The embarrassing root of Islam, Judaism and Christianity

Labarbapostiza

Okay.

Let's start with Exodus. When the Pharaoh's daughter finds Moses in his reed basket she gives him his name because she has drawn him from the water. Classical Hebrew script leaves out lots of vowels. The name in the text is מֹשֶׁה. This is MSH. There isn't an Egyptian word Moses, but there is an Egyptian word Masses, as in Ramesses. Which literally translates as the son of Ra. In Egypt under the Ra cult, all kings were known as Ramassees ...They were all Sons of Ra, or reincarnations of Ra. Literally sons of the god Ra. And they were all simultaneously both sons (reincarnations of Ra) and Ra. They were a hypostasis of both God and son of God.

Now to Jesus.

The spelling of Messiah in classical Hebrew is מֹשֶׁה. Which is the same as the spelling of מֹשֶׁה, Moses....because they are the same word.

Jesus, is both God and the son of God. The King etc. He dies and is resurrected. Also Joshua and Isiah, and Jesus all have the same spelling in Hebrew, יְהוֹשֻׁעַ. Because Jesus is a reincarnation of those biblical figures. False distinctions are created to avoid confusion. But in Hebrew it's all the same name.

So, Jesus is the Messiah....the Masseses....The Ramassees ..The Son of God. And also God.

And now the Muslims.

Muslims celebrate the festival of Ramadan.

Peregrinus

And the "embarrassing" bit would be . . .?

shane9689

Youre posting in an athiest forum. We agree. However your linking to egypt osnt 100% perfect. Jesus was a byproduct of jewish rebellion. A cult of personality that got out of hand.

Peregrinus

Plus, on a nitpick, Moses (מֹשֶׁה) and messiah (מָשִׁיחַ) may be spelt the same in Hebrew when the vowels are omitted (as is standard), but that doesn't mean they're the same word. Rose, the past tense of "rise", and rose, the flower, are spelt the same but they are not the same word. They are what we call homographs, two different words which have the same written form. Since Hebrew is written without vowels, it has many, many homographs. If English were written without vowels, then raise, rise, ruse, rase, rays and rosy would all be homographs.

There are a number of theories about the etymology of "Moses". A plausible one is that it is from an Eyptian root meaning "child of", and that it's a contraction of, e.g., Rameses, which does indeed mean "child of Ra". However as the name of the deity has been dropped in the contraction, we have no reason to think it was Ra; it could have been any of a vast pantheon of Egyptian gods. Or it need not have been a god at all, but the child's actual father.

"Messiah" is not from an Egyptian root at all; it's from a Hebrew word meaning "to anoint".

brian00278

The story of Moses is strikingly similar to that of the epic of Gilgamesh, great flood, two of every animal, great drought and plague on the land nearly identical, the only difference being the epic of Gilgamesh was written 2100BC.

Peregrinus

I think you possibly mean that the story of Noah is similar to (parts of) the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Plus, for the honours students, neither the story of Moses nor the story of Noah involve a "great drought". Drought is about the only natural disaster that doesn't feature among the Ten Plagues in the Moses story. Noah's story, of course, is pretty much the opposite of a drought. There is a prolonged drought in the story of Joseph, though.

cowboyBuilder

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Okay.

Let's start with Exodus. When the Pharaoh's daughter finds Moses in his reed basket she gives him his name because she has drawn him from the water. Classical Hebrew script leaves out lots of vowels. The name in the text is מֹשֶׁה. This is MSH. There isn't an Egyptian word Moses, but there is an Egyptian word Masses, as in Ramesses. Which literally translates as the son of Ra. In Egypt under the Ra cult, all kings were known as Ramassees ...They were all Sons of Ra, or reincarnations of Ra. Literally sons of the god Ra. And they were all simultaneously both sons (reincarnations of Ra) and Ra. They were a hypostasis of both God and son of God.

Now to Jesus.

The spelling of Messiah in classical Hebrew is מֹשֶׁה. Which is the same as the spelling of מֹשֶׁה, Moses....because they are the same word.

Jesus, is both God and the son of God. The King etc. He dies and is resurrected. Also Joshua and Isiah, and Jesus all have the same spelling in Hebrew, יְהוֹשֻׁעַ. Because Jesus is a reincarnation of those biblical figures. False distinctions are created to avoid confusion. But in Hebrew it's all the same name.

So, Jesus is the Messiah....the Masseses....The Ramassees ..The Son of God. And also God.

And now the Muslims.

Muslims celebrate the festival of Ramadan.

That's quite interesting, but what about Ramadan ?

Peregrinus

Ramadan shares some letters with Rameses therefore something something something oh look at that really surprising thing over there! therefore embarrassment for Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Or something like that.

cowboyBuilder

ah of course ... riight .. I was expecting some connection with Muhammad

oldrnwisr

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Okay.

Let's start with Exodus. When the Pharaoh's daughter finds Moses in his reed basket she gives him his name because she has drawn him from the water.

This is a frequently used mythological tradition. In later Egyptian tradition, following the birth of Horus, he too is floated down the Nile to protect him from the machinations of his uncle Set. In Sumerian legend Sargon of Akkad recalls the circumstances of his birth:

"My mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not. The brothers of my father loved the hills. My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates. My high priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which rose over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me her love, and for four and ... years I exercised kingship."

Even in as far removed a tradition as India we see the story of Karna in the Mahabharata whose mother Kunti, afraid of having a child outside marriage puts Karna in a basket and floats him down the river where he is found by a charioteer of the king and subsequently raised by the couple as Vasusena.

Modern scholarly consensus is that Moses was a legendary figure with no actual historical basis. Therefore any connection between Moses and Ramsses is neither surprising nor meaningful in an overall discussion of biblical historicity.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Classical Hebrew script leaves out lots of vowels. The name in the text is מֹשֶׁה. This is MSH. There isn't an Egyptian word Moses, but there is an Egyptian word Masses, as in Ramesses. Which literally translates as the son of Ra. In Egypt under the Ra cult, all kings were known as Ramassees ...They were all Sons of Ra, or reincarnations of Ra. Literally sons of the god Ra. And they were all simultaneously both sons (reincarnations of Ra) and Ra. They were a hypostasis of both God and son of God.

Now to Jesus.

The spelling of Messiah in classical Hebrew is מֹשֶׁה. Which is the same as the spelling of מֹשֶׁה, Moses....because they are the same word.

Jesus, is both God and the son of God. The King etc. He dies and is resurrected. Also Joshua and Isiah, and Jesus all have the same spelling in Hebrew, יְהוֹשֻׁעַ. Because Jesus is a reincarnation of those biblical figures. False distinctions are created to avoid confusion. But in Hebrew it's all the same name.

So, Jesus is the Messiah....the Masseses....The Ramassees ..The Son of God. And also God.

Hebrew is a diacritical language and as such the diacritic marks attached to the letters significantly change the meaning of the word. Thus the word

מֹשֶׁ֔ה

or Moses is very different in context from mashiach or messiah:

מָשִׁ֫יחַ

despite being constructed from the same three letters, mem, shin and he. The segol under the shin in Moses and the kamatz under the mem of mashiach make this obvious. Furthermore, mashiach or messiah is derived from the Hebrew word mashach meaning anointed and has no connection to Moses or egypt.

