Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet...

I suggest you read: "Jesus the apocalyptic prophet of the new millenium" by Bart D. Ehrman. He goes about to prove that Jesus was nothing more than an eschatological/doomsday preacher who predicted that the end will come in the lifetime of his disciples. (View Mark 13:30) In the rest of Mark, the term generation is used as in lifetime, although generation could also mean humanity in ancient Greek.

Ehrman is a textual critic who uses all the possible texts available in order to discern what the historical Jesus really stood for. He analyzes the Gospels as Greco-Roman biographies, which they were, and analyzes them as the type of texts they were. If somebody read for instance Sein Language by Jerry Seinfeld, people will know to read it as a comedy. Just like the Gospels, one in the ancient world will read it as a Greco-Roman biography. If you want to discuss this thesis further, i'll be more than happy to debate it with any of you.

Here's some good information on the apocalyptic theory. It just should give you a brief synopsis of it..........

Apocalypticism Explained
Jesus and John the Baptist - John Collins


Jesus and John the Baptist I think can accurately be described as either as eschatological or even apocalyptic prophets. Meaning that they were people who expected an abrupt and decisive change, that you might describe as the manifestation of the kingdom of God. Now you can quarrel as to whether apocalyptic is quite the right word for them, but they at least had that much in common with most apocalyptic literature, that they expected some big overturning. Now, one has to realize, though, that there were many kinds of people in Palestine in the first century, or around the turn of the era, who expected some big upheaval, who expected some massive change. And within that umbrella, they might have disagreed most vehemently with each other. Many of the Pharisees might have had apocalyptic beliefs. Might have expected the resurrection of the dead and a great overturning of the status quo, but they and the Essenes hated each other, basically. What makes the difference, for an apocalyptic group, is not whether you believe that there was an end coming, but who you think will be vindicated at the end. You all believe that there will be a judgment, but the question is, "What will be the criteria for the judgment.? Whose interpretation will stand?"


PAUL BOYER

Is it fair to describe John the Baptist as an apocalyptic preacher?


Boyer is the Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

(more about Boyer)
I think the texts that have survived in Christian scripture certainly present John as viewing Christ as the figure who will bring on the kingdom, who will bring about this glorious moment of transformation. What John actually said, who John actually was, what his message was, is very difficult to recover at this point, but his role in the Christian scenario certainly has been that of foretelling the coming of the Messiah, and that then is a step toward the ultimate triumph of righteousness.

Did Jesus himself believe the ending was near?

There are certainly passages in the Gospels that make it clear that Jesus is anticipating an imminent moment of apocalypse. That the end is very near. Certainly the earliest Christians took away from his message the belief that his return would occur in their own life time. And in his final sermon to his disciples before his arrest, when he's asked, "What are the signs of the end times?" He tells them about wars and conflict and wickedness and evil, that then ends with the promise, "All these things shall be fulfilled in your own time. So yes." ...

something

It was a very serious issue for the early church because Christ after all said to his disciples, "This generation shall not pass away before all of these things have been fulfilled." That's a fairly explicit promise. And there's considerable evidence that the early Christian church was rooted in an intense apocalyptic anticipation. That indeed the end could come, at any moment. And when the decades past, and the first generation did pass away and the Second Coming did not occur, Christianity went through a sort of major period of re-assessment. And what emerged from that I think was a reinterpretation of these apocalyptic texts, taking a much longer view of things, and in fact the early church as it becomes institutionalized in Rome discourages apocalyptic speculation. They viewed it as dangerous, and basically take the view that Christ's kingdom will gradually unfold over time. There will be a culmination of righteousness at some point in the future. But we don't know the precise details. So you can see a quite dramatic change in Christian theology from the very earliest Christians to the medieval church.


