===========

Catholic cleric: Christ nullified God’s promises to the Jews

A Catholic synod called at the Vatican to address the rising persecution of [...]]]> [ Next to Islam, the Catholic Church is the largest purveyor of "replacement theology" in the world, with many Protestant denominations (including even some so-called "Evangelical" churches) following suit. ]

===========

Catholic cleric: Christ nullified God’s promises to the Jews

A Catholic synod called at the Vatican to address the rising persecution of Christian in the Middle East wrapped up on Saturday with a joint statement that focused a lot of attention on demanding Israel end its “occupation” of Arab lands.

The gathering was meant to address the various acts of persecution, intimidation and discrimination that are resulting in a severe dwindling of Christian communities across the region.

But the bulk of the two-week meeting was spent discussing how Israel is the root cause of all the Middle East’s woes, including those faced by its Christians.

The final statement reflected that position. It listed the “occupation” of Arab lands, the building of Israel’s security barrier, military checkpoints, the jailing of terrorists (defined in the statement as “political prisoners”) and the general disruption of Palestinian life as some of the main reasons behind the exodus of Palestinian Christians and Muslim attacks on the Jewish state.

Cyril Salim Bustros, the Lebanon-born Greek archbishop of Our Lady of the Annunciation in Boston, Massachusetts was responsible for delivering the final statement.

In clarifying remarks, he stated that “the Holy Scriptures cannot be used to justify the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians, to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands.”

He then escalated the situation by declaring that the original promises made by God to the children of Israel “were nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people.”

Bustros rejected the idea of Israel as “the Jewish state,” and insisted that eventually all the so-called “Palestinian refugees” must return to the land, a sure recipe for the demographic destruction of the world’s only Jewish nation-state.

Mordechai Levi, Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican, decried Bustros’ comments and the damage they had done to strengthening ties between Israel and the Church.

A Vatican spokesman later stated that the Church’s official position is the synod’s declaration, and not Mr. Bustros’ explanatory remarks. However, he did not outright reject what Mr. Bustros said, even though it would appear to contradict more recent Vatican declarations that God’s promises to the Jews remain intact.

It should be noted that the synod declaration, in its section addressed to the Jews, insisted that “recourse to…biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.”

The only thing Israel and its supporters use the Bible to justify in this case is the Jews’ right to the land, including Judea and Samaria. If the Vatican is now saying that the Bible and the divine promises therein no longer give the Jews claim to the land, as Mr. Bustros tried to clarify, then for many the Vatican’s commitment to its earlier declaration regarding the Jews and God’s promises to them remains at least partially in question.

Read Article

(WND) JERUSALEM – A Jewish Temple organization has slammed as “a hubris-inspired act of self-aggrandizement” controversial plans by a Pentecostal church to reportedly build a $200 million replica of the First Temple in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

“This planned church is a mockery which stands in diametric opposition to everything that [...]]]> By Aaron Klein

(WND) JERUSALEM – A Jewish Temple organization has slammed as “a hubris-inspired act of self-aggrandizement” controversial plans by a Pentecostal church to reportedly build a $200 million replica of the First Temple in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

“This planned church is a mockery which stands in diametric opposition to everything that the Holy Temple of Jerusalem represents,” Rabbi Chaim Richman, director of the international department of the Temple Institute, stated in a press release.

“The Bible, bequeathed to the world by the Jewish people, emphasizes the preeminence of Jerusalem and its spiritual and prophetic role in the future of both Israel and all mankind,” Richman said.

“We are witness today to the phenomenon of nations that seek to de-legitimize Israel’s connection to Jerusalem. This planned megachurch represents the next logical step, the de-legitimization of the significance of Jerusalem altogether,” he said.

Richman slammed the reported plans by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God as a “cynical and manipulative attempt to morph the Bible’s universal message into its own self-serving agenda.”

According to the U.K. Guardian, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God will construct a church in Sao Paulo based on King Solomon’s Temple, including a replica of the Ark of the Covenant at its center.

“We are preparing ourselves to build the temple, in the same mold as Solomon’s,” Bishop Edir Macedo, the church’s leader and founder, was quoted as saying in the report.