There are plenty of solid arguments against the historicity of certain Old Testament and New Testament stories but this isn't one of them.

recedite

I wonder was it common thing to float unwanted newborns down a crocodile infested river, or was it an unusual practice? If it was a well known phenomenon, then all these stories could have arisen separately.
The stories would become popular because they would bolster the hope that the baby "might" be found and be looked after, and eventually grow up to become a Celeb. Which would help enormously to assuage any feelings of guilt at the time of the flotation.

Peregrinus

I can't really speak for the worlds from which Gilgamesh, etc, came. But exposing unwanted infants to the elements, so allowing the gods to decide their fates, was a condoned and accepted practice in the Graeco-Roman world, and if it was also common in other societies this may account for why it is such a common trope in mythic stories. The Jews, and later the early Christians, considered the practice unconscionable and, in fact, the suppression of this practice in the Roman world is usually attributed to the growing influence of Christianity.

smacl

recedite wrote: »

I wonder was it common thing to float unwanted newborns down a crocodile infested river, or was it an unusual practice? If it was a well known phenomenon, then all these stories could have arisen separately.
The stories would become popular because they would bolster the hope that the baby "might" be found and be looked after, and eventually grow up to become a Celeb. Which would help enormously to assuage any feelings of guilt at the time of the flotation.

Was just about to post the same thing, with images of the many less fortunate also-rans floating around the estuary. OT, but a quick google suggests hauling babies out of the river has become something of a modern parable.

recedite

Peregrinus wrote: »

The Jews, and later the early Christians, considered the practice unconscionable..

But the Moses story is taken from Old Testament (Jewish) scriptures is it not? So the Jews must have been just as familiar as any other culture with it.
I'm guessing that as civilisation advanced, the practice gradually became socially unacceptable in all the various cultures, connected as they were by the Roman Empire "network".

shane9689

Eitherway, its all bull****, so who cares?

ScumLord

I think there's a possibility the torah is an amalgamation of religious or spiritual practices around at the time that got turned into one single narrative at some point. Apparently the flood myth was taken from the sumerians, there's some cross over with other ancient religions and cultures, I've even heard of the numerology being linked to numerology at Göbekli Tepe.

While we're left with major religions now, in the past there were many, many competing religions. Each town would come with it's own god that would be competing with the neighbouring gods and the gods of their enemies, the romans basically collected gods from people they conquered, gods got merged under circumstances like this.. So it doesn't really surprise me there's some repetition. There seems to have been a sort of agreed on narrative for visiting gods.

johnnysmack

shane9689 wrote: »

Eitherway, its all bull****, so who cares?

Because it's interesting history. Dunno about you but I just learned about various meanings of ancient Hebrew words and that sending babies down rivers was a common practice.

shane9689

its just trying to trace the origins of moses etc... is near impossible and anything written here is speculation. Its a 3000+ year old game of chinese whispers.

Peregrinus

recedite wrote: »

But the Moses story is taken from Old Testament (Jewish) scriptures is it not? So the Jews must have been just as familiar as any other culture with it.
I'm guessing that as civilisation advanced, the practice gradually became socially unacceptable in all the various cultures, connected as they were by the Roman Empire "network".

Well, no. The cultures from which these stories emerged had disappeared before the Romans came along. Plus, many of them were in places which never fell under Roman rule anyway. The spread of Rome did nothing in itself to end the practice of child exposure, since the Romans themselves sanctioned it, both socially and legally. Christians opposed it, but this was very much a countercultural stance.

The Jews likely did emerge from a culture which had practiced child exposure; their rejection of the practice is one of the things which distinguished them from their neighbours and was part of their identity as Jews. By the time the scriptures are being compiled they are familiar with the practice, but as a practice carried on by Those People Over There, Not By Us. In fact, the "Moses as a foundling in a basket of rushes" detail is one of the features of the story which points to the story being, in large part, a borrowing from a neighbouring culture.

Peregrinus

ScumLord wrote: »

I think there's a possibility the torah is an amalgamation of religious or spiritual practices around at the time that got turned into one single narrative at some point . . .

I think it's more than a possibility; it's a racing certainty.

magicbastarder

Peregrinus wrote: »

Ramadan shares some letters with Rameses therefore something something something oh look at that really surprising thing over there! therefore embarrassment for Christians, Jews and Muslims.

WHOAH BLACK BETTY

Peregrinus

Well, what can I say? The thread title promised embarrassment, but here we are 22 posts later and, so far, nothing to raise a blush to the cheek of even the chastest maiden. And Labarbapostiza, who hinted at so much, hasn't reappeared since post 1, the little tease.

Labarbapostiza

Peregrinus wrote: »

Plus, on a nitpick, Moses (מֹשֶׁה) and messiah (מָשִׁיחַ) may be spelt the same in Hebrew when the vowels are omitted (as is standard), but that doesn't mean they're the same word.

No. I've spent a bit of time looking into this. The script the Torah is written in, doesn't have the features in modern Hebrew script removing ambiguities. So, both Messiah and Moses are spelled MSH. There's also an interesting issue over whether the H, ה, should be pronounced or is meant as an honorific, and silent. This is important, because it may be the reason Gaelic scribes chose the letter h for accenting in script. Like the h in through...the h is in fact the dot of lentition, or the séimhiú. Why you find it in English is because the Gaelic scribes were the first to write English. I haven't gotten around to checking out the detail, whether choice of the h was specifically to do with the reading of Hebrew, with an actual Gaelic scholar of antique documents, but I've a good hunch.

There are a number of theories about the etymology of "Moses". A plausible one is that it is from an Eyptian root meaning "child of", and that it's a contraction of, e.g., Rameses, which does indeed mean "child of Ra". However as the name of the deity has been dropped in the contraction, we have no reason to think it was Ra; it could have been any of a vast pantheon of Egyptian gods. Or it need not have been a god at all, but the child's actual father.

I'd advise you to do something, that's quite painful, and actually read Exodus, King James. (It's not a nice experience whatsoever). The story is pretty emetic, and it's obviously scrambled. But, there's direct references to places like Goshen. Palestine is a very close neighbour of Egypt. The chance of cultural cross fertilisation not happening are zero to none.

So, why not the Ra in front of Moses name?.....This could be part of the injunction not to take the name of God in vain. Which actually means the name of God is not to be spoken. And there are various variations of this, many Jews write the name G-d, with a dash to remove the o, so it's not completely writing the name of God.

The other thing, which is exhausting to get into explaining, is how interpellation works in the bible as prophecy. In Gnostic Christianity, Judas is Jesus' twin brother, which sounds weird but it's likely to have been something removed from the mainstream, not created by the Gnostics. And it would have been there, likely as an interpellation to the story of Jacob and Esau. You get all these repetitions throughout the bible, and these are the prophecies. (they don't tell you this when they're indoctrinating you as a kid). Anyway, Joshua's invasion of the Levant and Syria, (at school you were told it was a land with no people, for a people with no land....in the bible it's a bloody and murderous invasion, driven by the ever loving God.) This may be a direct interpellation to Ramesses II invasion of Syria.

Why Jesus is occasionally called the Son of Man, in the bible is a biblical interpellation.

There has been an effort to cover the link for a long time. But, it's a bit like the way, the Greek and Latin version of Christianity is pushed by the Christian Church as being the pure and original form. But, the reality is it was a lot more varied. The bit where Jesus has a twin brother, that's something I'm not sure if it's been completely dropped from Syriac Christianity.

Labarbapostiza

shane9689 wrote: »

its just trying to trace the origins of moses etc... is near impossible and anything written here is speculation. Its a 3000+ year old game of chinese whispers.