James Tabor


Tabor is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

(more about Tabor)
paul

paul

The best evidence we have as to what the followers of Jesus thought about the imminence of the end after his death is clearly Paul. We have very early letters from Paul. They date from the 50s AD and they're first hand, they're autobiographical. They're undisputed. And they say the most startling things. For example in First Corinthians, which we date about 54 AD, Paul says that it's better not to get married. The end of all things is at hand. In view of the present distress that he thinks is coming on the world, he's actually advising people, "Slaves, remain a slave. Don't try to really change the social order, because everything, very rapidly, is coming to an end." One of his phrases is that "the appointed time has grown very short." It's a phrase right out of the Book of Daniel, about the appointed time, the time of the end. He's our earliest and best evidence. So that tells us that in the 50s, around the Mediterranean world, Christian communities are sprouting up, believing that Jesus is the messiah. That he's going to come again, probably in their lifetime and that they shouldn't really worry too much about their economic and social order, and even their marital state, because the end is coming so soon. ...

What did Jesus warn about the end time?

When you read the gospels and try to discern what Jesus actually said about the end, particularly what we call the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, he really says two things. One's very specific and one's more general. The specific thing he predicts is right out of the Book of Daniel and that is that a foreign power would invade Palestine, presumably Roman, because that's his time, but would set up what he calls a desolating sacrilegious statue of some type in the very temple, the Jerusalem Temple, the Jewish Temple. That's the specific thing. And he says, "When you see this, leave Judah, people should flee, they should go to the mountains. Don't even go back in your house, then everything will come to an end." As far as when this is going to come, that's the more general prophecy. He simply says, "This generation will not pass till all of these things are fulfilled." Now that statement of his caused a great deal of problems for the early Christians. If a generation is forty years and it's been fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred years, how do we read that? It created a kind of a crisis, I think, for the Christians. The end should have come and yet it didn't. ...

If you look at some of the later letters of some the New Testament, Second Peter for example, he begins to say something rather amazing. "A day with God is a thousand years, and a thousand years is a day," which is this typical kind of adjustment--it's only been one day, but maybe a day is longer than we think, so how do we really know? Even in the later letters of Paul, which we think were written by a Paulean school actually, Timothy and Titus, you don't find any more waiting for the end, we find Paul talking about his own death and then he says, "And in that day, whenever that might be, I will come before Jesus to be judged." But he's not telling anybody any more "don't get married." He's establishing a system of church government. It looks like the movement is more in for the longer haul. We don't find those sorts of apocalyptic statements in some of the later books. ...


PAULA FREDRIKSEN

Can you convey the atmosphere of the Book of Revelation?


Fredriksen is a William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University.

(more about Fredriksen)
I think that it's impossible to look at the New Testament evidence and read it as a non-apocalyptic text. Most Christians, or most Christians I hang around with who are academics, have no problem looking at the New Testament and seeing it as the language of authenticity, nice ethics, doing good and being good. But in fact if you look at the idea of the Kingdom of God as it functions in the first century, and the Kingdom of God as the phrase is attributed to Jesus in the New Testament text, the way the Kingdom of God is used in the letters of Paul who stands closer to Jesus than the authors of the gospels do, that idea is an apocalyptic idea. ... I think that when Jesus says, "Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand," he means something. For him to have been understood by his own Jewish contemporaries he must have meant what they meant by that phrase. And when we look at the broad range of evidence we have, the Kingdom of God means the end of normal time, and the beginning of a reign of goodness and peace. Yes, I think Jesus was apocalyptic. ...

There's a rebellion against Rome in the first century. It breaks out in 66. It finally terminates in 74. And in the course of the revolt against Rome, in the year 70 Jerusalem and the Temple are utterly destroyed. This is a tremendous watershed, not only in the history of Judaism but also in what will become the history of Christianity. The Temple's destruction is something that immediately resonates, if you have a bible. Because the Roman destruction of Jerusalem immediately sets up a vibration with the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem half a millennium earlier. So once you have those two events, you have the re-articulation of the apocalyptic idea. ... In the aftermath of the revolt, with the destruction of the Temple, many Jews, including those Jews who were Christian, interpreted the destruction of the second Temple as an apocalyptic signal that the end of time is at hand. And that's what we get in the gospel of Mark. ...

