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Friday, July 01, 2011

Blasphemy and exaltation

In a religious atmosphere where it is presupposed that God is not a man, one can heap exalted terms, terms normally reserved for God, onto that special man, the Son of Man, and people will not infer that that man is God himself. Over and over, you ignore the crucial points that predictions about YHWH can be fulfilled in his special agent, and that beings other that YHWH can be called by names and titles normally reserved for YHWH - even the proper name, "Yahweh"!

An obvious problem with Tuggy’s contention is that Jesus was executed for blasphemy. That’s multiply-attested in the synoptic gospels. Moreover, the blasphemy charge also crops up in the Fourth Gospel.

Therefore, in the “religious atmosphere” of 1C Palestinian Judaism wherein the Gospels are set, the audience inferred the very thing that Tuggy denies such an audience would infer.

5 comments:

  1. The Internet continues to be great evidence for the fact that people talk too much and write too much and think that their thoughts are profound enough to share. The Internet just amkes it easier.

    I love these people who think they can infer back into the past what the people were thinking all the while ignoring the obvious evidence that destroys their claims.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. What it means has been analyzed by scholars like Craig Evans and Darrel Bock.

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  4. Gents, it is actually pretty unclear what "blasphemy" means for Jesus' contemporaries. Surely claiming to be God himself would count. We need to look carefully at the texts, though, to see just what Jesus is claiming - not jumping to what his enemies infer, enemies consistently portrayed as thoroughly "blind". It's none to clear what else would count - claiming prerogatives supposedly only enjoyed by God (e.g. forgiving sins), and perhaps even falsely claiming to be the Messiah. There have been big papers written recently by evangelical scholars about what the term "blasphemy" could mean.

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  5. Craig Evans and Darrel Bock

    Right - I haven't had a chance to read that yet.

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