Tracing the origins of the actual Moses is not really relevant. But, it's particular references to places or statements made can date the origin of a particular version of the story. The Chinese whispers themselves are interesting.

Islam is half Chinese whispers...and half a book, the Koran, that may turn out to be something written by one of the more colourful fragments of early Christianity.

There are not that many people working on the ancient documents. And I've heard from someone who does dabble in this research, that there are tons of old early Christian Aramaic documents, no one has gotten around to looking at yet. There's only a handful of people in the world who can read Aramaic.

Samaris

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

I'd advise you to do something, that's quite painful, and actually read Exodus, King James. (It's not a nice experience whatsoever). The story is pretty emetic, and it's obviously scrambled. But, there's direct references to places like Goshen. Palestine is a very close neighbour of Egypt. The chance of cultural cross fertilisation not happening are zero to none.

Actually, on that note, I should really give it a read again. The Old Testament had some cracking good stories in it. It's probably best (if you're agnostic or atheist) to read them as the legends and mythology of the Jewish people, much as you'd read the ancient Norse or Egyptian tales.

It's been quite some time since I read anything about this, so don't take this as gospal (sorry), but I recall (doing a bit of refreshing on this while I'm writing, but mistakes may creep in) that the ancient roots of Judiaism are from ancient Canaan, and the God (Yahweh) of Israel was taken from the head of the pantheon at the time, El, from which the name Israel itself comes. El himself was part of a Divine Duality with Asherah, the mother of gods, including Baal. Asherah was also linked as the divine consort of ...the head of another major ancient religion at the time, and of Yahweh for a time. It's interesting, even fascinating to me, to see that as the worship of Yahweh became more aggressively monotheistic, that Asherah (who may have been melded into other goddesses over time, such as Inanna and Ishtar, either retroactively or proactively) and Baal were both demonised quite literally, with Solomon's statues of her in his Temples being demolished and Baal becoming more well-known eventually as the demon and a lord of hell.

As a note, Asherah, once called Queen of Heaven, has been basically replaced in modern Christianity by Mary, although it is carefully defined that she is not a god (which would conflate dangerously with the monotheistic ideal of the ultimate power of God), but rather a mortal raised to semi-divinity, something of a reward for her great faith.

This is all pretty by the by, I just find it interesting!

Labarbapostiza

Samaris wrote: »

Actually, on that note, I should really give it a read again. The Old Testament had some cracking good stories in it. It's probably best (if you're agnostic or atheist) to read them as the legends and mythology of the Jewish people, much as you'd read the ancient Norse or Egyptian tales.

There are lots of reasons to look at these texts. The myths have influence in the present. And not only that, new myths are being created in the present for purposes in the present, and since very few people ever bother to read the original texts (and you can count virtually the entire clergy of the world in this), they can get away with it.

Like the Zionist line, that there's no mention of Palestine in the bible. Now, many of whom may believe there is no mention of Palestine in the Torah, they've never read it, and those who do know it's there expect no one is going to check. The version that children are given in schools, isn't simply meant as a more palatable version suitable for children, it's meant as indoctrination for adults. In the children's' version, Israel is a magically empty land. A land with no people for a people with no land. As a child, I had copy books that had maps of Israel on the backs of them, maps that didn't show the existence of the Palestinian territories. And they were maps of the modern state of Israel, not biblical era.

Whatever the intention of whoever was behind this (who being the Catholic hierarchy, I'm not making any insinuation otherwise), they were definitely trying to implant a political message, under the cloak of religion. And, the same kind of political indoctrination is going on with the education of Jewish and Muslim children, as much as Christians. And it can be harmless; Lots of Muslims I've spoken to, have told me they're really confused by the extremist ideology, because when they were at school the emphasis was absolutely different.

The glorification of martyrdom is a new thing. The first suicide the mission in the middle east, was carried out by Japanese Marxists in support of the Palestinians. The Palestinians then began to copy it, and the idea spread. It's was a combination of the Christian tradition of martyrdom, with that of the Japanese kamikaze. Can precedents be found in any of the Islamic texts, yeah, but, you could probably find the basis for justifying suicide attacks by squinting your way through the collected works of doctor Seuss. In the Koran there is no injunction to kill either Christians or Jews and neither are they considered infidels or Kafir......But a political situation arises where someone wants either Christians or Jews killed, and what do you know, a Hadith, a saying of the Prophet can be found, to justify it. Even though, from even early Islam, the Hadiths have always come with a caveat that some, if not all, are fake....But you don't even need a genuine fake hadith to begin with, who the F is going to check if you just make them up as you go along. Which is what they actually do.

There's even a distortion of what the word Kafir means. Kids, who then become adults, are told it means non-Muslim, or unbeliever, when it doesn't mean either. Which can then be used as a motivation for violence. Kafir is the same word as the English word cover. It means a person who covers the truth, specifically of Islam, for some wicked end. And the distortion of the meaning of the word, Kafir, would be an example.

One of the gags in the film Four Lions, is one of the guys packing an Islam for children book for his trip to Afghanistan. That's based on reality, it has been found over and over again, guys travelling to Syria to fight for ISIS have done things like buying the Dummies guide to Islam from Amazon before their trip.

Peregrinus

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

No. I've spent a bit of time looking into this. The script the Torah is written in, doesn't have the features in modern Hebrew script removing ambiguities. So, both Messiah and Moses are spelled MSH.

You’re missing the point. I’m not denying that in biblical Hebrew Messiah and Moses are spelt the same way. What I’m saying is that this doesn’t make them the same word. There are many example in English of two words which are spelt the same way; we do not imagine that this makes them the same word. Why would we see the matter differently with Hebrew?

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

There's also an interesting issue over whether the H, ה, should be pronounced or is meant as an honorific, and silent. This is important, because it may be the reason Gaelic scribes chose the letter h for accenting in script. Like the h in through...the h is in fact the dot of lentition, or the séimhiú. Why you find it in English is because the Gaelic scribes were the first to write English. I haven't gotten around to checking out the detail, whether choice of the h was specifically to do with the reading of Hebrew, with an actual Gaelic scholar of antique documents, but I've a good hunch.

To be honest, I don’t know when the ‘h’ started to be used to indicate lenition in Irish orthography. My impression is that it’s a modern convention, but I could be wrong. But, either way, I’d be astonished if Hebrew had any influence in the matter. The Irish acquired literacy with Christianisation, in the fifth century, but Western Christians at the time read the scriptures in Greek and Latin, not in Hebrew. I seriously doubt there were many Irish scholars with any knowledge of Hebrew prior to the Renaissance, nearly a thousand years after Irish first developed a written form. It’s very unlikely that Hebrew had any influence at all on Irish orthography.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

I'd advise you to do something, that's quite painful, and actually read Exodus, King James . . .

I have read it, but not in King James. (Why do you suggest King James? It’s an appalling translation.)

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

. . . there's direct references to places like Goshen. Palestine is a very close neighbour of Egypt. The chance of cultural cross fertilisation not happening are zero to none.

So, why not the Ra in front of Moses name?.....This could be part of the injunction not to take the name of God in vain. Which actually means the name of God is not to be spoken. And there are various variations of this, many Jews write the name G-d, with a dash to remove the o, so it's not completely writing the name of God.