The gospel of Mark is the shortest, sparest, most muscular, most tightly-written of the four canonical gospels. ... What the gospel of Mark does, the evangelist lines up Jesus' prophecy of the coming Kingdom of God with the apocalyptic event that Mark knows happened: the Temple is destroyed. And what he does is put into the mouth of Jesus the prophecy that the Temple will be destroyed. This is in Mark 13. ... What Mark's Jesus talking about, is a reference to the Book of Daniel. That when the temple is destroyed, the Kingdom of God will arrive. And that's what Mark has his Jesus announcing. But Mark is a Christian Jew, not a non-Christian Jew. So what the Kingdom of God means for Mark is not only the destruction of the Temple as the immediate foregoing event before the kingdom comes; he weds the idea of the Kingdom of God with the Second Coming of Jesus ... .

If we take Jesus of Nazareth as the starting point for Christianity, Christianity is apocalyptic in its origin. If we take Paul's letters as the starting point of the New Testament, then the earliest textual level, the kernel, if you will, of the New Testament collection is apocalyptic. If we take the New Testament canon as beginning with Matthew, but ending with Apocalypse, then the entire New Testament canon is apocalyptic. In other words, apocalypticism is Christianity. That's what distinguishes it from other forms of Judaism in the first and second centuries. Apocalypticism is normative. ... It's a perpetual possibility within Christianity itself. If you think of the shape of the Christian story, Jesus doesn't only come once. He was crucified the first time he came. He has to come back a second time to finish what he started. This is the point that Paul makes in First Corinthians 15. That the Kingdom hasn't been established until Christ comes back. ... So if you will, in the Christian idea of history, as opposed to the Jewish idea of history, which is its foundation, the church lives in this charged period between two poles of the First and Second Coming, so this idea of the Second Coming is intrinsic to the idea of Jesus Christ as a universal savior. And in that sense, it's available constantly. In antiquity in particular, the vivid belief in a Second Coming was traditional Christianity. It seems otherwise to us, because Christianity had another fifteen centuries to develop. When I was being trained for my first communion, way back in the 1950s, I certainly wasn't taught to stay up late at night waiting for Jesus to come back. ... And certainly many of my friends who are professional theologians, they're not apocalyptic. But once I was giving a lecture on precisely this topic, Christian apocalyptic, to a pastors college. We were together for four days, and I was talking to these churchmen, these are pastors. I was talking to these churchmen about apocalyptic and I did this liberal arts, comparative, secular review of the Book of Daniel, the Book of the Apocalypse, and he was wrong and these people and Montanus, they were wrong, on and on and on and on; four days of listening to these wrong prophecies that described the history of Christian apocalypticism. I should add that I was doing this during Operation Desert Storm. When I took questions, the first one was from a pastor in the back of the room who said, "Yes, Professor Fredriksen, but now that Saddam Hussein is raining nerve gas down on Israel, now that he's the power from the north raining fire from the sky on God's elect, isn't it clear that now is the time of the Second Coming?" Nothing I had said touched his belief. The amazing thing about apocalyptic thought is that a specific prophecy can be disconfirmed, but the idea can never be discredited. You just recalculate. ...

Apocalyptic thought is native to Christianity. ... Nothing will ever end Christian apocalypticism, especially now, with literacy at the high level it is. Where people who were even brought up on non-apocalyptic Christian traditions, like I was, all you have to do now is pick up a bible and read it. And if you're not familiar with the elite reinterpretation of those texts, the proclamation of Jesus' Second Coming is right there, waiting for you. It's the last line in the New Testament. "Come Lord Jesus."

A good site to look at:

www.teach12.com...

Question or two or three or......
* How long has the Church and Christendom/Christianity/Christians been awaiting the return of Jesus Christ? How long have they been saying "Come Lord Jesus"?

* How long has this same 'church' and Christendom/Christianity/Christians been awaiting the likes of the Anti-Christ?

IMHO, don't need to read Ron L Hubbard or Bart D. Ehrman....
Try this instead:
Apocalypse! The Evolution of Apocalyptic Belief and How It Shaped the Western World






seekerof

Good Thread:

Your introductory remarks from real Biblical Scholars in the field is quite refreshing on discussions like this for a change---and strongly echoes the sentiments of what I have been typing on these threads for 3 months now.

