There is a strange little fringe movement, including in its ranks even atheists and other nonbelievers, that attempts to make the bizarre argument that Christians should abandon their religion because “the Bible” says the entire Christian gospel concluded its business in 70 A.D. It’s called the “Israel Only” movement, because it holds that the “original” teaching of the Christians was that the gospel was meant for Israel only, and only applied to canceling the Old Torah Covenant, and thus once that was concluded (particularly with the final destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 A.D. “ending” Old Judaism, thus bringing to final culmination the magical effects of Jesus’s atoning death), it no longer had any role to play in human society. In other words, the “original” Christian teaching, we are supposed to believe, was about a temporal event that has served no cosmological function since—the religion was never intended to persist or apply beyond that date. And the IO crowd claims to have such devastating proof of this as to warrant continual eyerollingly hyperbolic rhetoric like that their evidence “destroys” Christianity and is a “Christianity killer” and “it should be obvious to anyone with even a single brain cell” they’re right, and other silly boasts.
The intended implication of the IO thesis is that “everyone” is now saved who ever could be saved (and no one today is saved at all), because “sin” no longer exists in the cosmic sense, Jesus “canceled” it, the covenant is done with, everyone who was ever really bound by it is long dead, and no one need do anything anymore to be resurrected or live forever, or whatever—much less get baptized or profess any faith or “bring Jesus into your heart.” By which again they mean, this is what the first Christians taught—as many advocates of this view appear to be unbelievers and thus don’t really believe the Christian God even exists, so their actual position is that this whole teaching was of course false. Their aim now (as they represent it) is not to promote a new religion, a new “post-Christian” theology, but to somehow “argue” Christians out of being Christians by convincing them they aren’t following any faith Jesus or the Apostles promoted—which is true (no modern Christianity at all resembles the original), but since that has never argued any Christian out of their religion before, it’s humorously Quixotic of the IO folks to pronounce themselves so confident that their obscure, ignorant, erroneous theory of the original Christian teaching is going to be any more successful at that.
First a Precise Definition of IO
According to IO Advocate Michael Bradley “Israel Only is an interpretive paradigm that shows the entire Bible’s redemptive narrative pertains only to old covenant Israel.” And it does this by returning “biblical words and phrases to their original Israelite context” and “showing that in many cases words like ‘world’ (kosmos) referred to the covenant world of Israel (not the entire planet)” and that any “Gentiles” (ethnos) who were saved were really, secretly, “descendants of the tribes of Israel who had been dispersed among the nations” (i.e. the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel; on which see entries in My Jewish Learning, the Jewish Virtual Library, and the Jewish Encyclopedia).
Likewise, IO advocates distinguish “Israelite” as including pagan descendants of the lost peoples of Israel, from “Jews” as the surviving, usually observant, Judahites (and Benjaminites), more often than New or Old Testament authors ever really intended (thus imputing hidden significance where there is, at best, only contextual variation). Bradley adds that “IO also defends the view that Israel’s redemptive narrative ended in AD 70, along with the need for the gospel,” and this “means nobody today is saved and redeemed, nor has anyone needed salvation and redemption since the first century.” (For a lengthy video on the movement, pro and con, start at minute 48 of A Case For Israel Only by Jason Decosta & MythVision; see also other entries in the MythVision series on IO.)
Overview of What’s Wrong with This
Like most uninformed crankery, IO rests on absurd degrees of confidence wholly out of proportion to its epistemic merits. It mostly fabricates entirely novel “tea leaf” readings of the scriptures, “re-reading” every passage as saying the opposite of what it says, and ignoring all actual standards of historical and literary analysis developed by real experts over the last hundred years; as well as almost all consensus conclusions in the field, too. Its advocates are often cocky, belittling, unmoved by any rebuttal no matter how cogent, and act so much like Christian fundamentalists, in both tactics and their naive and bizarre operating assumptions about the Bible, as to be wholly perplexing, especially for nonbelievers.
Their principal stock in trade, like all cranks, is to rely on stacks of possibiliter fallacies (“possibly x, therefore probably x”) and ignorance (of the actual context and even scholarship on first century Christianity and Judaism, and the language and text of the Bible), while insisting they have flawless logic and a more informed grasp of the ancient context and languages than the entirety of experts the world over. And like cranks, it looks a lot to me like when they do get caught being ignorant of these things, they pretend to have known about them all along and invent elaborate excuses for rejecting all that expert knowledge as false; usually by circular logic: presuming their assumptions are true, using them to “reinterpret” all the evidence, and then concluding they have thereby proved their assumptions are true. Just like practically every Christian apologist you have ever met.
Oh, perhaps I should have mentioned, no IO advocate has any relevant qualifications that I’ve been able to discern. So far as I can tell none have a Ph.D. in any pertinent subject nor any applicable publication histories or even any real grasp of the languages. And they have never published any of their claims under academic peer review. They have zero expert backing for any of their weird claims. Not that that automatically nixes their theory, but it’s a huge red flag; it means their claims merit skepticism. They have a really high bar to meet if they want anyone to actually take them seriously. They don’t meet it.
Why Bother with This?
IO has of course been debunked by Christian apologists (e.g. at Answering Israel Only and Dissecting Israel Only and the Preterist Research Institute). But it’s worth an atheist’s expert look, since one might dismiss the Christians as having an obvious agenda, and even justify that dismissal by nitpicking many of their arguments and claims that have too much of a faith-based foundation. No such charge can be laid to me; I’d love it if the IO thesis were provably correct. But it’s not. And I have to tell it like it is.
Of course I usually wouldn’t waste my time on this—there are thousands of crank theories out there, and this one wouldn’t interest me any more than any other—but as I will often do, if you hire me to research and evaluate something in my wheelhouse, I will. And as I tell anyone who employs me on any such mission, I won’t necessarily tell you what you want to hear. I’ll conclude as the facts indicate, even if it disappoints you. But this is my profession. It’s what my Ph.D. is for. So no matter what the result, I’ll make a serious job of finding out what the facts are and report them. It just so happens that in this case, the claim I was hired to examine is incorrect five times from Sunday.
I didn’t assume it would be. It’s at least plausible that maybe, for example, Paul thought the Gentiles he was converting were the only ones “allowed” by God to convert because they “happened” to unknowingly be Israelites from the lost tribes (the only way the IO thesis can honestly make sense of the historical facts), and maybe Paul imagined his imminent apocalypticism to be unextendable—as in, even if the Earth wasn’t melted in his lifetime (or very shortly thereafter) and the saved weren’t all snatched up into the clouds to don our magical new bodies stored in a warehouse in outer space, he might have taught that the conditions assuring anyone’s resurrection would nevertheless still be fixed and concluded by the mid-to-late first century regardless, ending the need for any further evangelism thereafter. These things I knew were all unlikely. But being novel propositions, I hadn’t double checked the scriptures to know for sure. You’d have to pay me to do that. Well, duly paid (by the generous fans and supporters of the MythVision Podcast), the following is what I found.
Problem Number One
IO advocacy often strains under multiple confusions. They often slip into conflating different cosmic, textual, and historical questions, and this screws up their case quite a bit. It’s important therefore to start off by sorting some of this out.
First:
There is a difference between what Paul taught and what the first Christians taught. IO advocates seem not to know this; or at least, a lot of their arguments act like Paul’s teaching was the original. But it wasn’t. The original Christians (principally, by Paul’s own attestation, Peter, James, and John) were not pursuing an ardent Gentile mission at all. And I mean that even in the IO sense, i.e. even if “Gentile” meant only currently-pagan descendants of Israelites. Paul makes clear he was the first to take much interest in starting such a mission at all, and he even had to struggle to get the original Christians to accept that (this is the whole point of Paul’s narrative in Galatians 1-2).
That means before Paul Christianity was a strictly Jewish sect, for Jews. And I mean that even in the IO sense, i.e. they were preaching only to Torah observant “Jews” (or as IO might identify them, Judahites and Benjaminites) and not investing any effort to “recover” lost Israelites; and even when they did it was to convert them to Judaism (a fact I’ll discuss more below). Paul was essentially a heretic—one who was only barely able to convince the original movement to accept his new marketing tactic of concertedly recruiting Gentiles, in any sense whatever (see Galatians 1-4; cf. Romans 11:13-14 & 15:14-20). This means Paul was not preaching what Jesus really did, if Jesus existed. It’s quite clear any historical Jesus there had been was originally understood to have promoted the faith only to already-Torah-observant Jews and converts to Judaism.
Which is another thing IO advocates often appear to confuse (or simply deny). The original sect (which is most clearly represented in the Bible by the Gospel of Matthew, the book of Revelation, and the Epistle of James) only preached to non-Israelites in the same sense all Jews had: by seeking converts to Judaism (Galatians 2 and 5-6; indeed conversion to Judaism was particularly at its peak in the early Roman period, as attested by numerous first century authors, including Philo of Alexandria; see Jews, Idumaeans, and Ancient Arabs by Aryeh Kasher, “Conversion to Judaism in Classical Antiquity” by Louis Feldman in Hebrew Union College Annual, and Paul the Convert by Alan Segal, pp. 80-93). This is crucially important. By the time Christianity arose, being “an Israelite” was not, as IO advocates naively think, a biological property at all. It was solely a function of whether you joined the covenant. Which anyone could do.
On the standard fact of conversion to become an Israelite see Exodus 12:48-49 and the relevant entries in the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Oxford Classical Dictionary, as well as Ellen Birnbaum’s The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes and J.C. Paget’s study “Jewish Proselytism at the Time of Christian Origins” in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament. Simply as Josephus put it, anyone who converts to Judaism, “they are thereafter no other than Jews” (Antiquities 13.258). No exception made for sharing in the resurrection. Hence biological descent was in practice irrelevant to the matter of salvation. Likewise the other way around: being biologically descended from an Israelite did not simply make you an Israelite. If you weren’t circumcised—if you weren’t initiated into the covenant—you simply were no longer of Israel (and apart from that, God would resurrect only exceptionally righteous non-Israelites, as well as not resurrect exceptionally wicked Israelites—or any who “renounced” the covenant). I don’t think IO advocates understand that ancients took adoption into a family far more seriously than we do today: to be adopted in was to be a part of the family—not literally, but in all other respects that mattered (like inheritance—whether it be estates or salvation). As the Talmud says, after anyone (literally anyone) completes their conversion, “he is an Israelite in all respects.” Period.
Uninformed amateurs often get this wrong, because modern Israel has adopted a biological-descent definition of Israeli; and amateurs don’t know that’s a new idea. It isn’t how Judaism originally worked. They also get this wrong because a lot of ancient talk does presume that the children of Jews would be Jews, and thus that the expectation was mostly of a biological fulfillment. But one should not confuse an expectation with a requirement. What mattered in practice was joining the covenant, not genetics. Thus, even when God “promises” the “seed” of Abraham would win God’s grace, this was not meant in the modern “genetic” sense at all. It meant anyone of his tribe—whether born or inducted; just as it also excluded any “genetic” Abrahamite who renounced the covenant (or behaved so outrageously as to be regarded as having done so). The Jewish Mishnah and Talmud are quite clear on this.
Biological descent could matter for other reasons: prestige, pedigree, kinship status, property inheritance, even prophecy (e.g. the only reason Jesus had to be “biologically” a Jew is that he had to be “biologically” a descendant of King David, a fundamental requirement to qualify as an eschatological messiah, as that’s simply what scripture said—unless it could be interpreted metaphorically). But it did not matter for salvation or membership in the Israelite community. Everyone who joined the covenant—even if born a Gentile with no Israelite heritage—would be saved in the end times, and fully accounted an Israelite. This was in fact why Torah observance was so essential to the original Christians: how could you be saved, if you didn’t even enter into God’s contract? Merely having a Jewish mom or dad didn’t accomplish that. It would not save you. (Even less so a pagan ex-Israelite mom or dad!) This the IO advocate will admit; but my point is that biology counted for nothing. Only entering (and remaining in) a contract with God brings salvation from death. All Jews and Christians agreed on that. Yet this renders the IO thesis unintelligible. Nowhere does anyone (in the OT or NT) say there will come a time when God will just resurrect “everyone” without any contract assuring it. In other words, IO doesn’t seem to understand what a covenant was for.
Which is also why the IO movement’s obsession with the “lost tribes” is in and of itself hopelessly anachronistic—no ancient Jew or Christian would have believed a mere descendant of a lost Israelite tribe qualified as an Israelite or even as under God’s covenant at all (hence why even the Mishnah declares them damned, being no longer a part of “all Israel” that will be saved, per M. Sanh. 10). So by IO logic they were already free of sin, as they were under no law. So why evangelize them? Under IO logic, they had no need of that. The IO thesis is thus self-contradictory. It requires fabricating some never-stated contradictory “third state” whereby pagan Israelites are somehow both “under the law” and thus in need of saving from that and not “under the law” as by definition they never entered into any covenant subjecting them to it. This simply makes no sense.
To be fair, there was in many a hope that the lost tribes would be reintegrated into the covenant that awards salvation, as simply a way to set right something gone wrong. Those captives were under the covenant then and thus had been promised their descendants would be (including subsequent inductees), so as to receive God’s salvation—which at that time meant simply inheriting the earthly holy land, but later became, under Persian Zoroastrian influence, “inheriting the heavenly kingdom” instead, by a resurrection of the dead. But either way it seemed unjust that those lost tribes’ descendants should never get to make good on what they were promised. But this expectation in no way implicated the idea that they were under the covenant. They weren’t. They had thus long since ceased to really be Israelites. They could only be so again by again converting back to the covenant—through circumcision and adherence to Torah.
Second:
There is a difference between what Paul taught and what is actually true. Even if Paul believed all Gentile converts were lost Israelites as IO imagines, in actual fact they weren’t; that’s scientifically false, historically and biologically. So it’s still a false belief. So we can’t really be asking here whether it’s true that every Gentile who then converted to Christianity was “secretly” (or even knowingly) a lost Israelite. It isn’t. We are only asking a far more useless and trivial question: whether the earliest Christians held this obscure but false belief. And that requires finding evidence they did—and not finding evidence they didn’t. And as you’ll see shortly, IO will strike out twice here: the letters of Paul not only don’t evince any such teaching as IO presumes, but they even explicitly contradict it. IO has to “invent” evidence by reinterpreting every text, because there is nowhere any plain statement of their thesis in the Bible.
(It’s also inexplicable how IO expects to deconvert Christians by selling them on a claim about the first Gentile Christians being lost Israelites that they have to admit is false—as it’s physically impossible that Paul “found” and successfully converted “all” the individuals on Earth descending from an Israelite whom some real “God” elected to be the remnant of Israelites saved, particularly since gods don’t exist, nor any of the miraculous powers and knowledge that would be needed to accomplish such an incredible thing—even if Paul believed he had done that, there is no plausible sense in which that belief could be true; but I’m less interested in IO’s self-defeating agenda than in its fact-claims about ancient Christianity.)
This distinction between what Paul taught and what would actually have been true is why it’s crucial to remember Paul was a heretic who never met Jesus, and claimed instead that Jesus came to him in a vision or dream and told him God had changed his mind. That we know is false. Jesus, even if he existed, was dead. He never really taught this to Paul, no matter how much Paul might have believed he did. Which means Jesus never taught it to anyone. Which means the first Christians cannot be assumed to have already held this false belief about whatever Gentiles they happened to convert being descendants of lost Israelites. Even if Paul believed that, it seems, more likely than not, he would have to have invented that belief. It wasn’t a belief Jesus advocated, and it wasn’t a belief of the original Christians—the many Apostles before Paul. They did not even have much of a Gentile mission until Paul’s innovation.
Ironically, that is a well-established fact in mainstream peer reviewed scholarship, unlike the IO thesis, and yet that fact has not caused the universal abandonment of Christianity. I doubt it has caused even a single Christian to leave the faith. Even though all Christians today are heretics, and thus assuredly damned according to the original Christian teaching (as would have been taught by Jesus and all his first Apostles), because they are not keeping Torah. They did not convert to Judaism. They are not under the covenant. So the blood of Jesus will do nothing for them—any more than the Yom Kippur temple sacrifices would have (which the death of Jesus merely conceptually replaced). Only Jewish Christians will be raised from the dead to live forever. That was the original Christian teaching. This is an honestly indubitable fact. Yet it has had no impact whatever on the Christian faith—much less has it “destroyed” and “killed” Christianity. It’s absurd to think the ill-conceived IO thesis is going to work any more magic than that already well-established fact has.
It’s thus important to note that IO advocates reject all ancient literature and all modern scholarship that unanimously concurs you didn’t have to be Israelite by descent to become one and be saved by God’s covenant. They instead “re-interpret” all that evidence as saying the opposite, by circularly assuming their conclusion in their premises. Even when this is impossible. For example, that a convert “is an Israelite in all respects,” per b. Yebamot 47, is a statement that entails they weren’t an Israelite before, and yet now wholly are. Even in the various trivial ways the Mishnah treats converts differently (e.g. they could not join a Sanhedrin until the third generation), they are still assured of the resurrection—the entire point of converting. Indeed, of all surviving lists of those who would not receive resurrection, “converts” is listed in not one of them.
Rabbis even cited scripture, noting that Isaiah 14:1 declares any foreigner who is not “of the house of Jacob” (in other words, not an Israelite) may cleave to and become so (whereas descendants of “lost tribes,” by contrast, would already be “of the house” of Israel in the IO sense). Indeed that whole section of the Talmud lays down requirements for any outsider to become an Israelite—and at no point is “they are descended from a lost tribe of Israel” ever mentioned. Nor is such a thing said anywhere in ancient Jewish literature. It therefore wasn’t required. Indeed, Mishnah Bikkurim 1:4 even declares it not to be the case: converts were not biological Israelites, yet still participated in the benefits of being in the congregation of Israel.
This is how ancient Judaism operated. Yet IO advocates won’t acknowledge any of this. They will try to insist Jews were racists who opposed foreign converts, but vast evidence even for the first century refutes that; they will try to insist converts weren’t “full” Israelites in some sense or other, but that’s irrelevant: they were under Torah law (not the limited Noachian law or “Natural” law many Jews believed all people were subject to), and they received the promise of resurrection for it. Accordingly, IO advocates fail to grasp that the dispute Paul initiated with the original Christians was not over whether non-Israelites could be saved, but how they could be saved. Because all agreed they could be.
The original Christians insisted only those who entered the covenant could be saved: that means Jews by conversion, not Jews by race. A Jew by race who never entered the covenant (e.g. was never circumcised, and never kept kosher) would not be saved any more than any random non-Israelite would be (as the Mishnah outright declares). So race didn’t cut it. Nor was it necessary. This is even more clear in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where “being a Jew by race” was so insufficient that most Jews were in fact damned, because they did not keep to the correct covenant. Even Talmudic Jews made this point, e.g. Sadducees, by denying the resurrection, were deemed as renouncing the covenant and thus would not be saved—their being “the seed of Abraham” accounted them nothing. This is largely why in the time Christianity arose Judaism had schismed into dozens of sects, each declaring the others damned (see “The Heady Days of Jewish Diversity” in The Empty Tomb, pp. 107-110).
Therefore:
Taking all these facts into consideration, the question becomes: Did Paul make this argument to the original Christians—that we need to get more Gentiles in and don’t have to convert them to Judaism to do it—on the grounds that everyone who just happened to agree to be baptized into the Christian community was going to be (by the grace of God?) a descendant of a lost Israelite? Or did he make the argument that his “new covenant” logic worked because material facts no longer matter, as spiritual facts can replace them? The latter argument is explicitly and clearly and repeatedly in Paul. The former is not. And that’s that. IO is done for. It has to be “read in” to Paul by going beyond the plain meaning of his words, and ignoring everything he says that contradicts it. IO thus becomes too improbable to credit. Because, seriously. Why would Paul explicitly argue biology didn’t matter, and somehow have meant that biology mattered? That does not appear to have ever been his argument.
What Paul tried to argue was not “that Gentiles could be saved” (Peter and gang already knew they could be: by converting to the Jewish covenant and thus becoming Israelites, per Exodus and Mishnah law) but “that Gentiles could be saved by spiritual circumcision” and thus they did not need to convert to the old covenant. Hence Gentiles, Paul argued, did not need to keep kosher or strictly follow Torah; they could follow the general spirit of it instead. He proposed they could enter a new and different agreement with God to be saved, a “New Covenant.” That is the actual dispute he represents throughout his letters. And Paul only eventually persuaded the original church to accept his innovation. (Probably, I suspect, because it was a cash cow; Paul’s letters so frequently refer to the wodges of coin he was bringing back to the original leadership on a regular basis, culled from his growing Gentile congregations far and wide—and I’ll bet they figured, better to get in on that than compete with it. See J.D.M. Derrett’s chapter “Financial Aspects of the Resurrection” in The Empty Tomb.)
Example: Hebrews 9:15
I’ll illustrate what I mean with an example. Like all crankery, IO is defended with gigantic, massive word walls of endless, rambling, convoluted claims that would take a lifetime to vet. But all we need, really, is to see if what even they claim are their best moves hold up or fall down as unsustainably erroneous and naive. If it’s the latter, then at that point we know we needn’t waste any time culling the rest. Their attempt to harass us with thousands of claims will fall flat as just more evidence of their crank methodology.
My first such example we get from IO fanatic Michael Beiras (from a Facebook group post I won’t link to), which declares “Hebrews 9:15 destroys Christianity” and is “the Christianity killer” and then proceeds with prodigious uses of capslocked text to claim that because that passage says only transgressions “under the first covenant” are redeemed by Jesus’s sacrifice, that therefore, no one today is thereby saved by it, since “not one person has been under the first covenant for 2000 years” (there are 15 million Jews today who would disagree with that, but never mind). In any event, he’s saying, Christianity no longer offers salvation to anyone today, because “there is not one scripture that teaches Jesus died for ‘sins’ outside of the first covenant.”
This is a serious facepalm moment. Lordy. Where do I even begin?
First:
Hebrews 9:15 does not say “only” transgressions “under the first covenant” are redeemed by Jesus’s sacrifice. Beiras seems not to know why Hebrews is called “Hebrews.” It’s a letter written “To the Hebrews” (that’s literally its title in Greek). The entire letter is meant only for a Jewish Christian audience, and it is only arguing with a Jewish Christian opposition (accordingly, the word “Gentile” appears nowhere in it). Its explicitly stated goal is to convince Jewish Christians that they don’t have to maintain Torah observance anymore (or return to it), hence they no longer require the temple sacrifices to be saved. Ironically, Beiras, like all IO advocates, illogically “assumes” that if some books in the NT were written specifically to or about Jews, “therefore” they all were—a straightforward non sequitur—yet he is in turn blinded by that false assumption to not take into account that this letter is written “To the Hebrews,” not to all Christians, so no inferences can be drawn from it about “all” Christians.
Hence when the author of Hebrews says (emphasis now mine) Christ “is the mediator of a new covenant” so that by his death there shall be a “redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant,” so “those having been called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance,” he means here his Jewish audience, who are the ones God “promised” an “eternal inheritance” to. They were under the first covenant because they are Jews. But, this author says, Jesus set up a new agreement, so they don’t need to stick to the old one anymore. The author does not say here that Jesus only died for those under that old covenant. He is merely speaking only to those who were under that old covenant. The word “only” thus isn’t there. This passage in no way entails a belief or teaching that Jesus didn’t also die to redeem non-covenanted Gentiles. Gentiles just aren’t the intended readers of this letter; so its author isn’t talking about them.
Second:
The entire point of this passage is that the old covenant isn’t needed because there is a new covenant to enter into instead. This is a point made throughout Paul’s letters as well (Paul did not write Hebrews). I get the impression that IO advocates don’t really get the fact that in ancient Judaism, and consequently in earliest Christianity (which was a Jewish sect) and in Paul’s mind (being himself a Jew), everyone is damned. Except for those remote few so unusually righteous as to impress God into making them an exception, non-Israelites will all either burn in hell or (more typically it was believed) simply stay dead once they expire, and cease to exist (based on Psalm 9:17, likewise per Tosefta, Sanhedrin 13.2-4, and so on; for the same reason, the lost ten tribes were excluded from the resurrection, per Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10, esp. 10.3.V.DD-EE). No one gets saved—no one gets resurrected to eternal life—who hasn’t made an agreement with God to inherit that boon.
The original Christians went around offering the same agreement as all Jews did—the Old Covenant (and lest it’s not clear, covenant means “agreement” or “contract”)—with really just one main modification: that the sacrifice of Jesus replaced the temple sacrifices (so you no longer were dependent on the Levitical temple system: see On the Historicity of Jesus, Chapter 5, Elements 23-29; and Chapter 4, Element 18). What Paul did was convert this notion into a New Covenant: the sacrifice of Jesus created the opportunity to sell a new agreement to people, principally to those who hadn’t already signed on to the old one. Thus, Paul argued, Gentile converts did not have to sign on to the old contract with God to be saved; they could sign on to the new contract to be saved. But they still had to sign a contract to be saved.