Again, you’re missing the point. There absolutely is cross-cultural fertilisation going on; I have said so explicitly. But “why not Ra in front of Moses name?” Because we have no reason to think of Ra before any other of the many hundreds of gods in the Egyptian pantheon, that’s why. Nothing in the text suggests Ra. You’re just assuming Ra, for no stated reason.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

The other thing, which is exhausting to get into explaining, is how interpellation works in the bible as prophecy. In Gnostic Christianity, Judas is Jesus' twin brother, which sounds weird but it's likely to have been something removed from the mainstream, not created by the Gnostics. And it would have been there, likely as an interpellation to the story of Jacob and Esau.

No, this doesn’t really make sense. You suggest that the Gnostic traditions about, e.g. Jesus’ family structure are more reliable than the more orthodox traditions. I don’t think you’ll find many scholars agreeing with youi; the Gnostic traditions are pretty diverse, and are mostly much later in time than the gospels and the letters of Paul, and they are explicitly mystical and dependent on “secret knowledge”. They are interesting and may be important, but they are of very doubtful historicity. And I don’t think you can simultaneously suggest that the twin Judas claim is (a) an interpellation of the Jacob/Esau relationship, and (b) “more reliable” than the conventional view. It could be one or the other, but not both.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

You get all these repetitions throughout the bible, and these are the prophecies. (they don't tell you this when they're indoctrinating you as a kid).

Because it would be false. The bible includes a number of prophetic texts, but the story of Jacob and Esau does not come from any of them.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Anyway, Joshua's invasion of the Levant and Syria, (at school you were told it was a land with no people, for a people with no land....in the bible it's a bloody and murderous invasion, driven by the ever loving God.) This may be a direct interpellation to Ramesses II invasion of Syria.

Well, it may be, but I don’t think we have any particular reason to think that it is. It could just as easily be an interpellation of any number of other invasions, or a composite story drawing on several invasions, or it may be entirely legendary.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Why Jesus is occasionally called the Son of Man, in the bible is a biblical interpellation.

It’s a re-use of a phrase that is used many times in the Book of Ezekiel (by Ezekiel, of himself), and one that would have been familiar to the authors of the gospels, to the readership, and indeed also to the characters mentioned in the gospels. If you want to call that an “interpellation”, feel free. It could be a phrase put in Jesus’ mouth by the evangelists, who want to point to parallels between Jesus and Ezekiel. Or – the parsimonious explanation - the evangelists could simply be accurately recording that Jesus used the phrase himself, with the same intention.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

There has been an effort to cover the link for a long time. But, it's a bit like the way, the Greek and Latin version of Christianity is pushed by the Christian Church as being the pure and original form. But, the reality is it was a lot more varied. The bit where Jesus has a twin brother, that's something I'm not sure if it's been completely dropped from Syriac Christianity.

Mark and Matthew both record that Jesus had a brother called Judas, which looks like pretty much the opposite of attempting to conceal anything. They do not identify him as a twin, and they do not identify him with Judas Iscariot. The third-century Gnostic text, the Acts of Thomas suggests he is a twin of Jesus, and identifies him with the apostle Thomas (known to us as “doubting Thomas”), not with Judas Iscariot. But it’s very ambiguous on both points and, in any case, is much too late in composition to be very persuasive.

Speedwell

I'm an atheist Jew, but even so, I would greatly appreciate Gentiles not constructing conspiracy theories around things they don't bloody understand in the first place. Thanks very much.

Peregrinus

Speedwell wrote: »

I'm an atheist Jew, but even so, I would greatly appreciate Gentiles not constructing conspiracy theories around things they don't bloody understand in the first place. Thanks very much.

A brave effort, Speedwell. But as Christians have been putting their own interpretations on the Hebrew scriptures for about two thousand years now, I think that particular ship has sailed!

Speedwell

Peregrinus wrote: »

A brave effort, Speedwell. But as Christians have been putting their own interpretations on the Hebrew scriptures for about two thousand years now, I think that particular ship has sailed!

Haha, sorry, I was cranky before my morning tea But you're right, you're right, if the goyim didn't talk about things like that, we'd feel slighted and start the conversation ourselves, more than likely.

Peregrinus

Oh, I think you're quite entitled to object to goyisch interpretations and constructions of the Hebrew scriptures, and to claim a degree of authority and authenticity for Jewish perspectives. But the goal of getting goyim to butt out entirely is not a realistic one.

It comes with the territory of being a light unto the Nations, I guess.

recedite

Samaris wrote: »

As a note, Asherah, once called Queen of Heaven, has been basically replaced in modern Christianity by Mary, although it is carefully defined that she is not a god (which would conflate dangerously with the monotheistic ideal of the ultimate power of God), but rather a mortal raised to semi-divinity, something of a reward for her great faith.

"Semi-divinity"... very diplomatically put
So that makes her appearances at Medjugorje kosher then, just about.

silverharp

Speedwell wrote: »

Haha, sorry, I was cranky before my morning tea But you're right, you're right, if the goyim didn't talk about things like that, we'd feel slighted and start the conversation ourselves, more than likely.

Railing against cultural appropriation is all the rage these days, maybe a new front could be opened up here

beauf

Wow an interesting thread in Atheism & Agnosticism. Who would believe it.

Curious about the study of alphabets, what prompted you're (for those that have commented on it) interest in this, or is it simply a product of researching the bible and similar.

oldrnwisr

Labarbapostiza, I hope you don't mind my fragmenting your post Absolam-style:) but I think it will make things easier to follow.


1. Moses, Messiah & the language problem

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

The script the Torah is written in, doesn't have the features in modern Hebrew script removing ambiguities. So, both Messiah and Moses are spelled MSH.

There are a few problems with this argument.

The first issue is that the Torah was not written in one single script. Some of the oldest extant copies of the Torah we have were written in Paleo-Hebrew:



which is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Manuscripts 4Q11, 4Q12 and 4Q22 which contain portions of Genesis and Exodus were written in Paleo-Hebrew. The oldest extant recorded text of the Torah, the Silver Scrolls , which contains the Priestly blessing is also written in paleo-hebrew. Other sections of the Torah including several portions of Deuteronomy are recorded on Papyrus 4Q175 which is written in Hasmonean script:



There was no one script used for writing the Torah because the Torah is a compiled work. It was finished around 450 BCE at a time when Imperial Aramaic was coming in to its own as the dominant written communication method of the Middle East. However, the Torah was compiled from four different sources: the Yahwist, Elohist, Priestly and Deuteronomist. Some of these source materials stretch back into the pre-exile period and are likely to have been written in paleo-Hebrew (based on the extant copies we have e.g. Silver scrolls, Dead Sea scrolls).

The second issue is that even if we take Imperial Aramaic as the language in which both the Moses story and the references to a messiah were written, you're still dealing with an abjad, a consonant only language. So how is it that you differentiate between say Moses, messiah and anoint. The word anoint, or mashach in Hebrew is also spelled MSH. So if Moses and messiah are the same word then how is anoint any different. In reading from an abjad alphabet the vowels and thus the meaning of the word are inferred from context. So in light of Peregrinus' earlier point:

Peregrinus wrote: »

... Moses (מֹשֶׁה) and messiah (מָשִׁיחַ) may be spelt the same in Hebrew when the vowels are omitted (as is standard), but that doesn't mean they're the same word. Rose, the past tense of "rise", and rose, the flower, are spelt the same but they are not the same word. They are what we call homographs, two different words which have the same written form. Since Hebrew is written without vowels, it has many, many homographs. If English were written without vowels, then raise, rise, ruse, rase, rays and rosy would all be homographs.

