on their own - seekers only had a general sense of the time they lived in due to their current state of affairs.

However, the OT had a lot more than TWO prophecies and it's clear none of those were meant for their own time. A serious study of John's visions informs one he wasn't adding much that they didn't already know.

It was just enough for modern Christians - under the pressure of challenge - to accept they had moved into the "Latter days". It's easy when you see the world around you going to hell in a hand basket - like when has it ever not been?

Since then, they've made up all sorts of excuses to extend the Latter days into the next 50,000 years. What else can you do when you're not correct? Say, "I don't know but I know"?

ghostgeek: Mark 12:35 While Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, he asked, “Why do the teachers of the law say that the Messiah is the son of David? 36 David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies
under your feet.”’

37 David himself calls him ‘Lord.’ How then can he be his son?”

Here we have Jesus quoting the opening lines of Psalm 110 while teaching in the temple. OK, so what? Well, it seems the lad didn't know his Hebrew.

I should note that the second “lord” in Hebrew is not “ado-nai” – the term the Torah reserves for God, but “adoni”. The latter is a simple Hebrew word which means “my lord” but is not sacred. Throughout the Torah that word is used in reference to honored human beings but never to God, e.g. Genesis 18:3, 23:6, 24:18, 31:35, 33:8, 34:14, 44:18, etc. Thus, it was incorrectly capitalized in your translation. In fact, Hebrew has no capital letters so capitalizations which are found in English translations are merely based on translators’ assumptions, and as you can see, are not always reliable.

[ https://www.aish.com/atr/Psalm-110-Two-Lords.html ]

It appears from the KJV translation that the “Lord,” which is God, said unto to “my Lord” – who missionaries would have you believe is Jesus (David’s “Lord”) – “Sit thou on my right hand, till I put thine enemies underneath thy feet.”

Is the above verse speaking about the messiah? Not at all. Yet look at the first and second word “Lord” in the verse (they are side by side). Were you able to detect any difference between these two words in this fundamentalist Bible? In the “translation” they appear virtually identical because the Christian translator cleverly masked the text of the original Hebrew.

Although the two English words in the KJV translation were deliberately made to appear virtually identical, in the original Hebrew text they are entirely different. Whereas the first word “Lord” in the Hebrew is a correct translation of יהוה, which is the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), the ineffable name of God, the second word “Lord” is a complete and deliberate mistranslation of the text. The second word “Lord” in the verse is an appalling translation of the Hebrew word לַאדֹנִי; (pronounced ladonee).

The correct and only translation of ladonee is “to my master” or “to my lord.” The Hebrew word adonee never refers to God anywhere in the Bible. It is used only to address a person, never God. That is to say, God, the Creator of the universe, is never called adonee in the Bible. There are many words reserved for God in the Bible; adonee, however, is not one of them. ...

As mentioned above, this tampering with Psalm 110:1 began at the time the Christian Bible was written. The Christian translators, who would later also mistranslate this verse, simply followed in the footsteps of the author of the first Gospel.

[ https://outreachjudaism.org/psalm110/ ]

ghostgeek: Is this to be believed, that Jesus could get his Hebrew in a tangle? Or was Mark doing a Tricky Dicky and deliberately misquoting Psalm 110 to make it seem the Messiah wouldn't be of the line of David?

ghostgeek: Now why wouldn't the Evangelist want Jesus to be of the line of David? Because he was doing a Marcion and dissociating Christianity from Judaism. And why might he want to do this? Because after 70 AD, Judaism had taken a hit below the waterline and was listing badly. Just the sort of thing to put the wind up those Gentile converts of Paul's. So along comes Mark's Gospel to tell the faithful that Christianity was totally divorced from the witterings of the previous religion.

Zanjan: The scrolls in the synagogues were in Hebrew and Jesus read from them. Even in English "Lord" has several meanings but we know by the context of the sentence which meaning is intended. I'm quite sure Greek was the same.

Jesus was known to ask rhetorical questions.

Regardless of it's roots, Christianity had an independent Revelation; therefore, was a different religion, independent of the Jewish Faith. One didn't have to know the Jewish faith existed to grasp Christ's teachings. The Book flies on its own.

"The Lord said to my Lord " - it's obvious they're two distinct beings since one doesn't give orders to himself. "The right hand" is God's hand. David made no distinction between Moses and Jesus as Messiah.

Jesus described Himself as the Son of Man; He was a man, born and died as a man - a true man. Same as Moses. Jesus described everyone who recognized Him as His family - all these men were His brothers and all these women were His sisters. He called His mother "woman".

So, the term Son of David indicates a male descendant of David. Both David and Jesus belonged to the tribe of Judah. Has anyone else from that tribe stepped up to hold the torch?

ghostgeek: One Lord is God and the second lord is a human being, at least in the Hebrew original. Different words with different meanings. Unfortunately, it seems those old Greeks only had one word for lord so couldn't distinguish between these two usages when they came to translate the Old Testament. The result is illustrated below:

Christian missionaries wish to view Psalm 110 as though it proves that the messiah will be Gd, but Jesus, in the Christian’s New Testament, uses the very same verse to prove that the messiah, if he is divine, cannot be a descendant of King David. Jesus, according to Christian theology was, himself, a descendant of King David, so, according to Jesus in the above verses, Jesus could not have been the messiah. Christians cannot have it both ways.

[ http://whatjewsbelieve.org/index.php/psalms-1101/ ]

ghostgeek: Mark has the Jesus of the Gospels quoting a verse from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, something that seems implausible if the man ever lived. Given that our lad was a wonder worker and preacher doing the rounds in the Holy Land teaching to fellow Jews, one would expect him to be using the Hebrew Tanakh. To do otherwise would see him branded a fraud by his listeners.

Zanjan: What makes you think Jesus couldn't speak Greek?

After Alexander the Great conquered the region in 332 B.C., Palestine became part of the Hellentistic kingdom of Ptolemaic Egypt. There were nearly 30 Greek cities in Palestine that had achieved that level of culture and, despite Roman occupying forces, this culture continued up to about 200 AD.

During this period, the Jews were permitted to govern themselves independently but they were Hellenistic Jews. As such, they'd be bilingual. The priests had become the wealthiest and strongest political group among the Jews in Jerusalem and you know what a dark road that takes society down.

I don't read the quotation the same as you do. Jesus was asking the Jews why the scribes said the Christ was the son of David. The Psalm didn't apply to lineage. The word David used was "Lord" - not "son".

Zanjan: Why did Jesus choose that Psalm? Every Jew knew about Isaiah's prophecy that a messianic king would arise out of a specific branch of Jews - "out of the root of Jesse", who was King David's father. It's in the Text.

Isaiah lived hundreds of years after King David so, David wouldn't have known about this prophecy.

Jesus never gave anyone a chance to respond with the obvious answer because He was teaching them something *they* didn't know but David did - that is, the true relationship between God, His Revelator, and man.

The crowd walked away agreeing, satisfied and pleased.

ghostgeek: Why would you think a carpenter's son, out in the sticks, would be versed in Greek when even Josephus wrote in Aramaic ( it was then translated into Greek )?

ghostgeek: Anyway, putting the mistranslation aside, what's interesting is that the writer of Mark's Gospel seems to be dissociating the Christian Messiah from the Jewish one. Now that, to my way of thinking, makes sense. I mean, why hitch yourself to a religion that's been kicked in the goolies when you can start off with a blank slate?