(June 18, 2024 at 5:24 pm)Questor Wrote: I come from a secular Jewish family that neither went to churches or synagogues, and due to their inherited fear of persecution, kept none of the Jewish Festivals, and attended Christian Churches in their childhoods only until they reached the age of responsibility, primarily as a means of finding social acceptance. They kept a surface adherence to Christmas and Easter, (presents and chocolates) and avoided all mention of G-d, but then, they were born in the 1920’s, and Judaism had not yet attained sympathy from most Christians in America. They wished to be seen to assimilate, yet, as had all their forebears, always quietly married other Jews. What I know of Judaism I was taught inadvertantly by my family, in things I was directly taught, and what was let drop, and then furtively hidden thereafter.
I had a few interactions with Christian communities that scared me to death, one in my childhood at the age of eight, as I had no real awareness of what they were talking about, and I was not encouraged by my family to gain such awareness. The second occurrence was in the seventies, when at the age of fifteen I was ‘invited’ into a local independent church when baptisms were handed out rather automatically to anyone requesting them, and which did not require any real knowledge of more than what Yeshua’s death meant to anyone, Jew or Gentile, in regard to what is commonly called ‘saving grace’, and is the justification of anyone who trusts in Yeshua to be remitted punishment of their sins in breaking Torah, as Yeshua had already died for the sins committed.
The whole notion of atonement by proxy is ridiculously ill-considered. You should give it a good hard look because it's every bit a Greco-Roman construct as the ones that you, quite rightly, criticize below. Yeshua was an apocalyptic street preacher and he got tacked up by the Romans for his troubles. That caused some serious issues for his church because you can't be the Messiah if you're dead, so Saul of Tarsus and the church fathers that followed him had to seriously rebrand and rework their saviour. Much of what you see in the divergence of the early Christian church from its Jewish roots isn't simply misinterpretation of language and culture, which there is a plentitude of, but also a necessary RetCon of Yesua into Jesus to give him an entirely new purpose.
The notion that somebody can die to atone for another person's sins, especially sins that haven't been committed yet, is just plain silly. Though in fairness, most of those sins are bloody idiotic in and of themselves, but two imbecilities do not make a truth.
Quote:This, in and of itself, is not a conversion to Christianity, as anyone with sincere belief in Yeshua can baptize someone who desires it.
I had read little of the Scriptures, and the Apostolic Writings, at that point, but I understood the gist of the matter. The events of my baptism were enough to keep me away from most any church from that point onwards, and when I did occasionally seek information at one, having read the entire Bible, any question I asked got me promptly kicked out, because I saw the oddities in the extremely imperfect translations from the original writings into Greek that most people call error, but are readily explained by an understanding of the original meanings of words that are very specific in their interpretation into Greek, but rather more attenuated in Hebrew and Aramaic. It does help to have some understanding of the Hebraic mindset that I seem to have picked up in part from my family, and in part from comparing Greek/English translations of the Scriptures to the Aramaic/English and Hebraic/English translations of them, but rigorous research is needed, seeking back into the writings of scholarly Jews who never met a Christian, and yet followed in Yeshua’s footsteps. They present a far different understanding of who Yeshua was understood to be than Christians do, who are sadly untaught in just how the Greek Church Fathers and the various decrees by Constantine changed what was a very Jewish sect of Judaism into the Greco-Roman based religion it is today.
What is most fascinating is the work of G-d through the Christian Churches, in that many of those that were ill taught later simply read their Bibles, and to the extent it is applied to Non-Jews, walk very uprightly in Torah. Unfortunately, most Christians are taught adherence to the outward forms of the Christian religion, and never get that far, leading to what is seen as blatant hypocrisy, but is a false assumption that Torah itself no longer matters to G-d, and thus need not be followed.
The only fault that I can find with your criticism of the Romanization of the early Christian church is that you're probably being too lenient. There are entire traditions in there that were simply invented from nothing. Now you simply need to apply that same rigour to your own beliefs.
We know that the notion of substitutionary atonement was developed by the Christian church to give their savior a job once he became unemployed on account of dying. It's yet another load of bollocks cooked up by people who had only the faintest notion of what Judaism was about and probably cared even less.
As for the god of Jewish scripture, we know that he is a syncretic mess created when El was fused with Yahweh. Ironically, Yahweh wasn't even a Canaanite god. You're worshipping a foreign import. El was an older, wiser deity and head of the Canaanite pantheon, whereas Yahweh was a red-handed deity of storms and battle. The result is the schizophrenic deity of Juadaism and the OT, guiding his chosen people one moment and glorying in destruction the next. It's also the reason that Yahweh could never tolerate Ba'al, who was the native Canaanite deity of being a murderous bastard. Ba'al loses out in the end and is supplanted/absorbed by Yahweh and gets painted as a villain. The untidy bits about El's wife and children make for a hilarious read too.
