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Goodbye Jesus

Trusting The Bible, Prophecy And Probability


Guest Jenny911

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I give up. I always thought this could be reconciled as poetic licence. Wouldn't it be just like the godless heathens to put in two "on's"? Maybe the NIV got it right:

"Say to the Daughter of Zion,

'See, your king comes to you

gentle and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.' " (Matt. 21:5)

This makes it only one animal and that animal happens to be a young one that can be known by more than one term. It can be known as either a colt or a foal. Or maybe the author didn't know. According to answers.com, a colt is a male whereas a foal is young--under one year of age...Oops! I just took a look at answers.com and got quite a jolt.

 

Colt Foal

 

Here is the entry for the Vetrinary Dictionary section of the page:

A young entire male horse up to 4 years of age; may be qualified, e.g. yearling colt; used also as an adjective, e.g. colt foal.

Going by what I've read about farm animals, "entire male horse" in this context probably means uncastrated. Most male horses and cattle not used for breeding are castrated when very young to make them less dangerous for humans to work with.

 

Is it possible that the author of Matthew was actually so sophisticated that he used the post-modern vetrinary term colt foal, and that soft-skinned theologians and biblical scholars translating bibles just didn't know better so they made two animals out of one? Let's look at the Greek.

 

From the Greek

 

DISCLAIMER: I don't know how to use Greek font and I am not very good at reading NT Greek. However, I am using Alfred Marshall's NIV Interlinear Greek-English New Testament. Marshall puts the English transliteration directly under each Greek word. This helps me learn to read Greek.

 

What I notice is that Matthew does NOT make it one animal like the English NIV quoted above. There are two "on's" in the sentence. Here is the English transliteration of the Greek in Matt. 21:5:

Tell ye the daughter of Zion: Behold, the king of thee comes to thee meek and having mounted on an ass and on a colt son (foal) of an ass.

I don't know why Marshall inserts the word "foal" in parentheses because the Greek word is "son," if I know my vocabulary...Yup, I looked it up. It's the exact same word as in John 3:16. I think we can take out "(foal)."

 

Conclusion

 

Without doing any more word studies and research, I am still not ready to throw out the possibility that the writer is making a crude attempt at being poetic, like the NIV in the first part of this post. If he wanted to be really clear that this was a miraculous ride, he would have said Jesus was riding on an ass and also on a colt at the same time. He would have inserted the word "also" to emphasize that this really was something out of the ordinary. There might even have been a discussion about it later. That is what always happens about the intentional miracles. Other than that, we can assume bad scholarship. I wouldn't throw out that possibility, either.

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Proves that Jesus was a horse thief...

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Maybe it was supposed to be worded:

 

Sitting upon HIS ass on the foal of an ass...

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Looks like Jenny911 might be another sniper who posts once and then turns it over to Jesus.

 

I don't know about you guys, but her incredibly convincing link has me fighting off the urge to go to church tomorrow and sob on the altar in repentence. That Holy Spirit is just so powerful.

 

:rolleyes:

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Another problem occurs to me that the author would not have over-looked. An ass is a mother animal and a colt is a young male animal. There were two animals. Maybe the little guy just ran along-side his mother???

 

Let me see. A spritely young colt let loose on Passover Eve in a city that was swarming with the masses of the entire countryside. If Jesus stole someone's prize ass AND her off-spring AND got the colt lost AND set off a riot AND upset business at the Temple...Why did he get executed???

 

Well, you know, because, because, well, you know, two thousand years later someone might have some kind of lustful thoughts...and god can't stand that. :lmao:

 

Sorry, Jenny, but Jesus said it was a sin to have lustful thoughts about another person's spouse yet it happens all the time. And the NT says Jesus died for all sins.

 

Yet when we look at what all Jesus did when he entered the city...if someone came to your church's bakesale this spring and turned over all the tables and emptied out all the money-boxes, who would be the fastest pulling out their cell phone and calling 911?

