This morning, I watched the following video from “Paulogia”:
Yes, Jesus was a FAILED PROPHET (feat Tim O'Neill) (Mike Winger / InspiringPhilosophy response)
It
reminded me of the following essay by Heather Hardy (wife of Grant) and how the
Book of Mormon “saves” Christianity (and Jesus being a true prophet):
Heather
Hardy, "'Saving
Christianity': The Nephite Fulfillment of Jesus's Eschatological Prophecies,"
Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 22-55
In Mark 7:22 Jesus warns against the evil eye which defiles a man
from his heart. Prov. 22:9 speaks of the generous man as the “good of eye.” Matt.
6:22 speaks of the eye as the lamp of the body, and the generous eye makes the
whole body ful of light.” (Goulder, 302)
Pirke Aboth 2:9 R. Johannan b. Zakkai said: “Go forth and see
which is the good way to which a man should cleave. R. Eliezer [b. Hyrcanus]
said, A good eye. R. Joshua said, A good companion. R. Jose said, A good neighbor.
R. Simeon said, One that sees what will be. R. Eleazar said, A good heart. He
said to them: I approve the words of Eleazar b. Arak more than your words, for
in his words are your words included. He said to them: Go forth and see which
is the evil way which a man should shun. R. Eliezer said, An evil eye. R.
Joshua said, An evil companion. R. Jose said, An evil neighbor. R. Simeon said,
He that borrows and does not repay. He that borrows from a man is as one that
borrows from God, for it is written, The wicked borroweth and payeth not
again but the righteous dealeth graciously and giveth [Ps. 37:21]. R. Eleazar
said, An evil heart. He said to them I approve the words of Eleazar B. Arak
more than our words for in his words are your words included.”
Pirqe Aboth 2:11 R. Joshua said: “The evil eye and the evil nature
and hatred of mankind put a man out of the world.” Pirqe Aboth 5:19: “He in whom
are these three things is of the disciples of Abraham our father; but [he in
whom are] three other things is of the disciples of Balaam the wicked. A good
eye and a humble spirit and a lowly soul—[they in whom are these] are of the
disciples of Abraham our Father. An evil eye, a haughty spirit, and proud
soul—[they in whom are these] are of the disciples of Balaam the wicked.”
In Mark 7:21-22, the list of vices corresponds with similar
compilations which probably arose in Hellenistic Judaism (cf. E.g.
Romans 1:29-31; Gal. 5:19-21; Col. 3:5-8; 1 Tim. 1:9-10; 2 Tim. 3:2-5). “Doing
evil” is placed alongside covetousness here and in Rom. 1:29, too. (Eduward
Schweizer, The Good News According to Mark, 150)
The evil eye in a Jewish context meant envy, but if the list is
from a Gentile provenance, it may mean the malevolent glance which casts a spell.
(D. E. Nineham, The Gospel of St. Mark, 196-97) (Mitchell Pacwa,
"Appendix 2: Excurses on Matthew 15:1-20 & Mark 7:1-23," in Not
By Scripture Alone: A Catholic Critique of the Protestant Doctrine of Sola
Scriptura, ed. Robert A. Sungenis [2d ed.; State Line, Pa.: Catholic
Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2013], 524-25)
If Jesus rose from the dead, it’s game, set, match.
Christianity is true—period! Why? Because when Jesus’s critics
challenged him for a sign to confirm his claims, he offered the sign of his
resurrection from the dead (Matt. 16:1-4 // Luke 11:29-390; John 2:18-22). So
if Jesus rose, he did so to confirm his claims. I now felt a freedom to
investigate these other matters with an open mind because even if the answer
turned out differently than I had hoped, Christianity is still true. . . . I do
want to suggest that many people are bothered by Gospel differences far more
than they should be. Since Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true. And
it remains true even if it turns out there are errors and contradictions in the
Gospels Once I understood that principle, a lot changed for me. Many things
that had troubled me either no longer did or did to a much lesser extent. (Michael
R. Licona, Jesus, Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story
Differently [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Academic, 2024], 5, 6)
The bottom line: Contradictions offer a challenge to the
historical reliability of the Gospels and to some versions of the doctrine of
biblical inerrancy. However, they do not necessarily call into question the
truth of the Christian faith. So if Ehrman’s rhetoric troubles you, take a deep
breath and relax. Things are not nearly as horrible as Ehrman and others would
have us believe. If you are a Christian who worries every time someone brings
up a Gospel difference or something in the Old Testament disturbs you, remember
this principle: since Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true—period!
