Wow, thanks for the sudden influx of votes. If that was all one person, though, beware of serial voting.
@DanO'Day @BobJones and anybody else who did a flurry of voting today: the serial-vote-reversal script just ran, so some of your votes from today may have been undone.
@Monica Out of interest do you imagine that some Christians mean 'worse' by 'old' in 'Old Testament'? At least in my limited circles that is not the intended meaning at all: we do believe that the 'New Covenant' is 'superior' to the 'Mosaic Covenant' (which Jewish believers may find offensive, I don't know?), but the 'Old Testament' contains both.
The 'New Covenant' is related to the 'covenant of grace/faith God made with Abraham', which of course is also in the 'Old Testament'
'new' is something of a misnomer here, or rather it doesn't mean 'new' in quite the usual sense.
On top of that, although Christians interpret the Tanakh through the lens of the 'New Testament', the reverse is equally true: we interpret the New Testament through the lens of the Tanakh. Much of the NT would be utterly unintelligible without an understanding of the law, prophets and psalms (and to perhaps a lesser degree the other writings).
Hey @MonicaCellio Jack's bringing the subject back up reminds me, I forgot to ping you when I commented the other day. Here's comment #1 of 3, my thoughts at least partly in reply to your comments:
In reading this comment thread, I think I need to update my post to make my argument more clear. I am all for educating people on the proper use of terms, but not at all for forcing one set of terms over another. I would specifically advocate allowing people to use whatever termonology was common in their respective circles and letting the reader interpret. Editing or otherwise imposing terms foreign to their vocabulary would ipso facto endow this site with its' own doctrinal stand: just the thing we are trying to avoid! — Caleb16 hours ago
@MonicaCellio looks like mine were. I learned a valuable lesson I guess. Don't go on 'scoring runs' of reading answers and voting up ones I think are good. Only read a question every 10 minutes I guess
yes I have treated Jude 5 (and the whole book) extensively in my monograph on Jude. The book is now on a supersale: http://www.eisenbrauns.com/item/WASEPISTL
These blogpost may be helpful:
http://diglotting.com/2010/04/06/jude-5/
Best wishes
Tommy
@JackDouglas I was just coming here to ask about that very thing
If it's really him, he really did write THE book on the material. And the blog post is an excellent summary. If it's him, he is literally THE expert on this question: orebromissionsskola.se/viewNavMenu.do?menuID=239
he isn't registered so there is no guarantee he will ever notice a comment from us, nevertheless I think we should try and ask him to summarise the content
@Dan you are the OP so it might be best coming from you: something along the lines of "the blog post you link to perfectly answers my question—it would be a really great if you would be willing to add a summary of it in your own words into your answer: would you be willing to take the time to do that?"
Me or one of the other mods can then back you up with a supporting comment
are you happy to do something like that?
.
then we just leave it for a few days just in case he checks back
@JackDouglas no imagination needed; I've been told by Christians of more than one denomination that their "new" testament superseded ours -- ours was fine in its time but the only way to be right with God ("saved") now is to follow their scripture instead.
So "old" in the sense of "deprecated" -- good in its time but no longer relevant/useful/supported. Like Windows 3.1. :-)
@MonicaCellio I think the amount of attention Christians pay to different parts of their Bible can vary greatly (and there can also be great differences between theory and practice, of course). And I don't just mean the main two divisions. Different parts of the same book can have vastly different levels of focus.
(JWs don't use the terms Old Testament and New Testament, by the way.)
@MonicaCellio it's possible that they are being clumsy with the words 'testament' and 'covenent', or it's possible they are just ignorant. Certainly Jesus and the authors of the 'New' testament had a very high view of the scriptures
(of course they didn't need to have a name other than 'scriptures'—there was only one sort then!)
Jehovah's Witnesses use the standard 66-book Protestant Bible, but usually use their own translation thereof (they do reference other translations from time to time, but generally use The New World Translation). It's fair to say that the NWT is quite, let's say, distinctive in places, and has rec...
> The terminology is slightly different: what is commonly called the "Old Testament" the Witnesses (and the NWT) call the "Hebrew-Aramaic Scriptures"; what is commonly called the "New Testament" they call the "Christian Greek Scriptures" (the word Christian is intended to prevent any possible confusion with the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures). This is, arguably, more neutral terminology than the usual. I like it.
@MonicaCellio not surprising since most Christians don't know their own history. There was a guy by the name of Marcion who made that case in the early Church - he was refuted as a heretic
@TRiG That's a useful and uncontroversial answer imo, +1 from me (though I don't usually vote over there)
@DanO'Day "In a treatment of the literary and text-critical relationship between 2 Peter and Jude, it is argued that the Epistle of Jude has literary priority."
I've often wondered...
@DanO'Day that link has an email address on it: I'll follow up with an email in a few days if we don't here back before...