This is what I think IO fanatics don’t understand about Paul’s system of salvation. When the author of Hebrews says Jesus died to redeem those who (being fallible inevitably) will transgress the old covenant (meaning, Jewish Christians), had you stopped him and asked him, “What about the Gentile Christians?” he would have looked quizzically at you and said, “Jesus died to redeem those who (being fallible inevitably) will transgress the new covenant, too.” In other words, if you didn’t “join in a covenant” with God (new or old), you didn’t get saved. Then when you die, you stay dead. Forever. But the way you get saved by “joining in a covenant” is that even if you should then transgress even that new agreement with God, the atonement (whether Levitical or Christian) still has you covered. In no way does Paul ever say non-Israelites “never” sin or are “never” sinners or have “no” stain of sin on them that must be removed to be saved; his letters are filled with declarations of the sinfulness of non-Israelites that will ensure their damnation thus requiring them to sign on to a new covenant with Jesus (or else convert to Judaism, i.e. sign that arduous old contract instead).
Paul is very explicit about this:
Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. God “will repay each person according to what they have done.” To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Greek; but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Greek. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law.
Romans 2:5-12 (see also Paul’s preceding point leading into this in Romans 1:18-32)
Beiras ignores the actual words of Paul here, and thus bizarrely claims Paul never said exactly what he here says. Literally Paul’s Greek reads that God’s wrath comes “upon every soul of man” (ἐπὶ πᾶσαν ψυχὴν ἀνθρώπου; again singular, thus “man,” not “mankind”) “who works evil” (τοῦ κατεργαζομένου τὸ κακόν, a much broader statement than “sins”). That’s everyone. There is no valid way to twist this into saying otherwise: Paul means everyone who does anything bad. Not just Israelite descendants who break Torah laws. Paul then goes on to say that explicitly.
The IO claim that “only” those under the “old” agreement need the redemption of Jesus to be saved is thus here directly refuted by Paul himself, who outright tells us those under no covenant at all need the redemption of Jesus to be saved as well. He explicitly says people can and do “sin apart from the law.” Exactly the opposite of the IO claim that only those under the law can sin. Hence the IO tactic of “reinterpreting” the word “Greek” here to mean “(descendant of a lost) Israelite (tribe)” (an argument of equivalence Paul never makes) simply does not work, because Paul already says that whoever these Greeks are, they are not under the covenant. Yet, he says, they still need salvation. They are still sinners too.
Which should be obvious. Christians today are principally Christians because they don’t want to die. And Paul plainly says the only way to live forever is to join in an agreement with God—so you have your pick: the old agreement (become a Jew) or the new agreement (become baptized in Jesus). The IO claim that “this isn’t true anymore” simply is directly refuted by Paul, repeatedly. So they cannot sustain such a false claim about ancient Christian belief. This is the one point on which ancient Christian belief and modern (conservative) Christian teaching remain the same: no contract, no eternal life. Period. Paul’s only innovation over the original Christian teaching was to claim God was now offering a new, easier contract. But you still have to join either contract to be saved. Paul never says that rule “ends” at any time, and his logic entails it could not end at any time.
I suspect the IO mistake here is partly caused by their not knowing that Jews were quasi-universalists: despite Paul’s rhetoric (since he, like IO apologists, and every other Jewish sectarian, tried to hide the truth behind convoluted word walls), for any Jew, every contract-holder is saved. It does not matter how big of a sinner you are, how much you fail to uphold your end of the contract. Because in ancient Judaism, the usual penalty for failure to hold up your end was not exclusion from eternal life, but atonement, i.e. enduring a punishment to cleanse you of sin, before gaining eternal life. There were some exceptions, e.g. blasphemers were deemed to have lost contractual access to eternal life, as they were regarded as having renounced God and any obligation to him, the spiritual equivalent of “revoking your citizenship.” And Jewish sectarians could be quite liberal in what they counted as “blasphemy” or other irredeemable crimes, so as to declare everyone they didn’t like damned. But generally, apart from those political disputes over whose covenant counted as “the real” one, even the most lax of Jews, if they were covenanted (for men, circumcised; and for men and women, placed under the Jewish law), they would be saved. Thus, strictly speaking, Jews don’t need Jesus. They just have a rougher ticket to salvation without him.
Of course, each Jewish sect claimed the others were “outside the covenant” and thus not saved, because they were following the “wrong” covenant—so every sect was eagerly evangelizing every other, and the Christian sect was no different in this respect. But of course the Jews they were evangelizing didn’t believe that—by definition, as that’s why they were in the sect they were in and not some other. The Christian mission was thus a hard sell. Indeed that’s why its Jewish mission basically failed and died out, just as most other sects of Judaism did. But even in this context, in any argument with a real Jew of his day, Paul would have been forced to agree that a Jew faithfully following a correct covenantal relationship with God would be saved eventually, if but for a great deal of suffering atonement. Hence Paul never says all covenants were false. He assiduously admits there was a real covenant, and many a Jew had been dying under it for centuries. So his only real selling point (from the perspective of any actual Jewish audience) was that his covenant was easier to follow. Otherwise, every Jew would have laughed Paul off with plain declarations that their salvation was assured, however rough the atonement it required.
This is why we find in the Talmud and Mishnah elaborate explanations of how even condemned and executed criminals—the most assured violators of God’s old covenant contract one can imagine—will rise from the dead to eternal life in paradise. The general teaching was as follows:
- Individual temple sacrifices (per Leviticus) “removed” all contract-violating sins, thus getting you back right with God, who will thus then make good on his end of the bargain by resurrecting you (see entries in the Jewish Virtual Library and the Jewish Encyclopedia).
- In the event any Jew forgot or failed or couldn’t afford to fund individual sacrifices for their every individual sin, there was a national atonement ceremony called Yom Kippur that blanket-canceled every Jew’s sins (see The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra).
- But even the Yom Kippur’s atonement magic only lasted until you sinned again (as was expected to happen at least yearly). So generally, everyone could be expected to carry some burden of sin at any given time.
- If you died in sin, you would remain conscious in the grave for about a year, experiencing being eaten by worms and the “burning” sensation of decay (as rotten corpses looked as though burned, some believed that’s what it felt like to rot); which is partly the basis for Jesus’s famous line that “the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48, paraphrasing Isaiah 66:23-24). The author is riffing on the Jewish belief in the purgatory of the grave. (See, for example, Eric Meyers’ discussion in “The Theological Implications of an Ancient Jewish Burial Custom” in The Jewish Quarterly Review, and my chapter on “The Burial of Jesus” in The Empty Tomb on the Rabbinical logic of secondary burial, the only logical basis for the practice at all, for which we have abundant early first century archaeological evidence, even of executed criminals.)
- That purgation in the grave then fully atoned for any remaining sins; after which you would get to fall asleep and await the resurrection, being then as saved as anyone (Ibid.). (There was also a belief that one’s suffering in life was a sin-atoning punishment as well, just usually not enough.)
Once you understand this, the entire IO thesis no longer makes any sense. Paul would never have converted any Jews arguing it. IO advocates seem to think Jews would agree they “needed” Jesus’s sacrifice to be saved because they all failed their end of the old contract and thus were doomed; but their failing at that had no effect on God making good on his end of the agreement. It only affected what he got to do to you before making good on it. They were not doomed; their salvation was assured.
Paul does preach a lot as if that wasn’t the case, but he’s deploying mere rhetoric—in actual fact no Jew then would have bought Paul’s false insistence that failing at the law damned a Jew to death. To the contrary, the only actually useful thing Jews would see the sacrifice of Jesus offering them was an avoidance of purgation (the temporary punishment God must inflict on you first, such as tribulations in life, and misery in the grave). And that was only because the Jesus contract was easier to keep to (its rules were simpler), and cost you less (since it required no costly individual atonement sacrifices in the temple throughout the year). But Gentiles, not being under any contract (as Paul says, all who “perish apart from the law”), were doomed without Jesus—or converting to Judaism.
Example: 1 Corinthians 10 & 12
In 1 Corinthians 12:2, Paul writes, “You know that when you were ‘Gentiles’, somehow or other you were influenced and led astray to mute idols.” From here the IO argument goes, “A Gentile,” i.e. pagan, “in the ordinary sense of a non-Israelite would have nothing to be ‘carried away’ from,” and therefore since “only an Israelite would be carried away from one thing to enter into something else,” it follows that “those ‘Gentiles’ in Corinth were Hellenized Israelites who were uncircumcised idol worshipers.” That is of course a non sequitur. Paul does not say they were led away from anything here, much less specifically Torah; nor would living descendants of Israelites raised as pagans have been under the covenant so as to be led away from it. The contrary is a fiction imported into the text by IO, which argues in a circle, by simply presuming its thesis is true in order to argue its thesis is true.
IO advocates seem again to be faltering here on their ignorance of the underlying Greek, using for instance the modern phrase “carried away from” as if that’s in the text. It’s not. The word Paul uses here simply combines apo and agô, “carried” and “away”; there is no second prefix adding a “from” on top of that sense. The word can carry that meaning, but in ancient Greek often did not. So context again is everything. The IO advocate is ignoring grammatical particles and other aspects of the structure of the sentence in the Greek, which actually says (following Conzelmann), “You know, while you were still pagans, how you were drawn to dumb idols and carried away.” Full stop. The crucial element of being carried away from something is not there, much less specifically “from Torah” (making this a double non sequitur).
Pay attention to the context: Paul says this in prelude to his correcting a misapprehension—apparently some Corinthians were worried that demons might be speaking to them in the guise of Jesus, so Paul reassures them they can’t do that (essentially, we are to infer, God won’t let them). Their concern was born of his prior teaching that when they were pagans this is what demons did: misled them into worshiping mute idols (this was a ubiquitous teaching of the early Christians, including Paul: see Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 152-54). If they could do that then, can’t they do that now? Paul calms their worry by answering no.
This passage is therefore not about their having been led away “from Torah,” but having been led away from understanding the true nature of the world (Romans 1:18-32)—not an understanding they once had and lost, but one they never had in the first place—thus “blinding” them from accepting the gospel (2 Corinthians 4:3-4; Galatians 4:8), which “blindness” Paul removed (e.g. 1 Corinthians 10:20 & 2:1-5). This teaching is what led some Corinthians to worry this old deception could still be occurring, requiring Paul to reassure them it wasn’t, because the name of Christ was too magically powerful for demons to feign (and conversely, any “spirit” claiming to tell them Jesus is a fake, must itself be lying; yes, circular logic, but I’m not claiming Paul’s system was logical, I’m only explaining what it was).
Paul had already taught the Corinthians the danger of being “led astray” in the sense of merely “misled” using the example of his own Jewish heritage in 1 Corinthians 10, where he reminds them of the teaching example of how many Israelites were misled to abandon God in the Exodus. That he chose that example I think confuses the IO crowd into thinking Paul means the analogy to be “you and we are alike being misled away from Torah” when in fact the Torah here is incidental; the analogy is merely being misled, being carried away from the truth (that there is but one God; all else are deceiving demons). Thus Paul does not say “your ancestors” were the Israelites in his example, he says “our ancestors,” meaning his ancestors—Paul being himself a Jew. The IO crowd ignores the difference between “your” and “our” and thus arrives at the false conclusion that he must be telling Gentile Corinthians that they are the descendants of those Israelites. Of course, it’s also a fact, per the research of Jason Staples (which I discuss below), that since Paul repeatedly argues non-Israelite converts to Christianity become Israelites spiritually, he could well have said “your” and still not meant biologically. Such a biological claim is the one thing Paul never actually makes, anywhere.
In fact, conspicuously—and as we’ll see shortly, he even denies it.
Which is why IO advocates have to “reinterpret” what Paul said to get that out of the text; it isn’t there in any plain reading. At no point, for example, does Paul say, “You are actually descendants of the Israelites, and that’s why we need you to join the community of Christ” or “those Gentiles who reject the call of Christ must not be Israelites” or “you need to join us because you are descendants of the Israelites God wants back in the fold” or any such clear declaration of the point. To the contrary, Paul repeatedly says the opposite, such as in 1 Corinthians 10:18-20, after having just given the Exodus tale of the Israelites as his teaching example:
Consider the Israel according to the flesh: Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? Do I mean then that food sacrificed to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons.
Here Paul makes plain the Corinthians are not Israelites, indeed “according to the flesh,” which remark supports Staples’ suspicion that Paul understands his Corinthian Gentiles to also be Israel but only according to the spirit. Thus Paul says they should look to the biological Israelites as an analogy to themselves, not as identical to themselves. Just as when Israelites (here depicted as a separate people from the Gentile Corinthians, not their ancestors) participate in the altar of Yahweh involve themselves with Yahweh, when Gentiles participate in the altar of false gods, they involve themselves with those false gods (meaning, demons). That Paul sees the two groups as separate, and thus only as material for an analogy between them, makes quite clear he did not believe the IO thesis; indeed, he’d never even heard of such a notion.
Example: Romans 5:13
One of the pillars of argument that IO rests on is the claim that “only Israelites were ‘imputed’ with sin” and therefore “there was simply no basis for Gentiles to be judged for violations of a law they were never given.” One of their “proof texts” is Romans 5:13, where Paul says, “To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law.” But the argument here ignores the actual context of that verse, and thus Paul’s actual argument there. It also ignores the entire ancient context of how Judaism understood sin as warranting damnation in the first place.
Hey…want to know how Judaism understood sin as warranting damnation in the first place? Let’s read Paul! Here’s the verse immediately preceding Romans 5:13, verse 12: “Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” Um. Doesn’t this say everyone descended from Adam—in other words, literally everyone—sins? And the punishment for doing so is: they die? Now, unless IO advocates can adduce evidence that only Israelites have ever in history died, they cannot maintain that only Israelites are punished for sin and thus that God imputes sin only to Israelites. So the IO tactic here of claiming Adam wasn’t “really” the first man and didn’t “really” die in Jewish or Pauline conception (which they assert on zero evidence, making this yet another illogical circular argument) is refuted not only by the entire OT narrative, but by all historical, biological fact as even understood in the time of Paul (much more so today). The Bible is rife with non-Israelites dying. In fact, basically, all of them (I mean, right?). And in no way did Paul believe non-Israelites don’t die (and thus “don’t” need to be rescued from death).
So the IO thesis can’t survive here. Paul’s entire argument is that everyone, not just Israelites, sins, and therefore everyone, not just Israelites, dies. And that’s the end of things. You stay dead. Unless you can convince God to resurrect you. And how do you do that? By entering into a contract with him. The original such contract was basically the following (at least as Jews in Paul’s day were teaching it): God laid out all the things that were bad (dubbed “the law”), so people knew what not to transgress so as not to sin, and they promised to abide by that, and in exchange someday He’d raise them from the dead and let them live forever in paradise. And not only that, but that law code included what to do if people transgressed the law, fulfilling which still constituted upholding the contract (look up “sin offerings” in Leviticus, e.g. Lev. 5).
Thus, it was not as if you transgressed, and then God canceled your contract with him. Rather, if you transgressed, you would submit (willingly or not) to the appointed punishments or atonement procedures, setting right the error, thus fulfilling, not canceling, the contract. By contrast, anyone not in the contract gets nothing. No eternal life for them. So you still have to enter the contract to get God’s promise to apply to you. And then God can impute specific violations of the law to you when you commit them, which you then must “pay for” to remain “in the contract.” No one else gets that consideration. They just stay dead.
There is therefore no sense whatever in saying “sin tout court is only imputed to the Jews.” Sin itself is imputed to everyone—the result of which is death. Exactly as Paul says; and he is there relating standard Jewish thought of the time, explicitly scriptural (Genesis 3:14-19 and Hosea 6:7; this was commonly based on the teaching that all human beings were under the Noachian law believed first delivered to Adam, failing to abide by which justified the Flood; or else as Paul’s Jewish contemporary Philo put it, the “natural law” inherent in the universe’s very design, cf. On Abraham 5-6). Note Paul is not stating Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, but the Jewish understanding that everyone who sins dies, because Adam and Eve broke a commandment of God. There were some “sinless” people in Jewish legend who never died, but the more typical lore was that no one was ever so righteous as that.
Hence Paul goes on to say:
To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
Romans 5:13-14
As Paul tells us, “the many died by the trespass of the one man,” hence by “the result of one man’s sin” (v. 15), that “brought condemnation…for all people,” not just Israelites (v. 18). Paul then adds that “the law was brought in so that the trespass might increase” (v. 20) not so that it would only then be created. Thus Romans 5 does not say “only Israelites sin.” It very clearly says the opposite: that everyone sins, and everyone is punished for it with death. This is the problem that the law (the covenant contract) was created to solve: if you don’t want to die (to be punished for your sins outside the law), you must subject yourself to a specific law code (complete with its designated punishments and atonements for specific crimes that can be imputed to you), in return for which God will resurrect you. No submitting to that law, no resurrection for you.
It is in this context that Paul argues you can skip that step and get God to agree to resurrect you by entering into a new contract, one that has a much simpler law and procedure to follow. But if you don’t enter into even that contract, eventually you will die, and forever stay dead. No resurrection for you. Salvation, not available. Because everyone sins, Paul says; and the wages of sin are death. So obviously anyone who dies, must have been able to sin. Otherwise they wouldn’t have died. IO theology makes no sense of this basic pillar of ancient Judeo-Christian soteriology.
How Romans Does IO In
These are not the only ways that Paul’s own statements refute the IO thesis. These are just incidental examples. Paul is even more explicit in Romans 9, where Paul engages an extensive discourse explaining quite explicitly that Gentiles were not Israelites, and thus he has to give an extended biblical apologetic for why their inclusion in the community of the saved makes any sense. What is his argument for including them? The one place where surely he would trot out the powerful IO thesis as that very defense (had it been the defense), he brings forth entirely the opposite argument. This is how we know Paul did not preach or believe the IO thesis.
Paul scours scripture for his justification, for example, and yet what he finds are not any passages he says declare Gentiles are lost Israelites. Instead he pulls Hosea 2:23 out of context to claim God had said “I will call them ‘my people’ who are not my people” (Romans 9:25). This is not what the author of Hosea meant—the IO crowd is at least correct to point out that Hosea meant fallen Israelites—but like all Christian apologists, who routinely use verses out of context (as even, ironically, the IO crowd do), Paul does not use this passage to make that argument at all. He instead employs it as an isolated declaration that Gentile Christians are not God’s people—and therefore not Israelites. So here, in the one place he needs the IO thesis to justify why Gentiles get a salvation promised only to the Israelites, where he could even have used Hosea to prove it, Paul fails to explain that as his justification. He instead takes that scripture out of context to construct a different justification that entails his rejection of the IO thesis. He chose not to argue IO. He chose to argue the opposite. You pretty much can’t get more refuted than that.
And though one might try to debate what Paul meant there in isolation, in context there is no way to escape this conclusion. For Paul had already declared in that same chapter:
It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” In other words, it is not the children by physical descent [lit. “children of the flesh”] who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.
Romans 9:6-8
Here Paul is referring to the doctrine he elsewhere explains in Galatians 4, where Paul explicitly says these references to Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, and the “promise” connecting them, are allegories for spiritual, not biological realities. Which is why he expands the original Christian creed, “so that he might redeem those under the law” in Galatians 4:5, with his own addition, “so that we might receive divine adoption as sons,” referring to Paul’s adoptionist soteriology, by which anyone can become an Israelite by adoption. And they can do so, he explains, by skipping “Hagar” (the Old Sinai Covenant) and being symbolically born “of Sarah” instead (the New Covenant of the Risen Jesus…and as the Hannibal character Mason Verger puts it, “No one beats the Riz”).
Thus here in Romans Paul explicitly repeats that same point: Gentile Christians are not saved because they are “children by physical descent” from any Israelites, quite simply because they are “not the children by physical descent” from any Israelites! Paul could not more plainly be refuting the IO thesis than this. His entire apologetic for why Gentiles can gain God’s salvation is to admit they don’t have any biological right to it at all, and then to argue that it’s by a spiritual mechanism they can gain that right (in particular, as I already explained, by entering into their own, new contract with Israel’s God—as that happens to be the only real God, so it’s the only way anyone can really be saved).
IO advocates will ignore these verses and take out of context and circularly reinterpret a verse two lines earlier, Romans 9:4, where Paul says of “the people of Israel” that “the adoption to sonship,” “the divine glory,” “the covenants,” “the receiving of the law,” “the temple worship,” and “the promises” are all “theirs,” by claiming that Paul must here be saying only “Israelites” can receive adoption (and thus baptism and thus be Christians). But Paul does not say these things “are only theirs.” He uses the relative pronoun, in the genitive hôs, “of whom, from whom,” meaning these things come from them, not are only available to them. But for Israel, we would not have access to them. That’s what Paul means. And we know that’s what he means by going on to read the next four verses where he says that’s what he means. As just demonstrated.
We see Paul attempting to make this make sense later in Romans 11, with an agricultural analogy:
I am talking to you Gentiles. … If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. …
You will say then, ‘Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in’. Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. … For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either.
Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off. And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. After all, if you were cut out of an olive tree that is wild by nature, and contrary to nature were grafted into a cultivated olive tree, how much more readily will these, the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree!
Romans 11:13-24
This is where IO folks come up with some malarkey about “olive tree” always meaning “Israel,” using wild non sequiturs from disparate Bible verses that have nothing to do with what Paul says here. In fact Paul is here explicitly saying the opposite: this passage declares that Gentiles do not come from the same olive tree, but a different one. Thus there is not “one” olive tree, and it’s Israel. There are two olive trees, the “wild” one that constitutes non-Israelites, and the “cultivated” one that constitutes Israel (the people God originally chose to “cultivate”). And Paul says that by his gospel you can be cut from the wild tree (the Gentile tree) and be “grafted in” to the Israelite tree. You thus were not originally part of that tree and cut off to be grafted back in—to the contrary, Paul describes separately that there are also some Jews or Israelites who, having gone astray, can be grafted back in. But he clearly demarcates them as a separate group from the Gentiles who are grafted in from an alien tree, not back into the same tree. Paul even explicitly says these trees have never shared the same root; he thus cannot mean trees that were once united.
Paul’s whole discourse here is to humble Gentile Christians into not looking down their noses at fallen Israelites as if they were their superiors, torn away so foreigners could be “grafted in” in their place. For those fallen Israelites might also get back into the fold. And indeed, the Christian gospel, Paul is saying, is the easiest and surest way to do that. Indeed this passage is rife with clear statements that Gentile Christians are not Israelites:
- “If God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either.” So, “you” (the Gentile) are not a natural branch of Israel.
- God showed “sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you.” So, “you” (the Gentile) are not the lost Israelites, “those who fell.”
- “Provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off.” Which means you hadn’t already been cut off. Thus, “you” (the Gentile) are not a lost Israelite. You are a new addition to the Israelite tree. You could fall as they did; “so don’t.”
- “If they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again.” Since “they” here means the lost Israelites (and all Israelites who have fallen away), Paul does not see “they” as being the same people as the “you” (the Gentile believer) he is addressing this argument to. Moreover, that only “they” can be “grafted in again,” whereas “you” (the Gentile) have yet to be grafted in at all (until baptism into Christ), entails Gentiles are not lost Israelites.
- “These, the natural branches,” will “be grafted into their own olive tree.” Again, not “your” olive tree (or even “our” olive tree); “their own” olive tree. Paul could not more clearly say Gentile Christians are not lost Israelites. They are entirely new additions to the Israelite tree; not “natural branches” to it cut away from it in the past.
Time and again, every one of these lines Paul would have written entirely differently had he meant the IO thesis. He therefore can’t have meant the IO thesis. In short, IO predicts Paul would have said things here that he didn’t; whereas the falsity of IO predicts Paul would have said exactly the things he here says. That’s how we know the IO thesis is false.
The entire Epistle to the Romans was written to heal a rift between Gentile and Jewish Christians in Rome, and is addressed to them both (see Romans 1), and argues extensively that Jews are as welcome as Gentiles into God’s Kingdom, and Gentiles are as welcome as Jews, and any conflict arising from haughty declarations that God has abandoned the Jews and has now turned his favor onto Gentiles should be staunched as resting on a false premise: that God ever abandoned the Israelites in the first place, and therefore that the Gentiles now allowed in are somehow “better” than Jews. This is precisely the one letter where Paul should be explicitly laying out the IO thesis in spades. And yet it is nowhere present. It is precisely the one argument Paul never makes to solve the dispute between the Jewish and Gentile Christians at Rome.
Instead, the arguments Paul does make here all entail the opposite of the IO thesis: desperate attempt after desperate attempt to give a justification for how non-Israelites can gain the salvation of the Israelite God, which in every case is to argue that biological descent doesn’t matter, that anyone can “enter into a covenant” with the Israelite God, and thus partake of “the promise” God once made to the actual Israelites. Hence, Paul says:
Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
Galatians 3:8-9
Here Paul cannot mean Abraham was promised that all his progeny would be blessed, and then Abraham was promised 10/12ths of his progeny would “also” be blessed. That’s nonsensical. Paul clearly understands this verse he is quoting (Genesis 18:18) to be saying that all nations in addition to Abraham’s nation (the coming Israelites) will be blessed through him; and Paul is clearly deploying this verse to argue that non-Israelites can therefore receive Abraham’s blessing—through faith rather than by descent. This is exactly the opposite of what IO wants Paul to be arguing.