“[Solomon's] Temple … used tons of gold, pure gold. … We are not going to build a temple of gold, but we will spend tons of money, without a shadow of doubt,” said Macedo.

Macedo told the British newspaper his church had signed an $8 million contract to import stones from Israel.

“We have signed the contract and commissioned the stones that will come from Jerusalem, just like the ones that were used to build the temple in Israel; stones that were witnesses to the powers of God, 2,000 years ago,” he said. “It is going to be a knockout, it is going to be beautiful, beautiful, beautiful – the most beautiful of all. The outside will be exactly the same as that which was built in Jerusalem.”

Read Article

[ Know them by their fruits... When was the last time a Jewish or Christian sect disfigured a woman's face in the name of their religion? When was the last time members of a church performed female "circumcision" on virgin girls, or decapitated others in the name of their faith, for that matter? [...]]]>

[ Know them by their fruits... When was the last time a Jewish or Christian sect disfigured a woman's face in the name of their religion? When was the last time members of a church performed female "circumcision" on virgin girls, or decapitated others in the name of their faith, for that matter? Or when did the Jews last endorse cutting off an alleged offender's hands because he stole a loaf of bread? It is obvious that Islam is a religion of those who are enslaved by fear. It is form of aberrant legalism that is based on seriously flawed and deranged ideas about God. ]

=====

(TIME Magazine) Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.

Read Article

==========

Muslim extremists chop off Catholic’s hand

Suspected Islamic militants have chopped off a Catholic professor’s hand in Kerala for [...]]]> [ I hope you detect my heavy sarcasm in the title of this post. This is a prime example of the sort of murderous frenzy that cultic thinking engenders among its adherents... ]

==========

Muslim extremists chop off Catholic’s hand

Suspected Islamic militants have chopped off a Catholic professor’s hand in Kerala for allegedly insulting Islam in an exam question paper.

Professor T.J. Joseph was attacked on July 4 in while returning home from Sunday mass with his mother and sister, a Catholic nun.

Kochi inspector-general of police, B. Sandya, told ucanews.com that an Islamic extremist group is suspected of the crime and have arrested four people and impounded a vehicle.

She said the attackers used the vehicle to block Joseph’s car before dragging the professor from his vehicle and chopping off his right hand. The attackers then threw the hand away before fleeing.

Church-managed Newman College in Thodupuzha had suspended Joseph, its Malayalam professor, on March 25 for allegedly preparing a question paper with insulting references to the Prophet Muhammad.

St. Joseph Sister Mary Stella said the assailants attacked her brother with an axe and swords.

“They also attacked our elderly mother,” before fleeing, she said.

Read Article

=============

Half a million observant Israelis made their way to Mount Meron on Saturday night as the Sabbath gave way to Lag Baomer, the Jewish holiday [...]]]> [ Lag B'Omer is a holiday that celebrates Kabbalah (or Jewish mysticism).  The mecca made to Meron demonstrates just how popular Kabbalah is in Israel these days... ]

=============

Half a million observant Israelis made their way to Mount Meron on Saturday night as the Sabbath gave way to Lag Baomer, the Jewish holiday on which bonfires are lit to commemorate the Talmud-era day on which a plague that had killed 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students finally ended.

Another of the rabbi’s students, Shimon Bar Yochai, survived the plagued and went on to become, according to tradition, the author of the Zohar. Bar Yochai is also commemorated on Lag Baomer, with celebrations and torchlighting taking place at his burial place on Mount Meron.

And so, hundreds of thousands of Jews made their way to the site Saturday for the annual celebration, during which three-year-olds receive their first haircuts.

Over 1,000 policemen were deployed to the site in order to ensure that the festivities were not marred by traffic jams or car accidents. They assessed that even as the Sabbath was waning, there were 20,000 pilgrims at the site.

Read Article

Note: For more information about “Counting the Omer” and Lag B’omer, see these pages:

• Sefirat Ha-Omer
• Lag B’Omer

Scientists examining the Shroud of Turin since the restoration that began in 2000 have found a “second face” on its reverse “hidden side,” a discovery they believe adds evidence to the argument it is not a medieval painting or photographic rendering.

