Tag: Messiah
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Rethinking Jesus (13) A Saviour from Sin?
Jesus earliest followers most likely believed that he was the promised Jewish Messiah, who would become the king of a restored Israel after the imminent, cataclysmic arrival of the earthly Kingdom of God. Let’s try, then, to grasp their traumatic shock and potential despair, when he was arrested, cruelly humiliated, and crucified. That was the […]
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Rethinking Jesus (12) God in the flesh?
It’s my belief that Jesus made no claim to be Yahweh, the Jewish God, made flesh. As a devout Jew, such a claim would’ve stuck in his throat. In John’s Gospel, he does say, “I am”, which is what God called himself in the Book of Exodus. That Gospel, however, belongs to the late 1st […]
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Rethinking Jesus (08) The Pharisees (i)
In the Gospels, the Pharisees seem to be Jesus’ most persistent opponents, and Matthew devotes a whole chapter (23) to giving them what he clearly considers a well deserved roasting. Jesus is said to regard them as “Snakes and children of snakes”, “deserving of going to Hell’. “On the outside”, he says, “you appear good […]
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Rethinking Jesus (05) Apocalypse Now
If we’re to understand Jesus the Jew, in the context of first century Palestine, we have to give attention to the appearance of Apocalypses, from around 200 BCE to 200 CE. During that time, there were Jewish apocalypses, supposedly written by Enoch, Zephaniah, Ezra and Baruch etc. Apocalyptic writings were also included in the Dead […]
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Rethinking Jesus (03) and John the Baptist
Let’s return to that day in the late 20s CE, when a 30 year old Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared on the banks of the river Jordan, where a charismatic preacher was baptising people in its waters. Since Jesus was obviously attracted by what he was seeing and hearing, even to the extent of casting […]
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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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The Gospels (3) ‘Jesus as Apocalyptic Preacher’
Ccontinung this series of posts, I’m writing about the Gospels as literature, and as religious ‘tracts’ designed to confirm to believers, and to persuade non-believers, that Jesus is the Son of God, Messiah of Israel and Saviour of the World, and that their contents should be understood as having been selected and shaped with that […]
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Matthew writes, not history, but his story …
In a previous post, on the genealogy that opens Matthew’s Gospel, I was saying, let’s value these books for what they are, not for what they aren’t. Matthew’s aim was persuading us that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and, from the Jewish scriptures, he engineered a three-piece genealogy designed to ‘demonstrate’ this. It was never […]
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