posted on Apr, 21 2011 @ 04:57 PM
Hi Crimsonhead –
By ‘God’ presumably you mean YHWH the post Exilic clan god of Yisro’el? You did know, didn‘t you, that the ‘old testament’ is rife with
literature stolen (or more politely, ‘adapted’) from the myriad of non Yahwistic cults of the many Canaanite and Levantine gods that were
amalgamated into a single deity (of sorts) by Ezra in the 5th century BCE?
Or by ‘God’ do you mean ELOHIM? Or do you mean EL Shaddai? Or do you mean the pagan god Ashur, (the god of the Assyrian invaders. Cc. 722 BCE)
you know, the one with the 4 faces (one like unto an Eagle, one like a Son of Man, one like an Ox, and one like a Lion – sound familiar? If not,
rRead Hezekiel chapter 1 and chapter 10 then)?
Or do you mean the Canaanite god El-Elyon? Or do you mean the Elamite ‘Eloah’ of Job’s poem? Or do you mean El-Berit? Or just plain old EL, the
Bull god of the cannanites? These were all different preIsraelite and Levantine Canaanite clan gods that were merged into a single clan god by the
time of Ezra (c. 440 BCE) just as before in Egypt the gods Amon and Re were joined into a single god to become you guessed it, Amon-Re.
When separate priestly cults of one clan-god joined (or were forced to join by politics / war !) other priestly cult centers of other gods in
antiquity, that is what you get double barreled clan gods as a single deity
The same would be when 'Susan Smith' marries 'Tommy Jones' she wouldd then sometimes write her name out as Susan Smith-Jones – or when LUCENT is
bought out by ALCATEL, they demanded that the new entity be called LUCENT-ALCATEL as part of the agreement, etc.)
But you seem to bandy about the name ‘god’ as if it has any meaning at all, so do be specific as to which ancient clan-god you refer in your
posts.
By your generically using the term ‘God’ always to refer to say YHWH -would be like me discussing American History and always referring to, say,
Grover Cleveland as The President, as if other presidents never ever existed before or after.
But there were many US Presidents, all with different names, and we must use their names in order to differentiate between them.
Names are very useful things...use them and use them carefully !
Before examining the canon of the Jews before Javneh in AD 90, try to understand that what later became ‘Christianity’ (or as scholars to-day
say, ‘all the various Christianities’ that sprouted up in Asia and later in Europe) was a tiny Jewish Messianic Movement that was in full swing
off expansioneven while the Dead Sea Scrolls were being copied (the caves were sealed in AD 68, barely 5 years after the death of Sha’oul of Tarsus
in Cilicia, aka Paul) and that the original followers of R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean Nazir (aka Iesous) were all Palestinian Jews who had
direct contact with such Messianic groups, and shared much of their literature.
These original ‘Ebionim’ (poor ones) headed up by Yakkov bar Yosef (ha Tsaddiq or ‘James the Lord’s Brother, called the Righteous’) after
the execution of his brother for armed sedition against the state during ‘The Insurrection’ (AD 36, at Pesach during the 100th anniversary of the
Invasion of Judaea by the Romans in BCE 63), were also called Nazoreans because they chose their Meqqaberim (‘overseers’ Greek ‘Epi-skopoi’
i.e. bishops in English) from the blood line of the Daviddic Dynasty (Natzir - ‘the Branch of David’ see Zechariah 6:9 Behold the Man who is
called The Nazir – he is the one who shall rebuild the Temple !’ - sound familiar? )
The Nazorean Ebionim were the original ‘Christian’ blood-liners, and had the ‘authority’ to bark orders to leadwers/founders of other splinter
Messianic ‘Chirsitian’ groups, including Paul’s gentile churches in Asia Minor much to his chagrin (read the opening of Acts chapter 15 and the
vitriol against the Nazorean disciples he penned in Galatians chapter 2) at least before Rome ground Judaea into powder in AD 70. After that most of
the Nazoreans were killed off, and Paul’s anti Kosher anti Circumcision, Anti James anti Ebionite ‘Christian’ churches took over with their own
peculiar theology of ‘salvatioin by faith alone’ (as opposed to salvation by Ma’aseh / Mitzvoth or ‘salvation by works’ as we see in the
‘Epistle of James’)
A close reading of the Dead Sea scrolls shows that the Nazoreans and Ebionites were so close as to almost be of the same group. One of the nicknames
of the Qumran covenanters who wrote the scrolls was in fact the very word, haEvionim (‘the poor ones’) – so Nazorean (‘Jesus-James’) early
Ebionite Christianity and the Scrolls were two groups very closely related (Paul was a few steps removed, having been born in what is to-day
Turkey)
The fact that Shaul of Tarsus in Cilicia (aka Paul) and the writer of the book of Acts described the earliest Christians as ‘Followers of the Way’
should tell you something about the Messianic Ossim (Gk. Essenoi) and the Ebionite-Nazorean Christian community some of whose members certainly came
from their number.