As I’ve already explained, this is really just one small step from what was already the case: Jews already agreed non-Israelites could join the Israelite covenant and thus be saved, by following the Torah conversion law; Paul is merely adding the tweak that one needn’t follow the Torah conversion law to do it, that baptism into Christ was sufficient to seal the deal—because it made you an adopted “son” of God and thus a legitimate “heir” to God’s future kingdom (Romans 8:14-16 and Galatians 3:26-29; cf. Romans 6:3-10 and 8:29). Paul would not have to argue you needed to be adopted into God’s kingdom, if he believed you had already by descent been born into it.
Paul often makes clear that Jews and Gentiles are different people, yet alike damned for their sin without a contract with God. So the role of being “under the Torah” doesn’t matter; nor could it, as I already explained: not being circumcised, “lost Israelites” would no more be subject to, and thus “under,” the Torah covenant than non-Israelites were. So the IO thesis literally makes no sense in historical context. The problem with Torah was not that it “created” sin (as if non-Israelites could never sin), but that it created a contract one had to follow to get a desired payout (salvation), but that contract was too hard to follow because everyone is a sinner—Israelite and non-Israelite alike. This is why Paul innovated the idea of turning the Christian gospel into a “new” contract offer, one that was easier to follow, and thus more easily gained the desired return (see Romans 7-8).
This is the context in which we must read what Paul plainly says:
- “We have already made the charge that Jews and Greeks alike are all under the power of sin” (Romans 3:9). No mention of “because they are all Israelites” or “are (or once were) all subject to the Torah covenant.”
- “There is no difference [between Jew and Gentile], for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus … to be received by faith,” not by birth (Romans 3:22-25). No mention of there being “no difference” between Jew and Gentile because they are both Isrealites, but rather because Jesus saves both—exactly the opposite of the IO thesis: as this boon comes, he says, by faith, not by common descent.
IO advocates will attempt the fallacy of circular argument to “reinterpret” all these verses as saying exactly the opposite of what they say, in order to then declare they say exactly the opposite of what they say, and therefore “Paul never says” what these verses plainly say. This is the stock and trade of any crank methodology. The rest of us just listen to what Paul actually said, no convoluted twisting of his words required, much less circular logic.
The same happens when we look at Romans 2:13-15:
For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.)
This does not say that Gentiles have the law “written in their hearts” because they had some long distant Israelite ancestor who “once” was under the law. It says they do not have the law. Period. They are not under that law. And yet still sin. The logic is clear as I already pointed out: everyone is damned—because everyone is a sinner. It is not that “only” those “under the law” are sinners, but that by agreeing to be under that law (by ritual initiation into the polity of Israel), one can try to minimize one’s sin by adhering to the law, and in return God will give you eternal life. It’s just that that’s difficult, so it’s a hard road to that reward; hence Paul contrived an easier contract out of the new Christian gospel. He is not looking for lost Israelites; he is looking for non-Israelites willing to join the Israelite polity, which they could always do, through a ritual initiation into Judaism. Paul’s offer is simply of a new and easier initiation: baptism, rather than circumcision; then following the spirit of the law, rather than the letter. There is nothing here of the IO thesis.
Does Any of It Survive Independent Expert Peer Review?
Another typical crank move is to scour the academic literature for any obscure article that might sound like what they want to argue, and then trumpet that as “their” thesis having passed peer review, and since “anything” that passes peer review can be assumed to be “true,” so is their thesis (never mind that they themselves reject almost all peer reviewed results in the field as false; consistency, alas, is the hobgoblin of cranked minds). They do this at least once: they will cite a paper published in an obscure Christian theology journal with words like “Israel Only” in its thesis: “Only Israel! John 3:16 Revisited” by J.E. Botha & Pieter Rousseau HTS Teologiese Studies 61.4 (2005).
However, that paper solely argues that a single popular verse only in the Gospel of John (the infamous 3:16) was only directed at the Jews (and not Israelites in IO parlance). Indeed, Botha and Rousseau do not say this verse excluded non-Israelites. Rather, their thesis is merely that it was “meant as a sorely needed exhortation…of a specific and identifiable group of Christians to remain faithful to Jesus,” and not a claim that only they could be saved. Their thesis also does not mention anything about lost tribes of Israel, or kosmos (world) “always” meaning only Israel, or John being written before the year 70, or Christianity being concluded, or any other essential IO proposition—in fact these authors outright denounce the IO thesis: “Christians can still with confidence say, and believe, that God sent his Son to this world to save those who believe in Him,” Botha and Rousseau say, it’s just that “John 3:16 should not and cannot be used” to prove that. I also think their argument for even that limited hypothesis is a bit weak. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s not the IO thesis.
Another paper sometimes mentioned is S.M. Lyman’s expert peer reviewed work in “The Lost Tribes of Israel as a Problem in History and Sociology” for the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 12.1 (1998). But he only describes modern IO-like movements; he does not argue their views are a correct description of ancient Christianity (indeed, he opens by explicitly pointing out that that’s unlikely). Likewise, Richard Horsley has argued that Torah observant Jews in ancient Galilee may have been descendants of some of the lost tribes; but this still isn’t the IO thesis. By contrast, actual expert peer reviewed studies of what the word “Gentile” actually meant in ancient Judaism and early Christianity—e.g. Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile by Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi—don’t support any weird take pushed in defense of IO.
The closest thing to a peer-reviewed quasi-IO thesis is Jason Staples’ expert peer reviewed work in “What Do the Gentiles Have to Do with ‘All Israel’?” for JBL 130.2 (2011) and his subsequent Chapel Hill dissertation supervised by Bart Ehrman, “Reconstructing Israel: Restoration Eschatology in Early Judaism and Paul’s Gentile Mission” (2016). But Staples does not defend any of the particular propositions of IO; to the contrary, he argues that Paul thought “that his gentile converts are actually becoming transformed, ethnic Israelites, complete with circumcisions not performed with human hands” (“Reconstructing,” p. 590). As Staples puts it in comments on Bart Ehrman’s blog (on 29 July 2020): “I don’t think there’s strong evidence that the gentile converts imagined themselves as biological descendants of Jacob” but only as having “become such by receiving the spirit.”
That means Paul’s gospel would still apply to everyone today, contrary to the IO doctrine—indeed, even on the “biological” view, as a lot of us could still claim Israelite ancestors somewhere in our past (not only do we still have fifteen million Jews around, but countless millions more probably have an Israelite ancestor somewhere in their family tree, had they full knowledge of its every member) and even those who can’t, can expect to be “grafted in” to Israel after the fact and thus become Israelites, spiritually, just as Paul, and Staples, argue—because all that is required for that to correspond to God’s intention is that you want to do that. Which countless people today do. No claim can be made that “hardness of heart” has barred everyone today from desiring it—for Christianity remains quite popular. So Staples’ thesis actually destroys the entire IO program. It does not support it.
I’m not entirely convinced by everything Staples argues, but that hardly matters to the present point. In hundreds of pages, Staples never presents any passage anywhere in Paul actually saying his Gentile converts were physical descendants of Israelites; and as I’ve shown, there are several passages in Paul that explicitly say they weren’t. Which is why Staples states his thesis as that Paul thought his “gentile converts are actually becoming transformed, ethnic Israelites,” rather than already being so. Which I think is closer to correct. “Metaphysically” speaking, that is what Paul believed: that by accepting adoption as a Son of God through baptism, you become an Israelite; but he meant that in the same way the Exodus law of conversion did. Hence this did not require (as Paul clearly indicates) any actual biological ancestry connecting you to Israel.
To what extent Paul would have imagined the “physics” of this is beyond our capacity to know (and probably Paul’s—after all, he knew nothing of genetics or any relevant scientific facts of biology). But it’s clear Paul did not believe God “transmutated the flesh” of Gentiles into Israelite flesh; for he repeatedly calls the joining process a legal adoption, not a physical transmutation. But that’s precisely the problem for IO. You don’t need to be adopted if you are already in the family by descent. Paul’s adoptionism for the faithful is therefore in and of itself a rejection of the IO thesis.
Goofing the Bible
Another signature of being cranks is that the IO crowd abandons mainstream scholarship altogether, routinely behaving as if “the Bible” (Old Testament and New) was all written by one author with a coherent singular agenda and belief system, rather than (as in fact) numerous authors with often competing agendas and belief systems and different vocabularies and understandings, often generations or even centuries apart, indeed often through multiple redactions and textual distortions as well. Which leads them to act with face-palming naivety, such as actually thinking that when Acts has Paul say something, that means Paul actually said it (he probably didn’t; Acts is a late fictional work of historical revisionism). They also don’t know (or simply deny, or speciously gainsay) basic facts of the field like that 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 is widely concluded to be a post-Pauline, indeed deliberately antisemitic, interpolation—and thus not usable to reflect the thoughts or ideas of Paul or any of the first generation of Christians. Indeed (being, oddly, Preterists) they reject many well-established facts of the field, like that most of the New Testament was written after 70 A.D., as that fact pretty much refutes any notion that its message didn’t apply after that.
In another signature of crankery, IO advocates sometimes use evidence in a way that looks rather dishonest—and that can only be honest if hopelessly delusional. For example, some will argue that “beyond the Euphrates” includes the Asia Minor of Paul’s mission (now Turkey) when the first century Jewish author Josephus (himself a Rabbi of the temple priesthood and provincial governor of Galilee) reports the then-popular Jewish belief that the lost ten tribes of Israel all reside “beyond the Euphrates.” But that is absolutely ruled out by what he actually says: “there are two tribes in Asia and Europe governed by the Romans, while the other ten tribes are on the other side of the Euphrates up to the present day” (Antiquities of the Jews 11.133).
Thus Josephus plainly says the ten tribes are not in Asia Minor, nor anywhere under the Roman Empire, but on the other side of the Euphrates—in other words, east of the Empire. There is no evidence this belief was true; Josephus is only reporting popular lore (which we already find in 2 Kings 17:23 and 2 Esdras 13:39-49). But that that was the popular lore presents a problem for the IO thesis: if even Josephus, like Paul “a Pharisee of Pharisees,” did not think any lost Israelites were in the Roman Empire, we cannot simply assume Paul did. It’s thus telling that IO advocates will choose to hide this uncomfortable fact by quoting Josephus only partially and then declaring he said the opposite of what in fact he said—evidently expecting no one to check. Another example of this tactic is when they claim the Epistle of James, which is written to “the twelve tribes in the diaspora,” proves their thesis; but that author is referring to Torah observant Jews (a fact James repeatedly presumes without argument: James 2:8-10 & 4:11-12), not unobservant (or even pagan) descendants of Israelites; so in fact James does not support IO. But again one would have to check these facts to notice. This is the kind of behavior I often encounter from cranks of all varieties.
But most of all they suck—really suck—at reading Biblical languages. Indeed, IO proponents routinely ignore the actual context of verses, both historical context (like when they “forget” that Hebrews is a letter written to Jewish Christians, not all Christians) and textual context, while falsely claiming to be the only ones attending to it. For instance, they will make outlandish claims such as that anywhere in the Bible that they decide—in every book, Old Testament and New—a word for “mankind” actually means Israelites, not every human being. And they will defend such claims with wildly false assertions like “Isaiah 2:6 begins by talking about Israel” and yet “by verse 20, Israel is called ‘mankind’,” and “therefore” we can assume ‘mankind’ means Israel anywhere else in the Bible they need it to. That’s not true in any version of the Bible; nor is that how any competent literary analysis works.
In Hebrew, the word they are talking about here is adam, which just means person. It does not have the valence of the English word “mankind.” It’s closer to our word “people,” which is not innately totalizing. If you say “People will stop supporting Trump someday” you are not talking about all human beings (most of whom already don’t support Trump); nor does that mean “people” magically now only means Trump supporters. Yet IO depends on just that kind of incompetent linguistic hackwork.
Which can be pretty funny. For example, throughout Exodus 9 the Hebrew text speaks of the plagues of God befalling adam, “men”—yet clearly that means non-Israelites. Without a fallacious circular argument to “rescue” them here, the IO advocate’s incompetent linguism would force them into the awkward position of having to insist God set the ten plagues of Egypt only on the Israelites, which paints quite a humorous picture if you are familiar with the actual story and its intended point. Moses threatens Pharaoh by throwing ten plagues on the Jews, while all Egyptians remain unscathed? Pharaoh would be laughing his ass off at Moses. Indeed, he’d already be justifiably perplexed even if those plagues struck everyone—Jew and Egyptian alike. The whole point of them was that they spared Israel (Exodus 9:4, 9:26, 12:12-13, etc.). Thus adam does not always mean “mankind” nor always means “Israel.” It can only mean one or the other, or any number of other things, if context establishes that it does. And it just doesn’t in any way relevant to proving the IO thesis.
IO proponents also try to pretend there is no difference between Greek and Hebrew. The most popular Greek translation of Isaiah 2:20 renders adam with anthrôpos—singular. Throughout ancient Greek, anthrôpos only meant “mankind” when it is given in the plural. In the singular, in a construction like we find here, it means, “In that day, one will throw away his idols,” again with “his” (autou) in the singular (literally: “In that day, a man will throw away his idols,” not “mankind will” nor “every man” will). So even the ancient Jewish rabbinical experts on their own Hebrew text did not imagine adam meant “Israelites.” It refers to Israelites here simply because that’s what is being talked about. Hence they translated adam here not with “mankind shall” but with the generic “one shall,” which means they used it in the same way I just used “people” to refer to Trump supporters. It’s like my saying “One ought to abandon Trump,” meaning those who happen to support Trump by obvious context, not because the word “one” only ever refers to Trump supporters.
I should not have to be explaining rudimentary grammar like this. But alas.
It’s only worse that IO proponents also apparently don’t even know what the underlying texts actually say. Like when they insist that “in Ephesians 2:3, ‘mankind’ is used to refer to Old Covenant Israel” since “the entire context of Ephesians 2 is talking about the Israelite diaspora.” Pro tip: the word ‘mankind’ is not in Ephesians 2:3. Or in fact anywhere in the whole second chapter of Ephesians (the singular anthrôpos is found only once, in verse 15, where it simply means “a man,” not mankind).
Aiming to find out how the IO folks could possibly have thought “mankind” was “in Ephesians 2:3,” I checked the Bible Hub parallels and found that only one translation, the English Standard Version, puts that word in there. But if you follow that link and compare translations, you’ll see this was just a modern translator taking license, creatively rendering the actual word for “the rest” (hoi loipoi, “the others, those remaining, those left over”), which would mean the other people who hadn’t found Christ—or the other Jews who hadn’t given up Torah, on the IO assumption that Ephesians 2 is talking about Jews (it isn’t, but never mind; it’s also, BTW, a forgery). So the IO advocates didn’t even think to check their claim against standard translations of the Bible, much less the actual Greek being translated. Ironically, this example also shows they were misled by a modern Christian distortion of the Bible, one that would thus be erasing the very Jewish context of the verse they want to claim here. In the original language, that error isn’t there, making their own argument a double error. Oi vey.
IO ignorance extends beyond knowing nothing about Greek or Hebrew or even how to check a text or translation, to include even entry-level historical understanding. Or else outright denying reality. For instance, Michael Bradley has tried to argue that because “mankind” in the Bible “always” (when they need it to) means only “Israelites” (by such illogical arguments as I just surveyed), “therefore” when Acts 17 imagines Paul claiming to the Athenians that “from one man God made all the nations” Paul is only talking about the twelve tribes of Israel (scattered across the world though they may be). But every competent reader of this text knows:
- Paul is here referring to God creating Adam, the first man, from whom all men are descended—not just Israelites. (IO advocates try arguing the entirety of Genesis is all just an allegory for Israel and therefore “Adam” is nowhere in the Bible said to be the father of all men; a claim so wildly improbable it can only be called delusional.)
- Paul is here depicted as speaking to, and of, all the Athenians, not a select hidden few of them who per chance were lost Israelite descendants. (IO advocates simply gainsay this, on a basis of no evidence whatever.)
- And Paul is being made here to deliberately echo Stoic teachings of a united humanity, as he is essentially repeating their doctrine that all men on earth belong to a common humanity by virtue of all being fathered by God, and thus are all fellow citizens of the world—a doctrine well known at Athens (and a fact in turn well known to the author of Acts), where the very “stoa” were that the “Stoics” held their classes. In fact, these framed the Athenian agora—and Acts places Paul exactly there. It would make absolutely no sense to reread this passage as saying exactly the opposite of all that. The historical context is clear, and clearly intentional; while the context IO needs to be here, isn’t.
Even the old Expositor’s commentary gets all this. That Bradley doesn’t know or believe any of it is, well, why he isn’t qualified to be doing Biblical exegesis. IO advocates hold all actual expertise, all real peer reviewed research, all expert evidence-based philology, in open contempt. Which is another red flag for crankery. But worse than simply denouncing all real experts as ignorant in order to elevate literal incompetence into the status of authority, is that they won’t even acknowledge plain, indisputable facts: what Acts never has Paul say in his speech to “the Athenians” is that there are lost or fallen Israelites in the crowd who are the only ones he is attempting to reach, or that he is “only” talking about some men descended from Adam, not all of them; or anything particular to the IO thesis.
It’s also important not just to know basic things like these (which the IO crowd doesn’t know, or circularly rejects because it contradicts their thesis—making theirs not even undergraduate level work), but also more esoteric things (of the sort graduate schools exist to teach you to know or find out first before spouting radical new theories in any academic field). For instance, some will notice that Paul is here made to echo Deuteronomy 32, “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel,” and then, “the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.” But this is a textual corruption. When the author of Acts was composing his Athenian speech for Paul, the text of Deuteronomy did not say that. It said “sons of God” or “angels of God” (phrases often then treated as synonymous), not “sons of Israel” (as we know, for example, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Greek Septuagint text that Acts actually employed as its base text, as was well as abundant other evidence).
Which means this verse in Deuteronomy, that the author of Acts is having Paul allude to, was then understood to be referring to Genesis 10, which catalogues God apportioning the whole world to seventy nations with, eventually, their seventy languages (and from only one of those nations—Shem—did Israel descend); and to each of which God appointed an angel as overseer. Hence, in the text that existed when the New Testament was composed, Deuteronomy 32 meant these seventy nations (the whole population of earth), from among which “the Lord” selected the people “of Jacob as his allotted inheritance.” So the author of Acts clearly was not depicting Paul talking only about Israelites, but all of humanity.
But, alas, attending to historical facts like these is not IO’s “thing.”
The Masked Man Fallacy at the Heart of IO
Amusingly, I do think a cornerstone aspect of the IO doctrine that Staples and Botha and every other actual expert rejects—that God already “collected” all the Israelites he predestined to be saved as of 70 A.D., and therefore the door to heaven has been closed ever since—is caused by a masked man fallacy. Which is neat, because that’s such a rare fallacy it’s hard to adduce examples to teach it by. But the irrational IO crowd have given us one. Huzzah!
There are many passages one can adduce showing that Paul believed the world would end soon—clearly, as I’ve noted, during his lifetime. So all his talk about God “bringing in the fullness of the Gentiles” before securing the share of Jews likewise to be saved relates to that belief. Which was in his conception “the end of the era,” to be followed by a new era of eternal paradise—not continuing on with an era still ruled by death. IO, being Preterist, then interjects the belief (which could never have been accessible to Paul) that “the end Paul was talking about really happened in 70 A.D.” But that is not what Paul thought. The world did not end then—it’s lasted thousands more years.
Thus when Paul spoke of everything “coming to fruition” at “the end of the era” he believed that meant in his lifetime the chosen would ascend to heaven, immortal, while the corrupted lower cosmos was dissolved (he’s pretty clear on this: 1 Corinthians 15:51-52; 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17; and 1 Corinthians 15:23-26). Descendants of Israelites would not continue to propagate, filling the undisturbed lower cosmos with billions more people facing eternal death and no chance of escape, ruining God’s promise to award that to all willing to come in. That would have horrified Paul—and certainly inspired him to change his thinking. He would then conclude the era was not soon to end. For Paul, the end meant death itself would be abolished from the universe, and all that would remain is the immortal faithful, sucked into space to reside there forever (Ibid. and cf. 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 & 12:1-4).
The fallacy then is when the IO crowd come in, start with one proposition, “Paul believed the era* would end in his lifetime or shortly thereafter,” add another proposition, “We believe the era** ended in 70 A.D.,” and conclude everything Paul said about the era* Paul also meant to be true about the era**. But era* and era** are not the same thing in Paul’s conception. He meant an actual end of the world, leaving no people left God would ever elect to save. He did not mean what the Preterists mean, which is in effect a thousands-years-long “post-era*” filled with billions of the inescapably damned who were thereby permanently abandoned by God as of 70 A.D. Paul would never have signed off on such a proposition. Paul and IO just aren’t meaning the same thing by “end of the era.” Paul was simply mistaken about when his idea of the end of the era was to come. It then becomes a masked man fallacy to assume the contrary, that Paul intended the Preterist-IO nightmare all along.
Bogus Falsification Conditions
So it’s pretty clear IO is false. I’ve solidly shown it has no claim to any appreciable probability. Its advocates are incompetent, its arguments factually inaccurate, and its conclusions supported by no actual evidence, but more usually refuted by it. It simply isn’t what any early Christians ever taught. It’s thus curious that, taking another page from the crank’s playbook, IO advocates ignore all the facts I just related, and instead contrive bogus falsification conditions, things they insist we “have” to prove to disprove their thesis, which really we don’t.
To this end IO fanatic Michael Bradley has insisted that “to disprove IO” one would have to show “from the scriptures” that:
- Non-Israelite nations had and were under the law and were imputed with sin thereby;
- Non-Israelite nations were to be judged at the end of the age on the same basis as Israel;
- Non-Israelites were ever referred to as an olive tree;
- Non-Israelites were part of Christ’s New Covenant;
- …and the need for the gospel was expected to extend past the end of the age.
“To date,” Bradley says, “no one has been able to do any of those.” Not surprisingly, as few of these things are even relevant to disproving IO. He has gotten the original context and Christian preaching so wrong that he doesn’t even correctly apprehend what would refute him. Only two of the propositions he claims we have to maintain to deny IO are even true: that Non-Israelites were called an “olive tree” (Paul says they are the wild olive tree, while Israelites are the cultivated olive tree, and that they did not share the same root); and that Non-Israelites (those “not” of Israel “by physical descent”) were (or rather, could be, if they chose to be) part of Christ’s New Covenant. And that was only true after Paul invented a convoluted way to argue that; it was not a component of the original Christian gospel. In the original Gospel, as Paul himself attests, the only way a Gentile could be saved was to become an Israelite (by the Exodus rule of physical conversion to enter the covenant). And as we saw, how Paul argued Gentiles could be saved without doing that did not require anyone preaching or believing any of the other propositions Bradley lists.
Likewise, the reason “the need for the gospel was not expected to extend past the end of the age” was not because they believed in the weird magical IO timetable, but for the simple reason that no one among them expected the world to still be here two thousand years later. They didn’t even expect it to be here a hundred years later. So confident were the earliest Christians on this point that they made no plans whatsoever for what to do about the gospel should that not occur. Indeed, the entire Sermon on the Mount is based on the belief that everything will end so soon there is no need to risk sinning by suing anyone or resisting them robbing, killing, or enslaving you.
So the reason the earliest Christians never talk about those contingency plans is because they never imagined they needed to. As Paul implies, in alignment with any other apocalyptic Jew of his time claiming the end was nigh, the world was to be vaporized in his lifetime. Full stop. And all faithful Christians, dead or alive, were to be sucked up into outer space and become invincible re-embodied supermen (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, 1 Corinthians 15:35-54, 2 Corinthians 5:1-5). Paul doesn’t explicitly discuss the corresponding destruction of the earth, but it’s clearly implied in his timetable at 1 Corinthians 15:23-26, and it’s a standard in OT and NT texts, e.g. 2 Peter 3:3-11 and Hebrews 1:10-12, quoting the apocalyptic Psalm 102:25-27; and there is no evidence Paul would have thought differently, particularly as indicated by his expectation that we needed to fly off the planet to be saved (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17).
In Paul’s conception, everyone not saved would simply be left behind, abandoned to the grave or even disintegrated, never to live again (or suffer some kind of eternal torment in hell; but Paul himself appears to have been an annihilationist: he thought the unsaved merely stayed dead; only the saved awake to new life). Why would anyone who believed all this need to discuss what to do if that didn’t happen? Doing so would suggest they were wrong to believe it will, and that would shake their faith too severely to even contemplate. So they didn’t. (And this is why every generation of Christians since has convinced themselves the world would end in their lifetimes—conveniently ignoring that this never happens: see A History of the End of the World and The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism.)
The same befalls every other proposition Bradley incorrectly thinks has to be true for IO to be false. At no point did Paul’s inclusion of Gentiles involve believing or preaching that they “had and were under the law,” but rather, he preached they had to enter into a contract (a “covenant”) with God to be saved, and he merely offered them a different one than the Jews (and the original Christians among them) had already signed onto. Paul taught that everyone gets annihilated—they all stay dead—everyone, period—except those who “enter into an agreement” with God to “inherit” eternal life instead.
