Making a Messiah, Pt. 4 (The not-so-good news)

The fourth video in a series exploring the role of the New Testament authors in shaping the character of Jesus Christ into their vision of the Jewish messiah.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• making
• messiah
• creating
• saviour
• jesus
• christ
• new
• testament
• authors
• who
• wrote
• the
• bible
• gospels
• epistles
• Christianity
• Paul
• Matthew
• Mark
• Luke
• John
• Acts
• invented
• created
• myth
• atheist
• atheism
• skeptic
• skepticism
• Dawkins
• Dennett
• Harris
• Hitchens

[qwyzl]

if the bible was written by jews, how can there be anti jewish sentiments in it? weren't the early christians jewish people? i don't get it.

[TaylorX04]

@qwyzl The Old Testament was written by Jews, but it's debatable whether or not the New Testament was. For starters, we have good reason to suspect many books of the New Testament were not written by the people they claim as their authors. Then there are some authors like Paul who may not have been Jewish in the traditional sense, but converted into Judaism. Lastly, there's the possibility of self-hating Jews, even though I loathe to use that stereotype. There were Hellenistic Jews then.

[qwyzl]

@TaylorX04 in respect to your mention of the hellenistic jews, i find all the different sects of jews so confusing. for example, in one of your videos you mentioned the pharisees - i had never been clear on who they were. then there's the essenes, the nazarenes, etc. and the word "pharisees" makes me think of the word "pharoah", so some how i always the two were related. all this stuff is just so messy, it's hard to sort it all out.

[TaylorX04]

@qwyzl Ah, I'm sorry, I do sometimes forget that not everyone reads as much of this nerdy shit as I do, lol. The Hellenistic Jews were Jews who supported Roman rule of Judea. There were Jews at that time who wanted the Romans out of their land and wanted to reinstate Israel as a separate nation, as well as do away with Roman customs that had begun to influence Jews living in the region. The Hellenistic Jews accepted Roman occupation and took part in Roman culture. (cont'd)

[TaylorX04]

(cont'd) So when I say "self-loathing Jews", I only use it in the sense that there were some Jews in that time who didn't seem to care very much about their Jewish heritage and wanted to assimilate into Roman culture. If Paul was a Jew, he was a Hellenistic one, because he writes favorably about the government in Romans 13, he claimed Roman citizenship, and he seemed to be in the good graces of some high Roman officials too. Slandering the Jews may have meant the Jews against Rome.

[xCrazyJayx]

So far, this series is win.

[LilGurl0218]

Your videos are amazing!

I'm an atheist and you show

me a lot more reasons to be one. =]

I love how you support everything with

facts instead of "belief" =]

I also agree with BellaLove155

[TaylorX04]

@d007ization I may do a future video on this, but if I recall correctly, no. There are some verses that each interpretation tries to claim for their own view, but they often overlap with the other interpretations and are generally pretty vague.

[d007ization]

@TaylorX04 Are there biblical passages that support each of these claim individually or is it all an intepretation of the same passage?

[TaylorX04]

In my opinion, the latter two have no real basis in scripture. What is the point of all the terrible "imagery" Jesus preaches in the gospels if hell is just separation or annihilation? There doesn't even seem to be a useful metaphor behind it.

[TaylorX04]

@d007ization There are varying beliefs on what separation still means. To some Christians, hell is eternal separation IN a fiery realm of agonizing torture, and to others it's just eternal separation without the flames and torment. Then there are others (and I used to be one of these for a time) who think eternal separation means annihilation of body and soul, so the separation is being absent the presence of god because you no longer exist.

[d007ization]

What do you think of some apologetics version of hell i.e. hell is "merely" seperation from God and a place of shame?