Therefore it is not very surprising then to discover that ‘Yohanon bar Zechariah’ (aka John the Baptist) preached his camel hair draped Messianic
message ‘in the Wilderness of Judaea’ = the small area around Qumran (ancient ‘Secaccah’) the exact spot where the Dead Sea Scrolls were
being copied, and that the message of the Qumran Zadokites (who went by 22 different titles, e.g. The Sons of Light, The Followers of the Way,
‘Ossim- Doers of the Law, the Pious Ones, etc.) found amongst the scrolls overlap Nazorean Ebionite Christian doctrine very closely at times (read
the Epistle of James in the NT, which reads nearly like a Greek-translated Dead Sea Scroll in peculiar vocabulary, content, Weltanschauung, sentence
length, phraseology, theology and ‘style of utterance’)
As for the Judaeans regarding ‘the scroll of the book of the Words of Henoch’ (i.e. I Henoch chapters 1-36 and also chapters 72-104) as
‘holy’ (i.e. ‘defiling the hands’ i.e. pre-canonical) we only have to look at their ‘pesherim’ (‘line by line commentaries on
Scripture’) found among the Dead Sea scroll material –
Judaeans of the 1st century (both BC and CE) wrote these lengthy ‘commentaries’ on their holy scriptures in separate scrolls (‘pesherim’)
but never on books they did NOT consider ‘defiling the hands’; so we have pesherim on the Psalms, pesherim on the Torah, pesherim on some of the
prophets e.g. Habakkuk, , Nahum and all the three of the Isaiahs (chapters 1-39 (proto-Isaiah), 40-55 (deutero-Is) and chapters 56-66 (trito-Isaiah)
were all three penned by different hands) etc.
Here is an example of the PESHER style: with the pesher portion written in [brackets]
e.g. As Moses wrote, ‘The Angels off Heaven shall fight with you, therefore have no fear of them…’
[Interpreted, this refers to all the Sons of the covenant of Light who shall fight all the sons of Darkness in the Last Days when all the Sons of
Belial shall come to naught…’]
Sometimes in a given pesher in the scrolls, the actual word for ‘interpreted’ is left out at the beginning of the formula, thus pesher might
begin with [‘now these are evildoers who shall fight against all the Followers of the Way in the Last Days,even they who follow after the lusts of
their own hearts…]
And this is exactly what we see in the very dead sea scroll sounding text of Jude 1:14-16 quoting The Scroll of the Words of Henoch in the Last Days
as canonical holy ‘defiling the hands’ authoritative scripture worthy of Pesher treatment–they never wrote pesherim on any text that was not –
and just to show you the PESHER portion of the text, I have put it in Brackets below: (but it would help you see what I am talking about if you could
read 1st century Koine Greek !)
QUOTE : Epistle of Jude vv. 14-16
Even Henoch the Seventh generation from Adam, wrote when he prophesied of these men ,
Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, in order to execute judgment upon all sinful flesh and to reveal to the ungodly among them
of all their wicked deeds which the sinners have committed, and of all their hard words which the ungodly evil doers have spoken against him.