Thus, Paul did not preach or believe Gentile Christians were “already” Israelites; rather, he specifically taught that they weren’t (they were “not” Israel “according to the flesh” at all), and therefore they needed a different contract to “get in on the investment” as it were, an investment theretofore only available to Jews—through their old contract, which Paul repeatedly affirms was still good (it was not canceled), just really hard to make good on without considerable suffering. Hence Paul only spoke of “grafting” non-Israelites into the Israelite olive tree spiritually, not biologically. Thus he referred to Gentiles not as the Israelite olive tree but as grafts into the Israelite olive tree. He is so explicit about this the IO position is wholly refuted thereby.
Conclusion
I can predict the IO response to all this (and just watch: it will happen in comments below), because I have dealt with cranks like this for decades. Circular argument, possibiliter fallacies, false facts we can expect for sure. But the standard crank response to being refuted is to throw up a gigantic word wall filled with hundreds or thousands of dubious claims, and then “insist” that if you can’t address and refute every single one of them, you’ve “lost,” and they are right and can go on haughtily pronouncing their crank nonsense. This is hopelessly irrational. The very attempt to respond that way proves they are cranks. We do not have to respond to every single one of their thousands and thousands of bullshit claims. We’ve caught them out in enough errors here to know anything else they say is simply not worth our time—being, quite probably, outright false, or not capable of proving their thesis even when correct.
The fact is, as with all the original Christians, Paul clearly and simply taught that if you don’t have a contract with God to get resurrected, you stay dead; and that at the end of the age even death would cease to exist in the world, and only those resurrected would live on, in a celestial paradise. There is no sense in which any of them thought this contract offer would have “ended” in 70 A.D. Nor is there any sense in which they would have imagined anyone could be resurrected without it. This alone destroys the IO thesis.
It’s just all the worse that their made-up claim that Paul (and the earliest Christians) were not offering this resurrection contract to non-Israelites is provably false—it requires assumptions contrary to the evidence, and thus too improbable for any competent person to credit. The original Christian faction (represented, e.g., in Matthew, Revelation, and James) insisted that to inherit eternal life non-Israelites had to become Israelites physically, by the old Exodus rule; while others (beginning with Paul, and from which all modern Christianity derives) said this could be accomplished with a new, more “spiritual” contract, so that even those who were “not the children” of Israel “by physical descent” could become so by being “grafted in” to Israel from outside it, by “adoption.” But either way, all agreed: in all times and places, anyone not in a contract with God is damned. That won’t be a comfort to any Christian desparate to live forever.
-:-
Handy Key to Crank Arguments in the Comments:
Circular Argument: Merely presuming some claim you are making about a text or fact is true (e.g. “When Paul said x, he meant y“), without any evidence of that actually being the case, and then using that presumption as if it were an established fact to argue the claim you are making is true. In formal terms, introducing improbable assumptions into an argument without commuting that improbability to the conclusion as logic requires.
Possibiliter Fallacy: Arguing “possibly x, therefore probably x,” i.e. arguing that something is “possible” (as in “logically” possible, such as being merely “consistent” with some piece of evidence), and then somewhere in the ensuing handwaving transforming that claim into having proved that thing probable, without presenting any evidence that it is.
False Fact: A false claim to fact, whether about what the underlying Greek or Hebrew words or grammar mean (“False Language”), or what a sentence means in its actual context (“False Context”), or what actually happened or was done or thought by some person or group in antiquity (“False History”), or what was actually in the text of some book at the time (“False Text”).
Non Sequitur: A claim that some statement being true “proves” any pertinent point (in, for example, the IO thesis), when in fact its being true does not prove or even argue for that conclusion at all. It’s irrelevant. The statement might also be false; but in this case that simply won’t matter, so there will be no need to waste any time fact-checking it.
Genetic Fallacy: “You’re biased, therefore you’re wrong.” This is a form of non sequitur: the conclusion does not follow from the premise even if the premise is true. You have to actually present evidence they are wrong before you can ever claim they are. Hence anyone who uses this argument is thereby revealing they have no actual response to what was said, and are hoping no one notices that, by trying to divert attention to meaningless complaints about “bias” (a classic “change the subject” avoidance tactic; it rarely has any value in honest, evidence-based reasoning).
False Charge: Claiming some argument made is fallacious, when it isn’t, or that it commits some particular fallacy, when it doesn’t. This is a common crank tactic. Often it is deployed without presenting any evidence of a fallacy committed. Sometimes it is defended with False Facts, i.e. the argument is misrepresented, and fallacies found in the fake argument thus invented, rather than the actual one (commonly known as a “Straw Man”). Ironically, so fond of this fallacy are cranks, that they will even claim False Charge when a fallacy called out is real (a false charge of false charge!).
Word Wall: A shady rhetorical tactic, of deploying a massive quantity of claims aiming to “shotgun” an opponent by making vetting and thus productively responding to everything said impossible for want of time. This can be as a trick to hide numerous other fallacies and false claims, by burying them in a massive array of words, making them too difficult to call them all out (or sometimes even discern what they are), and then claiming that if they aren’t all answered, the proponent “wins” the debate—which is never true; that’s not how logic works.
Motte and Bailey: A shady rhetorical tactic, of making a bold and highly dubious claim, and then when evidence against it is presented, retreating to a different, much weaker and less relevant claim and pretending you only ever were making that argument. Then resuming the original argument after you think enough time or words have passed that no one will notice. Also known as “Whack-a-Mole,” anyone deploying this tactic is by that very fact proving their dishonesty or irrationality. (See Disarming the Motte and Bailey in Cultural Discourse.)
Your critique of Israel Only (IO) was filled with rhetoric and false representations of IO. You failed to address the founder of IO and his infamous proof text of IO. Guess who that is? Bingo…..Jesus….you win a toaster.
But He (Jesus) answered and said, “I was sent ONLY to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Matthew 15:24 – NASB
Was Jesus sent to the aborigines of Australia? How about the Chinese? Maybe the lost sheep of the house of “gentiles”?
You should do your homework before taking on IO. Your critique is obsessed with Paul but you forgot about Jesus. Your exegesis of the scriptures is pedestrian at best.
Jesus said that the Father sent him exclusively (only) to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The Father didn’t send Jesus to humanity.
We will be responding to your numerous errors in the following days. Sincerely, Michael Beiras
You have asserted a claim: that my article is “filled with rhetoric and false representations of IO.” I await any evidence for that claim. You have presented none here.
You instead have here just demonstrated more of your ignorance and incompetence.
If you had actually read mainstream scholarship on this (see, for example, Sim, cited elsewhere in comments here), as any responsible person would do, you would know the author of Matthew crafted a Jesus who promoted only Torah observant Christianity, specifically in argument against Paul and the Pauline Gospel of Mark that the author of Matthew surreptitiously rewrote for that very purpose. The evidence for this is extensive and experts the world over concur.
There is also abundant, mainstream, expert, peer reviewed evidence that Matthew fabricated sayings for Jesus to push Matthew’s agenda against Mark’s and Paul’s (as pretty much all mainstream scholars now agree). See my survey of scholarship on these points in Chapter 10.5 of On the Historicity of Jesus.
This makes your argument here a non sequitur. That Matthew promoted Torah observant Christianity (whereby only physical adherents and converts to the Israelite covenant are saved) bears no relation at all to proving the IO thesis. For all the reasons my article already in detail explains.
But one thing you are saying is true, and I actually said this in my article: if there was a Jesus, he probably taught that only Torah observant Jews and converts to Judaism could be saved. But that is not the IO thesis. Because it is not what Paul taught, nor many other authors now assembled in the New Testament, whose texts were gathered into a single edition only in the mid-to-late second century by the very Christians promoting universally available salvation that you claim are “faux” Christians.
Your other arguments are just nonsensical. The lack of a Greco-Roman knowledge of Australia or inability to immediately effect a mission to China has no relevance whatever to the IO thesis. And it was Paul, not the original Apostles, who invented the idea of spreading Christianity beyond Torah observant Jews, by marketing Jesus as a Judean savior of mankind, as all mainstream expert peer reviewed scholarship today concludes.
That Jesus began as a Judean savior god also has no relevance to proving IO; that’s no more logical or evidenced than claiming Osiris’s being an Egyptian savior god was being used to argue the Osirian mysteries only offered salvation to Egyptians. To conclude so is simply a non sequitur, devoid of any evidence, and contrary to all evidence and anthropological trends of the era.
Meanwhile, with your lame “pedestrian” claim backed (as usual) by no evidence, thanks for reminding readers here to include “Claims an actual published expert has less expertise than a rank amateur with no qualifications or peer reviewed publication history in the subject” on their “You Know They’re a Crank When…” bingo cards.
Paul, Peter, James and John’s audiences were all descendants of the tribes of Israel, people who had once been under the law and/or were descendants of those who had once been under the law. The mission was always to gather the elect who had been dispersed among the nations. According to 1 Peter 1:1, Peter’s audience were Israelites. According to James 1:1, James’s audience were Israelites. According to John’s letters, they were to people to whom sin was still relevant to, which means the old covenant religious system was still intact. According to 1 Jn 3:4, sin was violation of the law. According to Ps 147:19-20 and Deut 4:8, only Israelites had and were under the law. Non-Israelites simply weren’t in view.
Here, we will see that Paul refers to some of his Israelite audience as ‘gentiles’, which clearly shows that they were paganized Israelites.
1 Corinthians 12:1-2 “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I do not want you to be ignorant: 2 You know that you were GENTILES, carried away to these dumb idols, however you were led.”
Those “gentiles” in Corinth were hellenized Israelites who were uncircumcised idol worshipers. Pagans without a link to Israel were never “led away” from anything because they had never been Israelites. Only Israelites would have been led away from their Israelite religion. You tried to refute this with over a page of long, drawn out commentary on a single word “from”. It’s hilarious. LOL
Paul also called his Roman audience ‘Gentiles’ when he said…
(Rom 9:24 ESV) Even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?
Paul then followed up in Roman 9:25 by quoting from Hosea 1:9 to inform his Roman audience that they were the “people once not a people but now have become a people” that Hosea spoke of. Only Israelites would have been familiar with and would have appreciated the significance of old testament passages like Hosea 1:9. It’s absolutely silly for you to assume that pagans would have listened to Paul quote Hosea 1:9 and that it would have been meaningful to them. You must believe that an exchange like this happened…..
Paul: (Rom 9:27) And Isaiah cries out CONCERNING ISRAEL: “Though the number of the SONS OF ISRAEL be as the sand of the sea, ONLY A REMNANT OF THEM will be saved,
Non-Israelite pagans: Yup! That’s us!
Seriously, this just demonstrates to what length even credentialed scholars like yourself (and Jason Staples) will go to invent a narrative that is clearly not in the scriptures in order to conform to religious traditions that have been ingrained into our culture. Then you call it scholarship when your peers agree with your error. Then you expect everyone else to bow before you as if you are the go-to guys for understanding the bible. IOers know better.
Paul also called his Ephesian audience of descendants of the tribes of Israel ‘gentiles’.
Eph 2:11Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands
Eph 3:1 For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles
They were called “gentiles” and “uncircumcision” by Jews because, like the Colossians, they were guilty of not keeping the ritual of circumcision. Non-Israelite nations were never required to be circumcised. Still speaking to the same people as in Eph 2:2, it is clearly seen that these gentile Ephesians were descendants of the tribes of Israel, part of the diaspora who had at one time adopted pagan cultural practices but who had responded to the gospel and come out of the nations in repentance and obedience to the gospel of Christ. Through the disciple’s great commission, these elect diaspora were brought near when they were once considered far, grafted in with those of the natural vine, the “other sheep” found by the shepherd, once considered strangers but later adopted as sons, become a people of God when at one time they had not been.
Non sequitur. This statement has no relevance to proving the IO thesis.
Circular argument. Insofar as you mean before Paul the Christian mission was to recruit Torah-practicing peoples all over the then-known world or convert other peoples thereto, this is exactly what my article says; it is not the IO thesis. Insofar as you are saying anything more than or other than that, you are making an assertion without evidence.
Non sequitur and circular argument. They were actual practitioners of Judaism. This is not the IO thesis. 1 Peter is a Jewish Christian text, written by the faction that only believed practicers of Judaism could be saved (whether converted to or raised in it); Paul changed all that, and much of the NT is written by Paul’s faction, not Peter’s. I already explain all this in my article. So you simply aren’t responding to anything I said here.
You make no argument here, but I know you do make the incompetent argument elsewhere, that 1 Peter 1 is talking about non-practicing descendants of lost Israelite tribes. But that is nowhere in that verse. You are just making that up. The actual words are Ἐκλεκτοῖς παρεπιδήμοις Διασπορᾶς, “the chosen living in the Diaspora,” which in ancient Greek always meant practicing Jews living in foreign cities (see The Jewish Encyclopedia and My Jewish Learning, summarized well at Wikipedia; for leading peer reviewed scholarship see The Jews among the Greeks and Romans by Margaret Williams and the entry on The Jewish Diaspora by Tessa Rajak in Volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Christianity).
Therefore there is no evidence this verse meant anyone not already an adherent of Judaism, much less anyone believed to be descended from a lost tribe. 1 Peter never says that. As Josephus says, the Diaspora was then believed to be composed only of the two surviving tribes, Judah and Benjamin. As my article already demonstrates. And 1 Peter does not evince any knowledge or belief otherwise. That you presume otherwise is just another fallacious circular argument. The text says what the text says, as the language was spoken and written at the time, in the place it was spoken and written. It does not mean some other thing, no matter how much you want it to.
Non sequitur. They were Torah observant adherents of Judaism. Not non-adherents. James, as my article already explains, was written by the Torah-observant faction of Christians, not by Paul’s faction.
As I already wrote in the article you claim to be responding to but are ignoring (like cranks tend to do): Another example of this tactic is when they claim the Epistle of James, which is written to “the twelve tribes in the diaspora,” proves their thesis; but that author is referring to Torah observant Jews (a fact James repeatedly presumes without argument: James 2:8-10 & 4:11-12), not unobservant (or even pagan) descendants of Israelites; so in fact James does not support IO.
There is no evidence the author of James understood by “Jew” only Judah. Benjaminites were also everywhere abounding (even Paul was one, for example), and “James’s” hopeful reference to all twelve tribes indicates he may have believed some of the exiles still practicing Judaism abroad were of the other ten tribes, too. But his letter was unmistakably written to already-Torah observant Israelites regardless. And his only attending to them is precisely the practice abandoned by Paul and his faction. This verse therefore does not support the IO thesis.
Circular argument. You are presuming without evidence that John believed only the Torah-observant were sinners. No passages in any of the Johannines say this. In fact 1 John 3:4 says the opposite: that sin is the absence of the law. Likewise 1 John 3:8 says even the Devil sins; but the Devil was never “under the Torah covenant,” so John clearly did not believe only those under Torah sin; in fact he says “all injustice is sin”, not “just” violations of Torah. So when John says “the whole world” sins, he clearly does not mean what you want him to mean, but what the word kosmos actually meant in ancient Greek: the world, not “just” Israelites.
By contrast, your citing verses not in John is not evidence for what John believed or meant. That’s crank methodology. But citing what John actually said, the only actual evidence of what this “John” meant, refutes your crank thesis.
It’s fairly widely agreed by mainstream experts that the Johannines were forged in the second century by ideological descendants of the Pauline faction. And it’s beyond dispute that the words “law” and “sin” only exist in 1 John; so your claiming “letters,” plural, is indicative of your not actually having looked at this evidence. And since First John never links “sin” and “law” in any way indicative of the IO thesis, it simply contains no evidence for that thesis.
False fact.
You keep ignoring everything my article says and continue to make no response to it at all. Like a crank.
As my article explains—even citing peer reviewed scholarship proving the point, and actual passages in Paul saying it—Paul believed his converts became Israelites. You are falsely claiming he meant they were physically descended from Israel. That’s false. He actually says they were not physically descended from Israel.
Thus when Paul says they “were” Gentiles, he means before they joined the covenant of Israel by spiritual conversion in Christ. He does not mean your thesis at all.
Circular argument. There is zero evidence for this.
False fact. They were led “away” from the truth of the world. Not “from Torah.” As I already demonstrated; and to which demonstration you here make no reply at all. There is, by contrast, zero evidence for your interpretation. Paul never says what you claim. Ever.
False charge.
It’s actually your argument that’s hilarious. Mine is grammatically correct. I actually attend to the Greek, not your circular crank assumptions based on the English. And I actually attend to the context of what Paul said, while you ignore it; yet sentences can only be understood in context.
Paying attention to the actual language and all philological evidence thereto? Expert methodology. Ignoring the actual language and all philological evidence thereto? Crank methodology.
Paying attention to the actual context of a sentence to understand the intended meaning of that sentence? Expert methodology. Ignoring the actual context of a sentence to understand the intended meaning of that sentence? Crank methodology.
Non sequitur. As I already proved, Romans is written to an audience of both Gentiles and practitioners of Judaism. Read Romans 1. Section 9 is indeed directed at the Gentile faction, in his effort to heal the riff between them and the Jewish faction at Rome. That has no relevance to the IO thesis.
Hence Romans 9:24 says Christians come from both Jews and non-Jews. It says nothing about the latter being Israelites of any variety. Paul doesn’t make the argument from Hosea that you claim. He uses it to make the opposite argument. As I already explain in my article. I’m sorry Paul did not make the argument from that verse that you wanted him to. But alas, he didn’t. And that’s that.
False fact.
Many pagans were familiar with the Jewish scriptures, particularly converts to Christianity.
You are making the same irrational argument here as if you said converts to Osiris cult “wouldn’t know” the scriptures that that cult was based on–the very cult they joined and studied!—or that even Christians today “couldn’t know” the Old or New Testament scriptures Christianity is based on. They wouldn’t study the very writings of the religion they joined? The second century Church Fathers you admit weren’t Jews or Israelites clearly knew the scriptures well. So why wouldn’t Christians a century before them have? There is no rational basis for assuming what you are.
Nor is there any evidence that any non-practicing “Israelites” would somehow “know the scriptures” that they didn’t follow and didn’t adopt any practices from, any better than anyone else outside of Judaism. Outside of Judaism is outside of Judaism. It is irrational to think people who rejected Judaism would “know the scriptures of Judaism” better than anyone else who rejected Judaism.
I know you claim this, that there was a strange, completely unattested group of people who somehow both know they are Israelites and all the Israelite scriptures but at the same time rejected the Israelite scriptures and their teachings and thus didn’t practice Judaism. But you are simply fabricating that. It’s a fake fact. There is no evidence of any such people. At all. Much less as the sole targets of Pauline evangelism. You have simply made all that up.
False fact.
Your statement here is the one that’s silly. It is indeed wholly illogical. Christians today do this; they study, know, and use the Jewish scriptures, which are entirely meaningful to them. So why would Christians then not do the same? Likewise foreign converts to Osiris cult studied, knew, and used the Egyptian scriptures of Osiris cult, which were entirely meaningful to them. And so on.
Non sequitur.
You are taking this verse out of context. In Romans 9 Paul is talking about both his non-Jewish and his Jewish audience, in parallel structure: he says both get to join (verse 24); he then cites Hosea to verify what he’d just argued about why the Gentiles are allowed in (verses 25 and 26); then he cites Isaiah to argue why only some Israelites are allowed in too (verses 27-29). He then goes on to reconcile these two factions so they don’t have enmity between each other over this (verses 30ff.). As I show in my article that you continue to ignore and make no actual response to, Paul had already explained that the Gentile side he means were not biologically Israelite (verses 6ff.). So in context, these verses refute you. That’s why you have to take them out of context and pretend none of that context exists.
Attending to context? Expert methodology. Ignoring context? Crank methodology.
False fact.
Ephesians is a forgery. But regardless, there is no evidence it was written to “descendants of the tribes of Israel.” As my article already pointed out (and you again ignore this), Ephesians was written to non-Israelites (people who were “Gentiles in the flesh,” meaning “Gentiles by birth,” not Israelites by birth). There is no evidence anywhere in Ephesians otherwise. You are thus just fabricating things not in the evidence.
Non sequitur. That Gentile Christians didn’t circumcise, and that this annoyed Jewish Christians, affords no evidence whatever for the IO thesis. As my article already explains; which you continue to make no reply to.
False fact and circular argument.
No, what you are claiming is not clear at all. It is, in fact, not even true. There is zero evidence in Ephesians for this thing you are claiming. Making this yet another circular argument: like a crank, you just presume without evidence that the words say what you want in order to argue the words say what you want. But they don’t. And that’s that. There is simply no reference anywhere in Ephesians to its audience being biological descendants of Israelites. It actually says exactly the opposite.
Thus you demonstrate your crankery: false facts, circular arguments, non sequiturs, derision of expert knowledge, and ignoring and never responding to any refutations of you. This is all you’ve got. You will never recognize that, because you are lost in a delusion. But most everyone else here sees what’s going on. And that’s all we need to forestall your crankery from spreading.
Michael Patrick Barber is Chair of the Graduate School of Biblical Theology at JP Catholic University in San Diego, CA. He has authored scholarly articles for academic journals (including Journal of Biblical Literature and Letter & Spirit) and has published popular level books on the Psalms and the Apocalypse.
Barber received his Ph.D. at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA, where he wrote a dissertation under Colin Brown, entitled, “The Historical Jesus and Cultic Restoration Eschatology: The New Temple, the New Priesthood and the New Cult,� which focused on bridging the fields of the study of the Historical Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels with Sacramental Theology and Eschatology. It is currently being revised for publication.
“I got a great question from T. C. williams. Speaking of my conclusion, he writes,
“You have provided Scripture for all your other conclusions but not for this one. Why? This seems like quite a hermeneutical leap. Where in Paul are Gentiles understood as the lost Northern tribes?”
“First, go back again and look at the logic in Hosea. The Israelites are sent off into exile and become “not my people”. But God will restore them again, and, on that day, they “will be called sons of the living God” (cf. Rom 9:26).
With that in mind, let’s return to Paul. Let’s look at Paul’s logic in 9:22ff:
“What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?”
Paul then applies the Hosea passage to those called from the Gentiles! Look at the next verse:
“As indeed he says in Hosea, ‘Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and her who was not beloved I will call ‘my beloved.’ And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people’, they will be called
‘sons of the living God'” (cf. Romans 9:25-26; Hos 2:23; 1:10).
Is Paul wrenching this passage from Hosea out of context? Some think so. Some think Paul is randomly applying this passage which originally spoke of the northern tribes to the Gentiles in a kind of “replacement” theology. For example, see E. Elizabeth Johnson, The Function of Apocalyptic and Wisdom Traditions in Romans 9-11 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 150: “Paul appears to wrench Hos 2:25 and 2:1 from their historical contexts to apply them to Gentiles rather than to Israel…”
I think that misunderstands Paul. As Richard Hays and others have shown, to understand Paul one must see how the contexts of the passages he cites forms part of his argument. For example, consider the argument above in Romans 9:6ff. There Paul’s point is that biological descent from Abraham does not secure salvation. He writes,”For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants; but ‘Through Isaac shall your descendants be named'” (Romans 9:6-7).
Paul cites Genesis 21:12, which contains the word spoken by the Lord to Abraham. The context of this passage is hugely significant for Paul’s argument. In Genesis 21 Abraham is told that his descendants will be named through Isaac–and not Ishmael. Paul’s point is simple: If Jews are going to assert that biological descent from Abraham secures salvation, ask them about Ishmael. The same kind of narrowing of the promised line occurs in the selection of Jacob over Esau–which, of course, is the point of the following verses (cf. Rom 9:10-13).
Now let’s return to Paul’s use of the Hosea passage in 9:25-26. Paul knows what Hosea prophesied–the Israelites who had been sent to Gentiles, who became “not my people” would one day be restored. On that day their status as God’s people would be restored–“they will be called ‘sons of the living God.'” That is how Paul can use this passage in reference to the Gentiles. He is NOT wrenching Hosea out of context.
I would also refer you to Acts, which I think is aware of Paul’s program to bring the lost tribes home.
Why is Paul arrested in the Temple? It is clearly because of his association with the Gentiles (cf. Acts 26:28). Before King Agrippa Paul even explains his mission as a mission to the Gentiles. Relating his vision of the Lord, he explains:
“The Lord said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. 16 But rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, 17 delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles—to whom I send you” (Acts 26:15-17).
At the end of the book we read Paul preaching: “Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen” (Acts 28:28).
But here’s what’s fascinating. Paul’s also understands his mission in terms of the pan-Israelite restoration. Note what Paul says to Agrippa in Acts 26:6-7:
“And now I stand here on trial for hope in the promise made by God to our fathers, 7 to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship night and day. And for this hope I am accused by Jews, O king!”
Note: Paul’s arrest for his Gentile association is ultimately wrapped up in his ministry to the twelve tribes. Wow! Also see Acts 9:15, where Paul’s ministry is described in this way: “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel…” Paul is going to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and the sons of Israel.
So much more could be said. Paul goes on to talk about the fact that he has been arrested because of his belief in the resurrection. Clearly this is a reference to Jesus’ resurrection. But do not forget that for ancient Jews resurrection was also an image frequently used to describe the restoration of the twelve tribes (e.g., cf. Ezek 37:1-14; Hos 6:1-2). In fact, as James Scott observes, in the ancient literature, the Greek term diaspora was not first used as a reference to “scattered” Israel. It primarily has the meaning of “decomposition” of a body after death. [See James Scott, “Exile and the Self-Understanding of Diaspora Jews,” in Exile: Old Testament, Jewish and Christian Conceptions (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 178-179. So Jesus’ resurrection would likely have carried the further restoration implications.”