You will be keeping matters in their proper perspective. And you will sleep
better at night. (Ibid., 7, italics in original)
Embracing a flexible view of inerrancy should by no means
result in giving up the Bible and Christianity. Christianity is true because
of the person of Jesus and his resurrection. If Jesus rose from the dead, it’s
game, set, match. Christianity is true—period! Thousands became
followers of Jesus during the decades before any of the New Testament
literature was written. If none of the New Testament literature had ever been
written, Christianity would still be true. We just would not know much about
Jesus. (Ibid., 215-16)
Jesus was referring to the opening
verse of Psalm 110: “The Lord says to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I
make your enemies your footstool.” He was pointing out that according to this
text, when David addresses the king-Messiah who is invited to sit on the right
hand of God, David calls him “Lord.” Then, Jesus commented, “David himself
calls him Lord, so how is he his son?” In other words, if the Messiah was in
fact from the house of David, David would have addressed him as “my son.” With
the support of this verse, Jesus was making an extraordinary claim: the Messiah
described there, whose arrival the people was awaiting, was not a descendant of
David!
Scholars have suggested that Jesus used
this verse from the book of Psalms to show that although he did not descend
genealogically from the house of David, he was the Messiah nevertheless. (See
Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, 141) If that was the
case, this tradition concerning Jesus’s sermon assumed that he did not belong
to the house of David, which contradicts the contention of the gospels of Matthew
and Luke that Jesus was in fact descended from this line (see Matt .1:1; Luke
2:4). The very existence of this contradiction makes all the more likely the
authenticity of the tradition that Jesus was not of the Davidic line and that
he offered an extraordinary interpretation to support his claim to messiahship.
It is hard to believe that New Testament authors would later fabricate a
tradition opposed to the one in the gospels of Luke and Matthew.
And, in fact, in Jesus’s own words, as
related in the Gospels, he himself never claimed to be a descendant of the
house of David. Some of the people around him did say that hew as in the Davidic
line—the beggar in Jericho called him “son of David,” the people at the Mount
of Olives pronounced “Blessed be the kingdom of our father David that is
coming!” (Mark 10:46-48 and 11:10, and parallels)—but Jesus himself never
confirmed it.
Yet there’s more here. Jesus’s sermon
denying that the Messiah would be descended from the house of David also represented
an ideological rejection of Davidic messianism, which expected the arrival of a
fighting Messiah who would liberate the Jews from Roman rule. To Jesus, the
Messiah was not case in the mold of the warlike David, but was the son of God.
As such, the Messiah was higher than David, which is why David had addressed
him as “my Lord.” The divine voice Jesus heard when he was baptized in the
River Jordan had addressed him as “my son,” and that is how he saw himself.
Jesus would confirm this a few days later when he stood before the High Priest
at his trial and asserted that he was “the Son of the Blessed one” (Mark 14:61-62).
(Israel Knohl, The Messiah Confrontation: Pharisees Versus Sadducees and the
Death of Jesus [trans. David Maisel; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 2022], 148-49)
Like much else in Mormonism, the doctrine governing the
ministry of the seventy may properly be described as a process of unfolding in
which divine revelation and necessity (or common-sense practicality) merged to
produce a coherent scheme. (Lyndon W. Cook, The Office of Seventy 1835-1845 [Grandin
Lecture Series 1; Provo, Utah: Grandin Book Company, 2010], 25)
[Parley P.] Pratt clarified the official doctrine and
policy of the church:
“[T]he difference between the authority of the Seventies
and High Priests was this: the High Priests possessed the High Priesthood, but
the Seventies possessed the High Priesthood and the Apostleship which
was [the] highest power on the earth or in the Church” (General Record of the
Seventies, Book B, 25 January, 1846). (Lyndon W. Cook, The Office of Seventy
1835-1845 [Grandin Lecture Series 1; Provo, Utah: Grandin Book Company,
2010], 121, emphasis in original)
At the same time, verse 3, “From the
womb of the dawn like dew your youth will come to you,” seems incomprehensible.
What might these words mean?
The solution is to be found in the
Septuagint translation (3rd-2nd century BCE), which renders this same verse
very differently. There, God says to the king, “At dawn from the womb I have
begotten you.” According to this version, the king was begotten by God.
Who, then, was the feminine partner
with whom God begot the king-Messiah?
Some scholars have suggested that
originally the verse read, “from the womb of the dawn, I have begotten you.”
According to this reading, the dawn served as a king of partner-in-marriage for
God. It had a human role, just as it played the role of parent in Isaiah’s
exclamation, “how are you fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of the dawn!”