I've had some success with that approach over on dba.se
@JackDouglas According to the comment, it's slightly inaccurate on the subject of the Majority Text (which was a somewhat tangental aside to my answer which I'd probably be best off removing).
@JackDouglas You may be right about them being sloppy about "testament" vs "covenant". I've definitely heard them say that they don't have to follow all the stuff that's in the "old" one, only the stuff Jesus brought forward (though it was really Paul, right?). So "10 commandments" are in but dietary laws are out, etc. I grok that, particularly in ministering to gentiles (Jews don't say anyone else has to follow the Hebrew bible either, mostly).
But then from there it goes on to salvation through Jesus being "the" right path, as opposed to the right path "for them" -- that now that there is a "new" everybody is supposed to set aside the parts of the "old" that don't apply any more. Perhaps I have merely encountered bad spokesmen.
@MonicaCellio Is this an accurate summary of the Law: 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
@MonicaCellio Many of the disputes and conversations going on in the early church are actually recorded in the letters which form the bulk of the Greek scriptures, and one of the biggies was how much Gentile Christians had to follow Jewish laws (particularly dietary laws and circumcision). Eventually, the decision was made that no one, not even Jewish Christians, had to follow them. But it's interesting to see the traces of the disputes.
@JackDouglas Hillel?
> Jews sometimes cited Leviticus 19: 18 as a summary…of ‘the law’… It was also turned into an epigram: ‘What you hate, do not do to anyone.’ This epigram is found in Tobit 4: 15, and it is attributed to the Pharisee Hillel in the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbath 31a).
@MonicaCellio This (leaving aside the issue of relativism) sounds quite a bit like the Marcion heresy (i.e. Christianity is something completely new); whereas much of the first century debates seemed to revolve around who the true Israelites were
@JackDouglas It is a summary, but not necessarily the summary. The rabbis of the early mishna made many statements of this form (and Jesus would be aware of that), saying things like "all the other laws can be found in the 10 commandments" or "all the other laws boil down to these 3" or Hillel's famous statement (noted by@TRiG) of "what is hateful to you do not do to others; the rest is commentary, now go and study". That last part gets dropped sometimes.
@MonicaCellio My personal (and slightly idiosyncratic) view is that all the instructions in all parts of the Bible are 'Law'—and the 10 commandments have no particular primacy. I don't quite know what the spectrum of belief is among Jews, but 'good' Christians (in my book) would say something more akin to "you are not saved by law, if you are saved, you are saved for law" and certainly not "you need no longer obey law".
The confusion is often made much worse when we fail to differentiate between the appearance of obedience and willing (and joyful) submission
@JackDouglas thanks. Judaism also holds that all the laws in our bible are, well, laws -- not just the 10 called out at Sinai. But we believe that following God's laws (which include loving and having awe of God) does satisfy the covenant.
@MonicaCellio Which is reflected a little later in the passage I quoted earlier,
> Efforts to summarize are not logical exercises. They are attempts to catch the spirit of the law.
E. P. Sanders, Paul (Oxford: OUP, 1991)
[also] (I have not read this blog before. I went looking on Google for that Hillel quote, and this was blog was the first reasonable-looking result. However, the post I referenced was a clarification on an earlier post, and that earlier post is interesting in itself, and largely agrees with what @MonicaCellio is saying.)
I hate to dump a lengthy quote here, but I have a great scholarly resource available on the meaning of this word that gives TONS of extrabiblical quotations. Here are a bunch of places it occurs in other literature:
συνείδησις, εως, ἡ (συνεῖδον)
① awareness of information about someth., ...
I added a bounty to one of my questions as well :)
@JackDouglas @Soldarnal thanks, glad you found it helpful. I've read a lot on Philo and Paul so I had to take that question ;)
at one point in time I was agnostic and I actually believed that much of Christianity was an invention inspired by Philo and other philosophers
It wasn't the study of history that led to my conversion to Christianity in general (altho it certainly led to my conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy), but it has played a big role in sorting things out
The problem is that good history books are dry and long (like those written by Jaroslav Pelikan, for instance) and they assume a lot of background knowledge. Meanwhile, books like "Pagan Christianity" are accessible and short
never mind the fact that it butchers every source it cites and does a hodge-podge of shoddy research
yes I have treated Jude 5 (and the whole book) extensively in my monograph on Jude. The book is now on a supersale: http://www.eisenbrauns.com/item/WASEPISTL
These blogpost may be helpful:
http://diglotting.com/2010/04/06/jude-5/
Best wishes
Tommy
I hate to dump a lengthy quote here, but I have a great scholarly resource available on the meaning of this word that gives TONS of extrabiblical quotations. Here are a bunch of places it occurs in other literature:
συνείδησις, εως, ἡ (συνεῖδον)
① awareness of information about someth., ...
The Library
The Library