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Post by wdmundt on Sept 18, 2007 8:43:31 GMT -4
Can do. Here is what Dr. Claude Mariottini, Professor of the Old Testament at Northern Baptist Seminary, has to say about Daniel 9:25-27: "The Hebrew word behind the word “Messiah” is mashiah. The word means “anointed one” and is used to designate kings, priests, and even Cyrus, King of Persia (Isaiah 45:1).
The word translated “Prince” is naGiD, a word that literally means a “ruler,” or a “leader.” The word is applied to people in the military, in government, and in religion. Thus, the word naGiD refers to a captain in the army, to a king, and to a priest. Azariah, the high priest was called “the ruler [naGiD] of the house of God” (2 Chronicles 31:13).
In Daniel 9:25 the word “the” as in “the Messiah,” is not present in the Hebrew text. Thus, the Hebrew text is talking about “an anointed one,” one who could be a priest or a king. However, when the translators of the King James Version used the words “the Messiah,” with a definite article and a capital letter M, Christians immediately say: “there is only one person who is ‘The Messiah,’ and that person is Jesus Christ.”
Thus, readers of the King James are predisposed by the translation to see Jesus Christ in Daniel 9:25. However, if one adopts the translation of the Revised Standard Version, the whole idea of the text changes."Dr. Mariottini's entire article about misinterpretation of Daniel 9:25-27 is here: www.claudemariottini.com/blog/2006/05/rereading-daniel-925-27-coming-of.html
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Sept 18, 2007 12:06:39 GMT -4
Do you have a link to Dr. Mariottini's next post, where he promised to give his ideas of what the correct interpretation is? I don't see an obvious way to find it.
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Post by Dead Hoosiers on Sept 19, 2007 23:43:11 GMT -4
Messiah the Prince - usage of term (according to Strong's)
a) Messiah, Messianic prince b) king of Israel c) high priest of Israel d) Cyrus e) patriarchs as annointed kings
Cyrus was alive at the time Daniel wrote this prophecy (see Ch. 10) The patriarchs lived and died back in Genesis, long before Daniel's prophecy. a, b and c are the prophetic descriptions of THE Messiah.
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Post by wdmundt on Sept 20, 2007 17:13:12 GMT -4
He says there are three parts, but I can only find two. Here is Dr. Mariottini's conclusion to part 3: "When the biblical text is taken at face value, the text speaks of two anointed ones and two princes. Also, when the biblical text is taken at face value, the dispensationalism of Scofield, the Great Parenthesis, the seven year tribulation and all the other issues related to this doctrine, are found to have no biblical basis.
As for the identity of the one who was a prince and an anointed one, I leave that for those who write commentaries. My intent was only to demonstrate how a biased translation of a text can lead people astray. Translators have a responsibility of being neutral in their translation of the biblical text."Here is the whole article: www.claudemariottini.com/blog/2006/05/rereading-daniel-925-27-seventy-weeks.htmlI like this guy. I don't agree with everything he says, but he takes a no-nonsense view of the Bible.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Sept 20, 2007 17:39:41 GMT -4
Yeah, he does seem like an interesting guy, and I agree with him that the Scofield Bible is reading too much into this particular text.
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Post by Dead Hoosiers on Sept 20, 2007 23:57:34 GMT -4
Well I'm not impressed. What Dr. C apparently either doesn't know or is carefully refraining from mentioning, is that the prophecy isn't restricted to Dan 9--some parts of it is written about and expanded upon by other biblical authors. I don't know what kind of an axe he's got to grind, but he's misleading you.
You could get a better "expert." But since this one is telling you what you want to hear...
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Sept 21, 2007 11:50:39 GMT -4
Have you read some of the doctor's other pieces, DH? He is a beleiving Christian (well, at least by my definition of Christian, perhaps not by yours).
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Nov 30, 2007 13:55:19 GMT -4
It's alive! It's alive!
Forgive me for the thread necromancy, but I thought this the most appropriate place to respond to an earlier comment on the Christmas thread.
So, what evidence is there that the New Testament was known within the first century?
Well, none of them have a date in the text as to when they were written. Some of them refer to earlier texts - Acts refers to Luke, for instance, and some of Paul's epistles state that they were written after earlier letters to the same group, but for the most part there are no claims of "this was written in this year." So no help there.
None of the existing manuscripts have been dated much further back than the 3rd century, and we don't have any originals, so we can't do direct testing of a physical document to determine when they were written. The existence of copies does indicate that the text was at least as early as the 3rd century, however. The John Rylands Papayri seems to be the earliest known copy of any part of the New Testament - it is dated possibly as early as AD 100 to the late second century and contains a tiny part of the Gospel of John.
