#sadducee

11/08/2019

Now poor Gabriel is sad, you see?

Gentile Authorship of the New Testament

By Author Eli Kittim

Paul forbid Gentiles from keeping the Mosaic law. He warned that if you keep the law you’ll be cut off from grace. I don’t know about you but Paul doesn’t sound like a Hellenistic Jew to me. Sounds more like a Gentile!

Paul was probably not a Pharisee. Jerome suspected this early on. In his debate with Mike Licona (“Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?” 2018), Bart Ehrman said he doubts that Paul knew Aramaic! What kind of a Jew doesn’t know Aramaic? There are many reasons why the Pauline narrative in Acts may not be factual; a) the idea that Paul was a disciple of Gamaliel is mentioned only in Acts, a book that was written much later than Paul’s letters. In Acts, we are told that Paul is a Pharisee and that he’s persecuting Christians at the behest of the high priest in Jerusalem. This cannot be possible because b) the high priest was a Sadducee, and the Sadducees (not the Pharisees) ran the temple in Jerusalem (Acts 5.17). Moreover, the Sadducees and Pharisees were bitter rivals, enemies who disagreed on a number of topics, including spiritual ones. So, it seems rather absurd that a Pharisee would be working for a Sadducee; c) the high priest in Jerusalem had no jurisdiction in Damascus, Syria. The point is that this story couldn’t have happened in the way that Acts describes it.

The same holds true for the trial of Jesus in the Gospels. Everything about the trial seems preposterous, from the notion that it was held at night to the idea that it took place on the day of Passover, and even some of the details seem rather improbable if one understood Jewish law.

If we look at the rest of the gospels, including Acts (the so-called 5th gospel), we’ll come to realize that the authors are seemingly unfamiliar with the local geography, customs, feasts, idioms, language, law, and the religion of the Jews. If we then look at the scholarly consensus as to how the NT authors copied the Hebrew Bible, it will give us some clues with regard to their ethnic identities. It is well-known among scholarly circles that the New Testament authors quoted predominantly from the Septuagint rather than from the Hebrew Bible. Obviously, this indicates that they were not familiar with the Hebrew language and could not understand it. Furthermore, Greek was the lingua franca. But the lingua franca was only used for commerce, not for writing sacred scripture! If the New Testament was written in Greek because it was the lingua franca, then we would expect most of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be written in Greek. But that’s not what we find. Most of them are in Hebrew, thus disproving the lingua franca hypothesis! Devout Jews preferred Hebrew. Besides, the New Testament was supposed to be a continuation of Jewish scripture! The Jews not only couldn’t understand Greek but they forbade their own from writing in it because it stood for everything anti-Jewish. Even according to modern Jewish scholars, Jews of the first century couldn’t have been such highly literate individuals in Greek to be able to write the New Testament with such refinement and eloquence. Nevertheless, the New Testament was written exclusively in Greek. And we also know that the NT authors wrote their books from various places outside of Palestine.

This coming Sunday is the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Lectionary Cycle C. In yesterday’s post completed our thoughts about the Resurrection and addressed the “real question” being debated by the Sadducees: the authority to interpret Scripture. But along the way, there is a statement Jesus makes that we did not address: “The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy…

God of the Living and the Dead

This coming Sunday is the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Lectionary Cycle C. In yesterday’s post we touched on the Sadducees’ belief that there is no afterlife. We pointed out that their belief was rooted in an assumption that there was no possibility of a life that was different from the one experienced here on earth. As well, we pointed out that even among people who believed in life after death…

This coming Sunday is the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Lectionary Cycle C. In yesterday’s post we considered the identity of the Sadducees and their resistance to the idea of Resurrection. Today we pick up the dialogue between Jesus and the Sadducees. “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, ‘If someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for…

The Sadducees and Resurrection

This coming Sunday is the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Lectionary Cycle C. The gospel addresses questions on Resurrection through a dialogue between Jesus and some Sadducees “those who deny that there is a resurrection.” (Luke 20:27). In yesterday’s post we considered the many Lucan passages that lay between the encounter with Zacchaeus (31st Sunday) and our gospel for the 32nd Sunday. Today’s…