Non sequitur.
And please cite the source of your quotations.
Non sequitur. Paul does not make that argument. It doesn’t matter what Hosea actually said. What matters is what Paul said.
Non sequitur.
Waiting for an argument.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur. It doesn’t matter what Genesis said. What matters is what Paul said.
Circular argument.
Ignores that Paul said exactly the opposite of this (“not all who are descended from Israel are Israel” and “it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are”.)
False fact. There is no such thing in Acts.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur. Ignores Paul’s actual teaching that that promise was now extended to those not physically descended from Israel. That teaching is nowhere contradicted in Acts, least of all here.
False fact. There is no mention of Paul’s ministry to the twelve tribes in Paul or Acts. Paul only says there that “the twelve tribes” share the hope of resurrection. He does not say they are the only ones receiving it or that he was doing anything to find the other tribes. He probably didn’t say any of this; this is the Gentile Luke inventing anachronistic speeches for Paul, and Luke might not even know that only two tribes are known to have survived—he commits enough historical errors in Acts to doubt it. But regardless, what Paul is here made to say refutes the IO thesis, as Paul is here made to say the twelve tribes are all Torah-observant, which is contrary to the IO thesis.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
I found not a single argument in what you presented. This was all just a series of non sequiturs and false claims.
That’s crankery.
Romans 11:17
And if some of the branches [of the house of Judah] be broken off, and thou [from the house of Israel], being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree.
When referring to a specific nation, olive branches or olive trees always represent Israelites in the Bible.
In Hosea 9:16-17, Hosea informs us that after Yahweh divorced the house of Israel their root was dried up and He had cast them away. This casting away did not change them from an olive tree to a cypress or some other kind of tree. They would have simply become a wild variety of olive tree.
Isaiah prophesied that the house of Israel would have its branch cut off:
…Ephraim and the inhabitant of Samaria … turneth not unto him that smiteth them, neither do they seek Yahweh of hosts. Therefore Yahweh will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day. – Isaiah 9:9-14
In Romans 11:17 Paul used the term “wild olive tree.” Yahweh used similar language to describe the house of Israel after she had turned away from Him:
Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me? – Jeremiah 2:21
The Old Testament prophets never describe non-Israelites as a wild plant of any kind. Isaiah employed the word “wild” to describe the house of Israel when in rebellion to her God:
My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill … and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes…. And I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned, nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns…. For the vineyard of Yahweh of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of [the house of] Judah his pleasant plant…. – Isaiah 5:2-7
Isaiah identified the wild grapes with the house of Israel. Verses 5-6 describe the house of Israel as an uncultivated vineyard. The house of Judah was depicted as Yahweh’s pleasant or good plant. As we will see, these descriptions are nearly identical to Paul’s portrayal of the gentiles and the Judahites in Romans 11:24.
Hosea prophesied that the house of Israel would be reunited with Yahweh, their Root, and that they would again become a fruit-bearing olive tree:
O Israel, return unto Yahweh thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity…. I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree…. – Hosea 14:1-6
According to the Old Testament prophets, the wild olive tree or branches of Romans 11 represent the nations of the house of Israel who had been divorced by Yahweh and scattered throughout the world.
Already refuted in my article. To which you still have not replied.
Your article did not refute one point of IO. Your biblical ignorance is on par with your arrogance. You suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. You are a wannabe scholar that pimps himself out to YouTube Mythicists for a small fee. You can always earn some extra cash as an Andy Dick impersonator. The 1970’s called and they want their perm back. ?
Still no response to any argument in my article.
Why do we see scattered Israelites in the New Testament who are called “gentiles”?
Moses tells us.
Deuteronomy 4:25-31 (NKJV) 25 “When you beget children and grandchildren and have grown old in the land, and act corruptly and make a carved image in the form of anything, and do evil in the sight of the LORD your God to provoke Him to anger.
27 “And the LORD WILL SCATTER YOU AMONG THE PEOPLES and you will be left few in number among the nations where the LORD will drive you. 28 “And there you will serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. 29 “But from there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find [Him] if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul. 30 “When you are in distress, and all these things come upon you in the LATTER DAYS, when you turn to the LORD your God and obey His voice 31 “(for the LORD your God [is] a merciful God), He will not forsake you nor destroy you, nor forget the covenant of your fathers which He swore to them.
God kept His word and SCATTERED His children throughout the known world for their idol worship. These Israelites became “gentiles” because they failed to follow the laws of God and became idol worshippers. An idol worshipping uncircumcised Israelite was a “gentile”.
Hosea 8:8, 14 NKJV) Israel is swallowed up; Now they are among the Gentiles Like a vessel in which is no pleasure.
14) For Israel has forgotten his Maker, And has built temples;
God didn’t forget about His wayward children.
John 11:51-52 (NKJV) 51 Now this he did not say on his own [authority;] but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation,
52 and not for that nation only, but also that He would gather together in one the children of God who were SCATTERED ABROAD.
Did you catch that? Jesus would die for the nation of Israel. Those in the territory of physical Israel and THOSE SCATTERED ABROAD.
James 1:1 (NKJV)
James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the TWELVE TRIBES which are SCATTERED ABROAD: Greetings.
I’m done with your bullshit, Mike.
You have two insurmountable problems.
1) The new covenant was promised only to Israel.
Because finding fault with them, He says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah — For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.
Hebrews 8:8,10 –
2) One had to be under the old covenant to be a recipient of the new covenant.
And for this reason He is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.
Hebrews 9:15 –
I’m done with your bullshit, Mike.
Here is your nonsensical quote:
“As Richard Hays and others have shown … Paul’s point is that biological descent from Abraham does not secure salvation. … but ‘Through Isaac shall your descendants be named’” (Romans 9:6-7).”
You are claiming that ‘salvation’ is not dependent on biological descent from Abraham and your proof text is that through Isaac’s seed shall Abraham’s descendants be named. Did you think through your statement? Isaac is a biological descendant of Abraham, genius and so are all his descendants. Oops! ?
Paul said exactly the opposite. As I showed in my article you quote…yet now bizarrely ignore and omit all the evidence and argument from. And now you pretend the evidence and argument you deleted from your quote don’t exist? You still have never responded to what I actually said, and actually quoted, from Paul here. And you have repeatedly failed to, after repeatedly being asked to.
That is literally insane, Mike.
“Of course, a key passage is Romans 11:25-26:
Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, 26 and so all Israel [πᾶς Ἰσραὴλ] will be saved…
The key question here is whether Paul believed every single Israelite would be saved.
The key here is identifying how “all Israel” [πᾶς Ἰσραὴλ] is used in the Old Testament and non-canonical Jewish literature. For that I recommend an excellent article by James M. Scott [“All Israel Will Be Saved,” in Restoration: Old Testament, Jewish & Christian Perspectives (ed. J. M. Scott; Leiden: Brill, 2001), 489-526]. Scott shows that the phrase is typically used to describe all twelve tribes. In other words, the term is typically used to identify the inclusion of the northern tribes.
It seems Paul is speaking of the pan-Israelite restoration hope. In fact, as Hahn pointed out in his SBL paper, a close look at Romans 9-11 reveals that, whereas up to now Paul has spoken about the “Jew” (Ἰουδαῖος), in these chapters there is a subtle shift in focus to “Israel”. Moreover, Hahn showed many of Paul’s Old Testament citations throughout this section are drawn from passages which speak of the northern tribes. For example, in Romans 9:25 Paul cites Hosea:
“’Those who were not my people
I will call ‘my people,’
and her who was not beloved
I will call ‘my beloved’ [cf. Hos 2:23].
26 “And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God’ [Hos. 1:10].”
These words are spoken to the northern tribes. In chapter 1 Hosea explains that in sending these tribes into exile God is punishing them for the infidelity–he will say, “You are not my people” (cf. Hos 1:10). This is clear if one reads the prophecy in context:
Hos 1:10-11: 10 Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Sons of the living God.” 11 And the people of Judah and the people of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head; and they shall go up from the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel.
The northern Israelites were sent into exile but they were not forgotten. Though they were dissolved into the nations through intermarriage God did not forget about them–he still knew where they were, much like God told Elijah he knew where the faithful remnant of his people was in his day (cf. Rom 11:2-6).
Paul thus sees his Gentile mission in terms of the pan-Israelite hope. The northern tribes must be restored to fulfill the promises made by the Lord through the prophets. Where are they? Among the Gentiles. To bring Israel home means to bring in the Gentiles.” Jason Staples
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
Possibiliter fallacy.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
Once again, not a single argument for the IO thesis. All you gave here is a Word Wall of non sequiturs, and one possibiliter fallacy.
Hey Richie, the only crank here is the one who in the absence of a substantive reply, cites various fallacies, while committing various fallacies himself. That’s you, Sparky and it’s freshman level. It’s too bad really. I have seen some of your work, and I was hoping you wouldn’t stoop to the level of today’s fake Christians. You argue like them. You even misuse some terms like them. And like them, you really don’t know anything about the back story concerning old covenant Israel in her last days and the motif of returning to the land / being reconciled to ‘God’ that is throughout the entire bible and that involves only Israelites.
BTW, you’re wrong. Audience relevance has everything to do with IO. It shows that the scriptures today’s fake Christians believe was penned to them was actually meant for a first century audience consisting of Jews and other descendants of the tribes of Israel….which isn’t anyone past AD70. They were the people Christ’s new covenant was for according to Heb 8:8. If you or someone else thinks Christ’s new covenant was meant to include people in addition to Judah and Israel, the onus is on you to prove it. Good luck.
Your reply to Michael Beiras is unbelievably ignorant. James 1:1 is clearly to the TWELVE TRIBES SCATTERED ABROAD. It says absolutely nothing about your claim that it was only adherents to Judaism. Judaists were only part of the cultural and religious milieu of ancient Israel. There were others, whom Paul was seeking, who were the scattered of Israel who were out in the nations, guilty of not being faithful to the law. That’s why the gospel went out to the nations. Even Jesus anticipated that “other sheep” would come in. In the bible, only descendants of the tribes of Israel were referred to as sheep. Your view would have people believe that non-Israelites were referred to as sheep, and the bible text says nothing of the sort.
The gospel was meant to gather descendants of the tribes of Israel into Christ before the end of the age of the old covenant religious system and temple community. That happened in AD70. There was never a call to gather pagans into Christ. Those who were out in the nations were the dispersed of both Jews and descendants of the tribes of Israel. Some of them were called ‘gentiles’, because as paganized descendants of the tribes of Israel, they had been absorbed into those cultures, had stopped being Torah observant and had stopped the practice of circumcision. Only they would have found Paul’s abundant quoting of old testament passages meaningful.
There were multiple, ongoing dispersions in the first century. One dispersion originated from the ten tribe’s release from Assyrian captivity in 722BCE, while another dispersion began during the Babylonian rule of Judah in 586BCE. Jews from that dispersion returned and later generations of them endured yet another Jewish dispersion which originated from the lesser known Greek conquest of the land in 332BC. These people were spread out everywhere, which is why the gospel went out to the nations by Paul and other apostles. It’s why there was an urgency for the gospel to gather the ‘elect’ (Israelites) before the expected judgement at the end of the age. It’s why Paul only prayed for “all Israel” to be saved, not all everybody. Good grief man. Your years of academia have blinded you to the meta-narrative that runs throughout the entire bible. It’s been right in front of you for years and you’ve missed it.
The scriptures repeatedly make the prediction that the descendants of Israel would be scattered throughout the nations “(e.g. Deut 4:27, 28; 30:1; Jer 30:11; Dan 9:7; Micah 5:7, 8 ) and that in the last days they would be regathered, leaving none behind :”(e.g. Isa 11:11,12; Jer 16:14,15; 23:3-8; 31:10; Ezek 11:17-19; 39:28; Zeph 3:20). We see that gathering of these elect Israelites beginning with Jesus’ ministry…
Mat 13:30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but GATHER THE WHEAT INTO MY BARN ”’”
The weeds were Jews who rejected Christ. The wheat were other descendants of the tribes of Israel who had been dispersed among the nations, called gentiles (GK ethnos/nations/people) because they had at one time stopped being Torah observant and had stopped practicing circumcision.
Even Jesus’ enemies knew he would die for his own people, descendants of the tribes of Israel who were dispersed among the nations…,
Joh 11:51 He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation,
Joh 11:52 and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the CHILDREN OF GOD WHO ARE SCATTERED ABROAD
Hello? Sparky? It looks like your attempt to keep the bible narrative limited to Jews and non-Israelite pagans just got disproven.
And later through the apostles….
Mat 24:31 And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
According to Isaiah 45:4, the elect were Israelites. Paul also said….
2Th 2:1 And we ask you, brethren, in regard to the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of our gathering together unto him,
The results of the gathering….
Jas 1:1 James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion: Greetings.
1Pe 1:1 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,
Rev 7:4 And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the SONS OF ISRAEL:
The motif of being gathered/returning to the land was symbolic for restoration and belonged only to Israel. There was never a gathering / return of pagans meant for restoration to Israel’s god.
According to Paul, writing in the late 50s to mid 60s, the gospel had already gone out to the nations, the whole world and to every creature (Rom 10:18, 16:26, Col 1:6, 23). It went out to the nations because that’s where the descendants of the tribes of Israel had been dispersed to.
All that was left was the end to come, which Jesus said would happen in their generation and which John said would “soon take place”. The time (their generation) and people meant for the gospel (those under the law, Jews and gentile descendants of the tribes of Israel) came to an end, in AD70.
You cannot argue against IO from an historical perspective and expect to win. The bible simply tells a different story than history, that much we agree on. However, IO is a scriptural position, based on what the text says to whom it was said to and for when it was relevant for. The bible could be a complete fairytale and it would still be IO. It appears that you’re not equipped to deal with IO from a scriptural perspective, from the way first century Israelites like Paul and John thought and believed and how they interpreted old testament scriptures.
On 1 Peter 1:1, you say…
“They were actual practitioners of Judaism. ” but the text doesn’t say that at all. Only you are saying that. Here is what the text actually says.
(1Pe 1:1) Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,
These were in the general sense, Israelites. Whether they were practitioners of Judaism is irrelevant. They were the ‘elect’. The elect (chosen) according to Isaiah 45:4, were Israelites. Your attempts to make this a debate about Jews and non-Jews is simply not supported by the text. Non-Israelite non-Jews were never under the law, weren’t imputed (charged) with sin, were in danger of an end of the age judgement and didn’t need a savior. Only Jews and non-Jewish descendants of the tribes of Israel fit those requirements. #IOWINS
Your commentary on 1 John is horrific. Are you really so obtuse as to believe that John’s audience were never associated with the law because the translation you are using says in 1 Jn 3:4 “absence of the law”? Are you serious?!
John’s audience were people who had at one time been living AS IF THE LAW DIDN’T EXIST FOR THEM. That is the context behind it being absent. Other, more reliable translations have 1 Jn 3:4 as “violation of the law”. According to Ps 147:19-20 and Deut 4:8, only Israel had and was under the law. John’s audience are people who were once under the law. That shows that they were descendants of the tribes of Israel. Sin, to them, was to violate the law, or live as if the law was absent. It is not a doctrinal statement about all mankind being guilty of sin. 1 Jn 3:4 is therefore totally IO.
Then you make yet more very ignorant statements. For example, you say “Likewise 1 John 3:8 says even the Devil sins; but the Devil was never “under the Torah covenant,””
Yes, the devil was under the Torah covenant. To John and other ‘Christians’ in Jesus’ pre-AD70 cult following, the ‘devil’ was the old covenant religious system. The scribes and Pharisees (the only people Jesus warned about the judgement to come) were leading national Israel away from the kingdom and were the ‘evil one’ (the devil), false accusers.
(Mat 13:38) and the field is the world; and as for the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one;
(Mat 13:39) and the enemy who sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are angels.
Jesus also said in John 8:44 that the devil is a liar.
(Joh 8:44) “……for he [Satan, their father] is a liar and the father of lies.”
And then in verse 55, Jesus insinuated that those who oppose Him were liars.
(Joh 8:55) and you have not come to know Him, but I know Him; and if I say that I do not know Him, I WILL BE A LIAR LIKE YOU, but I do know Him and keep His word.
Jesus is calling them liars individually, but satan / devil corporately. Jesus also called Judas a ‘devil’.
(Joh 6:70) Jesus answered them, “Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?”
Thus, Jews who opposed Jesus were satan.
Jesus also called Jews who opposed Him “vipers”, snakes, an opposition which of course pictures Satan as a snake in Genesis 3 and Rev 12:9.
(Mat 23:33) “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?
(Rev 12:9) “….the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world……”
Again, we see that Jews who opposed Him were satan. In the Revelation, there is Jesus’ reference to “Jews who are not” and the “synagogue of Satan”.
(Rev 2:9) ‘I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich), and the blasphemy by those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.
False Jews, that being Judaizers who opposed the doctrines of the pre-AD70 church are closely associated with satan / devil. John 18:29 shows the Jews as the ultimate false accusers of Jesus.
(Joh 18:29) Pilate then went out unto them, and said, What accusation bring ye against this man?
The same Greek word for ‘accuser’ is used to describe false accusations leveled against Paul in an attempt to hinder His work for Christ (Acts 23:30,35; 24:8; 25:16,18).
In the Revelation, we also see satan is the accuser of the brethren.
(Rev 12:10) …..for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.
Thus, Jews who falsely accused Jesus, the apostles and other Christians were satan.
The same Greek word for ‘accuser’ is used to describe false accusations leveled against Paul in an attempt to hinder His work for Christ (Acts 23:30,35; 24:8; 25:16,18).
In 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 Paul describes how Jews were….
(1Th 2:16) hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may besaved; with the result that they always fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them to the utmost.….
But Paul goes on to say in verse 18…
(1Th 2:18) For we wanted to come to you–I, Paul, more than once–and yet Satan hindered us.
The “satan” here was the Judaist opposition to Paul’s plans to preach the gospel in Thessalonika. Similarly, Paul says in his second epistle to the Corinthians….
(2Co 11:13) For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.
(2Co 11:14) No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.
The idea of satan being a personal being is simply not in view in these scriptures but is instead, a symbolic representation of opposition to the gospel by Judaizing impostors who were trying to infiltrate the primitive church. (see also 2 Cor. 2:11; Gal. 2:4-6; Jude 4). So we can see that Old Covenant Jewish authorities were personified as “satan”, which literally means “adversary” and the “devil” which means ‘accuser”. Those Jewish descendants of the tribes of Israel were people had and were under the law. Your opinion on this was just disproven.
And here we go. Argument by Word Wall. Crankery.
False charge. Statement absent evidence.
Insults instead of arguments. Crank behavior.
Non sequitur. Just a Word Wall with no arguments in it.
False fact. James repeatedly assumes his audience is Torah observant. I cited verses proving it. Whereas your assumption has no evidence for it at all in James.
Ignoring the evidence refuting you and making no response to what I actually said is crank behavior.
Circular argument. Statement absent evidence.
Non sequitur and circular argument.
Non sequitur and circular argument. Ignores that Paul says non-Israelites can, in Christ Jesus, spiritually become Israelites.
In effect you are here making no response to my article at all. You are just ignoring everything it says refuting you and just re-asserting what was refuted. That’s crank behavior.
Circular argument. Statement absent evidence.
False fact. Refuted extensively in my article, to which you continue to make no reply.
Word Wall absent even an argument.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
Circular argument. Statement absent evidence.
Circular argument. Statement absent evidence.
Circular argument. Statement absent evidence.
Also a non sequitur: you are confusing “Paul only prayed for x” with “Paul prayed only for x.” Those are not the same thing. The reason Paul only mentioned his prayers for Jews not being saved is that it cut him emotionally that his own people, the very ones who were originally made the offer, were passing away unsaved and Gentiles with no biological link to Israel were being “grafted in” to be saved in their place. No such tragedy was befalling the non-Israelites for him to pray for. This is absolutely clear in context. And it actually contradicts any claim Paul thought non-Israelites were not being saved by his gospel. He explicitly says the opposite. With statements you continue to ignore and make no reply to.
Circular argument. This sounds exactly like a crank. Devoid of any argument, full of arrogant pronouncements devoid of any evidence.
Non sequitur.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Non sequitur.
Circular argument. There was literally no evidence or even argument presented here. So, obviously not.
You are again conflating “Diaspora Jews” with the non-observant Israelites of your thesis. There is zero evidence supporting even the existence of the latter category of people, much less that “Diaspora” ever referred to that in the Roman era, in the Gospel of John or anywhere. The Diaspora Jews were Torah-observant Judahites and Benjaminites. Vast evidence confirms this—evidence that does not exist at all even for this other kind of Israelite you’ve invented existing, much less being referred to as the Diaspora community in the Roman period, even less being the sole referent of the word Diaspora. That’s three steps of reasoning without evidence. And that’s crankery, not scholarship.
Non sequitur. Matthew is a Torah-faction Gospel. It only refers to Torah-observant practitioners of Judaism. You have presented not a single passage even in Matthew saying otherwise.
False fact. 2 Thessalonians is a forgery. Paul did not write it.
Non sequitur. No reference here to lost tribes.
Non sequitur. Refers only to Torah-observant practitioners of Judaism. Explicitly, twice. You are again just ignoring the evidence presented in my article.
Non sequitur. Refers only to Torah-observant practitioners of Judaism in the Diaspora. No evidence otherwise.
Non sequitur. As my article explains, Revelation is a Torah-faction text. It refers only to Torah-observant practitioners of Judaism. No evidence otherwise.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
False charge. I already did. You have not responded to any of my refutations. To date, pretty much all you have posted are word walls of non sequiturs and circular arguments.
Circular argument.
False fact. The Diaspora is a known term. In ancient Greek it meant practitioners of Judaism outside Judea.
You are the one who has no evidence it ever meant otherwise; much less here. You are the one claiming words meant strange things they never meant in antiquity. And doing so without evidence. And never responding to any demonstration of that fact. That’s what makes you a crank.
Non sequitur. Conclusion does not follow from the premises.
Non sequitur. No argument presented.
Non sequitur. Conclusions do not follow from the premises.
False fact. The devil is not a biological descendant of Abraham or Jacob and was never circumcised and never under a covenant with God to inhabit Israel and be resurrected from the dead.
False fact. The devil was an archangel who rebelled against God and now deceives nations. There are no passages in the Bible that say the Devil is just a metaphor for the covenant. You are making this up.
False fact. They were said to be serving or aiding the evil one. There are no passages in the Bible that say they were the Devil. You are making this up.
Um. This passage just proves what I just said. Unless you don’t understand the difference between being the Devil and being “the sons” of the Devil. And here of course meant metaphorically and not literally; the literal sons of the Devil (and of his legion of angels who sided with him in the fall from heaven) are the demons Jesus exorcises and has conversations with in the Gospel mythology—they are notably not equated with the Pharisees. If you want to school yourself in ancient Judeo-Christian demonology, see On the Historicity of Jesus, Chapter 5, Element 37, where I provide an extensive bibliography.
Non sequitur. This passage does not say anything supporting the claim you just made up.
Non sequitur. This passage does not say anything supporting the claim you just made up.
Non sequitur. More than one person can be a liar. I mean, seriously.
Non sequitur.
Also, false fact. No one ever calls Judas the Devil in the NT. They distinguish the two as separate persons. John: “the devil had already prompted Judas” and “as soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him.” Judas was possessed and manipulated by the Devil. That is not “being the Devil.” When Jesus says “one of you is a devil” he therefore cannot mean literally; in fact the word diabolos means a backbiter, a betrayor, a false accuser—that sentence is using that word as the Greek word. The pun on “Devil” (as a proper noun referring to a specific person) is indeed intended—but that smart stylism was not intended to fool you into mistaking a pun as a metaphysical statement about Satan. You’ve really lost how to read a text here.
Indeed, you appear to really be going insane by this point in your meandering, pointless comment. At one point you started by claiming the Devil meant the Covenant, then tried to argue it meant The Pharisees—apparently forgetting in a matter of sentences what you were supposed to be arguing; and then you did that again in just a couple more sentences, now confusedly arguing Judas is the Devil. It’s only the worse that that’s not even true. You are thus not only making shit up, you are wildly rambling through a psychotic break of incoherent positions, none of which supporting your thesis even if they were true. I am flabergasted.
Non sequitur. This is never stated anywhere in the NT; it does not follow from any premise you presented; and it is even contradicted by multiple passages that distinguish Satan from those whom he influenced or who serve or aid him.
Non sequitur. Not everyone called a snake is being called Satan. And Pharisees aren’t “the Covenant.” So you are making no sense at all by this point.
Non sequitur.
Indeed, I can’t believe you are so insane that you think a specific reference to a specific snake means that any and every snake and anyone and anything called a snake is that one specific snake. That’s beyond tinfoil hat.
Non sequitur.
That you can’t tell the difference between being Satan and being an assembly serving Satan is just more insanity.
“Satan’s assembly” is by definition not Satan himself. Any more than God’s assembly is identical to God. I should not have to be explaining rudimentary grammar like this.
Non sequitur. Your conclusion simply does not follow from any of this, and is even contradicted by much of it.
