Am I paranoid or am I right?

So he was lying?

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No. He was simply saying that it’s not something for Him to say.

So it was just a little white lie? I don’t know is a world away from I won’t say.

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I don’t think it’s a lie, it’s a way of saying that He won’t say.

You may not consider it a lie but it is. We have become so accustomed to people lying to us that we don’t always recognize it for what it is. No one considers a little white lie to be a lie any more.

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A lie is something said with the intention of deceiving, right?

If Jesus knew that Christians would always know what He meant, wouldn’t we say it’s not a lie?

A lie could be telling the truth with the intention to deceive, but God is not a deceitful God. A lie is telling a falsehood. If you knowing tell a falsehood then the intention to deceive is a given. Saying “I don’t know” when in truth you do know is a lie.

In this case I think it is safe to say that Christians do not all agree with what He meant, so Jesus would/should/might know that we don’t always know what He meant.

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Jesus knew perfectly well how to avoid questions if he didn’t want to answer them, even at his trial. And he said, “I am the truth.” So for him to tell a lie is unthinkable!

I don’t think this was debated when Nicene orthodoxy was being developed.

I know this has been discussed on other threads, but it seems you are equating making a mistake with sinning. I do not think it is the same, as when gave the wrong answer on an exam, I do not not think I sinned. In the view presented, as I understand it, Jesus would have made a perfect score on his English language SAT. That seems quite a stretch. It also makes it less of a big deal to have been sinless and more difficult to be approachable as human. That, I suppose is what I have the most trouble with .

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That is actually a big problem with much of our estimation of the difference between the human and the divine; fallibility, original.sin and God’s expectation. On one end of the spectrum, some evangelicals seem almost to believe in gnosticism, where by definition humans are evil. One godly person told me that because Adam was human, there was no chance of his not falling; but If he had not fallen, each of us would have fallen anyway. But if any sin at all results in deserving eternal conscious torment, what kind of God would predestined that…other than an evil one? That is why it is so hard to make theology simple. At least, that is my take.

I did not find your link convincing. And we have to be careful about the nature of Christ. While he did have a divine nature and a human nature, we can’t tease them apart and attribute stuff to one nature or the other. (For example, we can’t say that when Jesus wept that was his human nature.) That’s what the Nestorian heresy was about.

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Thanks for clarifying. I did point out that Jesus referred to Abel. I do not know whether Hman is YEC or not. And whether or not Jesus quoted Genesis so frequently— not so sure about that, but you say that some assert this. I believe It was Walton who noted once that “there is no evidence” that ancient geneaologies included individuals whom the genealogy writers “did not believe existed.” The citation I gave you is, of course, a range and not a genealogy. But given the audience to whom Jesus was speaking, it is – as I asserted – hard to imagine He was referring to anyone that He and His hearers did not believe existed. It was hardly the setting for a philosophical discussion. In such a situation, I would think He would not simply tell a story. This is my opinion, of course. I read that statement of His and think He must have believed in the identity of Abel’s father. While I am not YEC or YED or ABC or any other acronym, this issue is of importance to me and makes me reluctant – among other things (YDNA etc) for not thinking there might be an Adam character somewhere. Others do not and evidently that includes you.

But the issue here is the context of the remarks. This situation only seems to suggest to you that Jesus was only accommodating the misunderstandings of His hearers — while accusing them of sharing the guilt of murdering God;s emissaries along with those past members of their establishment.

. You might argue that He was just accommodating (despite the situation) but that sounds unlikely —given the setting of the commeht. But then you do not take that approach when Jesus refers elsewhere to Jonah and his experience. So you believe Jesus then but not in the first situation???

I have some knowledge of Jesus quotation of the Old Testament. “Before Abraham was, I am…” and other things. But this is outside of your original question…

He was making a point. Jesus often told a story to make a point.

It wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was what the audience believed to be true and even if it wasn’t history it applied to the point He was making. As Jay said

Jesus was making “a larger point” to people who were planning on killing Him? But how do you determine that anyway? And then how do you determine that He was not “making a larger point” when He talked elsewhere about Jonah???

In Matthew 23 Jesus was speaking to “the crowds and to His disciples” so He wasn’t speaking just to the Pharisees. As I said when Jesus spoke to the crowds he just about always did so using stories.

Verse 35: so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah,

The larger point is the guilt will be upon their heads. This guilt will include everything from A to Z so to speak.

With Jonah, Jesus was making a direct comparison.

Jesus is in the remarks He made in chapter 23 is also making a direct comparison — comparing His hearers (scribes and Pharisees) to those who, in past eras, did these evil things that the scribes and Pharisees believed themselves incapable of repeating. .

In chapter 23 of Matthew, He spoke to the crowds through verse 12 — that is, verses 1-12. After that He spoke to the “scribes and the Pharisees” — and rather harshly. Sources on this incl NICNT (France), WBC (Hagner), the Conmentary, Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, George Haycock’s Catholic Bible Commentary, plus another commentary citing Bruner who notes that “most critical commentaries” think Jesus was being unfair to the Pharisees and thus doubt that He said it at all. At least, you and I agree that He said it. Haycock quotes Challoner, and "Denis the Carthusian] in his remarks.

