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Reverse Engineering Judaism.

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
If there was nothing wrong with the first covenant no place would have been sought for another. . . By calling the covenant "new" God has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear [2 Cor. 3:6].​
Hebrews 8:7-13.​
Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little (if any) insight into exactly how it does so. Depending on the system under consideration and the technologies employed, the knowledge gained during reverse engineering can help with repurposing obsolete objects . . . or learning how something works.​
Wikipedia.​

As the writer of the book of Hebrews notes, if there's nothing wrong with a given covenant no place would be sought for a new, or renewal, or re-engineering, of the original. We know, importantly, that the "new" covenant isn't a replacement or a reneging on the covenant that comes before it, but merely the removal of aspects of the covenant being made new, or else additions (or both) implying that something got into the original, or was missing from the original, that makes the renewal necessary. Furthermore, since by the reasoning of the writer of Hebrews, we have the prototypical schematic of the new covenant in the life and death of the messianic-figure related to the original covenant, we're the lucky possessors of the eisegetical tools necessary to exegete the original covenant in a manner that lends great weight toward finally understanding the intricate, symbiotic, and yet paradoxical, relationship between the old and the new. Elements in the life and death of the messianic-figure related to both the older and the newer covenant represent the opportunity to suss out what mightn't belong, or that's missing from, the covenant being renewed.



John
 
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joe1776

Well-Known Member
John, I'm an agnostic who gave up on my family's Catholic tradition as a young man. I regard all the sacred texts that you and others believe to be divinely-inspired as the work of well-intentioned men whose morals reflected those of their time and place. I doubt they were divinely inspired.

I also think the texts are evidence that our species has made moral progress: the rejection of slavery, equal rights for women, and so on. At the same time, because those sacred texts misled the faithful for a time {There was no condemnation of slavery, for example] I doubt that the texts were divinely-inspired as claimed.

I accept your post as an argument to counter my position. Is there anything else that I'm not considering?

Joe
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
If there was nothing wrong with the first covenant no place would have been sought for another. . . By calling the covenant "new" God has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear [2 Cor. 3:6].​
Hebrews 8:7-13.​
Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little (if any) insight into exactly how it does so. Depending on the system under consideration and the technologies employed, the knowledge gained during reverse engineering can help with repurposing obsolete objects . . . or learning how something works.​
Wikipedia.​

As the writer of the book of Hebrews notes, if there's nothing wrong with a given covenant no place would be sought for a new, or renewal, or re-engineering, of the original. We know, importantly, that the "new" covenant isn't a replacement or a reneging on the covenant that comes before it, but merely the removal of aspects of the covenant being made new, or else additions (or both) implying that something got into the original, or was missing from the original, that makes the renewal necessary. Furthermore, since by the reasoning of the writer of Hebrews, we have the prototypical schematic of the new covenant in the life and death of the messianic figure related to the original covenant, we're the lucky possessors of the eisegetical tools necessary to exegete the original covenant in a manner that lends great weight toward finally understanding the intricate, symbiotic, and yet paradoxical, relationship between the old and the new. Elements in the life and death of the messianic figure related to both the older and the newer covenant represent the opportunity to suss out what mightn't belong, or that's missing from, the covenant being renewed.

In the context of the foregoing we have the fortuitous fact that the lineages of the parents of the messianic-figure in the crosshairs of the examination throw us a bone. The father's lineage stops at Abraham, while the mother's lineage goes all the way back to the genesis of the first human ha-adam. Catching a glimpse of this udderly important nuance, the Jewish Chachamim legalize the counterintuitive law that states that the lineage of a genuine firstborn Jew is matriarchal not patriarchal. The true Jewish firstborn's matriarchal lineage goes all the way back to the prelapse genesis of the human race implying typologically that he's the firstborn of ha-adam as though the first human is the first Jewish firstborn's (פטר רחם) mother rather than his father. Consequently, the first Jewish father (and the messianic-figure's lineage makes this link) is Abraham rather than ha-adam.



John
 
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John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
John, I'm an agnostic who gave up on my family's Catholic tradition as a young man. I regard all the sacred texts that you and others believe to be divinely-inspired as the work of well-intentioned men whose morals reflected those of their time and place.

One of the first and foremost aspects of correct Biblical interpretation is the isagogical principle that the text must be interpreted according to the cultural and linguistic understanding of the time in which it was written. The revelation evolves along with the writers and readers of the text. The writers and readers are real, genuine, partners in the evolution of the revelation.

The orthodox view is that verbal plenary inspiration occurred for the writers of the canon, so that without waving their personal idiosyncrasies (even idiomatic idiosyncrasies), God made His full and complete revelation to man known and knowable within the texts written by His appointed vessels.

Furthermore, not only does man evolve along with the text, but the relationship between the writers and readers of the text is what guides man into a brighter and more humane day. Without the Biblical text, without the revelation related to the writers and readers of the text, mankind would not be where it is now. It's not an accident or even a cultural anomaly that 99% of the winners of the Nobel prize have been People of the Book. It's no accident that the fathers of modern science were mostly Christian and that Judeo/Christianity is the engine of evolution in Western Civilization. In fact, the USA, which is the most fervent proponent of Judeo/Christinity is clearly the greatest source of positive evolutionary advancement that has ever existed.

I also think the texts are evidence that our species has made moral progress: the rejection of slavery, equal rights for women, and so on.

