With palms together,
There is an interesting article in the N Y Times today about a stone tablet found amid the Dead Sea Scrolls. Apparently it suggests that the notion of a suffering messiah who would rise in three days was a common belief in the century prior to the Christian Jesus.
The article suggests:
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
Hmmm. The death and resurrection myth prior to Jesus' birth? It would seem this adds to the notion advance some decades ago by a Jewish scholar suggesting this whole Jesus script was a scheme to get Jesus recognized as the Messiah, that Jesus was aware of the things that needd to happen before they happened in order to meet the criteria.
And later:
Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.
But there was, he said, and “Gabriel’s Revelation” shows it.
“His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said. “This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.”
Strange.
Link
Be well
Symbols are not literal. Rainbows existed prior to the flood. If it raind on the N. American continent...or any place...and the sun's light was in the right angle, there would be a rainbow.
Here's where we must try to learn and discover, insteaed of saying "case closed" as Lula argues. We should ask ourselves why Jerome would "choose" this way to translate. It seems to me that the Church at this time was seriously into the growth stage. The early founders of Christianity wanted the text to have a universal appeal. What better way than to universalize the language?
Be well.
Leauki,
Thanks. I am getting somewhat lost in this. I was under the impression that the book Lula was referring to used "world". Is the text Lula referring to an English translation of Greek or Latin?
Hello AD,
I am not suggesting that the Torah mentions a rainbow existing prior to the flood, but rather, that rainbows must have existed prior to the flood without being mentioned. The Torah does point to a mist rising from the ground. Gardens were planted, fields planted and harvested, and so on. I think, outside of scripture, it would be naive in the extreme to think that it didn't rain before the flood of Noah's time. My guess is that God assigned a meaning to a common phenomenon.
IMHO, we cannot take scripture as a linear history. Stories are placed and used as teaching mechanisms.
KFC, The Torah is hardly evidence. Its words on paper, intitial transmitted verbally from memory. I am not basing my statements on "assumptions" but on geologic evidence, biology, and essentially common sense. Moreover, rainbows do not need rain. They can occur in mist.
Are you really suggesting that gardens and fields grew without rain? That dinosaurs lived without rain? Really? Give me a break. The formation of this planet took millions of years. Certainly it rained before man was here to see it, let alone float on it s accumulation in a boat.
Actually you do, thousands and thousands of years of geological and fossil records. the geophysics of planet formation, and well, just plain common sense.
link
Moreover, a recent study suggests acid rain weathered earth's minerals some 4 billion years ago. A tad before Noah.
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