 

If the villain managed to get away and got himself taken in by someone for a few hours until word got around, and he then sneaked into a nearby park to pray after supper because he had nowhere else to go...Would it not be logical for him to predict that he would be taken that night? Would it not be natural for his friends to eulogize him at his burial just to make sense of his failure to be all they had hoped? After all, the triumphant entry had looked all it should have been. How could it have gone wrong so badly so fast?

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Looks like Jenny911 might be another sniper who posts once and then turns it over to Jesus.

 

I don't know about you guys, but her incredibly convincing link has me fighting off the urge to go to church tomorrow and sob on the altar in repentence. That Holy Spirit is just so powerful.

 

:rolleyes:

 

You too?

 

:fdevil:

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Ruby,

 

Bit like in the Wild West, the Romans used to execute livestock thieves...

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Matthew gets the idea of two animals being ridden simultaneously at Jesus' entry to Jerusalem because he misreads the "prophecy" in Zechariah.

 

Here is Robert Price's explanation:

 

Matthew has the peculiar habit of doubling characters, as he does when he gives the Gadarene demoniac a playmate (8:28) and clones two new blind men from Bar-Timaeus (9:27), but these are nothing to the grotesque extravagance of Matthew 21:2-3, 7, where Jesus is said to have ridden two animals at once - rodeo style? Flesh and blood have not revealed it to him, much less historical memory, but rather slavish scriptural literalism. Zechariah describes Jerusalem's king as riding on "a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey." The point of this was similar to having Jesus ride a donkey no one had ridden before, the finest mount, only here it is stressed that the creature is purebred, a donkey, not a mule. Zechariah's oracle employed the familiar device of synthetic parallelism, making "a donkey" equivalent to "a colt, the foal of a donkey." Only the best for the king! How on earth could Matthew not have understood this, especially when he himself actually employs the same technique in his own creations? But, however artless, Matthew is not stupid. We know from the rabbis that, while they, too, recognized poetic parallelism and used it in their own compositions, they felt obliged to treat biblical poetry as if it were prose, so as to squeeze all (supposedly) available information from it. This is exactly what Matthew has done, albeit with ludicrous results.

 

"Incredible Shrinking Son of Man" pg. 293

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Proves that Jesus was a horse thief...

 

Right on. I think that colt got lost and probably the mother got lost, too. He didn't care about animals. He cared about getting the crowd's attention. Nowhere in the entire NT do we see him being nice to animals. I can't quite see the ethics of an adult human male setting his entire weight on a yearling colt, esp. of a small animal like a donkey. A large draft horse might be okay but that pic posted above--he's going to crush the baby animial's back!

 

Ruby,

 

Bit like in the Wild West, the Romans used to execute livestock thieves...

 

Yes Gramps, you guys were posting while I was writing. I didn't spell it out in so many words but I meant that post to imply that Jesus caused so many disruptions, on top of stealing livestock, that his execution just makes sense. I also meant that given this context it is ridiculous to think that he died for anybody's lustful thoughts two thousand years down the road.

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Here is Robert Price's explanation:

We know from the rabbis that, while they, too, recognized poetic parallelism and used it in their own compositions, they felt obliged to treat biblical poetry as if it were prose, so as to squeeze all (supposedly) available information from it. This is exactly what Matthew has done, albeit with ludicrous results.

 

"Incredible Shrinking Son of Man" pg. 293

 

Thanks for this. It makes sense. I read the passage in Zechariah and debated which one to post here. They're identical in the NIV. The decision was just the luck of the draw but it determined the direction this discussion would take. I had no idea others were interested in the topic. Thanks, everyone, for your contributions.

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Looks like Jenny911 might be another sniper who posts once and then turns it over to Jesus.

 

I don't know about you guys, but her incredibly convincing link has me fighting off the urge to go to church tomorrow and sob on the altar in repentence. That Holy Spirit is just so powerful.

