Resurrection Reality
Sunday, February 14th, 2010 | events, teachings | No Comments
Dr. Habermas is a well-known researcher among Christians (famous for debates and dialogues with atheist-turned-theist philosopher Antony Flew; and for his work on not only the resurrection, but on near death experiences, and on dealing with doubt), and part of my own curiosity in attending the lecture was (surprise suprise) hoping to understand how the Jewish identity of the first century Yeshua-movement played into his historical case. While I didn’t get to ask my question (the Q&A time ended with me standing there just after an skeptical student disgruntled with his position walked off mutterring “well, at least I have logic on my side”), Dr. Habermas did give hints throughout the lecture that this mattered.
I don’t want to do injustice to his case, but here is a sketch. History is based upon data about what probably happened as understood from reports and other forensic evidence. The historian has to give an account which best explains that data. There is not good prior reason to simply rule out events described as miraculous - unless, of course, there are metaphysical reasons to rule out their very possibility, which was not the topic. But, at the very least, Hume is wrong. (Not only did Hume come up in the lecture and Q&A, but Dr. Ehrman did as well, as he uses Humean arguments foundationally (and to my mind unwittingly since he seems to misunderstand Hume as arguing Spinoza-style against the metaphysical possibility of miracles ever having happened, instead of against the historical possibility of ever having good enough miracle reports, which is what in fact both Hume and Ehrman argue), as seen in the link of his 2006 debate with Craig).
Dr. Habermas performed as a human timeline to date and discuss the data according to current scholarship. He does not base his case primarily on the reports of Yeshua’s resurrection in the Good News accounts, though he wanted us to appreciate the evidence there to see why others do so, since they are compared generally with ancient literature quite quite good. However, he goes to a single chapter from 1 Corinthians and Galatians. Why? Because he finds it helpful to use only materials which are universally (or near-universally) agreed by critical scholarship to be authentic and extremely early. (however, i think it is important to realize that he still does and can in my opinion use elements from the later accounts to get a better picture of the earlier reports; the point is that he puts the primary weight on 1 Cor. 15).
1 Cor. 15, while itself written 25 years after “Ground Zero,” contains a creedal summation of beliefs about Yeshua’s death and resurrection which goes to within 6 months to 3 years of Yeshua’s death. This means means the beliefs themselves are temporally speaking right upon the event itself. So there isn’t any time for legendary accretion to develop in the basic beliefs of the death, burial, raising, and appearances.
The question then is how best to explain the data. the resurrection does explain the data, whereas naturalistic theories by contrast all fail. Historically, the best explanation is the resurrection.
I leave that last paragraph short because he spent very little time on theories having used most of it in describing the nature of the earliest reports from Paul, though he was able to address in depth a theory ‘apparent death’ among others. He also explained why the historical resurrection of Yeshua has personal and existential relevance for him (cf. the Feast of Firstfruits). Overall it was quite an interesting lecture. As for the Jewish element? Well, he pointed out, the Jesus-movement was of course Jewish from the start; but moreover, crucial to understanding why it is that scholarship weights 1 Corinthians 15 the way it does is because Paul is referring to technical terms of reception and transmission when referring to the creed. Paul the Pharisee was passing on a carefully preserved report of Jewish eyewitnesses.
Afterward our group ended up discussing the relevance of his information heavy talk, and were met by and dialogued with Jewish seekers until 2AM. But I leave that story for another time.
Resurrection: Myth or Reality?
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In anticipation of the upcoming lecture some of us will be attending tonight by Dr. Gary Habermas (at UNCC, Lucas Room, 7PM-9PM for those interested) on the plausible historicity of Yeshua’s resurrection from the dead, I thought I would link to an interesting debate between William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman. There are many things to consider within but I will reserve further comments until after the lecture.
Lechayim!
Tattoo miscellany
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | News | 3 Comments
A church is (hilariously? experimentally? emergingly?) giving tattoos in its services.
In 2007, Hillel covered the issues for Jewish student life, presenting a mixed take on it.
But the burning question is: when will this movie finally be finished? Was it in vain that over the years I’ve mentioned it a handful of times in passing (even name-dropping it without shame to tattooed friends, both Jew and non-Jew alike), all the while assumming there was something finished we could perhaps … see? This is not me being pushy. I am interested.
