Christianity and the Old Testament

The Great Commission is in Matthew, Luke & Acts, and John, as well as in Mark. If you are going to argue that Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke used Mark, that's a vague argument since nobody knows which (Matthew or Mark) was first, there are very well studied people on both sides, and experts have even changed their minds over the course of their academic career.

The idea of spreading the Word to Gentiles arose very quickly. Peter - not Paul - was the first to baptise a Gentile, the Roman Centurion Conrnelius. Peter also had his dream of a "sheet with a variety of animals" (Acts 10) which he understood to mean that Gentiles should be taught about Jesus.

The very active early Church at Antioch was also largely Gentile, and was before Paul ever visited it or the issue of Gentiles was resolved by the Apostles in the Council of Jerusalem.

Clearly Jesus message spread far and wide to Jew and Gentile almost immediately.

Luke 2:25-32:

25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. 27 Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:
29 “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss[d] your servant in peace.
30 For my eyes have seen your salvation,
31 which you have prepared in the sight of all nations:
32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.”​

Simeon was with the Holy Spirit. Essentially, God revealed to Simeon who Jesus was and what Jesus would do, and Simeon relayed Gods revelation in 29:32.

So Luke 2:32 is not the human Jesus' words but it is God's message.

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In Matthew 10:5, Jesus was sending the Disciples out on their solo evangelical tour. Since Jesus teachings and lectures were founded in Jewish life and the Torah, it was a much easier task for the Disciples to first go into communities that would already understand the foundation of Jesus message. It would be much harder to go into areas in which the novice evangelicals would have to first explain Judaism before they could explain Jesus. That's why Jesus instructed the Disciples not to go into Gentile territory.

 

Luke was a companion of Paul and neither ever knew Jesus.

The Storytellers

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/luke.html

You can watch it online here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/watch/

 

Scripture disagrees with you.

 

Jesus Christ is born in Betlehem in Swedish Lutheran Church Bible.

 

Jesus was following the First Commandment as stated in Exodus 34:12-16, which says to stay away from Gentiles.

 

Simeons prayer fits in well with Judaistic beliefs of the time. Simeon believed that Jesus was the Messiach, that he would bring salvation to Israel. The Jewish belief is that God will come and bring victory for the Jews, and that the Gentiles will realise that Jahweh is God. He was wrong - except to Christianity.

So much of Jesus life is bound with Judaism. To the Jews water was for cleansing in all aspects of their lives. So Jesus Baptism was in line with Judaism. Remember Naaman.
Satan is an adaption of HaSatan - Gods messenger - and given the task of testing men's faith. Lot passed, Jesus passed. Christianity has turned Satan into an enemy of God.

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." (Matthew 10:5-6) House of Israel - the lost 10 tribes.

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Do you know when Paul went to Antioch? We don't have a timeline in the Acts but we do know that almost immediately after his 'conversion' he went into Syria - where Antioch was - and was there for 14 years preaching the gospel - except for a 15 day visit to Jerusalem to meet just Peter and James after 3 years.

 

True, Luke was Paul's companion and biographer and never met Jesus.

Paul, however, does seem to have met Jesus. Paul states in Galatians 1:11
But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.....But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went to Arabia, and returned again to Damascus

After Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, Paul disappears for 3 years, he does not re-enter the story until meeting Peter. Paul did not meet any other Apostles during those 3 years, so he was not instructed in the Gospel by them, yet when he meets Peter, Paul is an expert on Jesus teachings. Paul claims he was instructed by the Risen Christ.

 

Roughly, Paul was converted around 37 AD, and spent 3 years out of touch with all the Apostles, he meets with Peter and Barnabas and travels to Jerusalem, Caesarea, Tarsus. Sometime between 41 and 44 AD he goes to Antioch, about 46 AD Paul and Barnabas are commissioned by the Church at Antioch for the first missionary journey.

 

Hmm. She's wrong because the book she questions the authenticity of, says she's wrong.

 

Have you read Pauls version of his life where he corrects Lukes version in Acts. Galatians 1-2.

After his conversion he goes into Arabia then back to Damascus. 3 years later he goes to Jerusalem and meets Peter and James (no mention of Barnabas). He returns after 15 days to Syria and Cilicia. He had no contact with the Christians in Judea personally as many were still suspicious of him. 14 years later he went back to Jerusalem when Barnabas sought him, and with Titus. Then he was introduced to the disciples who were told of all that had been happening in the north, and Pauls part in it.

