Charles
Perhaps the implication that the TORAH is some sort of "old testament" leads to the next logical Christian step, that we accept Jesus.
The thing is, I already have accepted Jesus, only not the same one that you accept.
2 Corinithains 5
16 Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.
This is logical for you because if Jesus is God, then he has no ethnicity any longer. I am aware that many Christians like to forget that he was Jewish. It may make some feel uncomfortable since if he is King of the Jews, them why aren't you Jewish?
2 Corinthians 11
3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
4 For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well humor with him [although do not].
On the other hand, this is precisely the Jesus I accept, YESHUA, the very Galilean Jewish freedom fighter who wished the uncircumcised Roman pigs out of Israel. They polluted the land with their uncircumcision and unkosher gods. But YESHUA was head of the group known as Nazarenes, NOTSRIM in Hebrew. This word means "Guardians". YESHUA led a group of Galilean Zealots who wanted to guard Israel and guard the TORAH. That is why he told hs disciples
Matthew 10
5 These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not:
6 But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
Only the editor of Matthew felt it necessary to tell the gentile Christians that he wanted them to spread the word to the wide world. I don't honestly believe he ever said such a thing. If he had said it, his disciples would have been appalled. Later I will get back to this point when I discuss the book of Revelation, originally a Jewish apocalypse.
And see how Paul in 2 Corinthians 11 curses out YESHUA's own brother, YAKOV, and his apostles:
12 But what I do, that I will do, that I may cut off occasion from them which desire occasion; that wherein they glory, they may be found even as we.
13 For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.
14 And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
15 Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.
YESHUA's bother is like "Satan himself"? Oh yes, probably too Jewish.
Moreover, Paul, when confronted by YESHUA's brother for perverting the Nazarene message regarding the proselytizing of gentiles, has the affrontery to bad-mouth James and the authentic apostles:
Galatians
6 "As for those who were held in high esteem‒whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism, ‒ they added nothing to my message!
11 "When [Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face". He opposed YESHUA's right-hand man! No wonder the evangelists take Paul's point of view and continuously bad-mouth Peter. Matthew 16:22,23; John 18:11; Mark 9:5,6; John 13:8; Luke 22:59-61; John 21:3
All this is very strange when you read about Paul's encounter with a Nazarene who helped him after his epiphany on the raod:
Acts 22: 12 “A man named Ananias came to see me. He was a devout observer of the TORAH and highly respected by all the Jews living there. 13 He stood beside me and said, ‘Brother Saul, receive your sight!’"
Paul's first helper after his conversion is a TORAH observing Jew. Paul had to have known that YESHUA's followers were expected to observe the TORAH. Therefor, knowing that, he had to know that founding Christianity without the TORAH, he was creating a heresy according to James, the brother of YESHUA.
The Romans hated Galileans more than any other Jews they governed because Galilee was a hotbed of antiRoman zealotry and YESHUA must have seen thousands of Galileans cricified as he was growing up and it must have made him very sympathetic to the Zealot movement. And during that fatefull day on Passover week, his mssion in the Insurrection was to drive those Jewish collaborators with the Romans out of the Temple and that's why the authorities were after him. But they didn't need that as an excuse. The fact that he was a Galilean Zealot sympathizer would have been enough. Pilate whom the Catholic Church made a saint was an evil, viscious antisemite who Rome recalled after he ordered a masacre of Samaritians. His end was exile to Spain till the end of his bitter life. Don't believe me?
Luke 13:1
Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.
"Whose blood Pilate had mingled ‒ This piece of history is not recorded (as far as I can find) by Josephus: however, he states that the Galileans were the most seditious people in the land: they belonged properly to Herod’s jurisdiction; but, as they kept the great feasts at Jerusalem, they probably, by their tumultuous behavior at some one of them, gave Pilate, who was a mortal enemy to Herod, a pretext to fall upon and slay many of them; and thus, perhaps, sacrifice the people to the resentment he had against the prince. Archelaus is represented by Josephus as sending his soldiers into the temple, and slaying 3000 men while they were employed in offering sacrifices."
The Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices: We don’t have a record in secular history about the specific incident mentioned here. But there is a similar incident before the ministry of Jesus, Pilate wanted to build an aqueduct from the Pools of Solomon to the city of Jerusalem. To pay for it, he demanded money from the temple treasury, money that had been dedicated to God ‒ and this outraged the people. When the Jews sent a delegation to beg for their money back, Pilate sent into the crowd soldiers dressed as common people, and at a certain signal they took out daggers and attacked the people asking for the money.
Source:
https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/23873/who-were-the-galileans-whose-blood-pilate-mingled-with-their-sacrifices.
This is amazing. Christian scripture says very little about the Romans and their occupation of the Land of Israel. They are background figures who are not real people but mere symbols. This just shows us that the gospels are not Jewish scripture since in any REAL Jewish Bible book, Israel's enemies are excoriated, such as in the book of Judges and First Samuel.
But when Romans ARE brought into the foreground, the evengelist only does it to show how noble these gentiles are as in the case of Pilate's wife and the centurion at the foot of the cross who realizes that Jesus is a divine son of the Jewish God, as opposed to "the Jews" who are ignorant of that, or are willfully blind, or are simply all brothers of Judas [whose very name means 'Jew'.
From THE INTERPRETER'S BIBLE: ABINGDON PRESS:
Matthew 27:24,25 pictures Pilate as absolving himself of guilt and the Jewish people accepting the responsibility for Jesus' death." (The "crowds" become the people as a whole" The scene is only in Matthew and was probably composed by Matthew himself.
261. But over against the Markan picture, one can see in Matthew the developing tendency to exonerate Pilate and condemn the Jews. In THE ACTS OF PILATE, for example, Pilate is pictured as a secret disciple who acknowledges the divinity of Jesus. Later Christian cradition made him into a Christian martyr, then along with his wife Proucula, into a saint.
581. Conrast the Johannine Jesus, who is pictured as talkative and magisterial, in charge of his own trial and death, [Not a victim of either the Romans or "the Jews".]
So in the failed Insurrection, YESHUA and other freedom fighters were rounded up by the Romans and executed.
Luke 23
32 Two other men, both also freedom fighters, were led out with him to be executed. 33 When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the freedom fighters‒one on his right, the other on his left.
These men were not thieves. I know of no society that executes thieves. In Jewish and Christian societies, thieves go to jail; in Moslem society, they get their hands chopped off. No thief is executed, not even by the Roman Empire. So who were they?
John 12
4 But one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was going to betray Him, asked, 5 “Why wasn’t this perfume sold for three hundred denari and the money given to the poor?†6 Judas did not say this because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief [KLEPTOS - this is the New Testament Greek word for "thief"].
Luke 23
33 And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him and the LESTAI.
The Sicarii: Ancient Jewish “Terrorists†Richard A. Horsley / University of Massachusetts, -Boston
___ the study of Jewish history and New Testament times, namely, that there was an organized religio-political movement calTled "the Zealots" which, from the time of its founding by Judas the Galilean in 6 C.E., agitated for Jewish liberation until it provoked the massive Jewish revolt against Rome in 66–70; and that SICARIOI, like LESTAI, was just another name for the members of this organized liberation movement.
___ they have become enshrined in important professional handbooks and dictionaries in the field. And influential scholars persist in their reading of Josephus's accounts,
still concluding that Josephus uses the terms ZELOTAI, SICARIOI, and LESTAI interchangeably for the Jewish rebel movement and labeling the Jewish "freedom movement" (whatever the differences between the separate groups) as "the Zealots."5
Morton Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii: Their Origins and Relation," Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 1-19. Smith has provided an extensive and highly critical review of nearly all of the pertinent literature; I will presuppose Smith's critique and his extensive references. Smith's critique applies also to George Wesley Buchanan, "Mark 11:15-19: BRIGAND's in the Temple," Hebrew Union College Annual 30 (1959): 169-77. See also Marc Borg, "The Currency of the Term 'Zealot,'" Journal of Theological Studies 22 (1971): 504 12. Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar list the Smith article in their notes to the new version of Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ ([Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973) 383, n. 128; cf. p. 462, n. 29), but presumably the "new Schürer" was not the appropriate context to deal with the implications of Smith's argument.
