Thursday, April 2, 2020

Acts17apologetics stuck in a tangled biblical web; multiple prophecies before end of times?

In answer to the video "Zakir Naik Declares: "Jesus Is the God of Muhammad!""

The phenomenon of collective revelation, as is alleged to have happened at Pentecost, through the descent of the holy spirit on several people at once, will only reoccur in the messianic age
Joel3:1"I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions".
This is the passage which the Christians link as the fulfillement of Jesus' prophecy of the paraclete, based on the faulty future tense in Jn14 as shown earlier. As stated in the following verses and preceding chapters, this will only happen in the end of times, and will be accompanied by obvious cataclysmic signs. This further shows that the holy spirit is always linked to the field of prophethood.

This, as a side note, poses a problem to the peculiar Christian notion of being filled with the holy spirit once they have accepted Christ and yet are unable to prophecy and never will be.  Similarly, no Christian today is able to "speak in tongues" as is alleged to have occurred at pentecost. Nothing prevents the miracle from being reproduced as the NT does not say the phenomenon ceased after pentecost. The purpose was to spontaneously evangelize in any audience's language, something missionaries are obviously unable to do today. Further, was the holyspirit limited that day, so that others who were present and heard the phenomenon Acts2:13"made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine"? The spirit left them out, their tongue was unworthy of being represented. To them, the spectacle was that of drunkards speaking unintelligibly. Where were Paul's interpreters when one desperately needs them 1Cor14? As Celsus, the early pagan intellectual opponent to Christians said
 "Having brandished these threats they then go on to add incomprehensible, incoherent, and utterly obscure utterances, the meaning of which no intelligent person could discover: for they are meaningless and nonsensical, and give a chance for any fool or sorcerer to take the words in whatever sense he likes".
Not a single of the well known criteria of the messianic age as outlined in the Hebrew Bible, have occurred until now, and neither were those criteria fulfilled at pentecost were God's spirit is said to have poured on several people as described in Joel. Yet we have Paul claiming the opposite throughout his writings, including Peter, based on that very messianic passage of Joel that negates the events of pentecost. The pentecost story cannot have occured as it is believed it did, and what descended on the people could not have been the holy spirit, let alone the paraclete.

There is a reason why the Pharisees in Acts2:13 mockingly alluded to these people on the day of pentecost as a group of drunkards, for their odd, erratic behavior and incomprehensible speech; this type of effect that the indwelling spirit of holiness supposedly had on them was something unheard of in the prophetic history. No prophet who received the holyspirit ever behaved in such a manner, whether the prophets of the HB down to the last Ishmaelite prophet.

Christians thus need to "loosen up" the definition of a prophet, despite it being firm and precise, in order to make place for their unscriptural ideas. The deeper difficulty however for Christians is that this passage from Joel, and other similar eschatological passages, rejects any attempt at identifying the end time king/messiah with Jesus. In addition to being "a" messiah, which requires the fulfilment of specific ritual and genealogical conditions which were never met in Jesus, the end times messiah also has to satisfy some lifetime requirements, including the global ingathering of the Jews, rebuilding of the temple, ushering of the age of unfaltering observance of the Law (which bellies by the way all of St Paul's innovations), universal peace, universal knowledge of God, blissful utopia, end of evil and sin, disease and death.

Obviously none of those criteria ever occurred anywhere near Jesus' era, and in fact the least that can be said is that the 1st century, its overall state of upheaval, was the antithesis of what the messianic era is supposed to be. 

There isn't a single prophecy saying the Messiah would come, die, be resurrected, and then return thousands of years later to BEGIN his mission. It in facts says he will accomplish these tasks within his own lifetime Isa42:4"He shall not fail or be crushed until he has set the right in the earth". That is why the idea of a suffering king messiah is inexistent in pre-Christian Judaism. The awaited figure is in fact expected to violently enforce the new world order. In view if this, Christians also need to explain why would anyone not see the "second coming" theory as an attempt to explain away Jesus' failure during his "first coming" to usher the messianic era.

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