Some more points to underscore:

It is IMPOSSIBLE to understand the NT Gospel material in the Greek (and the so-called Book of Revelation, and for that matter, the whole NT) outside of TWO contexts:

l. The 100 year Anniversary (since Pompey's invasion of 63 BC) of the Roman Occupation of Judaea in AD 36 (the year R. Yehushua bar Yosef the Galilean ("Jeeezuzz"), a Daviddic Pretender from a Kingly Line which had been in exile since Zerubbabel (BC 430) went out and took his very armed disciples on to a hill and led an armed rebellion against Rome thinking that 12 legions of Angels would come to his aid...and well, look how that turned out...

The flavour of this Insurrection against Roman occupation can be felt by reading the WAR SCROLL (1 QM) of the Dead Sea Community (BC 167 to AD 68) which used phrases that "Jeezuzz" used apparently ("THESE BE THE DAYS OF VENGEANCE" as it placed into the mouth of "Iesous" in Luke's gospel etc.) : this echoes his mantra in other places ("Amen, Amen, I say unto you there are some standing here that will not taste Death until they see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power coming in the glory of his Kingdom with a Myriad of his Holy Angels with him..." as it says in "Mark" chapter 9 immediately before the "Midrashic expansion" of a Thunder and Lightning episode formed into the socalled Transfiguration Pericope, based on Isaiah chapter 4 etc.)

2. One cannot understand the NT " Christian" Gospel Message (which is "Messianic" at its roots) without reference to "Apocalyptic" End of Days thinking (again read the Dead Sea Scrolls for a tast of what the Righteous Remnant was supposed to accomplish at the Great and Terrible Day of YHWH which they (like "Jeeezuzz") thought was fast approaching----a timetable which kept getting pushed back and pushed back until the Christian Church saw such Apocalyptic hopes were futile (i.e. the 1st Jewish War against Rome, if you read Josephus' eye witness account of some of it, was a complete and utter disaster).

Even the Book of Revelation must be read in this light, a document which was forged out of the 1st Jewish War and which predicted victory to the Jews who believed in the power of the "slain" Messiah of the Jews with such words placed into his mouth: ("Behold I am the Bright and Morning Star...the Lion of Judah...The Seed and Offspring of David..." and other such Messianic titles).

The actual origin of Christianity is shrouded in Mystery, but we can be assured that it occurred in the context of Roman Occupation, the need for a Messiah saviour, and the negative outcome of the War against Rome where early Nazorean Christianity was wiped out (allowing Paul's Gnetile churches spread about the Empire to survive and pass on a non Nazorean Gentile Gospel of a "Spiritual Kingdom") and in which more than 900,000 Palestinian Jews lost their lives.

ATS ought to divide this among scholarly debates vs avg people debates.

Seekerof....

Good introduction site. It's too bad they don't mention too much on Johannes Weiss, who first proposed the theory back in the 1880s, or Albert Schweitzer who expanded off of it. Ehrman is from their school essentially. Other notable authors/scholars aren't mentioned though such as J. P. Meier or E.P Sanders. Otherwise, a very good site.

I noticed how they wrote about the failed prophet Hal Lindsay. Too bad they didn't mention Edgar Whisenant who wrongly predicted that the end of the world was going to happen in 1988, then 1989, then 1992.

I remember reading Tom Harpur's "The Pagan Christ". I asked him about the apocalyptic thesis and he couldn't answer my questions. His theology is a bloody joke. He tried to use Alvin Boyd Kuhn's thesis that Jesus never existed and all the stories were written in order to be understood metaphorically. He couldn't even defend his case. That's the funny thing.

Amadeus,

What proof do you have that Jesus was a violent revolutionary as you hinted? That thesis was argued by Robert Eisenman back in 1997. The problem with him is that he just dismisses a lot of evidence completely.

Hi BeMore Cynical:

Pause for a second and reflect WHEN the 4 canonical Grek Gospels finally arrived in their Greek "written down" forms: i.e. right after the Jewish War Against Rome after AD 75 in which nearly 1 Million Palestinian Jews were starved, executed, killed in battle or sold off into slavery.

Going around touting a Warrior Messiah in that context would have been a rather hard sell to those Goyim (gentiles) in the Roman Empire who saw the Jews as a defeated people whose god was also defeated.

Only Universal saviour gods were popular in the 1st century among all classes of people, so Christianity forged gospels to re-write the negative facts of history into "midrashic" proofs that despite everything, Iesous was the Christos...