Confirmed. You are insane.
Now you think anyone and everyone called a false accuser is therefore identical to a single specific false accuser. I don’t even know how to respond to madness like that.
You then ramble on with more non sequiturs like this, listing verse after verse, none of which making any point you are trying to establish.
In your madness you literally presented not a single pertinent argument against anything in my article. Or even for this last, wholly crazy theory about Satan that isn’t even relevant to your IO thesis.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what a crank looks like.
Richie, you make another dogmatic and erroneous claim pertaining to the word ‘kosmos’. Who do you think you’re fooling? It’s a freshman level argument, easily disproven. You said here…
“So when John says “the whole world” sins, he clearly does not mean what you want him to mean, but what the word kosmos actually meant in ancient Greek: the world, not “just” Israelites.”
Yes, it does mean what I said it meant. As I showed before, sin was violation of the law,. living as if the law was absent. The context of one being under the law is an Israelite context because in the first century, only Israelites had and were under the law. The world was indeed, the old covenant world of Israel.
So the Pharisees said to one another, “See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world (kosmos) has gone after him!”(John 12:19)
Did the whole planet go after Jesus? Of course not.
And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world [kosmos] . (1 Jn 2:2)
What sins was the whole planet guilty of? Most of the world didn’t know and didn’t care about Israel and its god, much less a law that put people under a curse. Only Israel had and was under that law anyway.
Jesus answered him, “I have spoken openly to the world [kosmos]. I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. (John 18:20)
Did Jesus speak in China? How about to Australian pgymies?
“If the world [kosmos] hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. (John 15:18)
Did the entire planet hate Jesus? Of course not.
“But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.’ (John 15:25)
Only Israelites had and were under the law. Who was the kosmos that had the law and hated Jesus? Try and be honest. Just try.
The word “world” (GK kosmos) used in John 3:16 is, like in many other scriptures, not referring to everyone on the entire planet, but the covenant world of Israel. Jesus’ use of the word agrees with the disciples and others who used the word kosmos to refer to Israel. For example..
Luk 9:25 For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?
Widening the context a bit, we can see exactly what world Jesus was referring to.
Luk 9:22 saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”
The context of Luke 9:25 pertains to the religious system in place. The elders, chief priests, and scribes were holding onto that and in turn rejecting their messiah. The religious system was the WHOLE WORLD of the old covenant. EVERYTHING revolved around it.
also…
“Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. John 12:31
What kosmos did Jesus say would be judged? The old covenant religious system and temple community of Israel. (Luke 22:30)
“I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world [kosmos] is coming, and he has nothing in Me; 31 but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let us go from here. (John 14:30-31)
Who was the ruler who came for Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane? Luke answers this question.
Luk 22:52 Then Jesus said to the CHIEF PRIESTS AND OFFICERS OF THE TEMPLE AND ELDERS, who had come out against him, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs?
The ruler of the world were the temple authorities. The world in this context was the old covenant religious system and temple community.
“because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world [kosmos] in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.” (Act 17:31)
The judgement was of the twelve tribes of Israel and that judgement happened in AD70. The world (kosmos) can only be referring to the old covenant religious system and temple community of Israel.
The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world [kosmos] John 1:29
Sin was violation of the law. Only Israelites had and were under the law. The world that needed sin taken away had to have been the covenant world of Israel.
There are MANY, MANY MORE examples. Your appeal to ‘kosmos’ as if it meant the entire planet is simplistic, naive and shows that you really don’t have a clue about the meta-narrative that runs through the entire bible text that concerned Jews and other descendants of the tribes of Israel.
You sound again exactly like a crank. Thanks for making this easy.
Literally none of the evidence you just presented in this latest Word Wall even relates to your thesis.
False fact. I refuted this in my article. Which you still have made no reply to.
Words change reference from context to context. That I have to explain rudimentary grammar like that to you is why you are a crank.
That in one verse someone is depicted using hyperbole (“the whole world is following him!” was literally false even in the context of that sentence’s mythic scene…only a fraction of even Judeans were following Jesus), “therefore” kosmos “only ever” means Israelites is crank methodology. Fantastically irrational, contrary to even the most rudimentary principles of how language works.
Your reasoning here is even doubly irrational, since if we treated this text in the lunatic, hyper-literal way you are, then it excludes lost Israelites: as the person made to utter that sentence in that fictional story could not have meant non-Torah-observant Israelites in, say, Greece or Rome. So if we took that passage hyper-literally as you require, kosmos can only mean Judeans, not Israelites.
That you don’t even grasp that it’s hyperbole is just one plank of the insanity going on here. But that you forward an illogical argument that contradicts not only basic principles of linguistics but even refutes itself is just all the more flabbergasting.
Your remaining points after that just ignore the refutations of them already in my article. Indeed, you still have made no reply to my article or any of its substantive points or evidence.
Dr. Carrier, you claimed that Paul marketed Jesus as a Judean savior of mankind, as all mainstream expert peer reviewed scholarship today concludes. I know what salvation meant to Israelites. According to the story, what do you think first century non-Israelites needed salvation from? Scripture and context please.
“What do you think first century non-Israelites needed salvation from?”
Death.
This is standard mainstream fact. It’s what Paul and the NT as a whole argues is the salvation we all want and receive (and will be denied if we fail to heed the call). Passages abound confirming this; you cannot possibly be ignorant of them (e.g. 1 Cor. 15:18-32; Rom. 8:10-12; likewise Rom. 2:7, 5:21, 6:22-23; Gal. 6:8; Phil. 1:28; etc.).
All foreign savior cults followed the same model and offered the same “salvation” (in different packages). Christianity in fact is the causal result of adapting Judaism to that very savior-cult model. Just as with all other mystery cults (Osiris cult did it with Egyptian religion, Zalmoxis cult with Thracian, Mithras cult with Persian, and so on). See my thorough discussion of the evidence and peer reviewed scholarship on these points in On the Historicity of Jesus, Chapter 4, Element 11, and Chapter 5, Element 31.
The only problem (for you) is, there is no scripture that affirms what you have just said. The death that Paul and others often referred to was the Adamic death, which was a covenantal death, a separation from an Israelite from their god, or from all Israel corporately from their god. Your simplistic surface readings of the text are childish.
You go on to say “and will be denied if we fail to heed the call”… No. It is not about we, people today, us. It was relevant to people under the law before the end of the age, which involved only Jews and their Israelite brethren, not pagan non-Israelites. You quoted Romans 8:10-12 as if that supports your simplistic reading, but you’re clearly ignorant.
From the beginning, ‘life’ was a relationship between Israel and their god. Adam was representative of Israel, not a literal first human being. Breathing life into Adam was symbolizing the beginning of a covenant relationship. And from the beginning, only covenant people (who as the story developed later became Israelites) had a relationship with Israel’s god. Death in the biblical sense of Adam dying in the day he sinned wasn’t physical death. It was covenantal death. Only people in the covenant community needed life, which was only those under the law.
During the Babylonian captivity Israel was cut off from her homeland. They spent seventy years in another country. While Israel was cut off from the promised land she was in the sight of God, as dead. Israel was not in her rightful place because of her sin.
All these Jews were alive physically, but as the Lord showed Ezekiel 37:11 they were a valley of dry bones (in a national grave). When the Israelites were living in exile outside of the land of Palestine, they were figuratively dead and in a grave.
God in restoring His covenant people back into their own land uses the figure of graves opening and his people coming forth in (a national resurrection). According to the story, Israel’s god said
“Behold, O My people, (I will open your graves) and cause you to come up from your graves, and (bring you into the land of Israel) (Ezekiel 37:12).
Once the Jews were living in the land they were all live nationally.
In the New Testament, life came through the blood of Christ’s new covenant, which according to Rom 11:25-26 and Heb 8:8, was made with and for those who had been under the old covenant, specifically Israel and Judah. We see the same themes of a gathering together of the elect, a return to the land, a special city, a nee temple, all signs of life symbolizing a restoration of the elect, Israel.
Death was the result of the curse of the law. Life was only needed by Jews and other Israelites because only they were dead under the law and needed restored relationship with their god before the time of the end, which was in AD70. As such, “life in Christ” from the biblical perspective was limited to Israelites. Again, IO WINS.
Another arrogant Argument by Word Wall devoid of any coherent arguments or relevant evidence.
False charge. Yes there are. I cite many passages proving my point in my article. You ignore all of it.
You are the one who never cites any verse that ever states the IO thesis. You are the one who has to “reinterpret” plain words to say what they don’t, and ignore the context that actually determines what those words mean. And you are the one who never responds to anything I actually demonstrated.
I needn’t repeat any further demonstrations of this. I have provided ample already.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Non sequitur.
Non sequitur and circular argument.
Non sequitur.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
False fact. Refuted in my article. Extensively. To which you still have not responded.
Richard, (May I call you Dick?)
You claim that Jesus had no intention of gathering in sheep beyond the Torah observant fold. You say that his mission was much different than Paul’s.
Explain to us what Jesus meant when he told the Jews in the gospels that he also had sheep not of this fold and they too must come.
While you’re at it, explain to us what the Prodigal son parable is all about? You know, that parable where A SON leaves the fold and heads out to the nations? Yea, that one.
Also while you’re beating your curly head against the wall trying to answer that, touch upon Caiphus and his prophesy recorded in the gospels that speaks of Jesus not only dying for the nation, but also for the sons of god SCATTERED ABROAD? Who are these sons of god scattered abroad Dick?
No.
Talking like a crank only confirms you are a crank.
That at least makes my job easier. Putting your foot in your mouth here does all the work for me.
As for a prophecy spoken by Caiaphas, you seem hopelessly confused. Caiaphas spoke no such prophecy, not even in fiction.
In fiction (the Gospel of John is fiction, remember?) Caiaphas says “it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish” in respect to killing Jesus to avoid his incurring the wrath of Rome against Judea. He said nothing else. Then the author of John who made this up “interprets” those words as “really” being, without Caiaphas knowing it, about Jesus dying simply “for the nation” (ethnous, meaning the polity of Judea mentioned earlier that the Romans would destroy); and then the author of John adds his own opinion that this must also have meant “not for the nation only, but so that also the children of God, those scattered, He might gather together into one.”
It’s hard to know which layer of redaction this represents. If it is a Pauline-faction redaction, it refers simply to the elect: those whom God predestined to convert to Israel and be saved with the rest (as Paul elaborately explains: see my article, the one you didn’t read but pretend here to be commenting on); if it is a Torah-faction text, then it refers to the Judahites and Benjaminites in the Diaspora (see other comment here on the actual meaning of the Diaspora and the scholarship demonstrating it), i.e. Jews not in Judea. There is nothing here about other tribes.
Same thing. “Not of this pen” means Jews outside Judea (Judahites and Benjaminites; practitioners of Judaism).
Even Wikipedia gives a sound answer to what the Parable of the Prodigal was about.
But in any case it must be interpreted in light of what we know about its author and his goals and intentions. Luke is a Gentile advocating acceptance of the Gentile church to its Jewish faction and to the Roman authorities. The Jesus who taught by parables is probably a later fabrication anyway (as we can see Paul knew nothing of such teaching, even as a mode, much less specific lessons); but this particular parable was probably invented by Luke, as it only appears there. The father in the parable is God; not Israel. The sons represent the division of God’s children—humanity—into those seeking faithful obedience to God, and those not. The lesson of the parable is that staying with God and adhering to the law does not save you; faith and the seeking of forgiveness do.
Luke is writing around the turn of the century, by which time it was already standard Christian preaching (as we see in Ignatius and other early Christian authors) that all humanity are sinners apart from the law. Just as Paul preached (“all who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law”).
Luke is therefore selling the Pauline doctrine that “by the trespass of the one man [Adam], death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!” who grants resurrection from the dead. As I explain in my article, Adamic sin cursed all to death; and in result everyone sins, even non-Israelites, thus ensuring that death reigns over them. The only escape from death is a contract with God. And there are only two contracts: the hard one (the Old Covenant) and the easy one (the New Covenant). In Luke’s parable, those who took the hard one (Israel) should not be jealous at those who took the easy one (everyone else who seeks forgiveness from God through Christ).
There is no evidence Luke intended any parallel to recovering lost tribes of Israel. His model predates that myth: the “two sons” fables of Cain & Abel, Ishmael & Isaac, and Esau & Jacob. That is what the parable is evoking. Not war captives torn away from the holy land and forcibly scattered abroad.
Richie, you’re very confused. The parable about the prodigal son was about Judah and Israel. SMH The prodigal son parable is part of a greater meta-narrative that is being played out in the New Testament as the end of the age of the Old Covenant approached. The son who stayed was a personification of the house of Judah (Jews) and their treatment of descendants of the tribes of Israel (symbolized by the prodigal son) when they would be gathered at the end of the age.
In the parable, the prodigal son is a personification for the northern kingdom, which in the first century consisted of paganized descendants of the tribes of Israel. When the kingdom split in 930BCE, the Israelites (northern kingdom) apostatized. They stopped being Torah observant, stopped practicing circumcision and were living among the gentiles, whom Jews considered as unclean as pigs. To Jews, the Israelite dispersion was considered a completely different nation (Acts 10:28). They were divorced from God (Jer 3:8), lost, without God and without hope.
As a result of the great commission going out to the nations, they were gathered into the kingdom before the end of the age, sealed before the day of redemption (which they lived to see) and joined their more Torah observant Jewish brethren, who were at first very suspicious and discriminatory of their elect diaspora brethren. This is the context to understand Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.
It’s also the context to understand Peter’s vision of the sheet filled with unclean animals. It’s why he considered the Israelite diaspora to be an entirely different nation (Acts 10). It’s the context to understand the dispute about whether gentiles (ethnos/nations) had to be circumcised or not (Acts 15). It’s the context to understand the “barrier wall of hostility” that existed between these two groups (Ephesians 2), that through the abolishing of the law for Israelites who believed, what separated them would be gone and peace could be made between them.
Eph 2:13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
Eph 2:14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility
Eph 2:15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace,
Eph 2:16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.
Through a shared faith in Christ, those who had once been under the law were able to overcome the enmity “that they may all be one even as I am one…” (John 17:21).
So, one can see that the context of the parable pertained to first century Jews receiving the Israelite “other sheep” into the fold as joint heirs. Nobody today has been a “prodigal son” with God. People who read some other, modern day narrative into this parable are simply mistaken.
Recall that the parable begins with two sons who knew their father (Luke 15:11). Amos 3:2 says that God only knew Israel. Jesus said his sheep hear his voice and he knows them. In the biblical narrative, only Israelites were referred to as sheep. Non-Isrealites simply weren’t in view.
Jesus said that eternal life was knowing him (John 17:3), but eternal life was promised to Israel. The bible is silent about anyone else knowing him. The bible affirms that the promises were for Israel, not pagans.
The parable employs the motif of an inheritance (Luke 15:12). The inheritance is what was promised to Israel, not people outside of Israel. It was God’s inheritance.
The parable is about the return of all Israel and the Jews’ response to the inclusion of Israelites who had been out in the nations. Like the rest of the scriptures, the parable of the prodigal son has nothing to do with non-Israelites.
You present no evidence for any of your assertions here. You just make up a bunch of crazy shit, and then insist it’s true.
No response is needed to that.
You still have not responded to my refutation of you. This is just more pointless Argument by Word Wall.
Hi Dick, those are some horrific answers you gave there. lol! You seem to be pretty thick in the skull regarding THE BOATLOADS of Old Testament promises and predictions that ISRAEL would be out in the nations living AS PAGANS.
The Prodigal parable is about the 2 houses lol. Your argument would imply that the Gentile nations had enmity over the law, with the Jews. How dumb. As if the Italians were upset over the Torah and how the Jews were upholding it. Are you serious?
The enmity was over the Law. Paul was bringing the 2 houses back together. Your article is laughable and I am preparing a long response to it as we speak. I will bury each of your points with ease.
Do you suppose the 2 sticks of Ezekiel have anything to do with Paul’s usage of the joining of the olive branches back together in Romans? No? Ok cool (lol!)
Since you butchered those 3 examples that I provided which clearly show that there were Jewish elect ones as well as scattered pagan elect ones, and proved that you have no arguments there, let me ask you a question.
You make the idiotic claim that there is no justifiable reason to assume the ones in the nations being saved in the New Testament last days period are the Israelites. But again you insert your foot into your ass.
Here’s a direct quote from Genesis 48…
“(Ephraim’s) descendants shall BECOME A MULTITUDE OF NATIONS”
Ouch. Did you catch the power of that Non sequitur boy?
I just showed you that this is precisely what was predicted to happen to ISRAEL’S (Ephraim- the 10 northern tribes) descendants. Not spiritual descendants you dud. OFFSPRING.
Check out the Hebrew and take notice that it literally means “A FULLNESS OF NATIONS”
hmmm…where do we see that saying by Paul?
Ah yes, Romans 11…
“Blindness in part has happened to Israel UNTIL THE FULLNESS OF THE GENTILES COME IN. In this way ALL ISRAEL will be saved”
So are you really going to argue that this isn’t the Israelites, the descendants of the Northern Tribes, in view in Paul’s writings here in Romans 11?
I have much more 🙂
This is just more insane rambling that does not respond to anything in my article. Just more circular arguments and non sequiturs reasserting what I refuted, without answering any of those refutations.
You, like Mike, have been given multiple chances to actually respond to the evidence and arguments in my article. You repeatedly refuse.
So you, too, are done here. You clearly have no actual response to my article.
I will not bother reading any more of the incoherent crazy shit you post here.
As for Mike, so for you..
Thank you for the thorough response. A nuke swatting a fly. There are those who think they have to pay to comment here. I seem to be able…
Every civil, relevant, and appropriate comment gets posted. But most go to moderation first, which can take days to clear. This deters a lot of misbehavior and abuse. Patrons, and select others, get the privilege of their comments posting immediately without moderation. So you are either a patron or have been grandfathered in as a vetted commenter. But otherwise, no, you don’t have to pay to publish comments here; you just have to follow the rules and be patient.
See my Comments & Moderation Policy for details.
Noted Correction: Someone mistook a sentence as saying something it didn’t. I revised it to forestall that mistake. The corrected line should read:
As would be clear to anyone who read the whole article, as I devote an entire section to how their thesis is that all who remain are damned and not saved (the “IO-Preterist” nightmare they are selling).
Of course, they might try to deny that and claim somehow now everyone gets resurrected, but if so, the rest of my article already refutes any idea that Christians ever taught that. The actual implication of their thesis is that no one today gets resurrected. Only a remnant of Israelites then did. Door closed thereafter. Sucks to be Christian. That’s their usual argument.
Your elitist attitude and arrogance is boring. When are you going to open up the comment section for proponents of IO? I made a direct comment to you last night but it hasn’t been posted.
It is typical of a crank to have no patience and check no facts and instead assume everything is a conspiracy against them—rather than just looking up how a site moderation policy works.
“The original Christian faction (represented, e.g., in Matthew, Revelation, and James)”
I noticed you mentioned these three sources as being the original Christian faction twice in the article. Is that more or less consensus, or is it a view that you argue for elsewhere?
It is generally agreed among experts that those three books of the NT at least were originally composed by the Torah faction. I mention this in On the Historicity of Jesus but don’t spend much time on it as it was only tangentially relevant to the thesis of OHJ and maistream experts don’t much challenge the point. The leading authority covering this today is David Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community (2000).
Back in July, Jason DeCosta (IO advocate) made the following video response to Robert Price’s interview on Mythvision: https://youtu.be/ZZFvIAfI0UM?t=307
Jason gave me permission to post some of the questions that he posted in the comments for Dr. Price for potential feedback and discussion.
I’ll start with Jason’s 5th question:
“In Gal 3, Paul tells the elect that it didn’t matter if they were slave or free, Jew or Greek, if they were christ’s then they were Abe’s seed and heirs according to promise.
Isn’t Paul saying here that if they were Christ’s, it was proof that they were a descendant of Abraham and an heir according to the promise made to him regarding his seed?
It seems that Paul is suggesting that no matter what direction life had taken them, Jew, Greek, barbarian whatever, it did not matter because Christ had made them one again. A new man. And they were the beneficiaries of that promise to Abraham regarding the chosen seed Israel. This was the whole point. Which is why Revelation 7 shows nobody but the 12 getting the Holy Spirit.
Would Dr. Price explain why Galatians 3 cannot be saying that these were dispersed Israelites who had become absorbed into different cultures and regions?”
I’ll take the liberty of responding to part of this question. For ease of reference, here’s a link to Galatians 3:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gal%203&version=NET
Michael Beiras has made the same point about Galatians 3:29 as Jason DeCosta. Here is how Beiras explained it recently on Facebook with a focus is on verse 29 (CAPS and brackets are mine):
Gal 3:29 – And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to the promise.”
[QUOTE]
“Here is the contrapositive or equivalent statement.
‘IF you are NOT Abraham’s seed, [or NOT heirs according to the promise] THEN you are NOT Christ’s.’
Sounds a bit different doesn’t it? Both statements are logically equivalent. What most people ignore or forget to deal with is the phrase ‘according to the promise’. What promise? To whom was it made and about whom was it made?”
[END QUOTE]
I’ll set aside the questions about who the “promise” is for and whether “seed” can ever refer to spiritual descendants, according to Paul. I simply want to address a demonstrably false claim about Greek grammar.
First of all, I’ll get rid of “heirs according to the promise” for simplicity. Also, I’ll get rid of all of the negation (“NOT”) that Beiras added in, because they simply cancel each other out and needlessly complicate the sentence.
Here’s what we’re left with:
A – [IF] you belong to Christ,
B – [THEN] you are Abraham’s descendants…
Now, if you simply swap out the order of the clauses, the basic meaning is preserved:
B – [*] you are Abraham’s descendants…,
A – [IF] you belong to Christ
But Beiras reworks the sentence further by swapping out “if” and “then”. This deliberately renders the exact OPPOSITE meaning:
*A – [IF] you are Abraham’s descendants…,
*B – [THEN] you belong to Christ
Hypothetically, if that WERE what Paul ACTUALLY said, this would be a proof text for IO. If Paul routinely made statements like this, it would be even better for IO. But, since Paul, in fact, says the exact opposite, IO is inclined to paraphrase it to change the meaning.
I’ll avoid delving into the details of Greek grammar (conditional syntax). Suffice it to say, we have an “IF statement” followed by a “THEN statement”. The “THEN statement” is the direct result of the condition that is set by the “IF statement”. The logic flows in one direction: cause > effect.
If this is still not clear, here’s an analogy:
A – [IF] you know Greek,
B – [THEN] you understand the Bible
We can reverse these clauses and still preserve the meaning:
B – [*] you understand the Bible,
A – [IF] you study Greek
But if we swap the conjunctions (“IF” and “THEN”) we end up with the opposite meaning:
*B – [IF] you understand the Bible,
*A – [THEN] you know Greek
This should be obvious – since (in this hypothetical statement) you understand the Bible AS A RESULT of knowing Greek. It does not follow that you know Greek AS A RESULT of understanding the Bible.
Likewise, Paul is saying to his audience – “you are a descendant of Abraham AS A RESULT of belonging to Christ”, not “you belong to Christ AS A RESULT of being a descendant of Abraham.” Surely, there were plenty of descendants of Abraham who did not belong to Christ.
Here IO imposes an interpretation onto the text that is the exact polar opposite of what it actually means.
I concur with Nelson’s analysis, particularly this conclusion.
It is interesting how delusion leads to this mistake on their part. In strict logical format, “IF you are NOT Abraham’s seed, THEN you are NOT Christ’s” is also true, but only because “Abraham’s seed” is inclusive of “those in Christ.” It’s a straightforward tautology, “Abraham’s seed = those in Christ.” This does not help you answer the question whether “Abraham’s seed” means biologically or spiritually or both or either. The IO advocate is thus here circularly inserting their interpretation into their premise and then acting surpised it’s what comes out as the conclusion. This is face-palm logic.
Whereas if we don’t import our conclusion into the premises—if we don’t assume what the extension of the set “Abraham’s seed” is for Paul—and instead attend to the context of what Paul actually said, we get the information we need to answer that question: the cause of membership in the set is “being in Christ,” not “being biologically descended from Abraham.” And as we see from Romans 9 and 11, where Paul explicitly says and explains exactly this, there is no other sane way to read Paul. You have to completely ignore nearly everything Paul said and its contexts, and then also import facts not in evidence (about what he “did” mean), to get the IO result.
This is what makes IO crankery and not sensible scholarship (by contrast with, for example, the thesis of Staples, which even if not wholly correct, is at least credibly and competently argued—and isn’t the IO thesis).
According to the promise. Not according to blood.
Per Romans 9:6-8:
As explained in my article. Galatians 3 says nothing different. There is therefore nothing here about any non-Jewish Christians being physical descendants of Israel. In fact, Galatians 3 repeatedly says the opposite. It is only operating in the context Paul establishes: that by converting they became part of Israel.
Paul says many things confirming this: “those who have faith are children of Abraham,” not those who are descended physically from him; “those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham,” which means they were not identical to his progeny but blessed “along with” it; “so in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith,” not through biological descent; Christians, regardless of physical descent, “are heirs according to the promise,” not according to blood inheritance; “you who want to be under the law,” not “under the law again” (Paul is thus talking about Christians being targeted by the Jewish Christian faction trying to argue they need to convert to Judaism to be saved).