Kirsopp Lake and Foakes Jackson, "Appendix A: The Zealots," The Beginnings of Christianity, 5 vols. (New York, 1920-33), 1, pt. 1:421-25; Solomon Zeitlin, "Zealots and Sicarii," Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 395-98, a sharply critical review of Martin Hengel, Die Zeloten (Leiden: Brill, 1961).
Source:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1202887?seq=1
As to Bar-Rabba, "son of the rabbi", he killed Roman pigs in the Insurrection. A Zealot hero, he was supposedly handed over to the Jewish crowd which loved anti Roman Zealots.
Jesus Barabbas (/bəˈræbÉ™s/; Aramaic: ישוע בר ×ב×‎ Yeshua Bar ʾAbbaʾ, literally "son of the father" or "son of the teacher") is a figure mentioned in the New Testament, in which he is an insurrectionary held by the Roman governor at the same time as Jesus, and whom Pontius Pilate freed at the Passover feast in Jerusalem .. Matthew refers to Barabbas only as a "notorious prisoner". Mark and Luke further refer to Barabbas as one involved in a στάσις (stasis, a riot), probably "one of the numerous insurrections against the Roman power" who had committed murder. [killing Roman pigs] Robert Eisenman states that John 18:40 refers to Barabbas as a λῃστής (lÄ“stÄ“s, "bandit"), "the word Josephus always employs when talking about Revolutionaries".
Three gospels state that there was a custom that at Passover the Roman governor would release a prisoner of the crowd's choice; Mark 15:6, Matthew 27:15, and John 18:39. Later copies of Luke contain a corresponding verse (Luke 23:17), although this is not present in the earliest manuscripts, and may be a later gloss to bring Luke into conformity.
The custom of releasing prisoners in Jerusalem at Passover is known to theologians as the Paschal Pardon, but this custom (whether at Passover or any other time) is not recorded in any historical document other than the gospels, leading some scholars to question its historicity and to claim such a custom was an invention of the writers.
According to Jewish historian Max Dimont, the story of Barabbas as related in the gospels lacks credibility from both the Roman and Jewish standpoint. The story, on its face, presents the Roman authority, Pontius Pilate, backed by overwhelming military might, being cowed by a small crowd of unarmed civilians into releasing a prisoner condemned to death for insurrection against the Roman Empire. A Roman governor who had done that could have faced execution himself. As Dimont puts it: "any Roman governor setting a traitor against Rome free in exchange for an avowed friend of Rome, as Jesus was depicted, would have had his head examined, after it was severed from his body." Further, Dimont argues against the believability of the Barabbas story by noting that the alleged custom of privilegium Paschale, "the privilege of Passover", where a criminal is set free, is only found in the Gospels. No similar custom is mentioned in any extrabiblical accounts, nor is there a precedent for such a practice in biblical or extrabiblical sources; this notable absence, Dimont argues, makes the basis for the narrative incredible and difficult to believe.
Benjamin Urrutia, co-author of The Logia of Yeshua: The Sayings of Jesus, agrees with the theory that Yeshua Bar Abba or Jesus Barabbas was none other than Jesus of Nazareth by a different name, and that the choice between two prisoners is not historical. Urrutia opposes the notion that Jesus would have either led or planned a violent insurrection. Jesus, in this view, must have been the planner and leader of the Jewish nonviolent resistance to Pilate's plan to set up Roman Eagle standards on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. The story of this successful resistance is told by Josephus‒who does not say who the leader was, but does tell of Pilate's crucifixion of Jesus just two paragraphs later – though the authenticity of that passage has been disputed.
The story of Barabbas has played a role in historical antisemitism because it has historically been used to lay the blame for the crucifixion of Jesus on the Jews, and thereby to justify antisemitism – an interpretation known as Jewish deicide. Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2011 book Jesus of Nazareth, dismisses this reading, since the Greek word "ochlos" in Mark means "crowd", rather than "Jewish people".
In The Liars' Gospel, a 2012 novel by Naomi Alderman, Barabbas is one of the protagonists and Alderman depicts Barabbas rather than Jesus as the man who summons fishermen.