I'd like to know how you contend that these different passages:

"So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined."
Daniel 9:25-26

"The child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. And she named him Moses, and said, “Because I drew him out of the water.”
Exodus 2:10

intend to convey the same word. What evidence do you have beyond the same three letters being used in their spelling?
You see, when dealing with languages which are different from English you sometimes have to accept that there are words and phrases which cannot be simply or directly translated into English but which will be understood implicitly by native speakers.
Take Psy's song Gangnam Style, for example. The song contains the repeated line "oppa gangnam style". Oppa ( 오빠) is a Korean word which usually refers to a woman's older brother but is used by Psy in the song to refer to himself in the third person. There is no way for an English speaker to simply or effectively communicate the full meaning of oppa to another English speaker but a Korean person will understand its meaning immediately. There are concepts missing from English which make intuitive sense to native speakers, concepts like evidentiality, polychronic time, absolute direction, time-independence etc.
Another example of this mentioned above is time-independence. In Chinese, verbs don't conjugate so time is not baked into the language like English where you have to include a time, I am reading, was reading, will read etc. I'm sure pauldla would be best placed to give us an insight on this.
There are situations like with Chinese above where the full meaning of a word or phrase will only be fully communicated from context. So it is with Hebrew. While the letters used in the word are the same, that doesn't mean that the meaning of the word is the same. The vowels are inferred from context.

The third issue is that there are no references to messiah in the Torah. There are, in fact, only five specific references to messiah which are rendered as such in English (in most translations) in the entire Old Testament (Psalms 2, 28, 89, 1 Samuel 2:10 and Daniel 9:25-26). The references to a future Messiah are contained only in the books known as the minor and major prophets.

The fourth issue is that the references to Jesus in the NT as the messiah were written in Koine Greek by people reading from the Septuagint, the greek version of the Old Testament. So these people, for the most part, would not have been familiar with Hebrew and would not have seen the connection (even had there been one) between Moses and messiah since the Greek spelling of Moses (Μωσῆς) is very different from that of messiah (Μεσσίας).
Take Mark for example. Mark's gospel is the oldest of the four and forms the basis for both Matthew and Luke's gospels. Mark's gospel is written in Koine Greek by somebody living in Rome. There are 18 Latin loanwords in the New Testament and 10 of them occur in Mark. By contrast there are very few instances of Hebrew references in Mark and most of them occur as direct speech quotations (e.g. Mark 5:41, 7:34, 14:36, 15:34). Furthermore, when Mark borrows from the Old Testament it is from the Septuagint and not the Hebrew text. This is clear from, for example, the story of Jairus' daughter in Mark 5:22-42, a story borrowed from an earlier story in 2 Kings 4:25-35. In the story Jesus tells the young girl to awaken or egeire in Greek. The past tense of this verb egerthe is used in the Elisha story when Elisha is told that the Shunnamite woman's son has not yet awakened, thus revealing Mark's source material as the Septuagint.


2. Jesus and the Messiah problem

The thrust of your argument from your initial post seems to be that the term Moses is a corruption of Ramses which in and of itself is a reference to Ra and that the terms Moses and Messiah are actually the same term and so by extension the Jesus as Messiah is really just a corruption of Egyptian myth. Which would be a nice story if Jesus was the Messiah, but he wasn't. And here's why.

There are several problems with Jesus being the Messiah mentioned in the Old Testament. The authors of the gospels certainly seem eager to portray Jesus as the Messiah but then again they're writing a backstory to a character which none of them met, forty years after he's already dead. So the best they can do is try to make connections between Jesus and the OT messiah. Unfortunately both they and modern Christian apologists make a very poor case for Jesus being the Messiah.

2a - Failed prophecies

The first problem is that certain NT authors, Matthew most prominently, make claims about Jesus' fulfillment of OT prophecies which are either completely fabricated or misquoted or distorted to the point of being inapplicable. Firstly, you have fabricated prophecies such as Matthew 2:23 and Matthew 27:9-10 where the supposed prophecy doesn't exist in the Old Testament. Then you have misquoted or distorted prophecies such as John 2:17, Matthew 1:22-23, Matthew 2:14-15 and Acts 8:26-39. Take John 2:17, for example. The passage reads:

"His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house will consume me.”

However, this is a reference to Psalms 69:9, which says:

"For zeal for Your house has consumed me,
And the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me."

When we look at this verse in its wider context, we see the problem:

"O God, it is You who knows my folly, And my wrongs are not hidden from You."

The passages which lead up to verse 9 show that the person speaking in Psalm 69 is a sinner which Christ wasn't. So this prophecy couldn't possibly refer to Christ.

It wasn't just the gospels which contained failed messianic prophecies for Jesus, modern Christian apologists like Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell have had no qualms in twisting Old Testament passages to make them look as if they apply to Jesus. Among the many examples of this are, Zechariah 13:6, Psalm 22:16 and Isaiah 53. For example, in "The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict" Josh McDowell argues that Zechariah 13:6 is a future reference to Jesus' crucifixion:

"And one will say to him, ‘What are these wounds between your arms?’ Then he will say, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’"

Unfortunately, for McDowell, the opening of Zechariah 13 shows that this cannot refer to Jesus as it actually refers to a false prophet.


2b - Characteristics of the Messiah

When you carefully examine the Old Testament you'll find that there are several passages which speak of a future messiah and the characteristics he will possess. It is also clear from these passages that these are characteristics not shared by Jesus.

Firstly, the Messiah would be a descendant of David as stated in Jeremiah 23:5

"“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “When I will raise up for David a righteous Branch; And He will reign as king and act wisely And do justice and righteousness in the land."

While both Matthew and Luke make a genealogical connection between Jesus and David, it should be noted that a) their genealogical records don't agree with each other and b) Jesus is connected to David through Joseph who he wasn't actually biologically descended from.

Secondly, the Messiah would be knowledgeable and observant of the Old Testament laws as outlined in Isaiah 11:2-5. While Jesus was certainly knowledgeable, observant he wasn't. He violates the dietary laws in Mark 7:18-19, the Sabbath law in Matthew 12:3-5, the commandment to honour your father and mother in Matthew 12:46-50 and the circumcision law in John 7:22-24.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, in several places the Old Testament authors speak about the Messiah's political prowess in addition to his spiritual ones. In Isaiah 11:11-12, Hosea 3:4-5 and Jeremiah 23:7-8 and 30:3 it is stated that the Messiah will reunite the Jews in Israel and restore Jerusalem. In Isaiah 2:2-4, 11:10 and 42:1, it is stated that the Messiah would create a single world government in Israel. Furthermore, despite the Christian claims about Jesus' body as a temple, the Old Testament makes it clear that the Messiah would rebuild a physical temple in Jerusalem and resume sacrifices in it (Jeremiah 33:17-18, Ezekiel 37:27-28 and Malachi 3:3-4). Jesus never accomplishes any of this and his death runs counter to the idea of the Messiah as a combined spiritual and political leader ushering Jerusalem into a new era of peace.

Speaking of peace, the arrival of the Messiah is supposed to herald the beginning of the Messianic age, accompanied by a number of signs. These include an era of perpetual peace (Isaiah 2:4), predators and prey will coexist peacefully (Isaiah 11:6), the entire human race worshipping Yahweh (Zechariah 14:9) and following all his laws (Ezekiel 37:24). None of these, obviously, came to pass, then or at any time since.