As part of the restoration undertaken in the summer [...]]]> By Jerome R. Corsi

Scientists examining the Shroud of Turin since the restoration that began in 2000 have found a “second face” on its reverse “hidden side,” a discovery they believe adds evidence to the argument it is not a medieval painting or photographic rendering.

As part of the restoration undertaken in the summer of 2002, the Holland cloth – the backing cloth placed on the shroud by the Poor Clare Nuns to preserve it after the 1532 fire – was removed, permitting for the first time in centuries an examination of the back side…

To the naked eye, the backside of the shroud appears to show no image whatsoever.

Like the face image on the front side of the shroud, the previously hidden image on the backside is a superficial image that exists only on the topmost linen fibers, created by the same dehydration process characteristic of the face and body image on the front.

The backside of the shroud contains only a limited ventral image of the crucified man in which a stain appears to correspond to the crossed hands seen on the front.

Read Article

By KATARINA KRATOVAC

CAIRO — Egypt displayed on Monday newly discovered tombs more than 4,000 years old and said they belonged to people who worked on the Great Pyramids of Giza, presenting the discovery as more evidence that slaves did not build the ancient monuments.

The series of modest nine-foot-deep [...]]]> Slaves didn’t build pyramids

By KATARINA KRATOVAC

CAIRO — Egypt displayed on Monday newly discovered tombs more than 4,000 years old and said they belonged to people who worked on the Great Pyramids of Giza, presenting the discovery as more evidence that slaves did not build the ancient monuments.

The series of modest nine-foot-deep shafts held a dozen skeletons of pyramid builders, perfectly preserved by dry desert sand along with jars that once contained beer and bread meant for the workers’ afterlife.

The mud-brick tombs were uncovered last week in the backyard of the Giza pyramids, stretching beyond a burial site first discovered in the 1990s and dating to the 4th Dynasty (2575 B.C. to 2467 B.C.), when the great pyramids were built on the fringes of present-day Cairo.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once described the pyramid builders as slaves, creating what Egyptologists say is a myth later propagated by Hollywood films.

Read Article

Preface: I regularly attended Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis for over eight years. The senior pastor there, Dr. John Piper, is a gifted and eloquent speaker, but I often detected a not-so-subtle theological bias in his teaching that suggested that God had no abiding interest in the State of Israel or in the [...]]]>

Preface: I regularly attended Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis for over eight years. The senior pastor there, Dr. John Piper, is a gifted and eloquent speaker, but I often detected a not-so-subtle theological bias in his teaching that suggested that God had no abiding interest in the State of Israel or in the Jewish people. For example, in a sermon he preached (“Son of God, Son of Man”,” Dec. 2008), Dr. Piper said the following:

Jesus is where we meet God. If you want to say, “Where on the planet today is a holy place that I can do a pilgrimage and be in the house of God?” Answer, “Jesus!” You want to go to a holy place on the planet? Stand still and come to Jesus. There aren’t any holy sites in the Christian religion. Zero. I’ve never gone to Israel mainly for that reason. Please, when I’m here 30 years don’t give me a free trip to Israel – fix my car! I got no problem with you going to Israel. I don’t want any emails. There’s just no more Jesus in Israel than there is in your pew right now. – John Piper, Sermon delivered December 7, 2008

Note that the (ahem) “expurgated version” of this was published on the DGM website as:

Now Jesus is the new Beth-el. He is the place where God is present. Heaven has opened, and Jesus has appeared. And from now on, Jesus will be the place where God appears most clearly among men, and where men find their way into fellowship with God. There are no holy geographic places any more designated by God as his meeting place with man. Jesus is that meeting place. [Edited revision of this part]

 
Now I understood the basic point of Dr. Piper’s comment, namely, that we don’t have to make some sort of “pilgrimage” to find Yeshua — that we can encounter His (risen) presence wherever we are, etc. Nonetheless, there was something odd about the way he preached this — an almost sardonic tone that I detected. Not that I was altogether surprised by his sentiment…. After all, Dr. Piper had gone on record saying that he considers the Jewish people “a non-covenant-keeping people” without divine right to the land promised to the descendants of Abraham (see this article). But after hearing him publicly disparage God’s faithfulness to the Jewish people (i.e., by implying that historical Israel is of no real significance), my heart grieved deeply. After much prayer, I decided it was time for me to personally meet with him to discuss his views of the Jewish people and ethnic Israel. The following are just a few remarks about that meeting. If I find more time, I will post some additional comments.