[Now these are the Murmurers, the complainers and the walkers after their own lusts; their mouth speaks boastful words, having men's persons in
admiration for the sake of gain…]
And what did scholars find lying among the pesherim of the prophets among the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Shock and Awe !
They found thousands of fragments of ‘pesherim’, many pesherim clearly written to comment on the Scroll of the Words of Henoch and also hundreds
of fragments of ‘pesherim’ on the Testament of Moses (‘Book of Jubilees’) and many fragments ‘pesherim’ on the Testament of the 12
Patriarchs lying right beside fragments of ‘pesherim’ on the prophet Joel and Amos (all in the highly secretive Cave 4 at Qumran, the contents
which are even now not completely published…)
All of which show beyond any reasonable doubt that that the Dead Sea Scroll Messianic Covenanters (Essenoi or Heb. ‘Ossim’ – ‘Doers’ of the
Law aka ‘The Followers of the Way’ etc.) regarded The Words of Henoch and The Book of Jubilees (=Testament of Moses) and Testament of the 12
Patriarchs as ‘canonical’ in their own minds (there was never a more or less official worldwide Council of Jews on this subject of what exact
books ‘defiled the hands’ before the Rabinnic Council of Javneh in AD 90 however).
So there IS proof after all (not as you claim 'ZERO PROOF' - you need to look at what is known as Evidence) that the Qumran Dead Sea Scroll sect as
late as AD 68 regarded the later 'non canonical' (addditional books of the 'bible') as 'canonical' as worthy of Pesher treatment, just as the
Coptic Nazorrean Ebionite Christians living in Alexandria (one of the earliest and MOST important of all the Christian movements beginning in the 1st
century AD) as well as the Syriac Nazorean churches regarded Jubilees, Testament of the 12 and I Henoch as 'canonical' i.e. defiling the hands -
despite the fact that Javneh Council rebbes rejected them.
Don't forget that they were not alone: the compilers of the 4th century CODEX SINAITICUS also included in their 'canonical bible' a few additional
books from the OT Apocrypha-Pseudipigrapha as well e.g. 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach
(=Ecclesiasticus) - all of which were dropped from the Protestant and Jewish canon (i.e. eventually..)
I’ll leave your jejune discussion re: of course Jesus had a bible, he’s god’s son !’ out for now since it does not warrant intelligent
discussion – you seem to think that since you believe he is ‘god’s son’ (whatever that means) he must have had the same book you read to-day
between two covers to work with –utterly illogical thinking and flies in the face of the facts that scholars have discovered in the wilderness of
Judaea – scrolls of the Hebrew scriptures that were being copied out while ‘Jesus’ was still alive – and the versions of all those 800 books
do not match very closely the much more select list of later versions that were voted in post Javneh ‘as those which defile the hands’ by any
stretch !
Here’s your own reading list – so you too can catch up on things (all available on Amazon.com) just so you’ll know I’m not just making stuff
up out of thin air—most are written for the ‘general reader’ except the 1st one which is more for scholarly types conversant in ancient and
modern languages – there’s 500 more books for you to read, but this is a start…
THE EARLIEST TEXT OF THE HEBREW BIBLE (edited by Adrian Shenker, Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta GA, 2003 - ISBN #1-58983-081-4)
RESCUING THE BIBLE FROM FUNDAMENTALISM (by Rev. John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark NJ, 1991) [published by Harper San Francisco, ISBN
#0-06-067509]
THE ORTHODOX CORRUPTION OF SCRIPTURE (by Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, NY, 1993 ISBN # 0-19-508078-5] and also by Ehrman, JESUS
INTERRUPTED, pub. Harper-Collins, 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-117393-6]
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS and the JEWISH ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY (by Carsten Peter Thiede, 2001, pub. by Palgrave, NY ISBN - #0-312-29361-5]