Finally, as I've mentioned above, the idea of a dying and rising God as a sacrifice for all people makes no sense in light of the Old Testament messianic prophecies. Firstly, no prophecy concerning the Messiah in the Old Testament requires the Messiah to sacrifice himself. Secondly, references to Jesus as the passover lamb in the NT show just how much some of the NT writers didn't understand Jewish tradition. There were several types of offering made by Jews in the OT, including voluntary burnt offerings, mandatory burnt offerings, guilt offerings, peace offerings, commemorative offerings and sin offerings. The passover lamb as referenced in Exodus 12:1-14 was a commemorative offering to remember the Israelite's deliverance out of Egypt. So, it's not comparable to the sin offering that Jesus purports to be. Furthermore, Exodus 12:3-4 states that one lamb would only suffice for one family, not all mankind.

I think it's fair to say that the idea of a spiritual and political Messiah is the result of a degree of optimistic wish-fulfillment on behalf of the Jews of the period. To a people who had historically and recently undergone huge suffering and upheaval at the hands of various other cultures (i.e. Egyptians, Babylonians, Romans), a political leader who would come and save them from all of that and create a land where everything would live in peace is a nice idea but not one grounded in any kind of reality. It's a fantasy story one which a lot of parents in various war-torn conflicts have told their children to make them feel safer.

In any case, the Jewish idea of a Messiah is not the one which Christians think Jesus is or the one you seem to think exists in the connection between Ra and Moses, it is a human political leader, a King Arthur, if you will, not a god or demigod.


3. Additional points

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

There's also an interesting issue over whether the H, ה, should be pronounced or is meant as an honorific, and silent. This is important, because it may be the reason Gaelic scribes chose the letter h for accenting in script. Like the h in through...the h is in fact the dot of lentition, or the séimhiú. Why you find it in English is because the Gaelic scribes were the first to write English. I haven't gotten around to checking out the detail, whether choice of the h was specifically to do with the reading of Hebrew, with an actual Gaelic scholar of antique documents, but I've a good hunch.

While it's possible given that Hebrew and Irish are both fusional languages, I don't think it's very likely. The oldest examples of Irish are Primitive Irish found on Ogham inscriptions which are dated to only about the 3rd century. It's much more likely that Irish was influenced by closer languages like Gaulish, Latin and Greek. On the basis of the morphology, extant texts and biblical scholarship it's much more likely that Gaelic scholars came in contact with the Vulgate or Septuagint than any Hebrew text.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

I'd advise you to do something, that's quite painful, and actually read Exodus, King James.

Respectfully I'd disagree. I think the King James is useful only as a historical relic. Anyone who is interested in the historicity of the Bible would be better served with an interlinear bible or a more accurate modern translation such as the NASB.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

The other thing, which is exhausting to get into explaining, is how interpellation works in the bible as prophecy. In Gnostic Christianity, Judas is Jesus' twin brother, which sounds weird but it's likely to have been something removed from the mainstream, not created by the Gnostics.

I really wish people wouldn't do this. You get a lot of this from Christians trying to reconcile the different lists of apostles in the New Testament. Just because you have someone called Judas listed in one book doesn't mean that a reference to Judas in another book by another author in another century is talking about the same person. The one thing that people of the time were not is good at picking children's names. If you shouted "Judas come in for your dinner" in 1st century Jerusalem, half the heads in the street would turn. Judas was a very common name.
This is an extremely tenuous connection. Firstly, the references to Jesus family are thin on the ground:

"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?".
Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55

That's it. One sentence. Later on in about 140CE you get the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas which opens with:

"These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down."

Now the Apostle Thomas is also referred to as Didymus indicating that he was a twin not Jesus' twin. Twin births occur about 1 in every 30 births, so there would have been a few Didymus' around.
The first connection between the apostle Thomas and the Gospel of Thomas doesn't come for another 100 years or so with the 3rd century Acts of Thomas. In the meantime, other writers such as Eusebius have attempted to connect Judas, brother of Jesus to Jude the Apostle, however scholarly opinion is still sharply divided on the issue. So the idea that Judas, brother of Jesus is the apostle Jude who is also Thomas who is a twin of Jesus is just wisful thinking. Even the earliest connections between Judas and Jesus come from people who never met Jesus and those that point to Judas as a twin don't come until 200 years after the events in question.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

And it would have been there, likely as an interpellation to the story of Jacob and Esau. You get all these repetitions throughout the bible, and these are the prophecies. (they don't tell you this when they're indoctrinating you as a kid). Anyway, Joshua's invasion of the Levant and Syria, (at school you were told it was a land with no people, for a people with no land....in the bible it's a bloody and murderous invasion, driven by the ever loving God.) This may be a direct interpellation to Ramesses II invasion of Syria.

Sure repeated stories exist, Christianity is after all a syncretic religion. Jesus is often depicted performing the same miracles performed by Elisha and Elijah which I have covered in detail in previous posts. However, the key point is that this was done with the aim of creating a backstory for Jesus by people who were operating on minimal biographical information. They attempted to portray Jesus as one whose power exceeded those of the Old Testament prophets or even the Egyptian gods (i.e. Lazarus). This Ramses idea is a nice notion but that's it a notion. It's not one that's supported by actual scholarship.

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Why Jesus is occasionally called the Son of Man, in the bible is a biblical interpellation.

Actually I'd say that 81 references are a bit more than occasional. There are 30 references in Matthew, 14 in Mark, 25 in Luke and 12 in John. Most of these seem to be used in comparable terms to the 32 instances of the phrase in the OT. However, the term "The Son of Man" is something not seen before the NT either in the OT or other Greek literature. It is most likely a Messianic reference to Jesus from Daniel 7:13-14:

"As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed."

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Tracing the origins of the actual Moses is not really relevant.

It might be relevant, except for one problem. There was no actual Moses.

The story of Moses is replete with fantastical elements, chronologically and historically impossible scenarios and archaeologically unverifiable references. For example, in Exodus 12:37, the number of male Israelites who left Egypt is given as 600,000, a figure later refined to 603,550 in Exodus 38:26. This would equate to a total population somewhere in excess of 2 million people. Since the total population of Egypt at the time was just 3-4 million. An exodus of that magnitude would have decimated the Egyptian population and yet no mention of it is made in Egyptian writings. Similarly, there have been many archaeological digs which have attempted to find the Yam Suph, the Reed/Red Sea which Moses supposedly parted and yet all have failed to substantiate the biblical narrative. Moses is a legendary character, an invention.

As I said in my last post, there are many solid arguments picking apart the historicity of the Old and New Testament. This simplistic approach isn't one of them though.

oldrnwisr

beauf wrote: »

Wow an interesting thread in Atheism & Agnosticism. Who would believe it.

Curious about the study of alphabets, what prompted you're (for those that have commented on it) interest in this, or is it simply a product of researching the bible and similar.

While I do have a general interest in language and linguistics, some of it has definitely been the product of semantic arguments with Christians over certain mistranslations in the Bible. The virgin birth "prophecy" or the flat earth of the OT would be good examples of this.

Speedwell

Just a nerd, lol.

recedite

Stop complaining. Nerds are a lot slower than anti-semites, but still good sport.

Speedwell

recedite wrote: »

Stop complaining. Nerds are a lot slower than anti-semites, but still good sport.

Who's complaining?

Labarbapostiza

Peregrinus wrote: »

You’re missing the point. I’m not denying that in biblical Hebrew Messiah and Moses are spelt the same way. What I’m saying is that this doesn’t make them the same word. There are many example in English of two words which are spelt the same way; we do not imagine that this makes them the same word. Why would we see the matter differently with Hebrew?

