JesusOverIsrael

thanks for your thoughtful comments. but they seem to be about my postings The Jewish Outreach Bible or Testimonial, and not my comments on Matthew. if you would like to dialogue about this, please confirm the source document for your questions! Hopey New Year!

pherguvsel

"I did not appreciate many aspects of American Jewish culture I witnessed at college, and this bolstered my view that only in Israel could a Jew live a fulfilled and non-neurotic lifestyle." I don't know if the person who uploaded this is the author or not, but I thought this could have been developed more fully. What aspects did he not appreciate? Why does he feel that way about living in Israel? "At the same time I was facing up to some doubts...." Just wondering how, if at all, he managed to reconcile them. I believe there are rational responses to the ones he mentions. "... a number of intriguing millennial periods..." I thought this section tended to be a bit forced as one could pick an event almost at random then select another event that occurred approximately 1000 years (such as 1020, 1132, or 996) before it and call it a millennial period. "... allowing the Jews to serve there as its proxies..." Maybe I misunderstood this, but this seems to be advocating support for the state of Israel which the author seems later to decry. "huge proliferation of denominations...." Just because there are many claims to truth doesn't mean that all such claims are equally valid. "... a further erosion of Christian tradition." That's all it is, though, tradition, not doctrine. "Christianity... is being transformed into a subset of Judaism. This idea is reinforced...." Maybe I missed something, but just how does the quote reinforce this idea? The closest I can find is "no longer need of a distinction between the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of glory", but these two kingdoms don't seem to refer to Judaism and Christianity. "The Bible clearly depicts Joseph enslaving Egyptians in exchange for bread, which he had stockpiled in anticipation of a great famine." How does anyone get that from the text? While it is true that Joseph was in charge of the granaries during the famine and thus had a lot of power in choosing who could and couldn't buy the grain (power that the Pharaoh at the time gave him- and, presumably could have taken away), there's no hint that he actually enslaved them (or anyone else, for that matter). "The rabbis teach..." Then what they teach is extra-biblical, at least on this point.