So the next best data source is contemporary accounts. Here we can turn to early members of the Christian community - the Church Fathers. If we look at the writings of Clement, Polycarp, and Ignatius, we find that they quote from nearly all of the books in the current New Testament, along with apocryphal writings. In fact, enough is quoted by these Church Fathers that we could reconstruct nearly the entire New Testament from them. Clement's first epistle is dated A.D. 95-96. The epistles of Ingatius to A.D. 115 at the latest. That means the New Testament dates to at least that time - the end of the first century.
Doing a lot of Googling over the past few days I have turned up mostly pro-Christian sites of course, but most of them follow a dating scheme of placing all the gospels in the first century, from A.D. 70 with the Gospel of John being the latest around A.D. 80-100, that they get from the scholarly works that have been written trying to date the New Testament. That puts them still 40 to 60 years after Jesus' death, and therefore not necessarily eye-witness accounts, but within the 1st century.
In fact that appears to be the consensus of those much better informed than I am on the subject.
How solid is the consensus? Well, there is a certain amount of ambiguity in dating any historical text. We do have far more early Biblical manuscripts than we do for many other historical texts, simply because the Bible, as the religious document for Christian Europe and Asia, was copied more often and better preserved. The dates could still shift around a great deal (and have in the past) but there seems little doubt that the texts are authentically ancient.
Now authorship, that's an entirely different subject.
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Post by wdmundt on Nov 30, 2007 15:23:47 GMT -4
My point in the other thread was that you can’t show that knowledge of the gospels was widespread among the populace. That the gospels existed in some form or other by the late first century is fairly certain. That there is another writing from that time that refers to them is not surprising.
I’m not all that familiar with Clement’s first epistle. I’ll have to read it this weekend. Doing a little research, I find that it is said that Clement doesn’t refer to any of the gospels by name and his quotations of Jesus don’t directly match sayings from the gospels. I haven’t had a chance to read it, so I’m not in a position to say that the above is true. Are you familiar enough with Clement to say if that is correct?
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Nov 30, 2007 15:47:15 GMT -4
I haven't read through the whole thing myself yet (it's fairly long). From what I understand Clement does not refer to the writings of the New Testament that he does quote from as scripture - he reserves that term for the Old Testament. That is to be expected from the early church, before canonization really had become a subject.
I agree with you that the gospels were not widely known among the general populace in the first century. Christianity itself was a fringe religion at the time. My point was that they were known enough among Christians to be quoted from as authentic.
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Post by wdmundt on Nov 30, 2007 16:07:22 GMT -4
I'll have to do more reading on this. My initial thought is that if the above is true (that he doesn't name the gospels by author and that he doesn't use exact quotes), then Clement is evidence in favor of a view that Christianity was in flux at that time; that his source had not yet coalesced into the gospels as we know them.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Nov 30, 2007 16:25:57 GMT -4
Christianity was certainly in flux at the time, having lost the apostles so recently, but Clement doesn't use the names of any of the Old Testament books he quotes from either, and he quotes much more extensively from the Old Testament (mostly Genesis, Isaiah, and the Psalms) than the New. Would you argue that the Old Testament "hadn't yet coalesced" because of that?
EDIT: Plus his Old Testament quotes are taken from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, and so don't exactly match the text in the King James version either.
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Post by wdmundt on Nov 30, 2007 16:38:26 GMT -4
I'm just pointing out that in the absence of Clement remarking on the supposed author's names and in the absence of Clement directly quoting Jesus from the gospels, Clement is not evidence in favor of the gospels existing as we know them at that time. Comparing what he does or doesn't say about the OT doesn't change this. I would hope they didn't.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Nov 30, 2007 16:58:10 GMT -4
I think the fact that Clement doesn't name any of the authors of what he quotes from except Jesus himself means that failing to name Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John doesn't mean anything either way. He does seem to identify Paul as the author of 1 Corinthians (he speaks of an epistle of Paul and then basically paraphrases the opening of 1 Corinthians).
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Post by wdmundt on Nov 30, 2007 17:12:03 GMT -4
I believe it is reasonably certain that Paul wrote much of what is attributed to him (though not all) and we know reasonably well when he was writing, so Clement supports the existence of Paul and of Paul's writings as we know them before the date assumed for Clement.
I'm not using Clement as evidence against. I am pointing out that in lieu of other evidence in support of the existence at that time of the gospels as we know them, Clement also can't be used as evidence in favor. So that still leaves us with no evidence in favor.
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