Tuesdays for the foreseeable Fall
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 | events | 1 Comment
Just the facts: We are meeting Tuesdays 7PM (starting two weeks ago actually, and going until at least mid november, at which point we will see how its going) in the Discipleship Center Rm 2. Apologies to any of those who looked here for info and found none. It is a tragic error to prioritze the Facebook group over this (contact Matt for more info). Oh the tangled web of internet technologies that can weave us into dire straights. But with this metaphor I digress far from the facts. In the study we are considering some particular details of the book of Romans.
propaganda used to promote
Eclipses, sun, moons, stars, HaShem!
Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
Check out the recent eclipse in Asia (for a real treat, look for the corona beginning at 2:10). Connects nicely with the message last weekend, no?
Summer Series: Share Messiah
Monday, April 27th, 2009 | News, events | No Comments
For the summer, starting this Tuesday (May 5) at 7:30, Studentim will be participating in Sharing Messiah, a ten-week seminar about sharing your faith with your Jewish friends and neighbors, at the Discipleship Center at Central COG. A chavurah discussion group will follow each class, at the nearby Caribou Coffee on Fairview Rd. “Chavurah discussion group” means there will be fellowship and conversation about what happened and “will follow each class” means Tuesdays at approximately 8:39-9:39PM. 
Here are directions to Caribou.
And here is the event on Facebook, with more details.
Larry Derfner on Messianic Jews
Friday, April 17th, 2009 | News | No Comments
I like how Derfner, writing the Jerusalem Post rebuts the false impression about Messianics as a cult; he simply points out that we aren’t one. Here’s an excerpt, but the whole thing is quite informative:
Kashtan, Sered and Ofer live with their families in secular neighborhoods, they neither advertise nor hide their beliefs, yet they report no antagonism from their neighbors or any kind of ostracism or taunting of their children at school - even, in Kashtan’s and Sered’s cases, after being denounced in pashkevilim. The Messianics say it’s only militant Orthodox Jews who give them problems; the mainstream Israeli Jews they live among are completely tolerant.
It wasn’t always like that. David Tal, who grew up in a prominent Messianic Jewish family in Rishon Lezion and Bat Yam during the 1970s, says he was “persecuted terribly as a child. I was spat on and beat up in school. They called me a ’stinking Christian.’ Once there were 300 haredim demonstrating outside our house, and some of them broke inside.” He says his teachers never treated him badly. “Although it was interesting, you could say, to study history and hear that Jesus was a terrible person,” he adds.
Since then, the community has grown so that Messianics, while still exotic, aren’t seen as Martians, and mainstream Israelis have become a lot more worldly. “Society accepts Messianics a lot more today than when I was growing up,” says Tal, 46, who is still friends with many in the community even though he left it as a teenager after deciding he didn’t believe in God.
Though he doesn’t side step the problems:
Although society leaves the community largely to itself, when interest is shown, it’s usually negative. When I began approaching Messianics for this story in December, I ran into a lot of suspicion. People seemed worried that I was either going to write about them as brainwashed weirdos, as many media accounts have done, or that I was working undercover for Yad L’achim or Lev L’achim. I came armed with references from the community, but even my references were wary.
The US State Department, for one, says they have good reasons to be. “Harassment of Messianic Jews… by Orthodox Jews increased during the reporting period,” according to the State Department’s section on Israel in its 2008 Report on International Religious Freedom. “Orthodox Jewish groups published announcements in religious newspapers calling Messianic Jews ‘dangerous’ and calling for their expulsion from Israeli areas.”
The Bnei Brak-based Yad L’Achim, which considers Messianics to be law-breaking “missionaries” and “cultists,” makes no bones about doing everything legally possible to make these people’s lives miserable. In an interview in 2005, the organization’s aged leader, Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifschitz, told me: “When we find out about a missionary, we’ll publicize his identity on posters, newspaper ads, by word of mouth. We don’t even have to phone up his place of work - a lot of Jewish employers don’t want to be involved with missionaries… So seeing an ad in the newspaper is enough for [the employer] to fire him. But not all employers will do this.”
Binyamin Klugger, then head of Yad L’achim’s Jerusalem office, told me he went undercover among the Messianics for several months (until they found him out), and once prevented the aliya of an American Messianic Jew by informing the Interior Ministry, which denied his citizenship application. “Yad L’achim knows all their plans,” said Klugger.