As I explain in my article, the “law had been given that could impart life,” as in, it was the only way to be resurrected; but now, Paul is saying, it isn’t needed, because there is a new contract that secures resurrection, one that bypasses the complex procedures of the law. And in the very next section of Galatians Paul confirms this, as I said in my article: Which is why he expands the original Christian creed, “so that he might redeem those under the law” in Galatians 4:5, with his own addition, “so that we might receive divine adoption as sons,” referring to Paul’s adoptionist soteriology, by which anyone can become an Israelite by adoption. And they can do so, he explains, by skipping “Hagar” (the Old Sinai Covenant) and being symbolically born “of Sarah” instead.
There is accordingly no support here for the IO thesis.
I just posted a 45 page refutation of your article in a couple discussion groups on Facebook. Preterist Perspectives And Debate, and Confrontational Christianity. I went through your article, part by part and pretty much dismembered it. You should have researched IO better. The part where I schooled you on some words you didn’t know the proper contextual application for was sweet. I also showed that you missed the back story that runs through the new testament (one that doesn’t involve non-Israelites). I showed that your grasp of preterism is freshman level at best. You simply weren’t equipped to discuss IO, which is consistent preterism, and I made that evident. When you mentioned Jesus’ new covenant, I nearly fell out of my seat. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. And I showed how the law (which only Israel had and was under) is a pillar of IO that your article ignored and I was able to use to affirm IO. It was brutal. While you were blathering on about academics with Ph.D’s and how much of a crank IOers are, I was tearing down your arguments. I hope you get a chance to check it out. I can make it into a PDF and email it to you if you’d like.
Argument by Word Wall.
Answer the article here, or not at all.
And answer without word wall tactics.
Otherwise, you’re just proving to everyone what a crank you are.
Because you don’t need 45 pages to explain the empirical philology of a few words. Much less anything else. Only cranks need that.
So don’t waste my time. You can answer here professionally and concisely (not “in 45 pages”). Or we all get to ignore you like every other word-wall-posting crank on the planet. That’s how this works.
You don’t get to decide who is a crank when you post articles and speak badly about others in articles that amount to little more than word walls of confused doctrines. Your article required 45 pages to weed through all your ridiculous claims anyway.
Another comment completely devoid of any argument or pertinent evidence, for its own or any other conclusion.
Carrier wants this to be about Jews and non-Jews. Whether they were practitioners of Judaism is irrelevant. The mission was to gather the elect. The elect (chosen) according to Isaiah 45:4, were Israelites. Carrier’s attempts to make this a debate about Jews and non-Jews is simply not supported by the text. It’s a narrative he is imposing onto the text. Non-Israelite non-Jews were never under the law, weren’t imputed (charged) with sin, were in danger of an end of the age judgement and didn’t need a savior. Only Jews and non-Jewish descendants of the tribes of Israel fit those requirements.
It’s also a story that ended in the first century which is part of the AIO paradigm. Even Jesus knew the need for the gospel would end in that generation when he said…
Mat 24:14 And THIS GOSPEL of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall THE END come.
The end is contextually linked to those who needed to hear the gospel by the end of the old covenant religious system and temple community, which is what Jesus is describing in Matthew 24. The end happened in AD70. Those who needed to hear the gospel were first century Jews and descendants of the tribes of Israel who were out in the nations.
According to Paul, writing in the late 50s to mid 60s, the gospel had already gone out to the nations, the whole world and to every creature (Rom 10:18, a quote from Ps 19:4 which pertained to Israel. Also, Rom 16:26, Col 1:6, 23). It went out to the nations because that’s where the descendants of the tribes of Israel had been dispersed to (Deut 4:27, 28; 30:1; Jer 30:11; Micah 5:7, 8 Dan 9:7, Acts 2:5, James 1:1, 1 Pet 1:1). All that was left was the end to come, which Jesus said would happen in their generation and which John said the would “soon take place”. The time (their generation) and people meant for the gospel (those under the law, Jews and descendants of the tribes of Israel) came to an end, in AD70. #IOWINS
This has all been refuted in my article. You simply aren’t responding to anything I wrote. All you are doing is continually repeating the same arguments I’ve already rebutted; just another string of non sequiturs and circular arguments. No further reply is necessary. My article already answers all this.
Baseless assertions are boring. You haven’t refuted anything. Your article has been refuted by IOers who have come to this page and in the YouTube responses by Jason Decosta. He pretty much dismembered your article in a single 20 minute audio presentation.
Your best attempts at responding to us have been childish. Claiming each of the points we bring up are one kind of fallacy or another is amateurish and suggests to me that you’re not really familiar with IO or the meta-narrative running through the entire bible involving sin, death, eviction from the land, repentance, restoration, life and return to the land. . . all of which only involves Israel and Judah, people who had and were under the law leading up to and including AD70, when the story ended.
And you just don’t get it. It’s irrelevant whether any of it is true. It’s irrelevant whether any of it happened in history. Appealing to historical sources? Who cares? Are we aware that at least half of the new testament are forgeries? Yes. It’s not relevant. As I tried to explain to Derek Lambert (who is now out $700..a waste), what is relevant is who the story is about, to whom were the scriptures were meant for and for when were they relevant, according to the story…not whether it is true or not. Your appeals to history are impotent against AIO’s consistent application of Israelite audience relevance.
After I schooled you on the contextual application of some words, now you’re also in complete denial of how words like ‘world’ and ‘heaven and earth’ ‘devil’ and ‘satan’ were used to refer to the covenant world. You’ve obviously not studied these things out. If you had more than a freshman knowledge level of preterism, you would understand how those words were used and for when they were relevant for. You don’t. IOers have. You would benefit from learning from us instead of claiming we are cranks. You’re too arrogant for that. So we will educate your sycophant groupies.
Your claim that non-Israelites needed saving from ‘death’ was likewise, naive and simplistic, and in error. Eternal life to an Israelite was a restoration of a covenant relationship with their god, not a literal, unending life in the hereafter. Salvation for the disciples meant [Israelites] being rescued from sin (violation of the law), from covenantal death (which was the curse of the law which only Israel had and was under), their enemies, their perverse generation and the wrath of God. All of that was fulfilled in the first century. Jesus put away sin and the law that imputed sin passed away. Neither Jesus or his ‘God’ have saved any modern day fake Christian from their enemies and the ‘wrath of God’ was the AD70 judgment on unrepentant Jews. There is nothing left for anyone to be saved from today.
And baseless denials with two-word claims of one fallacy or another shows that you’re really just unprepared to discuss those terms. There is in fact, a huge list of terms that today’s fake Christians use in the mundane sense (as you do), but that AIO’ers know were used in a very different and contextual way.
Your claim that Satan was a fallen angel? Are you serious?! That’s one of the ignorant things you have declared, among many thus far. Satan as a fallen angel is a myth, based on a misinterpretation of parts of Isaiah 14. There are a multitude of examples in the new testament of how ‘Satan’ was used in various ways as a personification, not an actual being. Yes, other cultures and religions have their own versions of evil boogeymen, but that is irrelevant. We are talking about the ‘Christian’ version, and first century Israelites knew that ‘Satan’ was not a fallen angel. Good grief man. There is so much we are farther ahead of than you are, that it is simply astounding.
Satan was never a fallen angel literally walking around trying to influence Christians to watch rated R movies and listen to rock music (both fun!). He was a personification of anyone or anything or that was opposed to Israel’s god. Lucifer is a man in Isaiah 14:12-16. Satan is Peter in Matt 16:23. He’s Rome in Rev 2:10. He’s Judaism in 1 Thess 2:16,18. Satan is also sin itself in Luke 10:18 among others.
Contrary to religious tradition, Satan didn’t fall from heaven.
Isaiah 14:12, often used to picture Satan’s rebellion in heaven and subsequent transfer to earth, isn’t about a personal fallen angel at all. It’s about a man.In Isaiah 14:16, we see that Lucifer (assumed to be a spiritual being) is actually a man who exalted himself among other men.
Isa 14:16 Those who see you will stare at you and ponder over you: ‘Is this the MAN who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms,
We can discover the identity of this man by looking a few verses back.
Isa 14:4 you will take up this taunt against the KING OF BABYLON: “How the oppressor has ceased, the insolent fury ceased!
When Jesus said…
(Luke 10:18) “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”
….He was not referring to a personal being, some “fallen angel” falling out of heaven and landing on earth. In both Isaiah 14:12 and Luke 10:18, “falling like lightning” is Hebrew idiom for losing authority. Just as the king of Babylon lost his authority and fell from heaven, sin (violation of the law) was understood to have lost its authority over the Israelite when the gospel was preached.
You’re the one who is too proud to acknowledge that you haven’t even used some terms properly. You’re so jaded by academia that you can’t even comprehend what we are saying. You’re no different than Christians in that respect. They’ve been indoctrinated with a belief that they’re sinners on the way to a judgement and in need of salvation, and here you are defending that same belief…because you don’t know any better.
For your entire career, you have probably believed that Christianity involved the salvation of non-Israelites and that it just flowed into the 2nd century and onward as if it had one cohesive storyline. That’s likely due to cultural conditioning. AIO demonstrates that the ‘Christianity’ that followed AD70 was a completely different ‘Christianity’, a non-Israelite Christianity that followed after the real Christianity ended along with the need for the gospel.
The so-called ‘Christianity’ that sprung up soon after AD70 had a different gospel, excluded and was hostile to Israelites and was an invention of Greek cultured people who misappropriated bits and pieces of Israel’s redemptive narrative for themselves. You’ve been arguing against the fake Christianity for as long as you have been a skeptic. You never knew there was a real, pre-AD70 Christianity, one that was exclusively Isrealite.
I’ll give you another bit of advice. Yes, you need it. If you want to know who the story is about, look to see who it ended with. In the Revelation, you’ll only find Israelites sealed, saved and redeemed, and that their story ended in AD70.
I know. So why is that all you have?
I presented evidence for every argument and claim I made. You have responded to none of it.
Circular argument. Statements without evidence.
False charge. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
False charge. Ignores what I said about exactly these points and makes no response to any of it.
False charges. You presented no evidence for any of that. Indeed, you still have not responded to anything I said about this. You are simply ignoring my article’s rebuttal to all your points here and elsewhere.
False fact. Statement without evidence and against all evidence presented to date. You didn’t even respond to the evidence I presented in the comment you now purport to be responding to. This is the behavior of a crank.
False fact. Extensively refuted by vast quantities of primary evidence and peer reviewed scholarship; I have given ample evidence here already in comments and the article. You are ignoring all of it.
Salvation was always understood as resurrection; this is why Sadduccees were declared damned, because they didn’t believe in the resurrection, and why Paul said the entire Christian faith was in vain (and we might as well “eat drink and be merry”) if there is no resurrection secured by it. Your resistance to this fact of ancient Christian and Jewish history is at this point literally insane. Your delusion here is outright brobdingnagian.
Circular argument. Statements without evidence.
False charge.
Indeed, this is precisely the crank move I predicted: a false charge of a false charge! That definitely goes on the “You Know They’re Cranks When…” bingo card.
Circular argument and false fact (about ancient beliefs). Statement without any evidence, and that ignores all evidence presented, responding to none of it. Crank.
Non sequitur. That you think I said this is more evidence that you’re insane. We are talking about ancient beliefs. Not my beliefs. I am not claiming Satan exists. Any sane person would know I meant ancient Jews and Christians believed he did.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Who fell from heaven. You don’t even read your own verses, do you?
Non sequitur. The word is ish; like adam it means a male person (as explained in my article). Not just a member of the species Homo sapiens; any male person. Angels are also ish (cf. Judges 13:6). Satan was an angel in ancient belief.
That you do not know basic facts like this is why you are a crank.
False fact. Jesus does not mean Peter is Satan. He is actually using the Aramaic word as the Aramaic word: adversary, opposition. I already explained this to you with regard to usage of diabolos. That modern Christians mistake this as a reference to the actual Satan has, ironically, misled you into agreeing with faux Christians, which is amusing. But even modern Christians understand that even if it meant Satan, it’s a metaphorical not literal statement. No one thinks Jesus said the angel who warred with God and fell from heaven and rules the world with death and an army of demons is Peter. That would be tinfoil hat.
False fact. Revelation is an entirely symbolical text. Nothing is what it is literally said to be in that text. Revelation no more means earthly persecutors (it does not say Rome the city) are the angel who warred with God and fell from heaven and rules the world with death and an army of demons, than it means an actual woman will ride a literal hydra with seven heads and ten horns. Only a crank would read Revelation that literally.
False fact. Paul never wrote that. As already explained to you. But it also does not say the Jews were Satan. It is saying Satan was their instigator. I already gave you a citation of scholarship on this: ancients believed Satan and his demons manipulated people to do their bidding. That is the context in which this verse must be read. And attending to context is what real historians do. Ignoring context is a crank thing.
False fact. No such thing is said in that passage. That refers to Satan as an actual angel falling from heaven. No mention of sin.
There are no passages in the Bible that say Satan is “sin itself.”
False fact. You just quoted Jesus saying he did.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
False charge. Statement without evidence.
False charge. Statement without evidence.
False charge. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
Circular argument. Statement without evidence.
So that’s it.
Still no argument responding to anything in my article. You have never responded to any of my arguments.
I will not bother reading anything you write from now on. You clearly are too insane to engage.
I’ve given you plenty of time to engage rationally with the evidence in my article. You have written thousands of words, without doing so. I’ve asked you to do so multiple times. You have refused multiple times. Those are all the chances you get. You chose to burn them.
You are done here.
Mike, I am sure this is pointless, but let me at least try to indicate how you are looking here.
Putting aside the constant childish jabs, which don’t make your position look strong but rather quite weak, someone like me who is not a Biblical scholar but tries to understand some basics since it’s relevant historically and culturally may not be able to track every argument being made between you and Richard. But what I can see is…
First: You are making an *extremely extraordinary claim. If you were right, the vast majority of Christians throughout history would have been misinformed. It’s not impossible, of course, but since it goes against the mainstream consensus, you need to make an exceedingly strong case. But I can go long, long paragraphs from you without finding even a single reputable scholar to quote mine. That actually makes you a lot less convincing even than your average creationist, who can at least spew out dozens of quotes (taken from the Internet) to act as squid ink.
Second: You talk about “meta-narratives” without proving that there *is a meta-narrative. You just assert it. Whether or not a Star Wars book is canon (to be understood in the context of other books or not) is actually a fraught (and changing) matter, and yet you are utterly confident that a complicated book written over thousands of years by different authors (as is transparent by the massively different writing styles) all has one throughline. Not only does this make you sound like a Christian fundamentalist, it also just doesn’t hold up. Again, it’s an extraordinary claim, and so I would need to see something besides you asserting that a particular set of terms should be interpreted the same way irrespective of otherwise-varying context.
Third, and most telling: When you tried defining Satan multiple different ways, *even within your own argument, you lost the plot. It’s not just illogical, it’s not even coherent. When you say “The idea of satan being a personal being is simply not in view in these scriptures but is instead, a symbolic representation of opposition to the gospel by Judaizing impostors who were trying to infiltrate the primitive church”, that is of course a metaphorical reading, one that you have to actually prove is the correct way of reading the text. But it doesn’t even match. Judas was within the church: He betrayed it only after being a member. How would that be the sign of an impostor? If Satan were to be just sin in general, how could that be a specific reference? Even by your own accounting, one term could have multiple different meanings by context. So how can you be so sure? You can’t.
If you had any humility, recognizing the likelihood that you could be getting either the intent or the proper reading of a text thousands of years old in a wholly different historical and linguistic context wrong, then most people not already in your cult would listen to you.
Which tells me that’s precisely why you don’t do that. You don’t want to admit uncertainty because it’s not useful for you.
The rest of us will have to keep being honest and navigating the evidence as we find it, not as an elegant theory would have it.
Hello my friend. How are you? Good article. I have been an IO proponent for a long time, and sometime ago I came to the conclusion that it is hard to maintain that the Gentiles cited by Paul in his letter were the lost tribes of the house of Israel. However, I still believe that these Gentiles were not just any Gentiles, but only some of them, who had, in some way, a prior connection with the community of Israel.
On your response to Stephen Nelson (December 2, 2020, 2:08 am), you wrote:
Paul says many things confirming this:… “you who want to be under the law,” NOT “UNDER THE LAW AGAIN” (Paul is thus talking about Christians being targeted by the Jewish Christian faction trying to argue they need to convert to Judaism to be saved).
But look, isn’t that exactly what Paul says a few verses before?
… 5 TO REDEEM THOSE UNDER THE LAW… So you are NO LONGER A SLAVE, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir. 8 FORMERLY, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. 9 But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are TURNING BACK to those weak and miserable forces[d]? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over AGAIN?…
Being NO LONGER A SLAVE (under the law) doesn’t means a one were formely a slave (under the law)?
Nope.
Paul says “when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods” — slaves to demons, not to the law.
You are thus ignoring what Paul says, and pretending he said what you want him to have said, but that he never said.
It’s also not possible to be under the law if you haven’t entered the covenant. If you weren’t circumcised, you weren’t under the law. So even for “descendants of Israelites” you aren’t making any logical sense here. Mere descendants of Israelites are not covenanted. They are thus not under the law. Ever. But Paul isn’t even talking about that. He is talking about pagans being enslaved to their fake gods (who, Paul repeatedly makes clear, are actually deceiving demons), not slaves to the law.
This is why Paul gives TWO repeated lines in verse 4 (the parallelism is clear in the Greek and I’ve pointed this out multiple times, it’s two, not one hina clauses): Jesus came to save those under the law AND to allow those not under the law to be adopted into the same benefits (albeit with Jesus’s magic, thus avoiding submission to the law). That is everywhere Paul’s point, as I prove extensively in my article, the article you are ignoring.
Richie, before you isolate more scriptures out of their Israelite audience relevance and embarrass yourself, LOOK AT THE NEXT VERSE.
Gal 4:9 But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more?
How does one go BACK AGAIN to something one had never turned to in the first place? Remember, Paul’s audience represented a people group who had once been shut up under the law (Gal 3:23) and needed redemption from the law (Gal 3:13)? That could only be descendants of the tribes of Israel because according to Ps 147:19-20 and a Deut 4:8 (among others) only Israel had and was under the law. Thus, those of Gal 4:8 who were “slaves to those who were not gods”, were paganized Israelites.
Looking more at Gal 4:9 the “weak and worthless elementary principles” of Gal 4:9 were rituals in the old covenant religious world, which non-Israelite nations didn’t know about and didn’t participate in. The context to these elements is clearly an Israelite context.
For Paul, the ‘passing away of the elements’ was referring to the destruction of the ‘elements’ of Israelite religion, which at that time was primarily Judaism. This of course happened between 66AD and 70AD. Peter got his view of the ‘passing away of the elements’ from Paul.
Paul says…
(Gal 4:3) Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world:
By ‘elements’, he is referring to the Old Covenant rituals, not some physical aspect of the world of dirt, air and water, but the world of Judaism.
In Gal 4:9, he warns them about returning to the bondage they were once under…
(Gal 4:9) But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?
The “elements” were the Old Covenant mandates concerning feast days (see Gal 4:10), again, something that non-Israelites wouldn’t have known the significance of. Compare Paul’s statement about freedom and the exhortation not to be enslaved again with Galatians 5:1-3. The thought is identical; freedom was from the Old Covenant rituals that were useless, not the material creation.
In both Galatians and Colossians, Paul calls the Old Covenant religious system “the world” and the rituals of that system as its “elements”. In Colossians, the ‘traditions of men’ concerning “meats, drinks, new moons, and Sabbaths” (Colossians 2:16) were the ‘elements’ he is referring to.
In Colossian 2:20 Paul reminds them
(Col 2:20) Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments (stoichea) of the world (kosmos), why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, do not touch, do not taste, do not handle.”
Heb 9:26 For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
So far, we have good evidence that the ‘elements’ and ‘world’ are not literal physical elements, but figurative for the religious works and requirements of Judaism which of course would eventually cease in 70AD and have not been reinstated even to this day. To both Paul and Peter, Jesus was the substance of what those religious works were, a shadow of and after the approximate 40 year transitionary period from Christ’s death and ‘resurrection’ and the destruction of the Jewish temple. Presumably, God would have ceased accepting any sacrifices for sin other than his son, Jesus.
In Hebrews, we see references to the “end of the world” being at the time of the end of the Jewish religion.
(Heb 9:26) For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
The ‘end of the world’ is of course, referring to an end of the Old Covenant religious system that was in place.
, which ended at Christ’s work on the cross but was physically manifested with the continued growth of the new temple, the church with Christ’s new covenant…made with and for who? According to Heb 8:8, Judah and Israel. If someone claims that Christ’s new covenant somehow involved other people than Judah and Israel, the onus is on them to prove it.
It should be apparent by now, that there is an understanding the scriptures that billions of people have been missing for centuries, and much of it has to do with the Israelite world of the temple, religion and Jerusalem. IO is the only view that keeps these scriptures in their proper historical context and Israelite audience relevance.
Already refuted in my article. You once again make no reply to my refutation. You don’t even mention it here. Much less address it.
That’s insane.
Richie, your attempts to demonize those who show from the scriptures that the bible’s redemptive narrative actually does have an historical core (amid frequent mythical elements) only shows that it’s YOU who don’t have a substantive answer to IO and that it is YOU who are in fact, inventing a doctrine about a story you don’t even believe in… which is insane. You’re literally creating a fairytale on top of another fairytale. LOL
And you haven’t seen the start of IO. Jason Decosta is going to answer your article too, and shred it, part by part, with proper exegesis. It’s on the way. When we are are finished schooling you, we will go after other so-called ‘scholars’ and start tearing down their whacked assumptions about Christianity too.
Eventually, your sycophant groupies will tire of your constant and ineffective appeals to one fallacy or another, or the brush off of “this was refuted in my article” and “you haven’t replied to my article”.. when all of our individual replies are part of a larger reply to your article and do in fact, debunk YOUR article. You’re just too incorrigible to admit it.
Still no response to the arguments in my article.
Assertions are not arguments.
You are also acting like a wounded, immature child here. And that is really the end play of any decisively refuted crank.
You truly are done.
Richie, you are done here. You were done before you could even get started, because you weren’t even aware of the Israelite narrative that runs through the entire bible text from start to finish. IOers schooled you Sparky. Your commentary on Romans 9 was debunked by..you guessed it… IOers. I guess you don’t read the wider context because if you did, you would have known that pagans wouldn’t have recognized or appreciated Paul’s quoting from Hosea 1:9-10.
We corrected your simplistic and naïve application of words like “death”, “sin”, “satan”, “heaven and earth” and “eternal life” and also “new covenant” among other terms. Your interpretation of those terms is childish and shows you’ve been arguing with fundies futurists for far too long.
We demonstrated a scriptural basis for understanding that Paul was seeking descendants of the tribes of Israel and that their story ended in AD70. You didn’t even know what the scriptural basis for salvation for Israelites was.
And you never had an argument against IO that could stand anyway. You don’t know how to argue with a view that doesn’t depend on historical facts. You’re still appealing to extra-biblical sources that you believe say something different, but AIO is a scriptural position. It doesn’t matter to us if the story is true or not. AIO is based on what the text says to whom it was said to and for when it was relevant for. It could be a total fairytale and AIO would still be true. You’re too dense to even comprehend that.
To today’s fake Christians, the bible is the authority, so that is why AIO is so effective. Christians can argue or deny your historical claims, but they cannot argue or deny what the bible itself says. AIO is the smarter way to argue against the Christian fairytale.
We have been taking apart your ridiculous fairytale narrative in our replies here. And this is just the beginning. Now it’s evident that you’re not able to handle it and want to disengage. Guess what Sparky? AIO won, just like it always wins. Take care. Comb your hair.
There are no arguments in that comment. You are just continuing to repeat unevidenced or impertinent assertions, and never responding to anything in my article. And then “boasting” of having been proved right.
That is literally insane.
I’ve been waiting for this article for some time. The IO thesis is championed and pushed by the chosen people of God: the Hebrew Israelites. This is a new sect (Israelism) that started in the early 20th century. Some of its basic tenants are that Jesus and the Egyptians were black (This is very interesting study that shows that the Egyptians were in fact Arabs https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694), the black and Latino Americans of today are the biological descendants of Abraham and that they are the only ones who can be saved (or at least will have some hierarchical advantage in the afterlife). They also refuse to refer to Jesus as “Jesus” since that’s his pagan name which according to them is a derivative of the word “Zeus”.
Some of their most notable characteristics are that they are very hostile and aggressive, overtly and unashamedly racist (particularly anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-Greek, and some are even anti-Asian), extremely misogynist and homophobic. They are also ridiculously unscholastic and I’ve never met a Hebrew Israelite who spoke Ancient Greek (Why would they? They hate anything that has to do with Hellenism).
I’ve hang out for a long time in Hebrew Israelite communities (yes, I’m a masochist) where the racial abuse that I and other whites experienced was truly disgusting (Apparently, Liberal FB has no problem with it). We’ve had conservative Christians for so many years contaminating and fucking up social relations with their theocracy and bigotry, and now we have these assholes who are arguably worse. You many not believe it because they are still a very small minority, but the movement is growing and their influence and impact are growing too. That’s why it’s important that true scholars step in and address this from scholarly perspective.