 

:rolleyes:

 

You too?

 

:fdevil:

 

Being a Mennonite and all, I am not at all familiar with alters. I don't really know what an alter is except that the OT talks about alters and people from evangelical churches talk about alter calls. So here is something you might want to check into before you go up and sob too much--Hosea says there's going to be thorns and thistles on the alter and I'd hate you guys to get your faces all stuck full of them. It's in Hosea 10:8. I found it yesterday when I was looking for something else and it just popped into my head when I saw your posts...

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WE NEED A SQUIDDIE FITTING TO THIS ONE... just incase it's not a dump and run fundie...

 

She's got one now.

 

I wish she would give a decent refutation of our refutations of the prophecies that never fail...Surely we've raised some valid points by now...

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The Bible is has been the most translated book in the world. The fulfilled prophecies it contains could not have occured randomly... there 2500 prophecies in the Bible 2000 of which have already come to pass!

 

Check out this vid which lists some of the fulfilled Bible prophecies: http://www.proofdirectory.com/videos.htm

 

Isn't this proof?

 

Jenny

 

You've got to do better than use reference to a book of fairy tales if you want a serious discussion. The only 'proof' is written in the babble which has never been proven to be true or inspired by anything and the proof is not available in any other form of writing. You can't even prove the authorship. If I wrote 10,000 pages of bullshit I'm sure some it would sound true over time too. But thiis is the same old argument funny-mentals use to try and show 'proof' which is more like a seven year old proving Popeye exists because of all the comics that have been sold. The babble is one of the most translated books in the world because so many people donated to have it translated which, again, doesn't prove it's true, just means it's been published. If i wrote a book and got someone to back the publishing costs I could sell it in many languages too. This proves another point that the story of Jesus is the biggest story ever sold, not that it is true. So, the only ones making money on babbles are the publishers who hold the copyrights to the word of gawd. Doesn't sound like it is god's word but someone selling it.

 

Without the babble you can't prove:

Creation

the talking snake and the magic fruit

adam and eve

fall of man from grace

Moses can't be proven without the babble, he only exists in the OT writings

Exodus of the Jews never happened except in the babble.

Nothing shows the Jews to be God's chosen people except the babble.

Nothing shows Christians to be god's people except the warped way in which they interpret the babble to include themselves.

sins and souls can't be shown without the babble.

Moses did not bring the law to man since the Code of Hammurabi predates that by maybe a thousand years.

More proof shows 'Moses' copied his law from the Egyptian Book of the Dead

Can't prove Jesus, since he is only found in the NT and no proof of his existance is known outside the babble

 

Others claim the story of Jesus started out as a Gnostic fable that was stolen by christianity around the time the Nicean Creed was created. Christianity demonstrates it is guilty of crimes against humanity and is operated by a bunch of murderous thieves and liars, historically

 

So, what is this proof you are babbling about?

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WE NEED A SQUIDDIE FITTING TO THIS ONE... just incase it's not a dump and run fundie...

 

She's got one now.

 

I wish she would give a decent refutation of our refutations of the prophecies that never fail...Surely we've raised some valid points by now...

 

She won't be back... her ass was handed to her with fries...

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***whispering in hope..."come on, takethebait-takethebait-takethebait-takethebait"***

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Proves that Jesus was a horse thief...

They used to get shot or hung within the hour.

 

 

...

 

 

Makes me wonder... maybe that's the reason they hung him on the cross? It wasn't for all this other bullshit and excuses - they were added on later -, no the reason was that he was a horse theif! So much loved God the world that he stole an ass for our sins. Nice going God! :vent:

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***whispering in hope..."

 

:sing: like the song of an angel

Jesus thy love is sweet music to me. :sing:

Oh let's see, there's other versions of that song. Well, that's the one I know best.

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Proves that Jesus was a horse thief...

They used to get shot or hung within the hour.

 

 

...