So the the Greek Gospel writers had to soften the war rhetoric in the Greek to make Iesous sound more passive than he was in real life: if one translates much of the "logia" (raw sayings) material in the Greek back to Aramaic idiom in the gospels, ithe phrases start to become surprisingly political and harsh even scathing in tone, and often has war rhetoric built into it with CLEAR parallels to the War Scroll of the Dead Sea Corpus.

So the Gospels did their best to sell their product in a bad market: or as John the Elder openly admitted in his Gospel:

"These things were written SO THAT YOU MIGHT BELIEVE THAT IESOUS IS THE CHRIST--- AND THAT BY BELIEVING YOU MIGHT HAVE LIFE IN HIS NAME..."

This is not the aim of an historian in the modern sense. It is the wording of a Propagandist.

We cannot therefore say the gospels are "history" the way a 21st century scholar might write "history" today: these are basically propaganda tracks as John's gospel openly confesses.

Having said that, we have to "look for clues" for the history that might be buried into the gospel material, most of which was excised as being "seditionist" against Rome.

But we still find some bones of the original skeleton popping through the fake stuffed body placed over it, as it were:

Here are some of the bones that I am talking about in the gospel material that perhaps suggest that R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean ("Iesous" in Greek) might not have been the passive little harmless Rebbe that Christians today WANT so deseperately to believe.

The following Words placed into the mouth of "Iesous" would hardly have been "invented" by the early church: it is something of a miracle that these phrases were allowed to stand in the Greek of most of the MSS copies !

l. [and Iesous said] "THESE BE THE DAYS OF VENGEANCE (of our god) IN WHICH ALL THE SCRIPTURES WILL BE FULFILLED" = see Luke 21:22

This is a violent "quote of the Final WAR" with the Romans, which is taken verbatim from the Dead Sea Scrolls WAR SCROLL (1 QM) = The Scroll of the Book of the War of the Sons of Light against All the Sons of Darkness in the Last days (found at Qumran in December1946) which is a violent tract on how in the Last Days the Kittim shall all be killed by phalanxes of Jewish Levites in the Final Battle of the Sons of Light against All the Sons of Darkness...

The Phrase DAYS OF VENGEANCE is a war cry, and was particularly prominent during the 1st Jewish War against Rome (AD 66-72)

2. [and Iesous said] "TONIGHT LET HE WHO DOES NOT POSSESS HIS OWN SWORD, GO OUT IMMEDIATELY, SELL HIS OUTER TUNIC AND BUY ONE NOW" = Luke 22:36

So "Iesous" really did arm his disciples with real swords: or as I once mentioned, Do you REALLY think that the SLAVE OF THE HIGH PRIEST's EAR WAS CUT OFF AT THE ARREST ON THE HILL WITH A BUTTER KNIFE LEFT OVER FROM THE LAST SUPPER ?

This violent passage is virtually ignored by most Clergy, although one still hears about the "little ear" (ear lobe?) of the slave of the high priest being cut off during the scuffle e.g. Mark 14:47

3. The so called "TEMPLE TANTRUM" was actually a violent political act, however one colours it (we do not know what was spoken, the gospels have him reciting different criticisms from the prophets: but what he seems to have been doing was exercising his right as the annointed King of Israel during Tabernacles, which was the Coronation Feast of the Messiah)...

This was a major political act/event where Iesous purportedly made "whips and cords" that were made to "drive out the money changers in the court of the Gentiles during a Feast (possibly Tabernacles, although the first three "synoptic" gospels of Matt Mark and Luke foreshorten and kaleidescope the narrative into "holy week" for liturgical purposes : John's gospel places the Temple Tantrum at the beginning not the end of the Ministry, so we can see that the gospel material was arranged for theological purposes not "history".

"and he physically blocked the way of all those who would sell doves and cattle and sheep..." :

This is a political move, on the lines of economic warfare against the Hashmoneans, since the Temple precinct in Jersusalem was the central bank as well as the central slaughterhouse for all 2nd temple business for Judaea and the heart of a very profitable priestly sacrificial system

At any rate, harmless little Rebbes telling harmless little parables do not cause major work stoppages like this which would have led to riots in the Temple during a MAJOR public Feast in Jerusalem...all within eyeshot of the Romans who could look down upon the Court of the Goyim from their perch atop the Fortress Antonia, which was on the Temple Mount itself...

