sooda
Veteran Member
The Herodians were fat and happy with the Romans.. They didn't want to rock the boat.. In fact, Herod's granddaughter (Queen Berniece) was Titus's lover.
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Odd Belief Of Early Christians
- Thread starter Skwim
- Start date
The Herodians were fat and happy with the Romans.. They didn't want to rock the boat.. In fact, Herod's granddaughter (Queen Berniece) was Titus's lover.
Heyo
Veteran Member
I'm sure you know better than I do.
Tom
Comedy aside,
The Israelites were a quarrelsome, fractious bunch from the get go.
Six weeks after following God and Moses across the Red Sea as on dry land, and escaping the Egyptian army, they started complaining about The Promised Land. Comparing it unfavorably to Egypt.
Can't you just picture the look on God's Face?
Tom
ETA ~Ex 16: 2-3
I had to look up the verses, sorry it took a bit.~
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IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
What he is saying makes a lot of sense to me. Early Christians were a heretical Jewish sect, so they took their non-messianic beliefs from Judaism. Judaism, at least Pharisaical Judaism, taught a resurrection and life in the world to come. The world to come isn't dying and going to live in heaven. It's the post-resurrection world here on earth.
Tumah
Veteran Member
I would guess that the Herodians and other like-minded Hellenized Jews would be on good terms with the Romans.
I guess coming from the Pharisees, they don't get a lot of face time, so I don't picture them as "elite".
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
Isn't Bernice the Jewish Empress that they had to throw out of power because they were afraid she would cause the Roman Empire to become Jewish?
Jewish conspiracy theories even back then!!!
sooda
Veteran Member
Berenice | Jewish Women's Archive
jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/berenice
Berenice, daughter of King Agrippa I, queen of Chalcis, was married three times and then became the lover of the emperor’s son, Titus. Inscriptions indicate that she was a Roman citizen and bore the Roman name Julia.
She didn’t plan on committing incest. Things just worked out that way. Berenice belonged to the elite Herodian clan, a dynasty that had ruled the Jews for over a century.
sooda
Veteran Member
Never heard that one..
- Berenice & Titus: Jewish princess almost makes empress - Lust ...
erenow.net/ancient/thejoyofsexus/30.php
Berenice & Titus: Jewish princess almost makes empress. A romantic at heart, gorgeous and zaftig Berenice didn’t plan on being married thrice and widowed twice. She didn’t plan on committing incest, either. Things just worked out that way. Berenice belonged to the elite Herodian clan, a dynasty that had ruled the Jews for over a century.
- Titus and Berenice - Everything2.com
everything2.com/title/Titus+and+Berenice
Aug 12, 2004 · Berenice was a foreign princess who had been married previously, and even accused of incest with her brother. Her credentials were not those expected of a Roman empress. Titus and Berenice did not stand a chance. It is interesting to note where Suetonius mentions Berenice in his biography of Titus.
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
THE TABLET
Berenice, the Jewish Queen of Rome, and the Origins of Replacement Theory
The earliest example of the fear that Jews might overturn and replace the social order with their own people probably occurred in Rome during the first century CE. A circumstance arose that threatened Roman dominion over the Mediterranean world: The Flavian family line was in danger of being replaced through a Jewish takeover.
In 70 CE, the Roman Emperor Vespasian’s son, Titus, had defeated the Judean rebellion, destroying Jerusalem and the Second Temple. However, once victorious, he chose as his willing consort Berenice, the sister of Agrippa II, the former king of conquered Judaea. This choice was not so odd as it may sound: Berenice and her brother had opposed the Jewish revolt from the beginning. Along with the spoils of the Temple, Titus brought Berenice back to Rome, where, according to Cassius Dio (Roman History LXV 15), she lived with him as if she were his empress, exerting considerable power.
Some Romans were troubled by the romance of Titus and Berenice and spoke out against her. In her prior marriage to the king of Pontus, Berenice had required that he convert to Judaism and be circumcised. There was probably concern that Titus would be convinced to do the same. The result would be a Jewish emperor of Rome, in effect reversing the outcome of the Jewish War. Worse, Titus and Berenice’s children would be Jewish, ensuring that future emperors would be Jewish. In other words, the Roman Empire would be in Jewish hands....
Titus understood that Berenice’s potential ascendance to imperial power was a threat, real or imagined, to the future of the nascent Flavian Dynasty, which like all dynasties, needed stability and not controversy. Berenice was forced into exile.....
amorphous_constellation
Well-Known Member
That's a new one to me. Seems like I'm always surprised by something new when I ask how all this stuff is supposed to work. Is this belief part of the JW canon or is this your idea
shmogie
Well-Known Member
That is what was thought, but based upon OT scriptures, and Certainly NT Scriptures, this is right, but wrong.
