After all, the Sacred Scriptures spent a thousand years in the hands of the Vatican (half of that if you count the Eastern Orthodox churches) . How do we know that the cabal didn't alter, add or supress anything important on them in all those years, that's also not counting the other supposedly reformed editions that were made by people with ties to Freemasonry and the City of London ?
I might also be in dire need of some time out of the news and the digging. Feel free to call me out if that's the case.
You need to look into how 1st century, 2nd Temple Jews understood these words. What you are essentially doing is trying to understand a first century text while wearing 21st century glasses.
The Religious leaders of the day knew exactly what Jesus was claiming when he said things like this - which is why they picked up stones to kill him. Blasphemy - equating yourself with Yahweh - was punishably by death.
Almost every title or name that Yahweh attributed to himself in the Old Testament Jesus attributed to himself:
The Bread of Life
The Light of the World
The Great Shepard
I Am...
The Door
The Gate
The Way
The Truth
The Life
etc....
By attributing these titles to himself, Jesus claimed to be God on more than one occasion. The Jews and the religious leaders saw this. You can too. You just need to remove your 21st glasses and put on your 1st century Jewish glasses.
Jesus was actually quoting the first verse of Psalms 22 while on the Cross:
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
~ Psalms22:1
When Jesus cries out this phrase, it is a reference to Psalm 22. This Psalm is held to be a messianic psalm and one where the author (King David) appears to be sharing in some vision of what will happen to the Lord’s Messiah. Jesus only shares the first verse of the Psalm, but because of the scriptural literacy of Jesus’ day, most people would have assumed he was referring to the entire Psalm. We can examine it and find tie-ins to the crucifixion narrative.
In Psalm 22:6-8, it says that David’s enemies are mocking him, specifically because he trusts in the Lord that the Lord would rescue him. Matthew 27:35-44 and Mark 15:29-32 both say that the people mocking Jesus claimed that if God loved him so much, then God should save him in that moment.
Psalm 22:18 states that the clothing of the author was divided up and the oppressors were “casting lots” (a game of chance) for the possession of it. Matthew 27:35 tells us that Jesus’ garments were divided up and the new owners were decided by casting lots. How amazing is it that across the approximately 1,000 years difference between King David’s vision—recorded in Psalm 22—and the recorded actions of the death of Jesus, should be so similar?
Historical Orthodox Christianity holds that Jesus was both 100% God and 100% Man. Fully Human, yet fully God. He had two natures - the Hypostatic Union. So Jesus, as a man, could experience pain and suffering, like us. He could also heal the blind, walk on water, control weather, bring dead people back to life (Lazarus), and resurrect from the Dead himself - as only God can do.
Historical Orthodox Christianity also hold to the teaching of the Trinity. God is a triune being with three persons in One nature. The 2nd person of the Trinity is speaking to the 1st person of the Trinity. There is similar language found in the Creation account (and the account of the Tower of Babel) pointing to this plurality within the Godhead:
~ Gen 1:26
Nice response, respect for the depth of your knowledge and the effort of your post.
Interesting list of names both Yahweh and Jesus used.
I would argue that you are painting a picture of a man and a religion already under political persecution by a regime that sought to maintain control over it's subjects.
This is the very definition of the organ that rewrites history and perpetrates Orwellian crimes against it's populace.
The fact is, like the Q drops that no longer have the entire thread attached or link to working videos Christianity has lost context and meaning over the centuries. It is not possible to know what was and was not changed either, particularly the New Testament for this very reason.
I would be willing to accept that maybe that human consciousness is comprised of three parts and the Holy Trinity is an attempt to describe them. These are just labels but for arguments sake lets say :- (the observer), the mind and the soul.
Whenever I have read Jesus words they always made more sense to me through the lens of Eastern Mysticism, Taoist or Zen philosophies. He sounded enlightened. He sounded like every single thing ever said sailed clean over everyone's heads not schooled in the fore mentioned philosophies.
It actually is possible to determine this. This is where the school of Textual Criticism comes into play.
There is absolutely no evidence that the Bible has been revised, edited, or tampered with in any systematic manner. The sheer volume of biblical manuscripts makes it simple to recognize any attempt to distort the Bible. There is no major doctrine of the Bible that is put in doubt as a result of the inconsequential differences among the manuscripts.
Follow me for a minute here....
Pretend your Aunt Sally learns in a dream the recipe for an elixir that preserves her youth. When she wakes up, she scribbles the directions on a scrap of paper, then runs to the kitchen to make up her first glass. In a few days Aunt Sally is transformed into a picture of radiant youth because of her daily dose of “Sally’s Secret Sauce.”
Aunt Sally is so excited she sends detailed, hand-written instructions on how to make the sauce to her three bridge partners (Aunt Sally is still in the technological dark ages–no photocopier or email). They, in turn, make copies for ten of their own friends.
All goes well until one day Aunt Sally’s pet schnauzer eats the original copy of the recipe. In a panic she contacts her three friends who have mysteriously suffered similar mishaps, so the alarm goes out to the others in attempt to recover the original wording.
Sally rounds up all the surviving hand-written copies, twenty-six in all. When she spreads them out on the kitchen table, she immediately notices some differences. Twenty-three of the copies are exactly the same. Of the remaining three, however, one has misspelled words, another has two phrases inverted (“mix then chop” instead of “chop then mix”) and one includes an ingredient none of the others has on its list.
Do you think Aunt Sally can accurately reconstruct her original recipe from this evidence? Of course she can. The misspellings are obvious errors. The single inverted phrase stands out and can easily be repaired. Sally would then strike the extra ingredient, reasoning it’s more plausible one person would add an item in error than 25 people would accidentally omit it.
Even if the variations were more numerous or more diverse, the original could still be reconstructed with a high level of confidence if Sally had enough copies.
This, in simplified form, is how scholars do “textual criticism,” an academic method used to test all documents of antiquity, not just religious texts. It’s not a haphazard effort based on hopes and guesses; it’s a careful linguistic process allowing an alert critic to determine the extent of possible corruption of any work
Good post.
At this juncture, in the middle of the Great Awakening, right here on GA no less I am physically incapable of sharing in the sheer level of confidence you have in contemporary historical fact.
Un-Able.
When the thousands of copies of manuscripts (far more than for any other document of antiquity) are compared, we can know that the New Testament is 99.5% textually pure. In the entire text of 20,000 lines, only 40 lines are in doubt (about 400 words), and none affects any significant doctrine.
Even if all the manuscripts in the whole world were to disappear, the New Testament is so comprehensively quoted by early church letters, essays and other extra-biblical sources that we could still reconstruct almost the entire testament.