Yes, I get your point, but.......There's been a culture among bible scholars, not to make statements they can't back up with very hard evidence (carbon dated documents etc). But, there is a different approach. I was watching a talk on line recently (I'm too lazy to look up her name). An Islamist (this is in the scholarly sense). Her talk was on the language used in the Koran. It's been known since year dot, that a significant portion of the language in the Koran appears to be gibberish, or it was indecipherable to readers. It's written in Arabic script, so the assumption was it's standard classical Arabic. A few decades back, scholars began to get the feeling they knew what the problem was. That bits in the Koran appeared to be indecipherable were not in fact pure Arabic, and were in fact a strange mixture of Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew...though written in Arabic. Can you prove something like this to be a fact. In the talk, during questions at the end, the woman was asked could she prove her thesis. And her answer, wonderfully was, that she was a literary critic and not a physicist.

The issue of Moses and Messiah being written the same, and the relation to the Egyptian word used for king (or the word Son meaning King in certain context.) It's a long running controversy. It gets mentioned by Flavius Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, which is from about 93 AD. Was the word borrowed from Egypt, and does its' meaning in the text have a theological meaning; in a similar sense that in some texts Jesus is the Lamb of God, but at no point is this to be taken as Jesus literally having been a sheep. Or more clearly, the word Israel, and the concept of Israel in later Christian texts, refers to the whole world, and not Palestine. Theological concepts are exotheric in texts, only if you already know what they are. If they get lost, and you don't have an early text you can carbon date, that explicitly explains the theological concept, you're left guessing.

To be honest, I don’t know when the ‘h’ started to be used to indicate lenition in Irish orthography. My impression is that it’s a modern convention, but I could be wrong. But, either way, I’d be astonished if Hebrew had any influence in the matter. The Irish acquired literacy with Christianisation, in the fifth century, but Western Christians at the time read the scriptures in Greek and Latin, not in Hebrew.

I don't know. But there's a strong chance, if they had Greek texts, they would have had Hebrew texts too. There's something very interesting about Greece, and a feature of how the Greek take on Christianity came to dominate. The Greeks had a very vibrant publishing industry, that dwarfed everyone else's. So, they were supplying the majority of Hebrew texts throughout the world at that point too. And there is a theory today, that Greco-Judaism, may have had a major influence on shaping or reshaping Judaism as it had on shaping Christianity. There's a theory, that if you took some devout Christians and Jews back to the middle of first century Palestine, they would be in for the shock of their lives, as in the religions in the locality being virtually unrecognisable to what they are today. Is there something funny about the traditional Hebrew texts (funny as in having Greek origin) there might be. The Greek scribes had habits of adding and removing bits, to their taste. Sometimes bits stuck.

I have read it, but not in King James. (Why do you suggest King James? It’s an appalling translation.)

King James is important for several reasons. Modern versions tend to have many "corrections". The bulk of the King James was written by John Wycliffe, and he tried to stay as close as possible to the original text. (the text is very important for it's influence both on the English language, English language texts, and modern European literature. ) The text may also have had a major influence on modern Judaism. In it being the commonly used English translation of the Hebrew text. Wycliffe had a major influence if not in reshaping European Christianity, but giving it added colouring. His translation is very close to the actual text, but he made it more poetic. A line like 'Jehovah said to Moses and Aron', becomes 'And the LORD spaketh onto Moses and Aron'. The original Hebrew seems to my eye more monotonous, with Jehovah said this, Jehovah said that.

Again, you’re missing the point. There absolutely is cross-cultural fertilisation going on; I have said so explicitly. But “why not Ra in front of Moses name?” Because we have no reason to think of Ra before any other of the many hundreds of gods in the Egyptian pantheon, that’s why. Nothing in the text suggests Ra. You’re just assuming Ra, for no stated reason.

Why Ra, over other Egyptian gods. One thing is the Ramasses were real people. And there's an explicit reference in Exodus to the Jews living in Goshen. Goshen was one of the centres of the Ra cult. They would have had Ra coming out their ears. If they were in fact ever in Goshen, but even the reference to Goshen would mean they'd know something about the Ra cult.

No, this doesn’t really make sense. You suggest that the Gnostic traditions about, e.g. Jesus’ family structure are more reliable than the more orthodox traditions. I don’t think you’ll find many scholars agreeing with youi; the Gnostic traditions are pretty diverse, and are mostly much later in time than the gospels and the letters of Paul, and they are explicitly mystical and dependent on “secret knowledge”. They are interesting and may be important, but they are of very doubtful historicity. And I don’t think you can simultaneously suggest that the twin Judas claim is (a) an interpellation of the Jacob/Esau relationship, and (b) “more reliable” than the conventional view. It could be one or the other, but not both.

Contemporary Catholic tradition shies away from reading for interpellations in the text, but it's alive and well among the Evangelicals. Jesus' last words in the Gospel of Mark are 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me'. This an interpellation to Psalm 22. And this is taken as having fulfilled a prophesy. The prophetic reading of the texts, at the very least has its' origins in Greco-Judaism. It's sounds like a prophesy if you've been acculturated to hear these things as prophesies. The bible is riddled with these things, Judas betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver is a multilayered prophetic interpellation. Joseph being sold into slavery for instance.

Because it would be false. The bible includes a number of prophetic texts, but the story of Jacob and Esau does not come from any of them.

Yeah, there are the explicit prophecies, which go 'this is a prophecy, blah, blah'. Then there are the far more obscure. Numerological readings of the texts. More commonly taking a fragment from something like a Psalm.

Well, it may be, but I don’t think we have any particular reason to think that it is. It could just as easily be an interpellation of any number of other invasions, or a composite story drawing on several invasions, or it may be entirely legendary.

Something that drives me around the bend about Dawkins, is when he says the Abrahamic religions emanated from the most backward region on earth. At the time of writing, the common version of the Torah having been written in Babylon. Babylon was one of the most advanced places on earth. The bible story of the tower of Babel may have been a crafty dig at the Babylonians. But history was well recorded in the area. The bible authors vary from being very sophisticated to outright morons.

It’s a re-use of a phrase that is used many times in the Book of Ezekiel (by Ezekiel, of himself), and one that would have been familiar to the authors of the gospels, to the readership, and indeed also to the characters mentioned in the gospels.

No, there's more to the Son of God, Son of Man thing. Ezekiel uses the term בֶּן-אָדָם. The Son of Adam. Adam is actually the Hebrew word for man. (The original Adam and Eve story is very clearly an allegory. The personifications come from people with no understanding of Hebrew. I came to digging into the bible in an attempt to understand Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Adam and Eve are mentioned in the opening lines. And there is a point. Adam is the Hebrew word for man, Eve is a Hebrew word for Life. The river Liffey is spelled Life in Gaelic. It's a false cognate. But the water of the Liffey is then the water of Life. Joyce is making a point about the interpretation of the bible, as well as working his way towards a very long winded joke. the joke is;

Whiskey is Uisce Beatha, which is the water of Life, which is the water of Eve. Tim Finnegan falls from the ladder because he's drunk. Adam falls from the garden of Eden because of Eve..Hence, women and drink are the downfall of man..

).

Where a confusion slips in and becomes a feature of Christianity, is the Aramaic word for man is Barnas, it's the same word in Arabic. It's a confusing word, because bar is used as the suffix for son, like Barabbas, which translates as Son of the Father. Translating Ben-Adam to Aramaic, you'd get Bar-Barnas, which is something that sounds nonsensical. But the use of the word Barnas causes confusion; so there's a play on words, does Jesus refer to himself as just a man, or the theological Son of Man. And is Jesus actually the Son of God, or is he like the rest of us, in being all God's children.

