Tag: Isaiah
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Matthew’s Debatable Verse
There are just two ‘nativity’ accounts, at the beginning of the Gospels called Matthew and Luke. Neither is referred to again in the New Testament, which nowhere else says anything about Jesus’ birth. The word “virgin” occurs only in Matthew, in a quote from Isaiah 7:14. Here’s a literal rendering of that verse from the…
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Jesus the Messiah?
‘Messiah’ comes from Hebrew ‘mashiach’, referring to someone ‘anointed’ with oil, as a sign of being set apart for God’s service. It’s worth noting that the Hebrew Bible makes no reference to ‘the Messiah’. There are many ‘messiahs’, principally the Jewish Kings in the line of David who, like him, were anointed at their coronations.…
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Jesus and the Church
Did Jesus intend to be the founder of a “Christian Church”, which would first ‘supersede’, and then separate itself from, his own Jewish religion? To answer this, it seems to me that we must strip away 2,000 years of exegesis and christology, and try to recapture the religious views of a 1st century Palestinian Jew,…
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Because Jesus was a Jew …
At some point, possibly in the 27 CE, beside the river Jordan, in a part of the world known to its Roman overlords as Palestine, a charismatic preacher, John by name, was holding forth to all who would listen to him. He was also baptising those who found themselves agreeing with his message, some of…
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An Unexpected Reversal
In a previous post, I wrote about Jesus agreeing with the teaching of John the Baptist, joining his movement, and being baptised by him in the river Jordan. John, however, was arrested and executed. Jesus formed his own movement, and continued with the same teaching, which is summed up near the beginning of Mark’s Gospel…
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