Well…I think we are at an impasse. I am not YEC anymore. I am not so sure that the other particular views on things have much more merit. This all began with a question regarding whether or not Jesus mentioned Adam. My initial comment still stands, especially with Walton’s comment — in rebuttal to another scholar — that there was no evidence that geneaologies included the names of people whom the writer, composer, hearer, speaker did not believe existed. Jesus appears to have taken up from a geneaology and, within the comments of the strident remarks He was making – “The pitch of Jesus’ prophecy is so high and its attack so bitter” that some disbelieve He even said it, per Bruner — if you accept that He said it at all — which you seem to do — then the context and the seriousness of the occasion should affect how one determines the reality of the remarks. A bitter person – if that is what Jesus was — makes direct accusations, not allusions to mythical Disney characters, in leveling his charges.

I have said this before.

I have looked a bit at my family genealogy, and even with paper trails etc. those get awfully suspect once you go back a hundred years. I see a lot of different versions of the genealogy of my family from different writers.

The issue is then, did Jesus learn the genealogy accepted of the day and use it as appropriate to illustrate his point, regardless of the whether or not they were perfectly factual, or would he change the genealogy and distract from his message if he had unique hidden knowledge of an irrelevant factual error?

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I don’t need a commentary to tell me that Jesus was speaking about the scribes and Pharisees in vs 1-12 and to the scribes and Pharisees in vs 13-34. But there is nothing in the text to indicate the crowd had left. They were still standing around listening.

And I think we have established Jesus never mentioned Adam directly. Something that I have often wondered about.

Sorry but you left off any reference to what it is this is in reference to.

Sorry, but where did this come from? I have never heard anyone describe Jesus as bitter. I never said Jesus made allusions to Donald Duck. Mickey Mouse maybe.

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Doing family history is an interesting — though time-consuming — hobby. And yes, it can be perplexing … I spent forever (years) giving up and trying again to find even the smallest bit of data on a great-grandmother who, it seemed, should not have been hard to learn about.

But most people go through life without leaving much of a paper trail — and throughout history this has been so. Census lists (national and local), marriage records, visiting old graveyards, talking with local historians, divorce records, immigration and passenger lists, school report cards, wills, local biographies, obits, newspaper articles, legal records defining the limits of a piece of land, homesteading records, military records…etc.

If you are in the USA, there are government agencies (for good or for bad) who have a lot of stuff on past relatives ----and it helps if you have an ancestor or two who filed a lawsuit, made a claim for benefits, or converted to a religion that emphasizes family history…not to mention a neighbor or landlord or ex-landlord (etc) whose brother still lives in the old courtry not 30 minutes from where your ancestors once lived — and who kindly sends said relative to a church where old records are ketp.

The genealogies done by 20th cousins only showed me how little they knew my particular line, but a mistake they made in detailing my elusive great grandmother solved that problem. …But a curious thing also was a bit of family data they reported — which was something my father happened to have mentioned to me once. Just odd when the same piece of info pops up — passed down from one generation to another

{That is, of course, along with other stuff]

Written documents are the things we rely on these days.

If you want “deep genealogy,” then you have to do the Mitochondrial DNA and/or Y-DNA route…you probably know about all of that.

I do not know how much of that – if any — can be applied to ancient times, even if there is some sort of “pre-writing” in Paleolithic times, as some have claimed. I know that many of those who specialize in the subject claim that “pre-literate peoples have highly developed powers of memory” (see Vansima, Lings, Grant and Nielson and probably others).

“Cannot a man remember and speak?” — Lings explanation of why people in the New Hebrides thought writing “a curious and useless performance.” [article pub 1992 and not sure how far back that experience goes]

And it is also true that the Judaism of Jesus’ day was conscious of genealogy information that maintained their personal ties to Israel or to a particular clan in Israel.

That people can pass information down (if they want to) for centuries (without written records) has been documented in various places. See the Mar/Apr 2007 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review for an article – quoting Dever — on the “long tradition” in the Homeric saga, The Illiad, that preserved authentic details of earlier Greek history—until they later were written down. The author of the article, Edwin Yamauchi (sp) asked the the Hellenic world could do it, why not the biblical world?

How any of this would apply to someone who may have lived 80,000 to 120,000 years ago — not really sure, although a YEC friend of mine says we are being willful and refusing to face facts.

But I was not talking with this other respondent about a family geneaology. Rather I was referring to a range of people — soup to nuts, A to Z — whom Jesus mentioned. The last name was a guy mentioned in 2 Chronicles, which was the end of the Hebrew Bible (as they arranged it). If Jesus was accusing these individuals as being as culpable as their scribal and Pharisaic ancestors, then He started with the guy at the beginning of the biblical story. I read this and wonder if, since He mentioned Abel He must believe in Abel…so what about Abel’s father??

That is a list or a range, not a genealogy.

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