Mark and Matthew both record that Jesus had a brother called Judas, which looks like pretty much the opposite of attempting to conceal anything. They do not identify him as a twin, and they do not identify him with Judas Iscariot.

Yes, in the Gospels, Jesus' brothers are mentioned. This caused a little problem for the early church. To maintain Mary's virginity, they needed a work around, and in the King James, there's the proto gospel of James.

The third-century Gnostic text, the Acts of Thomas suggests he is a twin of Jesus, and identifies him with the apostle Thomas (known to us as “doubting Thomas”), not with Judas Iscariot. But it’s very ambiguous on both points and, in any case, is much too late in composition to be very persuasive.

Okay. The Gospel of Mark is the first gospel. And it's quite scrambled, and it's believed to have been written by a scribe who may not have been Christian. And they're getting it dictated to them. In the Greek text, the word Diddymus is used for Thomas. In Greek this explicitly means twin, Thomas in Latin doesn't carry that meaning. So, from the reading of Mark in Greek, it can be assumed that James is in fact Jesus' twin brother, but that might not be all that clear.

The Gnostic gospel of Thomas is titled Judas diddymus, just as the Syriac Acts of Thomas. The earliest copies of the Gospel of Mark, don't in fact have the doubting Thomas story. They just finish with the death of Jesus. It's not clear where the twin idea originates. Gnosticism is believed to have originated wholly from Greece. But Syriac Christianity may in fact have originated from the original Palestinian Church. The mistake in the past, was to immediately see anything that looked like Gnosticism to be Gnostic. And jumping to conclusions in general.

Jesus may have also been a feature of early centuries Palestinian Judaism. And the origins of Islam could in fact be Jerusalem, or somewhere nearby in Jordan.

Absolam

oldrnwisr wrote: »

Labarbapostiza, I hope you don't mind my fragmenting your post Absolam-style:) but I think it will make things easier to follow.

Yes! Another convert

pauldla

oldrnwisr wrote: »

....
Another example of this mentioned above is time-independence. In Chinese, verbs don't conjugate so time is not baked into the language like English where you have to include a time, I am reading, was reading, will read etc. I'm sure pauldla would be best placed to give us an insight on this.
There are situations like with Chinese above where the full meaning of a word or phrase will only be fully communicated from context. So it is with Hebrew. While the letters used in the word are the same, that doesn't mean that the meaning of the word is the same. The vowels are inferred from context.
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Not much to add actually, as you've summed it up quite well. Verbs in Chinese don't conjugate, so either aspect particles are used or the meaning is inferred from the context. So, for example, take the verb chi 吃, to eat. Adding the aspect particle le 了 shows a completed action, so wo chi le 我吃了 means 'I ate'. We can add another aspect particle gang 刚 to show a recent action, so wo gang chi le 我刚吃了 means 'I just ate'. But a lot of it is contextual. On it's own, chi 吃 could either mean an invitation to eat, or it could be an answer to the question chi le ma 吃了吗 ("Have you eaten'), ma 吗 being a question particle, and Chinese having no direct word for Yes or No (it's a bit like Hiberno-Irish that way, one repeats or negates the verb, 'Did you eat? I did', 'Was that you outside Grogans last night shouting at a German tourist? It wasn't').

Of course if you don't have Chinese language support on your operating system you're looking at little squares up there where I've used the Chinese.

Still a few of the t-shirts left, by the way, if anybody is interested.

robindch

Absolam wrote: »

Yes! Another convert

Unless I've missed something, there are six letters too many in that middle world, Absolam

Nick Park

Labarbapostiza wrote: »

Yes, in the Gospels, Jesus' brothers are mentioned. This caused a little problem for the early church. To maintain Mary's virginity, they needed a work around, and in the King James, there's the proto gospel of James.

Sorry, this sounds so bizarre that I'm thinking I must be misunderstanding you in some way.

Are you actually claiming that the non-canonical book 'The Gospel of James' is included in the King James version of the Bible?

Absolam

robindch wrote: »

Unless I've missed something, there are six letters too many in that middle world, Absolam

Nah... I'm just not as loquacious about the others

Labarbapostiza

Nick Park wrote: »

Sorry, this sounds so bizarre that I'm thinking I must be misunderstanding you in some way.

Are you actually claiming that the non-canonical book 'The Gospel of James' is included in the King James version of the Bible?

It's in a copy of the King James I have. Which I think I got from project Gutenberg. It's not canonical. But canonical in the sense, it's not obscure, and it was being placed in print editions of the bible. I don't know that much about it, only that it's awful, and an obvious case of what bible scholars call pseudographie (a forgery). I was just assuming since I saw it in the edition I have that it was King James.

Labarbapostiza

oldrnwisr wrote: »

Respectfully I'd disagree. I think the King James is useful only as a historical relic.

If the King James was good enough for Jesus.....

Yes..but...if you're looking at any of these elements, as relics, to examine them for what they are. For example, the King James in its' relation to the development of literature, you would look at the King James.

Finally, as I've mentioned above, the idea of a dying and rising God as a sacrifice for all people makes no sense in light of the Old Testament messianic prophecies. Firstly, no prophecy concerning the Messiah in the Old Testament requires the Messiah to sacrifice himself.

In temporary Christian traditions the answer to that question, why Jesus dies, how his sacrifice takes away the sins of the world, is always given as it being an unknowable mystery.

But, other opinions are that it is an interpellation to the scapegoat ritual in Leviticus.

16:7. Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the LORD at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting;

16:8. and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the LORD and the other marked for Azazel.

16:9. Aaron shall bring forward the goat designated by lot for the LORD, which he is to offer as a sin offering;

16:10. while the goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be left standing alive before the LORD, to make expiation with it and to send it off to the wilderness for Azazel.

There's a bit of a problem with this tradition. Azazel is another word for the devil. Sacrificing goats to the devil, is not an old tradition modern Judaism is all that comfortable with. And the idea of Jesus being sacrifice to the devil, is not something Christianity would be all the comfortable with either.

Mark, makes a very brief reference to Barabas. But, the use of the name is a good indication, that Christianity does have an Aramaic origin. And also, the way Mark writes this bit gives me a strong impression he's not a Christian, and doesn't know the importance of the name.

Translating Barabas from Aramaic gives you Bar Abas, Son of the Father. Jesus is Barnas; the Son of Man, or even possibly the Son of God.

This is an interpellation to Abraham and Isaac. The father is Abraham. The Son of the Father, is Isaac. And Jesus is the Lamb of God. Geddit!!


Writers like John are not in fact making mistakes as to actual Jewish traditions. They're making a theological point. Even in harmonised versions of the passion, Jesus manages to have the last supper on the feast of the Passover then, get crucified on the day of the Passover.

Just a little edit:
I know people who are a lot more into this stuff than I am. And there is confusion over what is actually meant to happen in the Jewish rituals involving animal "offerings" (I won't use the word sacrifice). Along the lines of do we eat the goat, or do we burn the goat, do burn a little of the goat, or is the whole process a form of early social welfare, where the priest distributes the goats meat to those in need. Rituals of feasting, may have had something to do with the lack of refrigeration. If you killed a calf, you'd have to eat the whole thing relatively quickly. It's not clear. And I haven't had much luck finding where or when the actual scapegoat ritual was ever practiced. There's different versions of it.