(describing the fate of this evil king who had boasted, “I will ascend to
heaven above the stars of God”) (Isa. 14:12-13).
If this was the case, the king-Messiah
was born from the union of God and the dawn. Then it would appear that the
verse is implying that he was a kind of heavenly creature, like a star. God
begot the king from the womb of the dawn like dew. God created the king as dew comes
into being in the dawn.
If that was really the original form
of the verse, two questions have to be asked: First, what is the meaning of the
image of “a birth like dew”? And second, why did the verse change so dramatically
from its original meaning reflected in the Septuagint to the common Hebrew version,
to the point that today we cannot understand it?
In order to answer the first question,
we need the assistance of some ancient Egyptian texts, sometimes accompanied by
illustrations, describing the birth of kings. These were generally rulers who
had to find some justification for sitting on their thrones because they did
not belong to the royal family or because they were female. One of them was
Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt in the fifteenth century BCE. After the death
of her husband the pharaoh, Hatshepsut was appointed deputy queen in order to
preserve the monarchy until the pharaoh’s son, the heir-apparent, grew up and
took over. But Hatshepsut became fond of her role and wanted to occupy the
throne of the pharaohs like all the kings of Egypt. In order to justify the
unusual phenomenon of a woman ruler of Egypt, texts and illustrations were
produced describing Hatshepsut’s divine origins. One of the texts says that the
leading god, Amun, inseminated Hatshepsut’s mother with his dew, and that was
how the queen was born. (Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 2,
75-100; 334; vol. 3, 12-19; Gardiner, “Coronation of King Hamerhab”) Of course,
the meaning was the god’s semen, but it was described as dew.
I suggest that the author of Psalm 110
may have known this Egyptian tradition, used it, and elaborated on it. There
were strong cultural relationships between Egypt and the kingdom of Judah. (For
example, several chapters in the book of Proverbs are based on an Egyptian book
of proverbs, the proverbs of Amen-em-ope). However, due to the theological gap
between Egypt and Judah, there was no place for complete and full borrowing. Here
in the psalm, in place of an actual union of the god and the queen mother, a
human being, the author depicted the God of Israel as fertilizing a divine
being, the womb of the morning.
Even if the author of this psalm did
not intend to describe the biological birth of a king as a son of God, this is
a very strange image. It could have disturbed the final editors of the Hebrew
Bible who lived in the early Rabbinic period (1st-2nd century CE).
Consequently, some changes were made in the text. As a result, future readers
would no longer be able to discern the original meaning of the text. (Israel
Knohl, The Messiah Confrontation: Pharisees Versus Sadducees and the Death
of Jesus [trans. David Maisel; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 2022], 84-85)
. . . unlike the tradition in other biblical
books, the king of Deuteronomy is not anointed with oil, and unlike Saul, David
and Solomon (see I Sam. 13:9, 2 Sam. 6:12-19, I Kings 8:63), he has no role or
status in religious ceremonies. Moreover, he does not even lead the army, for,
according to Deuteronomy, those that go before the camp and encourage the
people to fight are God’s representatives, the priests (Deut. 20:1-4).
Furthermore, the king plays no part in the legal system, in total contrast to
the point of view in the Psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah, which particularly
stress the king’s role in imposing “righteousness and justice.” In fact, the decision
in a complicated legal and cultic problem is given to the priests or to the
judges, and not to the king (See Deut. 17:8-11).
One might then ask: What should the
king do after all these responsibilities are taken from him? Deuteronomy’s
answer is simple: let him sit and study the Torah. “And when he sits on the
throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law,
from that which is in charge o the Levitical priests, and it will be with him,
and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the
Lord his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statues, by doing
them; that his heart may not be lifted above his brethren, and that he may not
turn aside form the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left”
(Deut. 17:18-20).
The fact that the king has no role in
ceremonies, in the army, or in the legal system seems designed to ensure that
he will have no sense of superiority, “that his heart may not be lifted above
his brethren.” A king of this kind is in total contrast to the wondrous and
lofty figure depicted in Isaiah’s prophecies. While Isaiah strives to elevate
the king as much as possible, to the point of calling him “Mighty God, Eternal
Father,” the book of Deuteronomy seeks to diminish the king’s image as much as possible,
largely by making him powerless to rule. In so doing, the book of Deuteronomy
can be read as an extension of Hosea’s view that the people must place their
trust in God alone. (Israel Knohl, The Messiah Confrontation: Pharisees Versus
Sadducees and the Death of Jesus [trans. David Maisel; Philadelphia: The
Jewish Publication Society, 2022], 29-30)