Hi Andrew
It is hard for me to link to a mortal king the words everlasting and eternal.
Take a look at this analysis.
Let no one henceforth accuse Bill of failing to provide precise numbers to support his claims. I must say, I applaud the researchers who scrupulously interviewed every single Jewish person in Israel to determine that exactly 23 of them believed in Yeshua as the Messiah.
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I decided to do my own research and here is what I found. An organization called the Caspari Center conducted a three year study using phone interviews and online surveys. They found “Based on the collected data, the number of Israeli Messianic believers in 2020 stood at 15,323 people. Less than half the congregations use Hebrew as their primary language. Russian-speaking fellowships comprise the biggest group, with their 136 congregations. Hebrew-speaking fellowships came in second, at 83 congregations. Other languages included Amharic (30 fellowships), English (16), Spanish (6) and Romanian (2). The congregation’s senior leader is a native-born Israeli in only 17% of the cases. The Israeli Messianic movement can legitimately be called an immigrant movement.”. The Caspari Center Survey Released: The Israeli Messianic Movement Has More Than Tripled in the Last 20 Years » Kehila News Israel
Further, "Of the 273 fellowship the authors managed to reach, there were 15,323 people who worshiped there, including 8,125 adults over the age of 18 who believe in Jesus."https://www.jpost.com/christianworld/article-696980
And the study defined “Jewish” as either someone who self-identifies as Jewish or had at least one Jewish grandparent. So 8100 mostly immigrant adults, over half of whom are from countries hostile to Judaism and likely received little Jewish education. Hardly sounds like a movement that’s sweeping Israel.
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The movement at less then 1% is small at this point but it will be interesting to see what happens going forward. Thanks for doing some research.
Well, it obviously wasn’t hard for the biblical authors, so… 
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It should not surprise anyone that the life and death of Jesus seems to be reflected in the verses of Isaiah 53 and other parts of the OT. This is not a coincidence. We have to remember that the Hebrew Scriptures came before Jesus. The authors of the New Testament used images of the Jewish Messiah they found in the Hebrew Scriptures and created their stories about Jesus to fit those images.
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Hi Boris
You agree that Isaiah 53, 7 14 and 9 6 and other OT prophecies were about the coming Messiah?
You also appear to believe Jesus was a legendary figure? How do you support this claim?
No, nothing in the OT has anything to do with Jesus. That is a Christian interpretation so we know it’s wrong.No one has the slightest physical evidence to support a historical Jesus; no artifacts, dwelling, works of carpentry, or self-written manuscripts. All claims about Jesus derive from writings of other people. There occurs no contemporary Roman record that shows Pontius Pilate executing a man named Jesus. Devastating to Christians, there occurs not a single contemporary writing that mentions Jesus. All documents about Jesus got written well after the life of the alleged Jesus from either: unknown authors, people who had never met an earthly Jesus, or from fraudulent, mythical or allegorical writings. Although one can argue that many of these writings come from fraud or interpolations, even if these sources did not come from interpolations, they could still not serve as reliable evidence for a historical Jesus, simply because all sources derive from hearsay accounts.
Hearsay means information derived from other people rather than from a witness’ own knowledge. Courts of law do not generally allow hearsay as testimony, and nor does honest modern scholarship. Hearsay provides no proof or good evidence, and therefore, we should dismiss it.
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Do try to leave the logical fallacies to the theists, old chap.
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Hi Boris
This is not the question I asked. Here it is again.
You agree that Isaiah 53, 7 14 and 9 6 and other OT prophecies were about the coming Messiah?
From ch 18 Antiquity of the Jews by the Jewish/Roman author Josephus.
- Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man; if it be lawful to call him a man. For he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross;7 those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. For he appeared to them alive again, the third day:8 as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
Boris appears to go for the mythical Jesus hypothesis. But it’s also possible to take an intermediate position, that the Jesus stories were based on a real 1st Century preacher but accumulated a lot of mythical details, some of them created to fit him into Old Testament prophecy. Thus the elaborate story that makes Jesus of Nazareth come to be born in Bethlehem, for example.
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Yeah, that’s more or less where I wind up. I suspect there is some historical core to the stories, but it seems impossible at this point to say what parts are genuine and what parts are not. Was he a preacher? Was he crucified? Did he perform hokey folk-magic stunts? Who the heck can say? The presence of prophecy-fulfillment material, which is invariably the sign of either fraud or delusion, doesn’t do much to aid the credibility of the sources.
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The need to invent Jesus was in August 70 CE. That’s when Roman troops set the Temple on fire. There was an absolute necessity for a new salvation story after the Temple was destroyed. Why? Yom, Kippur was now impossible. All other Jewish holy days could be shelved in a sense but not Yom Kippur, it was the annual national remission of sin ritual.
That passage was forged by Eusebius. “In the edition of Origen published by the Benedictines it is said that there was no mention of Jesus at all in Josephus before the time of Eusebius [c. 300 ce]. Moreover, in the sixteenth century Vossius had a manuscript of the text of Josephus in which there was not a word about Jesus. It seems, therefore, that the passage must have been an interpolation, whether it was subsequently modified or not.” (Drews, 9)
“Its brevity disproves its authenticity. Josephus’ work is voluminous and exhaustive. It comprises 20 books. Whole pages are devoted to petty robbers and obscure seditious leaders. Nearly forty chapters are devoted to the life of a single king. Yet this remarkable being, the greatest product of his race, a being of whom the prophets foretold ten thousand wonderful things, a being greater than any earthly king, is dismissed in a dozen lines.”
No Christian apologist or historian mentioned Tacitus until it had appeared almost word-for-word in the writings of Sulpicius Severus, in the early Fifth Century, where it is mixed in with other myths. Sulpicius’s contemporaries noted his skill in the ‘antique’ hand. Fantasy was his forte. He wrote about the life of St. Martin which mentioned a bunch of miracles including dead people being raised and several personal appearances by Jesus and Satan.
An ultraviolet photo of a critical word “Christians” from the earliest known manuscript of Tacitus revealed that the word reportedly used by Tacitus in Annals 15.44, “chrestianos” (“the good”), was overwritten as “christianos” (“the Christians”) by a forger. This explains the space between the letters and the exaggerated “dot” above the new “i”. The entire passage of Tacitus is not only fake, was repeatedly worked on by forgers to improve its value as evidence for the existence of Jesus.
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The very elaborateness and implausiblity of which ought to give pause to anyone who wishes to argue that the NT stories represent actual fulfillment of prophecy.
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Not to mention the irreconcilability of the two separate birth narratives with one another.
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Especially since Nazareth didn’t even exist in the First Century. Notice it isn’t mentioned at all in the OT.
This passage is widely believed to be, at least partially, inauthentic.
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In Matthew 13:53-55 when Jesus is finished preaching in the synagogue the townsfolk are amazed. “Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? Are not his brothers James and Jospeh and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” Where then did this man get all this?" What they should have been saying is, “Is not this is the child who was visited by Magi who brought him royal gifts, the one the soldiers were looking for when they killed all the male children?” This is a pretty good clue that the birth narrative in Matthew is a later addition because the author of chapter 13 seems completely unaware of it.
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And this sort of mischief was pretty common, apparently. There are also spurious Christian interpolations into some manuscripts of The Jewish War. By and large the apologists seem to have decided that the ones there are so obviously fake as to be too embarrassing to mention, but for some reason they continue to trot out the bits from Antiquities.
None of this would be terribly helpful if it were authentic, though. By the time these things were written the folkloric traditions were well developed, and so it’s not surprising that other people were repeating them. Corroboration would require independent sources, but we don’t have any of those at all.
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