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Permalink Reply by matt.clerke on July 7, 2011 at 1:02am

Having not studied Jewish belief very much I can really only speculate... Perhaps the NT kind of forces itself into the story... kind of like in a movie, if there is not an opening to a sequel then there is this kind of gap which the sequel writers need to fill in order to relate the two films... Maybe the author(s) of the NT did something like this. Christians believe the whole story(OT and NT) while Jews reject the NT because it is clearly an awfully written sequel to their favourite movie... BTW the movie analogy is not mine, I read another post a few days ago which explained this concept better and also included Islam in the discussion.

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Permalink Reply by Jimmy N. on July 7, 2011 at 11:26pm

Could it be that the OT God reinvented himself into the trinity for the NT? Afterall Jesus did not exist before the NT and could not have been part of the OT God.

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Permalink Reply by Brian Wood on July 7, 2011 at 4:39pm

A fine question.  Pagans had many triple gods and goddesses.  All's I know is that if the trinity is, then "jesus"™ was either complicit in his mom's rape or was jes' watchin'.  Creepy.

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Permalink Reply by Gaytor on July 11, 2011 at 5:40pm

As I understand it, he's noting that the Father is the greatest and that the trinity is not necessarily an equal trinity. It comes across to me like he's along for the ride and really doesn't have a say in what is about to happen. Do you have some other specifics that you were thinking of in terms of passages? I'm thinking of the Good Teacher parable where "No one is good but the father in heaven." (para) End Times prediction, "Non one knows when but the father in heaven." (again, Paraphrase).

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Permalink Reply by David on July 12, 2011 at 8:06pm

Firstly, we are dealing with religion, coherency and sense are not mandatory.

Secondly, the question you have put before us is far more complicated than you may think. Not all factions of the Jewish or Christian faiths agree internally with each other on the nature of god, let alone with a seperate external faith.

 

In theory, Jews, Muslims, and Christians are all praying to the same skygod, they just disagree on the details. At some point in their history a faction within the Jewish people decided to write their version of events, giving us the Torah, to which other writings were added, giving us the Tanakh. When Jesus made his big debut he was talking to Jews about Judaism; he was essentially a Jewish reformer. He did not set out to start a new faith, just revise the one that was already there. So Christianity began as a Jewish cult. But people were really fond of this carpenter, and soon his message eclipsed that of the Tanakh, and people started writing what he said down, long after he had died. There were many versions floating around, some of which were collected into a 'New Testament'; the rest were suppressed. Later, an Arabian trader heard about this amazing new pyramid scheme called 'monotheism' and decided to start his own franchise, picking and choosing the bits he liked, and adding his own personal spin.

 

For Christians the NT is a continuation of the OT; the OT promises a messiah, and the NT is about how that promise is fulfilled. The god is the same in both, only that in the sequel there is a new sidekick, so there is no reason why Christians wouldn't claim the god of the OT to be the same as the one in the NT; for them it is a logical sequence. Furthermore, the notion of the trinity is not explicitly used in the bible, it was developed a few hundred years later, though it is hinted at. And theologians have built imaginary empires on the merest of hints.

 

Your statement "The Jews of the Old Testament do not believe that Jesus is God, not even close" is puzzling; of course they wouldn't. If you are speaking historically, of the Jews in the Old Testament, well, Jesus wasn't born until hundreds of years after the Tanakh was written. If you are referring to modern Jews, why would they believe in Jesus, to them he was delusional faith-healer who started a really annoying cult that ended up persecuting them for the best part of two millennia, and they are content with their own firmly-established religion. That said, some Christians do not believe that Jesus is God, but is filled with divinity, or has a dual nature, etc. etc., which is one of the reasons why there are so many flavours of Christ-lovers in the world.

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