<mod>taijasi / andrewx: please dial it down. i know you have serious disagreements, but please try and hold on to your handbag; personal comments are not OK. sam albion: in the best scouse tradition, caam down, caam down!</mod>
Ben Masada said:
Othodox Rabbis! Any Orthodox man with a beard and teaching some children is looked at as a Rabbi.
nonsense. semikhah is semikhah. if you don't have semikhah, you can't call yourself a rabbi; i understand the etymological and cultural aspects of the title (as per the way people use the word "rebbe" in its hasidic sense; i have lots of "rebbes", some of whom are neither orthodox, nor men, nor jewish); however, this is a very different sense. the formal title is hardly as lax as you suggest.
A real Rabbi from University Yeshivah will never climb higher than a junior Rabbi if he is not a married man.
look; that is not a function of it being necessary to be a rabbi, but simply something that is expected of a male above a certain age. an unmarried man, rabbi or otherwise, of above that age is cause for comment, specifically: "i wonder how he gets his jollies, then?" it being assumed that everyone needs some form of sexual outlet. in orthodoxy, this means being married. however, this cultural context cannot seriously be imposed upon that of jesus.
Jesus, although married at age 30, never became a senior Rabbi, probably for having been a single man up to that age.
well, rabbi aqiba didn't even become religious until he was 40 and didn't even get married until after that - and he is a) roughly contemporary with jesus and b) about as "senior" as you like!
I don't know about it in the Diaspora, but here in Israel, I have never met a unmarried senior Rabbi.
the way rabbinic seniority works in the modern israeli context is hardly something one can extrapolate from, as it is both uniquely modern and uniquely pernicious. are you suggesting that if jesus was around now, he'd be trying to hang with ovadia yosef?
And a commandment is not set aside because a Jew is about to die.
unless, by setting it aside, you can prevent him (or anyone, not just jews) from dying, unless it's one of the three that can't be broken for that.
I married a very religious Yemanite lady, the daughter of an old fashioned Rabbi here in Gedera
and if you're both still religious, i find your positions completely peculiar compared to the norms, even for the
teimani context.
the text says that "thy love to me goes beyond that of women." It means that the love between David and Jonathan was different from that between a man and a woman. Love between a man and a woman, involves sex by 101%. Otherwise, it is not love. It didn't at all between David and Jonathan. The 3rd reason is that, both carried normal sexual lives with their own wives.
erm... that really doesn't prove anything, even if this line of argument was remotely convincing. i know it's upsetting to people who don't care for homosexuality, but i find it rather odd that G!D should apparently build this stuff into our DNA and those of numerous animal species if it has no practical benefit. regardless of what the "religious parties" in israel might think. i hardly think they merit our admiration as upholders of fair-mindedness.
Then, there is something you have said above that has caught my attention: "If Jesus was a 'true Jew,' there would be no Christianity at all." Since there is Christianity, Jesus was not a Jew. With this statement of yours, you have, all of a sudden, solved all the contradictions of the NT. This brings about the truth that Jesus must have been a Greek man. Hence, the Hellenistic doctrine which pervades the NT throughout.
dude, what is it with you? why can't you deal with anything ambiguous or complex? why has everything got to be so black and white with you? this isn't the feckin' knesset, y'know. servetus' quote is a case in point.
Thomas said:
John 1:38 actually qualifies the term: '(which is to say, Master)', to signify its general honorific usage rather than its particular meaning in Jewish ecclesiology.
so, in other words, he's not using as per a guy-with-semikhah-in-the-normative-tradition, but as a "you're my teacher so i'm going to give you the teacher honorific" - i.e., as for example, one might use the term "rebbe".
It's a common 'gnostic' teaching and it pops up again and again, it's a great excuse for the leader to shag everything that moves ... Alistair Crowley was an exponent of the rule.
true dat and worth pointing out.
radarmark said:
Thomas, as usual is sooooo correct. The whole idea of "hidden" texts (the vast majority of the Gnostic texts) imo just do not make sense. If G!d is G!d and we are H!s Children, why would he hide the truth from us. This is what I find the ultimate argument against the versions of creatinism that hold that fossils are left "to mislead us".
yes, that's a good point too - even our "hidden" texts are now publicly available, but in point of fact, that doesn't really make them any less hidden, as the keys to understand them are extraordinarily hard to grasp. hidden texts are elitist of course, but i don't think that's such a bad thing; they're just really, really technical and don't make a great deal of sense to the lay person.
By all means, apply textual and scientific criticism to the Scriptures. But as Thomas says, be even handed.
hah, yes, theosophists - stanzas of dyzan, anyone? hehe.
Sam Albion said:
If Jesus was a "true Jew", then there would be no Christianity and all christians would call themselves Jews.
i don't think that's the point here; what jesus did or didn't do or was or wasn't, becomes entirely a matter of conjecture, projection and belief within a couple of generations and certainly by the time stuff starts to get written down or the early church splits off from judaism officially. it's messy, not straightforward and i don't think we help by projecting from even further off.
If he was a Jew, then he was a radical.
now here, we can agree. i find jesus quite interesting, i can locate him in the jewish context but i don't think he's a "normative rabbinic" figure for all the reasons stated. he is closest to, well, the sorts of charismatic figures that in judaism have always been a cause of challenge, divisiveness and ultimately false messiahship. judaism is an elastic definition, but eventually it snaps. i'm just interested in the interface, i don't feel i have to particularly feel strongly about someone who isn't in what ends up being the normative tradition that i do adhere to.
b'shalom
bananabrain
))- Testament wherein David is said to have a unique fondness for another beloved John, Jonathan:
