tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post1803104109066241364..comments2024-03-27T17:15:37.606-04:00Comments on Triablogue: Jews and JesusRyanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17809283662428917799noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-7585841014711243992019-11-15T01:29:21.799-05:002019-11-15T01:29:21.799-05:00Thanks, Lydia. I'm traveling but might try to ...Thanks, Lydia. I'm traveling but might try to reply when I return. I think I agree or at least don't disagree with a lot of your points. Regardless much appreciated for the clarification! Hawkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01142879704651632453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-15917120481169094922019-11-14T21:37:24.952-05:002019-11-14T21:37:24.952-05:00Having listened to hours and hours of Michael Heis...Having listened to hours and hours of Michael Heiser's material (and trust me, all those hours constitute a tiny fraction of the total material available!) regarding Jewish binitarianismā¬, it seems belief in a divine Messiah - or else, a human who would be raised to divinity, or an angel - was present in various Jewish groups.<br /><br />The various candidates for 'Malak YHWH' and 'One Like A Son of Man' included Adam, Enoch, Moses, Elijah, Michael, Yahoel/Jehoel, Metatron and so on. The only innovation the Christians believed was that Jesus of Nazareth was the correct candidate.<br /><br />Ever wonder why the NT writers don't seem to spend any time addressing how YHWH can be embodied or multiplural? Unitarians would argue that it's because the NT doesn't actually teach those things. I would argue it's because Jews already accepted those things - for the NT writers to argue such would be like arguing that YHWH created the universe, it's preaching to the choir.Scotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16155328940062919187noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-10575044587049611432019-11-13T18:54:41.064-05:002019-11-13T18:54:41.064-05:00Hawk, yes, that's right. I don't think any...Hawk, yes, that's right. I don't think any of those groups you name had the expectation that the Messiah would be both God and man--a man, born to a real mother, etc. I don't think that theophany-like passages in the OT (e.g, the three figures appearing to Abraham) give this expectation, since none of those figures had a human history, even if one of them was a theophany.<br /><br />I think this was something that they had to learn. <br /><br />I realize that that means that we probably disagree about how clearly God had taught this in the Old Testament.<br /><br />I think this is useful, btw, in countering certain misimpressions about historical probability. Example: It's often said that if Jesus told people not to tell others that he was the Messiah, he "wouldn't have" said that he was God as clearly as he does in Jn. 8:58 and 10:30. Michael Licona has made this arg., tho' he's shown ambivalence about whether he wants to endorse it outright or not. It's a kind of armchair history argument against the historicity of the unique Johannine claims to deity. Once we recognize that the people in Jesus' audiences would have been far more likely to get a confused idea about his intentions from a claim to Messiahship than from a claim to deity and would have reacted far differently, this arg. collapses. In fact, we see it right in John 10. In vs. 24 they *want* him to make a plain claim to Messiahship. In vs. 31 they try to stone him for making a claim to be one with the Father. That was not what they wanted. They clearly don't think the former entails the latter. Jesus had some justifiable concern that a plain claim to Messiahship in various places would lead to an attempt to make him an earthly king (John 6:15). He didn't have to worry about that with a claim to be one with the Father or to be the "I am." That was just an inflammatory claim that the audience regarded as blasphemous. So the a priori arg. about what Jesus "would have" done based on the Messianic secret shows a failure to make an important distinction.Lydia McGrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-41528123085254638332019-11-13T17:35:20.041-05:002019-11-13T17:35:20.041-05:00Lydia,
I think the large majority of Jews didn...Lydia,<br /><br />I think the large majority of Jews didn't expect a Divine Messiah, though we can't say that all of them didn't.<br /><br />As you mentioned, that's a different issue than what they <i>should</i> have expected. Given what Jesus says about his generation's corrupt nature, false priorities, ignorance of scripture, failure to understand the signs of the times, etc., it seems that he considered their faulty view of Messianic prophecy highly culpable.<br /><br />And it should be noted that Messianic expectations aren't all that's relevant here. We use terms like "Messianic prophecy" today to designate material that could be divided into a larger number of categories. Ancient Jews wouldn't have to have known that a passage was referring to the Messiah, or even that there would <i>be</i> a Messiah, in order to have been responsible for recognizing how evidentially significant it was that Jesus' life aligned so well with the passage in question. I often make that point in response to modern skeptics. If they want to deny that Isaiah 9 is Messianic, claim that the Servant Songs were about Israel in their original context, deny that Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy is Messianic, etc., they still have to explain why Jesus' life lines up so well with those passages. It's not the sort of thing you'd expect to happen by naturalistic means. So, part of the issue here is what ancient Jews considered Messianic predictions to begin with. Even if the passages they identified as Messianic didn't refer to the Deity of the figure in question, we'd have to go on to ask what those Jews made of other passages they didn't identify as Messianic, which seem to predict some sort of Divine figure.<br /><br />And agnosticism would have been one of the options on the table for ancient Jews, as it is in any generation. I wouldn't assume that every ancient Jew, or even a majority, had reached a conclusion, much less a confident conclusion, about every relevant Old Testament passage. Many would have been undecided on some issues while having opinions with differing degrees of confidence on other issues. Widespread confidence that the Messiah would be a descendant of David or rule over a worldwide kingdom, for example, could be accompanied by less confidence, or even agnosticism or wavering, about the different implications of a passage like Isaiah 9:6 or the Suffering Servant prophecy. We see that with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, for example. It can be misleading, then, to refer to the more widespread and more confident opinions of ancient Jews as representative of the entirety of ancient Jewish Messianic views. Even some post-Christian Jewish sources acknowledge that there seems to be a higher figure involved in some of these Old Testament passages, a figure like what Christians see there. If even post-Christian Jews would sometimes acknowledge that fact, surely Jews at the time of Jesus and earlier were even more open to it.Jason Engwerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17031011335190895123noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-26289600529296416492019-11-13T15:46:02.572-05:002019-11-13T15:46:02.572-05:00If I may, I have a question for clarification, tho...If I may, I have a question for clarification, though maybe it should be self evident. Of course, the Jews of Jesus' day seemed to have had different expectations about the Messiah depending on the Jewish group in question. I guess you'd say none of the Jewish groups had the expectation that the Messiah would be God and man? Would that include "groups" like Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph? Jesus' own disciples before his resurrection (e.g. Mt 16:16)?Hawkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01142879704651632453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-65349778776914672222019-11-13T15:23:16.646-05:002019-11-13T15:23:16.646-05:00Wd. you concur then (setting aside the question of...Wd. you concur then (setting aside the question of what the OT really *should* be interpreted as saying and what the Holy Spirit was saying in those passages) that the Jews of Jesus' day did not expect the Messiah to be both God and man? Because quite frankly, I think that's obviously true.Lydia McGrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-39420103559156912182019-11-13T12:28:18.519-05:002019-11-13T12:28:18.519-05:00Lydia McGrew wrote:
"Craig doesn't have ...Lydia McGrew wrote:<br /><br /><b><i>"Craig doesn't have to be saying here that Jesus *didn't* fulfill OT prophecies but simply that he was to some extent understandably unexpected in terms of the OT."</i></b><br /><br />Craig has gone further than that. See the thread <a href="http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/05/assessing-craigshapiro-dialogue.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>, where Steve and I respond to Craig's interview with Ben Shapiro. I also wrote a Facebook response <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jason.engwer.3/posts/2333620930010830" rel="nofollow">here</a>.<br /><br />You wrote:<br /><br /><b><i>"So I think it's actually correct to say that it was new and unexpected for the Messiah to be God and hence one kind of does need to say what Craig says--that it was somewhat understandable that the Jews of Jesus' time took him to be a blasphemer, but that God seems to have vindicated him by raising him up, and this was why the early Jewish Christians did shift their ideas and accept that a real man could be both God and the Messiah."