 
The Paradoxical Insecurity of Covenant Theology

On June 2nd, 2009, I met with Dr. John Piper (of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis) to discuss his theology of Israel, or “Israelology,” as it is sometimes called.  I wanted to know why, in particular, Dr. Piper said (during a sermon I attended) that he “would rather have his car fixed than to get a free trip to Israel for his 30th anniversary” (i.e., as Bethlehem’s senior pastor). As a Messianic Jew, I found this comment deeply offensive coming from a man who professes to have faith in the One born “the King of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2).  How could a pastor of a well-respected Evangelical church express an almost callous indifference to Israel’s past, present, or future? Is not the God Dr. Piper claims to believe in explicitly called the LORD God of Israel (Exod. 5:1, Psalm 41:13, Luke 1:68, etc.)? Did not God tell Moses that this was His Name forever (Exod. 3:15)?  Is not God repeatedly called the “King of Israel” (Isa 44:6, John 12:13)? Indeed, does not the word “Messiah” itself indicate a regal title given to the anointed King of Israel?  And does not the New Covenant itself (בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה), as foretold by the prophet Jeremiah, explicitly promise the perpetuity of Israel forever (Jer. 31:31-37)?

 

Thus says the LORD (יהוה), who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar– the LORD of hosts (יהוה צְבָאוֹת) is his name: “If this fixed order departs from before me, declares the LORD, then shall the offspring of Israel (זֶרַע יִשְׂרָאֵל) cease from being a nation (גּוֹי) before me forever.” Thus says the LORD: “If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will cast off all the offspring of Israel (זֶרַע יִשְׂרָאֵל) for all that they have done, declares the LORD. – Jeremiah 31:35-36

 
According to the great prophet Jeremiah, if you saw the sun shine today or the stars in the night sky, you can be assured that God’s promise to preserve the “offspring of Israel” — i.e., zera Yisrael — is in effect. Indeed, in the world to come, heavenly Jerusalem will have the names of the twelve tribes of Israel engraved upon its gates (Rev. 21:12). Note well that this is the only occurrence in the entire “Old Testament” that the New Covenant (בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה) is explicitly mentioned… It is a foundational passage of Scripture for those who claim to be followers of the Jewish Messiah…

As I discussed some of these truths with Piper, I was sure he was going to argue that God had rejected Israel because he regards the “church” as “reconstituted Israel” or else to claim that ethnic Israel had forfeited their status as God’s people because they failed to keep covenant with God (first by failing to keep the terms of Sinai, and later by rejecting Yeshua as the Messiah).  Dr. Piper surprised me, however, since he claimed that the nature of the Abraham covenant, i.e., the “Covenant Between the Parts” (בְּרִית בֵּין הַבְּתָרִים) found in Genesis 15:9-21, is a conditional, rather than an unconditional covenant. This theological “move” by Dr. Piper allowed him to claim that ethnic Israel  ”failed” to keep the terms of that covenant (of faith) and therefore is (present tense) subject to Divine Censure or curse.  In other words, the rejection of Israel in God’s plan is not on account of their failure to keep the terms of the Sinai covenant, but rather because they have failed to keep the Abrahamic covenant… This is a puzzling position, to be sure, since it negates the point the Apostle Paul made regarding the idea of “Justification by Faith” in the Book of Galatians and subtly adds an element of “works” righteousness into the idea of being declared righteous by faith alone…

At any rate, the paradox of Dr. Piper’s position — despite his commitment to Calvinism — is that it leads to a lack of assurance of salvation, since “eternal security” is based on human merit, after all.  This “works righteousness” is alien to the true intent of Scripture and reveals a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the New Covenant itself (i.e., Jer. 31:31-38).  It reveals a confusion between the historical covenants by regarding them as functions of fictive covenants posited by Covenant Theology itself (see below)…. If God breaks His promises to Israel, why do Christians like John Piper think that He won’t break His promises to the Church?

