Salvation by Faith alone? Parable of the vineyards

A place to snark and vent about CoC doctrine and/or our experiences in the CoC. This is a place for SUPPORT and AGREEMENT only, not a place to tell someone their experience and feelings are wrong, or why we disagree with them.
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agricola
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Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2014 10:31 pm

Re: Salvation by Faith alone? Parable of the vineyards

Post by agricola »

I actually found the idea that Jesus was a Jew talking to Jews, occasionally talking to Samaritans (Jew-adjacent) and only RARELY talking to non-Jews of any type, very useful in understanding the gospels - if less useful for Paul etc.

Seriously - no matter what else - assuming Jesus existed at all, as a person in Judea/Galilee in the first century, as a Jew talking to Jews, he literally HAD to be saying stuff that was somewhat understandable to his audience.

How Paul etc interpreted that for a gentile audience is a whole other topic.

Preachers are far too fond of grabbing verse X from the gospels (Jesus says X) and then pulling some verse elsewhere (in the letter of Paul to the whosis folks, he says Y WHICH MEANS....) but seriously, unless X meant something to the Jews at that time, all that 'it means Y' is at least subject to question.

This is - I think - one of the reasons that Jesus Committee cast doubts on certain statements attributed to Jesus in the gospels - they just weren't something a first century Jew would conceivably actually say and hope to be understood, because it was just too outlandish (example: anything attributed to Jesus conflating him with God - that is simply not just 'weird' but positively impossible in that culture - it would have been clearly understood all right - if his audience were Greek or Roman pagans).
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
B.H.
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Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2014 8:26 pm

Re: Salvation by Faith alone? Parable of the vineyards

Post by B.H. »

agricola wrote: Wed Sep 06, 2023 1:23 pm Let me assist with this a little bit.

In Hebrew, the word 'faith' is a verb. It isn't something you mentally assent to. It is the way you ACT, what you do, not what you say about your 'beliefs'.

James is often described as 'the most Jewish letter' because it literally is the most 'Jewish' approach compared to lot of the rest of the New Testament.

Who actually wrote it, I don't know. But that 'faith without works is dead' is spot on. It isn't faith, if it isn't 'action'.
James even used the Greek synagogea for assemblies when he speaks of how the wealthy should treat the poor at church services.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.----Karl Marx
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