 

But you see, that doesn't really make a lot of sense, does it? If you are the God of the Bible, and you created this WHOLE universe, and then spend 2000 years worried about one little tribe in the Levant and whether or not you can get them to follow a bunch of crazy rules about sex and how they dress and what they can eat and how they wear their hair... and you punish them horribly with plagues and invasions when they stray even a little from the path.

Then after that, you decide to send yourself/your son (yes, it's bizarre, don't spend too much time on it) down to live like one of them, and you decide to suspend all the goofy rules and open the whole thing up to anyone who wants to join, and hey, we are even going to offer you this super cool afterlife with puppies and sunshine we never offered our original customers.

It makes God look even shadier than a cable company!

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How could Paul "Correct" Luke's version when Luke supposedly wrote it after Paul was martyred. "Hey, I know that knob Luke is going to mess this up, I'd better write down what really happened before anyone gets confused."

 

I think this is the problem with having Gospels that were written by different guys with different agendas.

Mark's Gospel, which all the other ones cribbed from, was written by someone who clearly was not Jewish and didn't know the geography of Palestine or the laws of the Judeans. He was writing for a largely pagan audience.


Matthew's Gospel was written for a Jewish Audience and probably never saw Christianity as anything other than a reform movement in Judaism. Of course, it has those crazy stories about Herod killing the babies and Zombies showing up on Good Friday, things Jews knew never happened. So of course, his Gospel has a Jesus who was Moses on Steroids on the goofy laws about haircuts and diet.

Luke, on the other hand, was written by a guy who was appealing to the Greeks... people who were literate and wanted more depth to the story.

Then you have John... written when it was pretty clear that Judaism and Christianity could never be reconciled, so he goes on and on about how "The Jews" were out to get Jesus. He was the Mel Gibson of his day.

If you put the gospels in that perspective, they are a lot easier to understand and then dismiss as the hooey they are.

 

We are talking about a time when there was no communications system as we know today. It is obvious that Luke was given the wrong information. That means it must have been in circulation at the time. Luke must have noted the information. Does anyone believe that the Acts was written from from memory?
The term 'corrects', I agree, is probably the wrong term. Paul gives us the true version of the events but unfortunately seems not to have given them to Luke. The letter to the Galatians seems to correct the ideas going round. That Luke uses his version later is possibly due to never having read the Epistle to the Galatians. In fact we don't even know to which Galatia the Epistle is addressed. In Roman times there was North and South Galatia populated by different groups. Paul may have travelled both, but to whom was he writing.

Your '"Hey, I know that knob Luke is going to mess this up, I'd better write down what really happened before anyone gets confused." could be nearer the truth than you think.

On the other hand there is only tradition from the 2nd century that Luke actually wrote his gospel and the Acts,
The gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles make up a two-volume work which scholars call Luke&#8211;Acts.[12] Together they account for 27.5% of the New Testament, the largest contribution by a single author, providing the framework for both the Church's liturgical calendar and the historical outline into which later generations have fitted their idea of the story of Jesus.[13]

The author is not named in either volume.[5] According to a Church tradition dating from the 2nd century, he was the Luke named as a companion of Paul in three of the letters attributed to Paul himself, but "a critical consensus emphasizes the countless contradictions between the account in Acts and the authentic Pauline letters."[6] (An example can be seen by comparing Acts' accounts of Paul's conversion (Acts 9:1-31, 22:6-21, and 26:9-23) with Paul's own statement that he remained unknown to Christians in Judea after that event (Galatians 1:17-24).)[14] He admired Paul, but his theology was significantly different from Paul's on key points and he does not (in Acts) represent Paul's views accurately.[15] He was educated, a man of means, probably urban, and someone who respected manual work, although not a worker himself; this is significant, because more high-brow writers of the time looked down on the artisans and small business-people who made up the early church of Paul and were presumably Luke's audience.[16]

The eclipse of the traditional attribution to Luke the companion of Paul has meant that an early date for the gospel is now rarely put forward.[6] Most experts date the composition of the combined work to around 80-90 AD, although some suggest 90-110,[17] and there is evidence, both textual (the conflicts between Western and Alexandrian manuscript families) and from the Marcionite controversy (Marcion was a 2nd-century heretic who produced his own version of Christian scripture based on Luke's gospel and Paul's epistles) that Luke-Acts was still being substantially revised well into the 2nd century.[8]

We know that 3 of the Gospels are wrongly attributed, aome of Paul's Epistles are also by others. And it's the same in the OT.