Ultimately I believe John Piper’s replacement theology comes from his veneration of the saints of the Reformation and to later Christian scholars who devised the theosophical paradigm called “Covenant Theology.”   This system of theology, not unlike theoretical Kabbalism, claims that it understands God’s purposes and actions — even before the creation of the universe itself.  The idea of “covenant” (בְּרִית),  in particular, is more a philosophical construct than a genuinely Biblical doctrine, inductively discovered….  Indeed, the “great covenants” of Covenant Theology (i.e., “Works” and “Grace”) are not historically rooted interventions into the human experience made by the LORD God of Israel at all, but rather are theological fictions devised by those who claim to give a meta-narrative account for “God, the universe, and everything in it.”

I may write about this more at a later time, but Christians should be aware that Dr. Piper’s “Presbyterian-Baptist” theology is decidedly not traditional Evangelicalism, but rather a nuanced version of Reformed theology that has its roots in anti-Semitic European theological traditions.

For more information about this issue, please visit www.hebrew4christians.com. In particular, you might want to see the articles:

• “Is Christianity Anti-Jewish?” [here]
• “Israel and the Church: What’s the Relationship?” [here]

By SARAH LYALL

The New York Times

LONDON – The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself.

Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide?

On the surface, the [...]]]> Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question

By SARAH LYALL

The New York Times

LONDON – The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself.

Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide?

On the surface, the court was considering a straightforward challenge to the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London. But the case, in which arguments concluded Oct. 30, has potential repercussions for thousands of other parochial schools across Britain. And in addressing issues at the heart of Jewish identity, it has exposed bitter divisions in Britain’s community of 300,000 or so Jews, pitting members of various Jewish denominations against one another.

“This is potentially the biggest case in the British Jewish community’s modern history,” said Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper here. “It speaks directly to the right of the state to intervene in how a religion operates.”

The case began when a 12-year-old boy, an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, applied to the school, JFS. … By many standards, the JFS applicant, identified in court papers as “M,” is Jewish. But not in the eyes of the school, which defines Judaism under the Orthodox definition set out by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Because M’s mother converted in a progressive, not an Orthodox, synagogue, the school said, she was not a Jew – nor was her son. It turned down his application.

That would have been the end of it. But M’s family sued, saying that the school had discriminated against him. They lost, but the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeal this summer. In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism – whether one’s mother is Jewish – was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”

The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said.

The school appealed to the Supreme Court, which is likely to rule sometime before the end of the year.

The case’s importance was driven home by the sheer number of lawyers in the courtroom last week, representing not just M’s family and the school, but also the British government, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the United Synagogue, the British Humanist Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal ruling threw the school into a panicked scramble to put together a new admissions policy. It introduced a “religious practice test,” in which prospective students amass points for things like going to synagogue and doing charitable work. That has led to all sorts of awkward practical issues, said Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, because Orthodox Judaism forbids writing or using a computer on the Sabbath. That means that children who go to synagogue can’t “sign in,” but have to use methods like dropping prewritten postcards into boxes….

The case has stirred up long-simmering resentments among the leaders of different Jewish denominations, who, for starters, disagree vehemently on the definition of Jewishness. They also disagree on the issue of whether an Orthodox leader is entitled to speak for the entire community. “Whatever happens in this case, there must be some resolution sorted out between different denominations,” Mr. Benjamin said in an interview. “That the community has failed to grasp this has had the very unfortunate result of having a judgment foisted on it by a civil court.” Orthodox Jews, of course, sympathize with the school, saying that observance is no test of Jewishness, and that all that matters is whether one’s mother is Jewish. So little does observance matter, in fact, that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.

Lauren Lesin-Davis, chairman of the board of governors at King David, a Jewish school in Liverpool, told the BBC that the ruling violated more than 5,000 years of Jewish tradition. “You cannot come in and start telling people how their whole lives should change, that the whole essence of their life and their religion is completely wrong,” she said. But others are in complete sympathy with M. “How dare they question our beliefs and our Jewishness?” David Lightman, an observant Jewish father whose daughter was also denied a place at the school because it did not recognize her mother’s conversion, told reporters recently. “I find it offensive and very upsetting.”… “The Orthodox definition of Jewish excludes 40 percent of the Jewish community in this country.”