</i></b><br /><br />Whether the Old Testament refers to a Divine Messiah and whether Jews just before and during Jesus' day recognized that fact are two different issues. We've argued in depth that the Old Testament does refer to the Messiah as God.<br /><br />The resurrection is a major, foundational vindication of God, but it was accompanied by many other lines of evidence, which people were accountable for recognizing (e.g., Luke 24:25, Acts 2:22).<br /><br />You write:<br /><br /><b><i>"That to my mind is better than some other places where Craig tries to make Jesus sound 'more Jewish' (as scholars conceive of it) by downplaying the explicitness of his claims to deity."</i></b><br /><br />Yes, it's important to not downplay that.Jason Engwerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17031011335190895123noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-70690903367930509882019-11-13T08:36:56.376-05:002019-11-13T08:36:56.376-05:00I didn't see the debate with Shapiro, and I of...I didn't see the debate with Shapiro, and I often criticize Craig, but I would actually defend the phrase "new and unexpected in Jesus." Craig doesn't have to be saying here that Jesus *didn't* fulfill OT prophecies but simply that he was to some extent understandably unexpected in terms of the OT. And I think that's true. In fact, I think it's better than strained attempts to support the idea that the OT Messiah would be God--something that occasionally Craig himself succumbs to in an attempt to find cryptic high Christology in just the "son of man" phrase of Jesus. That's a very popular thing to do now--to imply that the Jewish son of man was sort of "almost God" anyway, so Jesus was not really doing anything new--or only a little bit new, or something--by teaching his own deity.<br /><br />That seems very dubious to me. So I think it's actually correct to say that it was new and unexpected for the Messiah to be God and hence one kind of does need to say what Craig says--that it was somewhat understandable that the Jews of Jesus' time took him to be a blasphemer, but that God seems to have vindicated him by raising him up, and this was why the early Jewish Christians did shift their ideas and accept that a real man could be both God and the Messiah. That to my mind is better than some other places where Craig tries to make Jesus sound "more Jewish" (as scholars conceive of it) by downplaying the explicitness of his claims to deity. And also, it was not far-fetched for the Jews of Jesus' day to expect the Messiah to found an immediate earthly kingdom. That was an understandable reading of the prophecies. So it was rather unexpected that Jesus didn't do so. Lydia McGrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6789188.post-22389468496025889012019-11-13T05:55:23.399-05:002019-11-13T05:55:23.399-05:00Craig does a lot of good work, but holds too high ...Craig does a lot of good work, but holds too high a view of the significance of that work and too low a view of the significance of what he doesn't specialize in. We have good evidence for Jesus aside from the resurrection, and we have good evidence for the Old Testament that's independent of Jesus. We've provided many examples in our posts on Biblical prophecy, for example. See <a href="http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2011/03/evidence-of-biblical-prophecy.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>, and notice that some of the prophecies of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Daniel, etc. have substantial evidential value independent of Jesus. Furthermore, the non-resurrection evidence for Jesus is far better than Craig suggests. Think, for example, of how Jesus has fulfilled many prophecies in ancient and modern times in ways that even most non-Christians would acknowledge, as I discussed in <a href="http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/09/arguing-for-prophecy-fulfillment-from.html" rel="nofollow">a recent post</a>. Or think of the significance of his fulfillment of prophecies that are more disputed, for which we have good evidence of his fulfilling them, even though they're more controversial (Davidic ancestry, the Bethlehem birthplace, the Suffering Servant prophecy, etc.). Or the cumulative effect of Christian miracles documented by Craig Keener and others. I'm only giving a few examples here, but they're more than enough to make the point. There's a large amount of evidence for Christianity (and pre-Christian Judaism in particular) outside of Craig's areas of specialization, evidence Craig often underestimates. He could focus on Jesus' resurrection, and try to give people more assurance and help them in other ways by discussing the resurrection, without making the resurrection out to be more significant than it is and without underestimating other lines of evidence. There's nothing wrong with specializing in the resurrection. But that's not all that Craig is doing.Jason Engwerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17031011335190895123noreply@blogger.com