 

 

Makes me wonder... maybe that's the reason they hung him on the cross? It wasn't for all this other bullshit and excuses - they were added on later -, no the reason was that he was a horse theif! So much loved God the world that he stole an ass for our sins. Nice going God! :vent:

 

We better call another Council of Trent and correct the New Testament. At least one more book is required to put the others into context. Half of it has to be Gospel oriented to deal with getting the "God so loved the world" part right and show that Jesus got hung for being a cattle thief. The other half is required to deal with Paul's rewrite of Jesus' teachings that were actually rather decent humanist values.

 

We could just take this thread and touch it up a bit. Then all that would be needed would be that meeting of Benny Hinn and Pope Benedict we had been planning a while back to sign it and make it an official book of the New Testament. :scratch:

 

PS Nobody could say it wasn't inspired.

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Proves that Jesus was a horse thief...

Indeed it does... after all, sending two people somewhere to nab a couple of horses/donkeys when they've never been in the area and giving no indication of paying? That's theft in my book...

 

Makes me wonder... maybe that's the reason they hung him on the cross? It wasn't for all this other bullshit and excuses - they were added on later -, no the reason was that he was a horse theif! So much loved God the world that he stole an ass for our sins. Nice going God! :vent:

There's more than a few people who've mentioned that to me, just based on what was in Matthew... interestingly, Christians always deny those animals were ever taken. :scratch:

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Well, they're accessories after the fact...

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The conspiracy deepens.

 

Perhaps in the core of the movement they were a gang of horse thiefs, and they hid their activity cleverly behind a curtain of "miracles" and magic tricks. With a little fancy, popularized religious and philosophical bull-shitting, fancied the ears of many, and few ever considered it strange that they came by foot and left the city riding.

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Isn't this proof?

 

1. Maybe a radical preacher called Jesus (Or Yeshua if you prefer) has lived back then. But the real question is, to paraphrase Ken from jesusneverexisted.com, "Did a holy carpenter walk on water and raise the dead?", in other words, was there anything supernatural about him.

 

2. The entire NT was written decades after Jesus supposedly lived, by missionary-minded fanatics with an agenda to make the world believe in him. These fanatics knew the OT and its prophecies. What would have been easier than think up some imaginary stories about Jesus fulfilling those prophecies?

 

3. Every, and I mean every, supernatural trait ascribed to Jesus has demonstrably been copied from other, older religions of that region of the earth. Not even the infamous "Lord's prayer" is genuinely christian. Try "Egyptian" to get closer.

 

Now guess why I don't believe a word of it all.

 

(Want to know more? www.jesusneverexisted.com, and bring much time - there's a whopping mountain of material over there)

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I don't know about you guys, but her incredibly convincing link has me fighting off the urge to go to church tomorrow and sob on the altar in repentence.

:rolleyes:

 

I feel a similar thing, but I'm not compelled to sob on the altar...

 

:fdevil:

 

 

 

 

 

:lmao:

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"Israel will become a nation again..." Ever think that people who believe in these prophecies made sure it happened through religious and political influence?

 

People disagree with me on this point but the suicide bombings started when the Jews were blowing up British soldiers in Jerusalem way back when Israel was trying to get its independence. I don't remember any history stories of suicide bombers before that but a whole dump truck load since. I've heard people blame Arafat for starting it but the hobby started before him. What fulfills prophecy but self-determination to fulfill prophecy.

 

just my 2 cents worth.

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No I'm not a "spoofer" or spammer if that's what you assumed.

 

Ah, and here we have another cut and dry example of Christian hypocrisy; Apparently Jenny isn't aware of the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Lie". Oh, thats right, being a believer doesn't make you perfect it just means that you are forgiven. You aren't just forgiven for sins committed in the past but those in present and future as well. Isn't that awesome?

 

Maybe thats the good news guys...we can accept Jesus and continue sinning because Heaven is guaranteed regardless. Woot! :Wendywhatever:

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