Summations Only

Hi GDR, Oh my sweet Lord no! That's the last thing you want to do! That will guarantee that you will never understand it.The OT wasn't written by Christians or for Christians. It was written by Jews for Jews. Whatever Paul or other later Christian writers thought those OT authors meant, well, they are entitled to their opinion, but ultimately, their opinions are worth no more than yours or mine.Trying to force fit the OT into a Christian framework is never going to be easy. It will never create a narrative that is free of contradictions. Your problem is that in attempting to view the OT through a Pauline lens, you are unfailingly going to create a distorted picture, and only increase the number and severity of those pesky contradictions. Much worse, you are allowing yourself to fool yourself into understanding the OT in Christian terms, something that I think is the single biggest error that Christians make in interpreting the Bible.Mutate and Survive

Hi Dawn, This question is a separate matter from interpretation. First we must ask "What are they saying?". Only then can we meaningfully ask whether or not it is true. The OT was written a very long time ago, when people had a lot of very odd superstitious beliefs. I don't see the idea that some of the miracle stories are weird being a barrier to interpretation. Believing, yes, but interpretation, not so much. The historical and cultural context from which they originated. Oh come on! "You couldn't possibly understand" isn't a very useful or satisfying answer Dawn. Would you be satisfied with that if I threw it at you? I would hope not. Anyone can claim that about anything.Mutate and Survive

Perhaps. But not necessarily in the same way as the authors. Paul is coming to the OT centuries after it was written. He may have been a scholar of Judaism, but his understanding of those texts would have been badly flawed. For example, he would have believed in Mosaic authorship, a major mistake. He would have had no idea about anything resembling the Documentary Hypothesis, another major failing. He would have been steeped in tradition about those texts, much of which would have been wrong. I don't think we can take him that seriously as an interpretor.His opinion maybe more significant than yours or mine, but I don't think his opinion is especially important. But it is also fair to say that Jesus shook up the status quo to a very great extent. His Judaism was a radical departure from that which had gone before. I don't think we should expect the Old and New Testaments to align with each other; if anything, we should expect them to disagree a great deal, which they do. I strongly agree with this.A Merry Christmas to you and yours!Mutate and Survive

It seems to me that you are willing to be more generous toward Paul than you would be toward a source that wasn't so important to Christianity.Mosaic Authorship was the standard model in the First Century. If you want to suggest that he held to any other model, you are going out on a limb; you need evidence for that, or you should assume that the default position applies. The default position in this case is Mosaic Authorship, because that's what people believed back then.As for the bit about Moses' death, I expect that people back then used the same poor excuse as ICANT does today, that "Joshua wrote the last few verses". I doubt it. Be honest, Paul's understanding of the Torah would have been dwarfed by any modern scholar. He was writing thousands of years after it was written, only without the benefit of modern knowledge and techniques. He was not any closer to the authors in any meaningful sense. His opinion is just another semi-informed opinion, no more valuable than any other opinion. That is true, but it doesn't mean that Paul's contemporaneous view of the scriptures was actually the correct one. He could still have got it very wrong, as indeed Jesus could have misunderstood the scriptures. Well this is definitely a whole separate topic, but from what I've seen, the OT material about the Messiah does not resemble Jesus very much. If that's your test, I think that Jesus fails it. Well, as I've said before, I consider this to be a rather counter-productive way of revealing something.Mutate and Survive

Because Moses didn't write the Torah. You are several centuries behind the times on this one ICANT. Please try to at least drag yourself into the Nineteenth Century. At least one of whom is likely a fictional character. Luke was written after Paul, numbnuts. No. The author of Luke is saying that Jesus said that Abraham said...Mutate and Survive

Except that this "one piece of evidence" is a pathetic fantasy. As I have explained to you previously, it's based upon inaccurate information on the science side and glaring misinterpretations on the Biblical side. Funny thing; reality doesn't actually care how much fun you think it is. Sanctimonious drivel. Magic. The word you are strenuously seeking to avoid here is "magic". If your explanation is that God used magic, then say so. Just don't pretend to have any right to then comment on the science.Mutate and Survive