It is right that He is a warrior, but the what he defeats is not Rome, but all evil and all oppressors and He will rule over the earth.
He was incarnated as a human, His human mother being of the House of David.
So, the Messiah was and is Christ.
Though the Jews missed him, the first time, they will play an important role in His second appearance.
shmogie
Well-Known Member
Well, demonstrate some actual knowledge, if you have it.And I am always amused by those folk who seemingly have little grounding in the NT, pontificating about how anyone and everyone who disagrees with them must not know know anything about the NT (or the old, or the history of religion...) and therefore must be blind, and following the blind...
You didn't in the post I was responding to, as I pointed out.
Heyo
Veteran Member
People weren't very nice to each other throughout history. But the people of the Levant were and are extremely nasty. I always thought "there must be something in the water". Tuns out there is something lacking in the water: zinc. Too little zinc makes you irritable. Marmite has been suggested as a possible solution.
De Bono's Marmite plan for peace in Middle Yeast
shmogie
Well-Known Member
Your author, in his first two sentences, uses the word probably in each. Probably means I think this is what happened.
He wasn't there, in the first century, and there is no contemporary documentary evidence to support his speculation.
I can find equally qualified academics who have a different view.
The only contemporary document on the Apostolic Church is the New Testament , accept it or not.
sooda
Veteran Member
The Nestorians were early Christians.
It was a new idea to me too, having been raised with the notion that all good people go to heaven. It wasn't until I actually studied what the Bible says about these things that I realized that God never had any intention to send humans to heaven originally. If he had wanted humans in heaven, he would have put us there like he did the angels. JW's opened my eyes as to what the Bible really teaches, as opposed to what the churches just assume.
We are material creatures who are designed to live in a material world....but in paradise conditions...not the world we have at present. Paradise was lost because of the disobedience of our first parents challenging God's Sovereign right to set the boundaries of their choices. He stepped back to allow them to see for themselves how foolish that was. We have made a right mess of everything by ignoring his laws and doing things "our" way.
But God promised to step in when it had gotten to the point where all life on earth was threatened by man's selfishness. He will rectify the whole situation, eventually taking us back to Eden....but not before precedents were set for all time to come regarding his Sovereignty. He will take only a limited number to heaven because only humans know the human condition best. Every one of the chosen Kingdom rulers, including its King have lived as humans on earth.
It was his first purpose to have a race of sinless, free willed humans to represent him here as caretakers of all that he made. It is why we were made in God's image, having the necessary attributes to fulfill the role that we were given. Heaven was never in God's original scenario.
Okay, you said:
In the Gospels, the Eleven are shocked and confused that Jesus has apparently been killed by the very people he was supposed to have victory over. For a little over two days they are in mourning, and on the morning of the third day they don't even believe the women who sent to minister to his body and found the tomb empty. It is only later that they realize that indeed Jesus had told them what would happen, and that contrary to their expectations following his execution, he came back. They were quite surprised. NONE of them believed what he had said before his death.
Now then, that is the story from the Gospels, isn't it?
amorphous_constellation
Well-Known Member
So when eden comes back, does that maybe mean they're coming back down here, and maybe heaven goes back into the tool box?
Heaven was never in the tool box. Originally, God designed humans to live forever on earth. Just because we are mortals didn't mean we had to die....it just meant that we could lose our lives if we disobeyed God.
The only mention of death in the garden was as a penalty for disobedience. Since the Bible does not mention a "heaven or hell" scenario, those who die, sleep in death. The "righteous and the unrighteous" will be resurrected from their graves (John 5:28-29) but the wicked will not have their lives restored. There is no heaven or hell....there is just life or death.
Look what God said after Adam had taken the fruit to join his wife in rebellion....
Genesis 3:22-24...
"Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life." (NASB)
There was another tree in the garden that was freely available to the humans.....one that would make them "live forever"....there was no prohibition on that tree, only on the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil".
But when Adam and his wife ate the forbidden fruit, God immediately withdrew access to "the tree of life", thereby allowing the sentence of death to be carried out. But before they died, God allowed them to fulfill his original mandate to "fill the earth". The lesson that he would allow, was to be learned by all of humankind before he restored his rulership to the earth.
So you see, there was never a reason to go to heaven.....everything that people think heaven is, was right here on earth. What Adam lost for his children, Jesus came to 'buy' back for them. That is what a redeemer does.