Fulton Oursler, in his 1949 novel, The Greatest Story Ever Told, portrays Barabbas as a friend of Saint Joseph, who was the husband of Mary and the legal father of Jesus. Joseph's friend, originally known as Samuel, is a member of a group dedicated to the overthrow of Roman rule. Samuel, acquainted with the story of Jesus' birth, tells Joseph that he is choosing the name "Jesus Barabbas".
A minority of scholars, including Stevan Davies, Hyam Maccoby and Horace Abram Rigg, have contended that Barabbas and Jesus were the same person.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1961 film King of Kings works out a fictionalized backstory of Barabbas' arrest, depicting him as a Zealot.
The controversial speculative history Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which posits a bloodline descended from Jesus and which served as source material for Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, advances the theory that Jesus Barabbas was the son of Jesus (and that the use of "Barabbas", meaning "son of the Rabbi" or "son of the father", was akin to "Junior"). The theory runs that the son was more violent than his father in efforts to overthrow Roman rule and to restore power to his Jewish royal family. It further proposes that Barabbas's release by Pilate was given in return for the surrender of Jesus, who had himself turned over to Roman authorities as a trade, to secure his son's release and banishment rather than execution, thus to preserve the Jewish royal line in his son by his own self-sacrifice. This release of the Jewish heir apparent, in exchange for the execution of his father, the claimant Jesus, King of the Jews, so the theory expounds, was done TO APPEASE THE JEWISH POPULATION AND PREVENT AN UPRISING.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas
From THE INTERPRETER'S BIBLE: ABINGDON PRESS:
The NRSV, but not the NIV. adopts the reading "Jesus Barabbas" "Jesus" is missing from most ancient texts but Origen, and about twenty medieval texts contain as a note that many ancient copies here read "Jesus Barabbas." It is more likely to have been omitted by pious scribes then added [back].
563. The Markan identification of Baabbas as a Freedom Fighter against the Romans, significant in the time of the Jewish war reflected in Mark is dropped by Matthew as ao longer relevant to his 90CE situation. For Mathew, Barabbas is simply a notorious criminal like the two "bandits" (lestai) crucified with Jesus.
27:38. The two crucified with Jesus are described, as in Mark, as "bandits" (anotai lestai), which can refer to criminals, to robbers as in Matt 21:13; Luke 10:30; John 10:1; 2 Cor 11:26, or to revolutionaries, terrorist/freedom fighters as in Josephus, The Jewish War 2.254]). Matthew had not described Barabbas in these terms (see 27:16, omitting the description in Mark 15:7). In Matthew, Jesus is not classed with revolutionaries, but with common criminals, thus increasing his humiliation (cf. Isa 53:3, 9, 12).
By the way, among YESHUA's disciples were several Zealots. One is actually named Simon the Zealot. Additionally, the sons of ZEVADIA, James and John, were called BNEI ROGES, "sons of anger"; it was they who wanted to bring down fire on the Samaritans who rebuffed the Nazarenes. The gosples call Peter bar-jona, supposedly meaning "the son of Jonah." But it means something else. In that time, the Pharisees who were anti-Zealot referred to the Zealots as BARYONIM, "thugs". This would fit in with Peter's story, jailed in Israel, crucified in Rome as a Jewish messianic agitator, alongwith hundreds of other Jewish messainists.
The names of the twelve disciples of Jesus are Simon Peter, Andrew, James (the son of Zebedee), John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James (the son of Alphaeus), Thaddaeus, SIMON THE ZEALOT and Judas Iscariot. (See Matthew 10:1-4 and Luke 6:12-16.)
Simon, the Zealot, one of the little-known followers called the Canaanite or Zelotes, lived in Galilee. Tradition says he was crucified. The New Testament gives us practically nothing on him personally except that it says he was a Zealot. The Zealots were fanatical Jewish Nationalists who had heroic disregard for the suffering involved and the struggle for what they regarded as the purity of their faith. The Zealots were motivated by hatred for the Romans. It was this hate for Rome that destroyed the city of Jerusalem. From this background, we see that Simon was a fanatical Nationalist, a man devoted to the Law, a man with bitter hatred for anyone who dared to compromise with Rome. Tradition says he died as a martyr. His apostolic symbol is a fish lying on a Bible, which indicates he was a former fisherman who became a fisher of men through preaching.
So YESHUA had bo problem employing a Zealot [LESTAS] as a follower.