Read Article

======

He’s one [...]]]> [ The late Dr. Flusser is sort of an evangelist for a "liberal" idea of Jesus -- not unlike what the German Higher Critical Schools attempted to do last century... What makes this disturbing, however, is that many in Israel appear to be listening to his "reconstructed" views of Jesus... ]

======

He’s one of us, he’s from here

By Yitzhak Laor

“Yeshu,” by David Flusser, Magnes Press and Dvir, 255 pages, NIS 88

The new translation into Hebrew of David Flusser’s “Jesus” is sheer delight. This marvelous book first came out in German in 1968. The new version is a rendition of the English translation of 1997 (Magnes Press, $46), and is published nine years after its illustrious author passed away.

It is a riveting book, and not only because Flusser refrains from repeating what he had discussed in a plethora of articles he published beforehand. Although it falls squarely into the imaginary narrative that Zionism takes for granted – according to which Jesus was “one of us” and, more important, from this land – the book also shows that one can both take part in shaping the national fantasy and also be interesting.

In other words, what was once seen as the acronym for the Hebrew “yimah shmo vazikhro” (“may his name and his memory be obliterated”), “Yeshu” is described by Flusser as the Galilean version of the Hebrew name Yehoshua, Joshua. There’s an idea for a scholarly research project: The history of the depiction of Christianity in Jewish culture.

When it first came out, conservative Christians didn’t like it, and various Christian radicals also had their reservations, because Flusser had tried hard to write the biography of Jesus as a figure of his time, while basing it on the New Testament, and in particular the Gospels, which were not contemporary with Jesus’ life. Indeed, from the conservatives’ point of view, it’s clear why Flusser was infuriating: It’s doubtful that a religious person, in this case a Christian, could accept the historical figure as portrayed by Flusser, mainly because the author elegantly bypasses everything the Christian faith accepts as part of Jesus’ revelation. At the same time, however, Flusser does accept the Gospels as very reliable texts, with the reservation that one must distinguish between what is original and later distortions.

Read Article

It is a mistake to say Codex Sinaiticus is the first "Bible," since there are numerous [...]]]> [ If you didn't know any better, you'd think the "Bible" dates back to the 4th century AD at the earliest based on the recent Independent-UK propaganda piece quoted below....  One word our British friends will recognize: Balderdash.

It is a mistake to say Codex Sinaiticus is the first "Bible," since there are numerous extant Hebrew scrolls that predate this codex, and Jews do not recognize codex forms of the Scripture as authoritative.  A "codex" is simply a collection of these scrolls put together in book form.  Moreover, there are numerous extant MSS fragments of the Gospels -- including the Gospel of John -- that date from the FIRST Century....

This article is a propaganda piece and the scholarship is sensationalist rather than serious. ]

=========

Fragment from world’s oldest Bible found hidden in Egyptian monastery

Academic stumbles upon previously unseen section of Codex Sinaiticus dating back to 4th century

By Jerome Taylor, Religious Affairs Correspondent

A British-based academic has uncovered a fragment of the world’s oldest Bible hiding underneath the binding of an 18th-century book.

Nikolas Sarris spotted a previously unseen section of the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from about AD350, as he was trawling through photographs of manuscripts in the library of St Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.

The Codex, handwritten in Greek on animal skin, is the earliest known version of the Bible. Leaves from the priceless tome are divided between four institutions, including St Catherine’s Monastery and the British Library, which has held the largest section of the ancient Bible since the Soviet Union sold its collection to Britain in 1933.

Read Article

“The contribution of Muslims to the United States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country,” Obama said [...]]]> US President Barack Obama on Tuesday praised American Muslims for enriching the nation’s culture at a dinner to celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

“The contribution of Muslims to the United States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country,” Obama said at the iftar, the dinner that breaks the holiday’s daily fast.

The president joined Cabinet secretaries, members of the diplomatic corps and lawmakers to pay tribute to what he called “a great religion and its commitment to justice and progress.”

Read Article