Sunday, June 14, 2020

Acts17apologetics stand by their saints; Paul was fluent in Hebrew?

In answer to the video "Knowledge of Languages: Paul vs. Muhammad (PvM 5)"

Paul always quotes from the translation of the HB into Greek, i.e. the Septuagint and misrepresents the sources he is quoting. If he had the slightest knowledge of Hebrew or the way Hebrew scriptures use that word he would have never stated 
Gal3:16"The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ". 
Either this is ignorance, or deceit, most probably the latter, aimed at a lay audience of gentiles to whom Christ should be preached by all means, uneducated in Hebrew or the Jewish scriptures.
For example in Rom11:26 he quotes Isa59:20 as such
"The deliverer will come from Zion, he will remove ungodliness from Jacob"
thus attempting to establish scriptural support for the concept of Jesus' atoning death. However the Hebrew original, of which he knew nothing about, says the oppostie in
Isa59:20"A redeemer will come to Zion and to those who turn from transgression in Jacob, declares the Lord".
It stresses the oppostie of what Paul ineptly tries to convey. It says the messiah will come when people turn away from sins FIRST, not that he will redeem people from their sins. Interestingly, many NT translations render the verse correctly in Isa59:20 and incorrectly in Rom11:26.

A study of the Bible in the original Hebrew was the basis for all Pharisee studies. The Rabbis thus held this Greek Septuagint translation with little esteem, for many reasons. It symbolized the Hellenization of the Jewish people, hence the rabbis' distrust, more specifically the pharisees whom Paul supposedly was part of. It is Luke, the supposed author of Acts, that gives Paul this Pharisaic background, in addition trained by some of the most renowed rabbis of the time such as Gamaliel I (Acts22). Paul himself, in the letters attributed to him makes no such claim. He instead despised the Jewish Law, described it with the crudest of ways no Jew would ever dare doing. Given his bold confession to resort to deceptive missionary methods, especially when preaching to Jews, ie gentile to a gentile, a Jew to a Jew 1Cor9:20-23 one may only wonder how true was he in his obsessive appeals to his Jewishness Gal1:13-14,2Cor11:22,Phil3:5.

He came from Tarsus according to the NT, where historically there were few, if any, Pharisee teachers and a Pharisee training would have been hard to come by. There arent even any records of Jewish citizen having lived there. It isnt surprising that early Christians like Jerome attempted to correct this by reporting that he in fact came from Galilee. No Jewish writings exist of a 1st or 2nd century student of Gamaliel who, following his studies in which he excelled, and was so zealous in his Jewish orthodoxy that he enforced it through persecutions on behalf of the high priests, and in whose name letters were written to synagogues attesting to his authority Acts9, suddenly rebelling in favor of a heresy. Not only that but urged his followers to disregard the very law he was zealously enforcing. Surely such a renegade could not have completely escaped the attention of the scribes? Josephus speaks of virtually all of Paul's main characters found in Acts with but one exception, Paul himself.

The Gospels themselves, neither mention nor even hint at Paul. Another thing to mention is that the Jewish authorities neither had the power nor need to send a "chief persecutor" all the way to Damascus, where Paul had on the way his encounter with a light, to harass a group of rebellious Jews who believed the messiah had arrived. The Jews of Israel had much more pressing concerns in their everyday life living under Roman dominion than to care about a far away Jewish heresy. It is interesting that even in Acts5 we read that Gamaliel was against punishing Christians.

But accepting the NT's claim as true for argument's sake, for a Rabbi to quote a translation looked over with such suspicion shows how lacking he was in Rabbinic training. To them, it symbolized all that was wrong with the Jewish people. Paul could have quoted from the Hebrew Bible, but he never did. Paul was most probably a Roman pagan who held both Roman and Greek citizenships. We even read in Ebionite writings of the 2nd century that he was a Greek convert to Judaism, that later apostaised when the High Priest rejected his marriage offer to his daughter.

In the Acts of the Apostles, when Paul finally returns to Jerusalem to have his showdown with James, Acts records that the Jews have him arrested by the Romans. He then invokes his ROMAN citizenship Acts22:28, asking whether it is lawful to treat a Roman citizen in such a manner. Later, while Peter, James and the others are arrested Paul again invokes his Roman citizenship by appealing his case directly to the emperor. Only a Roman citizen of the upper social classes would be afforded this ability and if Jews had that right, then why didn't Peter, James and the others do the same?

The Bible does not say how or when Paul died, and history does not provide any information. It is only Christian tradition that has some unreliable accounts on how his life ended around the mid 60s A.D., during the reign of Nero.

http://www.biblestudy.org/question/sauldie.html
    "But there is great uncertainty on these subjects, so that we cannot positively rely on any account that even the ancients have transmitted to us concerning the death of this apostle; and much less on the accounts given by the moderns; and least of all on those which are to be found in the Martyrologists. Whether Paul ever returned after this to Rome has not yet been satisfactorily proved. It is probable that he did, and suffered death there, as stated above; but still we have no certainty" 


(Commentary on the Bible by Adam Clarke, commenting on Acts 28:31).

During what can safely be described as an "infiltration" into the early Christian movement by its chief persecutor who allegedly reformed himself due to a vision that contradicts itself from account to account, Saul of Tarsus now renamed Paul, was protected throughout his "ministry" from the Jewish crowd wanting to kill him by the Roman authorities who had even deployed an army for his sake Acts16:37-39,21:31-32,22:25-29,23:12-27,25:11-12,24-25,26:32 and who apparently even acquitted him from all charges laid against him by the Jews Acts23:29,25:13-26:31.

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