4. The words "THE TIMES OF THE GOYIM ARE FULFILLED, REPENT BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE AND BELIEVE THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS NEAR..." is a kind of mantra which is placed into the mouth of "Iesous" in the gospels at the beginning of his ministry--almost as if some timetable were being followed:

In fact, when the crucifixion of Iesous took place in AD 36 "during the Insurrrection", it was around the 100th anniversary of the Invasion of Pompey the Roman General (invaded Judaea in BC 63) : - this fact would have been a flag to those who believed in Messianic end of days timetables (like the Dead Sea Scroll community who divided up everything into 50 year periods or Jubilees).

50 years = 1 Jubilee ; 2 x 50 = 100 years = 2 Jubilees : cf: Micah: AFTER TWO DAYS HE WILL DESTROY US, ON THE THIRD DAY HE WILL RAISE US UP...

again the 100 year timetable is in the back of the Messianic Mind here.

The wording TIMES OF THE GOYIM (gentiles) is FULFILLED is nothing less than a War Chant: it is a phrase which was a veryt conscious "hearkening back" to the times of Moses and the taking of the promise land by WAR (cf: the echo here of Moses warlike words about "the Times of the Amorites shall be fulfilled" when speaking about the socalled PROMISED LAND, which was NOT EMPTY BUT THICKLY INHABITED BY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE):

Iesous here is echoiing the WAR SCROLL (1 QM) of the Dead Sea Scrolls again when the land of Israel would be RETAKEN in the Last Days:

We cannot understand even begin to the "ministry" of the "Kingdom of God" announcements apart from the context of the anniverary of the brutal Roman military occupation of Judaea since 63 BC --especially since Iesous was a Daviddic pretender who belived that the Son of Man would "come into his Kingdom sitting at the right hand of the Power with the myriads of his holy Angels with him" while his disciples still were living ("some of you standing here will not taste death until they see the son of man coming with power...") which suggests he believed the Romans would be expelled sooner rather than later...


5. The "Triumphal" Entry of Iesous into Jerusalem on the white she ass of Solomon (see Zechariah 9:9) would have been interpreted by the Kittim (Romans) as an Act of War :and most of the language of this Messianic End of Days Prophecy in Zechariah 9:9 is found also in the WAR SCROLL

"Rejoice heartily, O daughter Zion, shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem! See, your KING comes to you; a Righteous Saviour, riding Humbly on an ass, yea even upon a colt, the foal of an ass.

6...he shall DICTATE TERMS OF PEACE TO THE GOYIM : HIS KINGDOM SHALL BE FROM SEA TO SEA , FROM THE RIVER OF EGYPT TO THE ENDS OF THE LAND (of Israel).

And As for you Jerusalem ... this very day, I will return you double for your exile: I will arouse your sons, O Zion, (against your sons, O Yavan,) and I will use you as a warrior's sword.

YHWH shall appear over them, his mighty arrow shall shoot forth as lightning; the god YHWH shall sound the trumpet, and come in a storm from the south:

In that Day, YHWH of Tsabeoth shall be a shield over them, they shall overcome all the sling stones and trample them underfoot; They shall drink the blood of the slain like wine, till they are filled with it like libation bowls, like the corners of the altar.

7... Luke 13:31 [has the Pharisees say to Iesous, Herod the king has issued orders to kill you, therefore leave Galilee at once..]

"and Iesous said to them:

Go, tell that cowering-Jackal that I perform signs today, and tomorrow until I am perfected on the 3rd day..."

A "cowering Jackal" is an "unclean" animal that runs about with its tale between its legs (known to haunt tombs graves, especially at night) :

For Luke to include a saying placed into the mouth of "Iesous" suggests that Iesous considered Herod (who spent most of his time in Rome) a Flunky of the Emperor (Herod's pro-Roman Hasmonean dynasty was a rival Dynasty to the Davvids) is telling: he's calling Herod a coward who dances with the devil as it were.