But I have a question regarding Paul’s view on salvation. In Galatians 3:28 he says the following: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. Here he seems to be saying that ethnicity, sex and status are irrelevant to salvation.
Whereas in Romans 1:16 he says: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” Here he seems to be saying that ethnicity does play a role.
Can you please give me your view on these 2 verses and tell me if they are reconcilable?
P.S. I know that this is not the IO thesis and I would understand if you don’t address it, especially since you’re busy debating all these crackpots. Forgive me for not making a significant contribution to your article.
In Romans Paul means the gospel was delivered to the Jews first, because they were the first to seek an agreement with God to be saved (hence explaining why God’s savior appeared first to Jews and not pagans). In Galatians Paul means that after you heed that new call, and become heirs to God’s kingdom by adoption, then there is no longer any difference. Many of the parables attributed to Jesus in the Gospels convey exactly Paul’s point in both these verses together.
The ignorance in the commenter and Richie’s reply is palpable. The distinction that was removed was not between Jews and everyone else on the planet, but between Jews and hellenized (Greek cultured) descendants of the tribes of Israel. After the kingdom split, temple the northern kingdom (Israel) fell into unbelief and idolatry and had stopped practicing circumcision. By the first century, the law had become a source of enmity between these two groups (Jews and the diaspora from the northern kingdom). Jews called them “gentiles”, and considered them a completely foreign nation. This was what Peter’s vision of the sheet was about. People not associated with Israel were never in view.
It was always about bringing the two houses (Judah and Israel) together into one new people and restoring them to God before the Old Covenant religious system came to an end.
Notably, Galatians 3:28 understates the fact that the elimination of distinctions such as “Jew and Greek” pertained to Israel, not people today.
Gal 3:29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to promise.
What kind of seed was that? According to Gen 15:4-5, a physical seed, not spiritual. Thus, only physical descendants of Abraham (through Isaac) were Christ’s. It follows inescapably that any “Greek” who later was Christ’s was an Israelite.
What promise? Paul said very clearly in Romans 9:3-4 that the law, covenants and promises were for fleshly Israel. That’s not anyone today.
Scriptures mentioning “Jew and Greek” have nothing to do with non-Israelites. Paul wasn’t speaking to or about them. He was speaking to and about descendants of the tribes of Israel, people who had once been enslaved to the law (Gal 4:3)..
Michael, merely continually restating your assertions is not an argument for them.
That you don’t know that, is how we know you are insane.
We’ve already refuted these claims of yours. Several paragraphs in my article alone dispatches them. You are simply refusing to respond to or answer any of those refutations.
Which is also how we know you are insane.
Michael, I know I’m ignorant – I’m no Bible scholar. That’s why I’m here asking an actual expert in this area.
But I think the way you are debating this issue is not very fruitful. There’s no point restating the same points over and over again without addressing Richard’s responses to them in the article.
I would paste Richard’s response to each point and below each one state why you think he’s wrong. That way it becomes clearer where you disagree and who is actually backing up their assertions.
Thank you, Richard
Richard, will you also be talking about this topic on the Mythvision podcast as part of this project? If you are, please tell me the date.
We record this week, December 17. The show will likely air later that day or not long after.
You can watch my Facebook or Twitter feeds for links to any podcasts I’m in, live or pre-recorded, whether this or any other. So if you want to keep getting those kinds of notices, please do “follow” me in either place; social media links can be found in the above right margin here. I don’t usually announce these things on my blog, as that’s for articles and more detailed announcements.
I’m really looking forward to that.
I’m already following you on FB but unfortunately I can’t comment on your posts.
I enjoy your work very much and I hope you never stop doing what you do.
Regular Patreon or PayPal Patrons can claim commenting privileges on my Facebook account.
Times are tough but $3/mo I can afford. When I can I will increase it. I’ve created a recurring payment on PayPal.
I’ve sent you a friend request on FB.
Does this mean I can suggest topics for you to write about?
You can certainly suggest! Many things I won’t bother with unless my research is specifically funded. But if something looks interesting and engaging enough to write on without that added incentive, I’ll definitely do it.
Passing through the cereal isle at Kroger this morning a Food for Like brand called Ezekiel 4:9 caught my eye.
On the cover of the cereal box it include that scripture:
“Take also unto thee Wheat and Barley and Beans and Lentils and Millet and Spelt and put them in one vessel and make bread of it…”
Can you explain how instructions of this sort would’ve made its way into the Bible?
Also I once heard a pastor proclaim that the Bible talked about the importance of bone marrow well before it was discovered by the scientific community but I can’t seem to find a specific verse that translates specifically to that claim. Are you familiar with such a claim?
As a general rule, when you want to know what’s behind a Bible verse really, the internet is full of competent, expert answers. Please use your own time and skills to find those. You needn’t consume my time with such things.
You know how to tell the difference between Christian apologists making stuff up, and legitimate mainstream expert scholarship. Use that knowledge. For example, in five seconds right now I found this Huffington Post article that answers your first question by appeal to a mainstream expert, which is how you know it’s probably more accurate than some random religions website making things up about what verses mean.
But if you are unsure, you can keep searching and see if other mainstream expert sources say pretty much the same or similar things. And if you don’t trust the internet, use your local public library to check a mainstream peer reviewed commentary; I recommend the Hermeneia series, which you can get volumes from using your local public library’s participation in the Interlibrary Loan Program. Speak to a reference librarian about it.
Meanwhile, I have no idea why anyone would think “bone marrow” hadn’t already been discovered before even written language. Archaeological evidence establishes it was being used as food and thus “known about” for tens of thousands of years. I checked the TalkOrigins archive and found no mention of an “Argument from Bone Marrow.” Nor even at Answers in Genesis. So sounds like you were just listening to another pulpidiot.
Gawdawlmiti: Dr Carrier out-jōbs Jōb here.
The IOrs reminds me of Shē’ē/Sunnē polemic aspects.
Hopefully, there’ll be IO crankry II coming soon.
Dr. Carrier wrote: <>
James does not call his audience “Jews”. I used the word search tool at https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=Jew&version=AKJV&filter=ALL&resultspp=25
He does use the term “Brethren” or “Brothers” depending on the translation one uses. The point being, James viewed his audience as members of the same family. Now I understand this term can be used of people who are not technically related by blood or ancestry, but given the fact that his letter was addressed to “the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” it makes more sense that he would view these people as his own kinsmen (vs total strangers who had no family ties to Jacob/Israel).
According to Exodus 31:16-17a “The Israelites must observe the Sabbath, celebrating it throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant. It is a sign forever between Me and the Israelites”. Why should we assume James was only addressing “Torah observant Jews” when the covenant was between YHWH and all 12 tribes (not just Judah & Benjamin aka “Jews”)? Why assume the other 10 Northern tribes were also called “Jews” and couldn’t be seen as “ethnos” or even “Héllēn” (since by the time James’ letter was written the Israelites had not been a kingdom or nation for well over 700 years) so why couldn’t these people (who were clearly uncircumcised and thus not “Torah observant”) be the descendants of ancient Israel? How would you even know? It seems everyone wants to lump all Israelites under the category of “Jew” when that is an unreliable label.
Ultimately, if the story is fictional does it really even matter? To maintain consistency throughout the Biblical narrative, if Israel’s God scattered His people and promised to gather them again, wouldn’t it make sense that this is what the New Testament was about (gathering YHWH’s people) and not some random pagans who were NEVER in a covenant to begin with?
James twice says his audience are Torah observant.
I linked to both verses.
You are thus simply ignoring what I said.
I’m watching one of your videos on Youtube on the topic of “Did Jesus Even Exist” and you mentioned Euhemerization. If Jesus didn’t exist, then who is to say that Mathew, Mark, Luke, John or Paul existed? What’s to stop someone from using Euhemerization as an excuse to discount ALL the characters in the Bible?
Is the Bible just an ancient form of historical fiction? Meaning fiction set in a historical setting (like the movie: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter)??
If the entire Biblical narrative is just one fictional story after another, then I think this absolutely supports IO. Why? Because of consistency. The books of the Bible start with a creation account that parallels Israel’s own creation as well as a backstory (origin story) for Israel. It describes how Israel entered into a contract with Abraham’s God and how they failed but it also shows how their God is faithful and true and ultimately finds a way to restore His relationship with Israel (at least a remnant) and enter into a New Covenant (Jeremiah 31) with her. In a sense, the “Old Testament” is like part 1 of the Israelite epic story and the “New Testament” is the sequel which ultimately ends with a happy ending for the remnant of Israel (YHWH’s Chosen).
No one (other than fundamentalists) thinks “Mathew, Mark, Luke, John” are the real names of the authors of those Gospels. Whereas that human beings must have existed who wrote them follows from the laws of physics. If you are suggesting a non-existent person can actually write a real book, you must have an extremely bizarre worldview.
As for Paul, see my article on that very question. And for “people in general,” i.e. when it is credible to doubt a person’s historicity, see my explanation of how this works in the actual science of history in my article on Hannibal.
As for Euhemerization, it appears you don’t know what that word means. Read my article on it. TL;DR, Euhemerization only refers to gods. None of the people you name or refer to were ever gods.
As to the nature of Biblical fiction, it depends on which book you mean. Nearly every book was written by a different person, in different times, with different methods, for different purposes. To get a general idea of some kinds of ways fiction is used in the Bible, read Chapter 10 of my book On the Historicity of Jesus. For a different example, e.g. the use of historical fiction as revisionist history, read Chapter 9 thereof.
I do not fathom how you think a collection of books written by different, unrelated people over hundreds and hundreds of years, not even in the same language, much less literary style, could support IO. You seem to be acting like a fundamentalist and imagining some bizarre scenario whereby a single person fabricated the entire OT and NT to support a coherent argument. That is obviously false—there is no coherent argument. At all. Much less for IO. To the contrary, if someone had done that (and all evidence proves, conclusively, that they didn’t), it would far more clearly articulate the IO thesis, and certainly not outright confute that thesis as my article proves it does.
Essentially, the point of euhemerization in context is this: You can take a character known to be mythical and make it historical with basically a literary retcon. Richard argues this could have happened to Jesus: That Yeshua began as the name of an archangel and then a story put him on Earth.
Mark and the rest are different. Even if there was a historical movement that was founded by a rabbi named Yeshua, most of the names we have are clearly mythical, but some seem not to be. Paul refers to Cephas as a real person he wrote letters to. We don’t have any evidence of an existing tradition that made those people out to be gods or supernatural entities prior to some creative , like we do with, say, Osiris or Uranus or Zeus. And while Jesus is written in the Gospels as someone fated to at least go up to heaven (in a low Christology), everyone else is written everywhere as if they were always humans.
But what I wonder is: If it’s all fictional, why does that support IO? Why is one fictive interpretation any more valid than any other at that point? The problem I keep seeing from IO advocates is that they want to mix and match techniques for interpretation. Sometimes you can treat the whole Bible as one text, sometimes you can’t; sometimes we treat intent as if it matters, other times we ignore it for a more “Death of the author” approach; etc.
Even if we take every single text in the Bible as being all one thing, which denies the fact that we know that scriptures that are were viewed as canonical have varied over time, why would we assume that the total story is the attempt to finally reunify the twelve Tribes? It strikes me that Christians would have a better argument at that point, that the story seems to be about ways that these people thought that they related to God. And if we’re going to interpret the OT and NT as all together, rather than separate texts with different intents, why are we ignoring what the NT fairly clearly says about its goals? If IO were correct, then the entirety of the New Testament would basically be about the mythical finding of the Lost Tribes and so forth. Instead, you have a text that has a ton of things going on within it that don’t seem to have much to do with that. If we’re going to interpret the text that way, isn’t it the most parsimonious to do it as the Christians do, as a story where God fulfills a covenant to everyone? That captures the entire text.
To be clear, Euhemerism only pertains to gods (demi- or otherwise). Not just any invented person (that doesn’t even make sense; again, see my article on it that I linked to). The broader category (of taking any fictional/mythical people and converting them into historical ones) is simply historicization.
But you are otherwise spot on: IO is a confused bundle of incoherent waffling between assuming the Bible is miraculously true and merely an articulation of early first century false beliefs. Whack-a-Mole style, they will deny one and then two pages later depend on its assertion.
Likewise, the IO thesis actually predicts the NT and OT would repeatedly and clearly declare and defend the IO thesis. Instead it does the opposite; so they have to “reinterpret” everything it says as saying something else, yet they never commute the improbabilities in all of their premises to their conclusions. This is a defining feature of crank methodology.
So would the book of James 1:1 be using synecdoche in his addressing the twelve tribes. As a part for the whole?
Would this letter even be circulated among the scattered tribes?
Would it be similar to Acts 2 reference to the Jews from all nations under heaven.?
It’s either synecdoche or a hopeful expression of thoroughness (i.e. apocalyptically assuming some of the Torah-observant members of the Jewish Church are of the other tribes). The letter would be circulated only among the Torah-observant churches of Christ, not “tribes.” He is referring to the church, as the new twelve tribes of Israel who would replace the old, abandoned ones. To what extent he imagined this was biologically rather than spiritually the case is unknown.
Acts 2 is making a different statement. It says “the Jews dwelling in Jerusalem” as one group, and as a different group, “the devout from all nations,” meaning Torah-observant people from the Diaspora (whether Judahites, Benjaminites, or any other tribe imagined; Acts does not specify).
Hello Richard
A Christian wrote :
“However the fact remains that this these observances are within the context of God’s covenant with Israel. Most of its laws/commands are only applicable to Jews”
You said :
They will try to insist Jews were racists who opposed foreign converts, but vast evidence even for the first century refutes that; they will try to insist converts weren’t “full” Israelites in some sense or other, but that’s irrelevant: they were under Torah law (not the limited Noachian law or “Natural” law many Jews believed all people were subject to), and they received the promise of resurrection for it.
Questions:
Do the academic papers you have recommended in your article above talk about jewish missionary work to the non-jews prior to and during advent of christianity?
Did all jews prior to christianity agree that “most of its laws/commands” are ONLY APPLICABLE to jews?
The author of the first quote might not be a Christian (if you are quoting an IO advocate, for example). But I only mention that to forestall misunderstanding. It isn’t relevant I think to your questions.
Yes, I only linked to discussions that include ancient Jewish proselytism. There is no evidence it followed Christianity. To the contrary, it became less popular an exercise after Christianity, owing to the Jewish War making Judaism deeply unpopular to the Roman authorities (which also pushed Christianity into becoming an anti-Semitic Gentile religion, so as to distance itself from the then-very-distrusted Jews; the original Jewish Christianity then slowly died out).
But do note, Jews were not ardently evangelical. They did not really have an active mission to win converts. The Christians were the innovators of that strategy, and only in their Gentile wing (the Pauline sect; which is why that sect rapidly outgrew and eclipsed the original). Though we have tons of evidence of people pursuing conversion to Judaism, the Jews themselves weren’t devoting a lot of time or resources to finding such people. Converting the world was not a part of their vision. So they accepted converts; but didn’t actively pursue them very much.
And also yes, if by “laws/commands” you mean the Torah legal code (as laid out in Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, etc., and expanded on and elaborated in the Mishnah and commented on in the Talmuds), only people who submitted to the covenant were considered “bound” by those laws, as in, they could receive the prescribed punishments for violating them, and had to enact the prescribed atonements to compensate, and so on.
But this depends on what you mean by “bound” by. If you mean, in a Jewish Sanhedrin court, and in respect to the atonement protocols that secure eternal life, then yes, only practitioners of Judaism are so bound. But if you mean, in God’s eyes, and thus in respect to whether he will resurrect you in the end of days, then technically everyone is “bound” by them in the sense that by not submitting and adhering to them, you will die and stay dead (or in some sectarian schemes, even be punished in the afterlife as a reprobate, but most Jews were annihilationist, as Paul appears to have been).
I linked to discussions in Philo and elsewhere of how the specific Torah/Mishnah law-code only particularizes general moral requirements of the universe represented in either a conception of the Noachic law (for violating which the entire population of the earth was executed in the flood, and Adam and Eve were subject to specific everlasting punishments, for example) or as Philo put it (adapting Stoic deistic metaethical concepts) in a “natural law” that governs all beings.
I show Paul references this (the law “written in one’s heart”). It’s what everyone is “bound” by in the sense that by not adhering to it you are condemned to a state of mortality (from which one then might want to be saved, for example). The only escape from that is to accept submission to the particularized law code, thus securing a “resurrection contract” with God (or an “eternal blessed Israel” contract, for mortalists like the Sadducees, who saw adherence to the law as not guaranteeing individual immortality, but immortality, and blessedness, for their nation and descendants).
I explain more in the article.
Jason Decosta refutes Richie Carrier in part 1, here.
https://youtu.be/qqtwLC1iULA
LOL. An hour and a half of insane rambling that never actually responds to anything I argued. And it’s labeled “Part 1.”
Yeah. You guys are done.
You got choke slammed Richie. I challenged You to a comment exchange in the comments of your beanie bros interview on myth vision. So far you’ve not showed up? Let’s show the peanut gallery who knows their bible better shall we? 🙂
You posted thousands of words here in attempted rebuttal. None responded to my article.
You are just insane, Jason.
And everyone here can tell that by now without any further explanation.
“Chokeslammed”? Very seriously. Much scholar.
The moment I saw you try that fundie-ass textual synthesis to arrive at a conclusion you already believed I was done.
Perfectly available and simple analyses are out there about the well women and other passages. If you were capable of undergraduate work, you would make an argument that explains that you are using a textual strategy that assumes that you can synthesize statements from different Gospels. You don’t try because you don’t know that you need to justify your methodology.
No, we’re not done. Richie, you’re done. Here is Part 2 of Decosta’s dismembering of your weak sauce arguments against IO. Also, his invitation to you stands, to reply to him directly on his video.
https://youtu.be/W4fy57Qv1jw
Because insane people need two bouts of multiples hours of ranting nonsense.
It’s just more of what you showed us here. You have never responded to my article’s arguments.
And that’s now the story of you.
Here is Decosta’s second video that totally demolishes Carrier’s arguments against IO. A total beat down.
https://youtu.be/W4fy57Qv1jw
If irrational, insane rambling that never responds to anything I said and traffics solely in the same refuted circular arguments and non sequiturs is “a total beat down” to you. To the rest of us, it’s just more of the same: a total waste of every sane human being’s time. You had your shot here. You blew it.
Richie, you literally got stomped. Luckily for you, most of your fan boys and fan girls have zero clue how to exegete the scriptures. William Lane Craig made you look stupid and he’s a confused futurist. Imagine how bad you looked to people with a brain on this exchange???! Dude, you have no arguments. If you did, you’d be over on the beanie bros video you did with Derelict Lambert, and you’d step up to my challenge there so everyone could see that you have no arguments and don’t know your ass from your elbow when it comes to the bible. I didn’t “wordwall” you at all. I put you to sleep in 2 comments, less than 10 sentences each. Khabib style. You didn’t even stand a chance in this one. Go back to debating futurist christians and other myth bozos. AIO is far too logical and backed by far too much biblical evidence for you to compete. 🙂
Childish, delusional bragging, conbined with more clams made with no evidence presented, is precisely what makes you a crank, Jason.
Jason, ever notice how he projects his own fallacious reasoning onto others? In actuality, he couldn’t exegete himself out of a paper bag if his life depended on it. He has zero knowledge of first century Israelite eschatology, and is completely dumbfounded that IOers have revealed his ignorance on the application of key words (world, all, gentiles, eternal, death, life etc) that he has been using in the mundane sense for his entire ‘scholarly’ career. I’m sure this has all been a shock to him. His exposure to IO is probably the first time since he became a conspiracy crank that he has had to reassess mythicism. Now he knows there’s a biblical view that shows from the scriptures that there is a cohesive, Israelite redemptive narrative that spans the entire bible, and there is an historical core to the story. Maybe later, when he regains his common sense, he will want to learn more. Until then, keep the audios coming, especially those that refute Carrier’s nonsense, but also other IO related content. Your recent “100 Reasons For IO” is a great series! Keep them coming!
Yeah, False Charge of False Charge. I already predicted you’d try that. It’s right up there in the glossary concluding my article.
Arguments that are void of evidence remain void of evidence.
Still no reply to anything in my article.
Okay. Let’s grant that there is a meta-narrative about Israel redemption throughout the entire Bible.
First of all, why does that mean the New Testament follows that pattern? That is circular argumentation. You are assuming that the NT follows your OT pattern and then arguing that it does. It is possible that the pattern is broken.
Second, is that the only meta-narrative in the Bible? You guys keep conflating “You can find this in the Bible” with “You can find only this in the Bible”. The Song of Songs? The description of Israel’s history that goes beyond the detail we would need to know about its revelation? The cosmology discussed in Genesis and elsewhere? All that is in there. You cannot circularly assume that a part of the Bible matches one meta-narrative rather than the other.
Third, isn’t it most consistent to then take Paul and the NT authors at their word about everything else too? You seem to simultaneously trust that they mean it when they say something that you agree with in plain language, and then don’t trust them when they say something else, having to then reinterpret them through some labored metaphor. Putting aside that literally everyone is telling you how bankrupt this is, Michael, isn’t it most parsimonious to, say, assume that the NT believed that the way that the OT would be fulfilled would be through the extension of the promises of Israel to the entire planet? You just assume that, despite everything else that Christianity is doing new and against Paul’s explicit protestations, nothing else is transformed in the NT. I can grant you the vast majority of your claims and still assert that the mainstream view is essentially correct, because Paul could be saying that the route to Israel’s salvation is through a salvation that was extended to the entire planet, and your theory is cooked. It explains everything. Constantly reiterating your claim of a meta-narrative doesn’t address that. You need to actually categorically close out alternative explanations, and you need to do so with rigorous methodology. You never do. You never justify a consistent argument and survey the data systematically. So your argument is incomplete. You fail to make your case.
Finally, how do you account for the selection bias you got? You know that even today there are debates about what books are canonical. Certainly what got preserved in the past has also been debated. Could your meta-narrative be a result not of the full range of beliefs that people had at the time, Paul and the early Christians included, but rather what later generations thought was important? Your theory could be an artifact of limited, distorted data.
It’s obvious that this is your woobie that you have invested deep psychological needs into, but whether you can accept this or not, these are the reasons why many people don’t listen to you. Even if you can defend these assumptions, you just don’t. In hours and hours of talking and pages of pages of writing, you just keep reasserting the same ideas, over and over and over again, without ever changing how you explain them or trying different strategies. You are, at best, utterly incompetent communicators and educators. If people like Richard think you are cranks, maybe stop communicating like cranks.
You’re a hopeless exegete. “Ephraim your descendants shall become a fullness of nations”…. flash forward to end of story…”The fullness of the nations will come in. In this way ALL ISRAEL will be saved.”
You’re a bozo who begs people to pay you for your pathetic research. Meanwhile, I’ve addressed each and every point in your laughable argument. (Something you claim we haven’t done lol)
#ChristmaswiththeultimateCrank
More immature boasting and insults combined with wild assertions stated without evidence.
Still no response to anything I argued.
The more you act like a child here, the more you discredit yourself and your every cause.
Lol yet myself and every other AIO voice HAS indeed addressed your every argument. We use the book you barely touch. You know, the Bible?
Again, your dishonesty shines bright. You say we haven’t addressed your article. I’ve produced a 4 part 5 hour response doing just that. Lol clown.
LOL
Jason, could you please – without fobbing off – tell us what your scholarly qualifications are – eg in NT Greek?
I shan’t laugh out loudly if you lack these.
What I don’t get is why you responded to his article on another platform but not here. You produced 5-hour long video material which not even your most dire heart cheerleader is going to watch to its entirety. Why don’t you simply copy-paste right here the points you think Richard got wrong and below each one submit your own response and refutation. That way we can all follow along and see that your position is that right one and accept IO. But instead of doing that, you keep going on about how you destroyed him on YouTube and how his exegesis is hopeless blah blah blah. All the time you spent boasting how brilliant you are and how you refuted him you could have spent actually refuting him right here for all to see. But I have a feeling I’m talking to a brick wall. This is just too insane.
[content not posted as containing only insults and no arguments and thus violating this site’s comment policy–ed.]
Ouch! This was a beatdown! Here is PART 3 of Jason Decosta going through Richie’s anti-IO article piece by piece, dismembering Carrier’s crank response to IO. Decosta continues to school Carrier on the bible’s redemptive narrative that pertains only to IO, which not only establishes IO as a view rooted in history but demolishes Carrier’s mythicism. Enjoy.
https://youtu.be/DDtLHpTaTSo
Even if one is high enough to watch all those hours of video material, no one is going to properly investigate his claims. It’s way too much information and he didn’t even bother to put timestamps. However, you can easily read Richard’s article in about 30 minutes. I’ve never seen a debate, spoken or written, where the opening statement is 30 minutes and the rebuttal 5-hours long.
Is there any connexion -credal or otherwise between these fellows and the Ebionites?
Not to my knowledge.
Ebionites were a sect of Torah observant Christians. That’s the only pertinent similarity I can see.