Calev Myers, a Jerusalem attorney who represents many Messianic Jews, said the Interior Ministry is still heavily staffed with Orthodox Jewish bureaucrats appointed during the years when Shas was in control, and these clerks work hand-in-glove with Yad L’achim to get around the law and deny Messianic Jews their rights.
For example, he told me of one of his clients, an American Christian woman who married an Israeli Messianic Jew and has been living with him here for nine years, yet her application for citizenship hasn’t been granted when by law, it should have been granted more than four years ago. “The Interior Ministry has been stalling them interminably,” he said, e-mailing me a ministry receipt they received in December that showed written on the back: “To Anat, the file of this woman was sent to you since there was a problem with the examination by Yad L’Achim as to whether she is actually a Messianic, and the file has not been returned to me yet. Ilona.”
Myers said a ministry clerk, Ilona, accidentally wrote that message on the back of the receipt she gave to the Messianic couple before sending them on to see another clerk, Anat.
By press time, the Interior Ministry had not responded to my questions about Myers’s claims.
At times Messianics have been targeted for serious violence. Congregation buildings in Jerusalem and Kiryat Yam have been firebombed, both times in the middle of the night, causing no injuries. The Beersheba community’s baptismal was once stormed by haredi activists, while in Arad, Messianics on their way to prayer on Saturdays are often spat on and cursed by local haredim, says Myers.
Last year there were two especially severe attacks, both cited in the State Department report. A campaign against Messianics in Or Yehuda, led by Shas-affiliated Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon, culminated on May 15 when he “sent a group of students from a local haredi Jewish school throughout the town to collect the New Testaments [distributed by Messianics], which were subsequently burned in front of a synagogue while ‘hundreds’ of students danced around the burning books,” according to the report, quoting a Ma’ariv story.
And on March 20, following a pashkovilim campaign against Messianic Jewish pastor David Ortiz in Ariel, his 15-year-old son Ami was badly injured when a pipe bomb hidden in a “Purim basket” and left at the family’s doorstep exploded.
No one has ever been brought to trial for any serious act of violence against Messianic Jews, and Yad L’achim strenuously denies any involvement in such crimes. When I told Lifschitz that the Kiryat Yam congregation suspected that Yad L’achim was behind the 1997 firebombing of its warehouse, he replied, “They’re lying, it’s all lies. For all I know, maybe there was a fire there, but that doesn’t mean we started it. Maybe they started it themselves so they could blame it on us.”
The bomb that put Ami Ortiz in the hospital, though, is the most grievous attack on the Messianic community ever. Police investigators were quoted in the media saying they suspect it was done by the same people who left a pipe bomb on the doorstep of leftist Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell last September, and, over the last two years, on the doorsteps of three Arab activists.
Myers, whose car was twice spraypainted by unknown vandals not long before our interview, said he doubted that Yad L’achim was behind the Ami Ortiz attack. “They incite, they foster the atmosphere that leads others to do such things, but they themselves don’t go in for such heavy-duty violence.”
Pictures from Israel Booth at CPCC-Levine
Friday, April 17th, 2009 | events, pictures | No Comments
This picture was not used at our Israel table, but it could have. It is Moses
Jonathan and Ari share with guests about Israel, Yeshua, throwing in a few millennia of history and traditional humor.
This move performed by Hannah and Angelica, is called a terkezia I believe, a traditional part of Israeli folk dancing.
Hannah and Angelica got the attention of passers-by. (The picture was already blurry so I decided to mess with the calibration and make "art.")
Go Angelica! After the Israeli folk, came a long stream of ABBA (to give equal time to Sweeden :).
Ari chats while Jonathan is distracted by a huge explosion of farm equipment.
Paul, who works with Student Life at CPCC Levine, takes our quiz. He does a good job.
CPCC Levine Campus Cultural Arts Fair
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 | News, events | No Comments
CPCC Studentim are going to be working the Israel table at the CPCC cultural arts fair on Levine Campus. There’’s going to be Israel related information, food, a quiz (with prizes), possibly dancing! So if you are any where near here on Wednesday April 15, 11:30-1:30PM, come by and say “שלום.” 
Hebrew Class starting this Saturday!!!
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 | News, Uncategorized, events | No Comments
BASIC HEBREW
(when we say basic, we mean basic)
When: Saturdays 9:30am-10:20am, starting Jan. 17
Where: at Hope of Israel Congregation in the modular (the classroom off to the side).
How long: 15-20 weeks
Who: taught by Matt Nadler
Search
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Feb | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||