Other related sayings of Iesous which suggest he saw the end of the rival Hashmonean "priestly" kingdom (i.e rival to his own Daviddic throne which he hoped to innaugurate "In the Last Days...") would have included sayings like:

"EVERY VINE THAT MY FATHER HATH NOT PLANTED HIMSELF SHALL BE UPROOTED AND THROWN INTO THE FIRE"

where the symbolic word "Vine" (DVD) is an ancient and popular play on words for the HOUSE OF DAVID (DVD)--)and there was even a large golden VINE with large golden Grapes placed in the 2nd Temple of Herod--for symbolic reasons along these lines)

These sayings are NOT the kind of language which would come out of the mouth of harmless little Rebbe telling harmless parable stories..but someone one the brink of taking over the government...despite the deliberate and understandable "softening" of the Greek wording at times.

-------enough said?

There are in fact a great deal more "not so harmless sayings" placed into the mouth of "Iesous" in the Greek gospel texts that still somehow managed to stay in the text of the gospels despite the editorial knives forever present (and also in the Book of Revelation, where the Son of Man is holding swords and sitting on white battle horses etc.) but these should be enough to suggest that perhaps the Church has been supressing the violent beginnings of Christianity, and its original contexts in the decades before the Jewish Revolt...

Test not God, for he has said these things and Jesus Christ if you will read the scripture has stated that these are god"s declarations shown to him so that he may tell them to us so that we know the truth and remain vigilant in our faith and respect of God lest we fell the judgement spoken of in Revelation, Matthew,Mark etc.

Hey BeMoreCynical:

I was curious what "evidence" you think that Eisenmann leaves out in his political revoltionary "Iesous"?

It is possible that some of this "evidence" you might be thinking of may be based on the "apologetic" tendencies of the gospel writers to "soften" the tone of "Iesous" sometimes angry and harsh speech?

I am not saying that "Iesous" (R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean) did not preach love and forgiveness TO MEMBERS WITHIN HIS HIS OWN GROUP: that he certainly did, and followed the same tenets as the Dead Sea Scroll "End of Days" Community. They treated the insiders like "brothers" guarding each other's welfare "like the pupil of their own eyes" but to others outside the community, they considered "dead" and "unworthy of the life" and "not chosen aforehand...." (remember the saying attributed to Iesous "Let the Dead Bury their own Dead..."?

But when it came to the Kittim (Romans, i.e. Goyim), he sang a different tune which eventually got him strung up as a seditionist during a Feast.

At any rate, if you think about it, nice harmless Rabbi's who go around telling nice stories don't get themselves crucified....!

Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, countries being wiped off the face of the earth - Furfillment of end times prophecy - what the illuminati try desperately to hide, especially now that they so desperately hope for extra time ...
www.abovetopsecret.com...

New catastrophic events, announcing the day of the final judgement for Mankind

New type of hurricanes : mega-hurricanes, gigantic size (Alex, Frances and Ivan); almost impossible to destroy (Jeanne, new born and yet able to survive the highest mountains of the Caribbean, at Santo Domingo); explosive birth (Karl set a new record in the time it took to become a cat. 1, 2 and 3 hurricane).

New earthquake patterns :
Major earthquakes (6+) recorded near the epicentre of mega-hurricanes (Grand Cayman/Jamaica, Ivan, September 13).
Major earthquakes (6+) recorded in areas where they were never recorded before, near the centre of new type of hurricanes (100 miles NW from the Bahamas, Jeanne, September 18).

The first results you should expect from all this :
- unprecedented tsunamis, mega ocean surge ----> from now on, dozens of millions living along the flat US south and east coasts should be prepared to be wiped off the face of the earth at any moment.

Hey MattMarriott:

You're on the WRONG THREAD in case you haven't noticed...!!

"Jesus the apocalyptic prophet of the new millenium" by Bart D. Ehrman

just another book to further the APOSTACY which the bible predicted.

i feel sorrow for Bart his enemies are mighty...actually the mighties enemies you could have...Jesus etc

as far as the hurricanes

bible-codes.com... (click on the link at the top about ivan)

i dont usually put much faith into so called codes, but these actually seem legit.

although im a sceptic when it comes to joe blow trying to solve the puzzle ill give the webiste a wirl thanks for the link NuTroll