. . . I would argue that the moral progress is part and parcel of the writers and readers of the text and not something that occurs outside of that domain. The USSR and communist China would have had something to say about mankind's moral progress if not for Western Europe and the USA; specifically their biblically based rejection of the kind of tyranny and de-evolutionary concepts that fuel communism.

At the same time, because those sacred texts misled the faithful for a time {There was no condemnation of slavery, for example] I doubt that the texts were divinely-inspired as claimed.

Many historians, agnostic, atheist, and theist, have argued that, ironically, it's the Bible that led to the end of slavery to the emancipation of women and such.


I accept your post as an argument to counter my position. Is there anything else that I'm not considering?

I accept the logic of your statements within the context that is your epistemological development. I've no doubt that your ideas and beliefs are self-consistent and logical within the worldview that circumscribes them.

Most of what I write is based on a tacit and absolute faith in the veracity and legitimacy of the Bible as the word of God. When I was born-again, I realized right away that my old worldview had a new foundation such that never again would I waste time questioning the dictates, so to say, of my rebirth. Now, as a new man, I move forward on the foundation of my rebirth rather than trying to question or establish the legitimacy of my new birth. Which is simply to say that having been on both sides of the divide, I understand that the logic of the unbeliever is logical and sound within the nature of our physical or biological birth. But having legitimately been born again, of spirit, rather than flesh, I have the sound sense to appreciate a certain degree of incompatibility between empiricism, rationalism, logic, versus a new kind of insight come from faith not as a kind of hope but faith as an utterly new kind of perception available only to those who possess it.

But, I suppose, if at the time of its release the soul is tainted and impure, because it has always associated with the body and cared for it and loved it, and has been so beguiled by the body and its passions and pleasures that nothing seems real to it but those physical things which can be touched and seen and eaten and drunk and used for sexual enjoyment, and if it is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid what is invisible and hidden from our eyes, but intelligible and comprehensible by philosophy -- if the soul is in this state, do you think that it will escape independent and uncontaminated . . .It is indeed no trifling task, but very difficult to realize that there is in every soul an organ or instrument of knowledge that is purified and kindled afresh by such studies when it has been destroyed and blinded by our ordinary pursuits, a faculty whose preservation outweighs ten thousand eyes, for by it only is reality beheld.​
Plato.​



John
 
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metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
If there was nothing wrong with the first covenant no place would have been sought for another. . . By calling the covenant "new" God has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear [2 Cor. 3:6].
Except Torah says that the 1st Covenant was forever.
 

joe1776

Well-Known Member
....Most of what I write is based on a tacit and absolute faith in the veracity and legitimacy of the Bible as the word of God. When I was born-again, I realized right away that my old worldview had a new foundation such that never again would I waste time questioning the dictates, so to say, of my rebirth. Now, as a new man, I move forward on the foundation of my rebirth rather than trying to question or establish the legitimacy of my new birth....

That wouldn't be possible for me. The position you adopted requires faith. My brain is incapable of faith. On important matters, it requires evidence. If faith was possible for me, I would have accepted Catholicism when offered at seven years old..
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
That wouldn't be possible for me. The position you adopted requires faith. My brain is incapable of faith. On important matters, it requires evidence. If faith was possible for me, I would have accepted Catholicism when offered at seven years old..

Interesting. I was just re-reading Freud for a study I was doing just last night when he made a comment similar to yours (on the first two pages of Civilization and Its Discontents). He spoke of a friend of his who'd read some of the negative things he'd written about religion. His friend said he might agree with much of what Freud wrote so far as organized religion is concerned, but that he himself experienced ---constantly --- a sensation of eternity that is boundless and "oceanic." It was that, Freud's friend wrote, that moves the organized religions.

The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, and who himself once praised the magic of illusion in a poem, caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this "oceanic" feeling in myself.​



John
 

joe1776

Well-Known Member
Interesting. I was just re-reading Freud for a study I was doing just last night when he made a comment similar to yours (on the first two pages of Civilization and Its Discontents). He spoke of a friend of his who'd read some of the negative things he'd written about religion. His friend said he might agree with much of what Freud wrote so far as organized religion is concerned, but that he himself experienced ---constantly --- a sensation of eternity that is boundless and "oceanic." It was that, Freud's friend wrote, that moves the organized religions.

The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, and who himself once praised the magic of illusion in a poem, caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this "oceanic" feeling in myself.​



John
Jill Bolte Taylor, who was doing brain research, had a stroke which shut off much of her left side brain function. She was left with what might be that oceanic feeling you are referring to. The left side of our brains, which may be responsible for our ability to reason, might be blocking the unconscious right side which is in touch with a greater reality.... I'm just speculating, of course. Here's a link to her Ted Talk.

My stroke of insight
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
Since I didn't know them personally, ... ;)

Your original statement about the first covenant being forever is important to this thread in the sense that the idea of a new covenant growing out of the older covenant isn't unique to the recent testimony that fancies itself the new testament.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not according to the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which covenant they broke although I was a husband to them saith the Lord.​
Jeremiah 31:31-33.​

Jeremiah claims Israel broke the covenant affected through the stone tablets such that it requires repair, renewal, a rebirth if you will (and most of you won't). From Jeremiah's point of view this thread is legit for those who brake the original covenant as well as those who think they're surveying the landscape of the new. The purpose of this thread is to reverse engineer the original covenant using aspects of the alleged new covenant to see if elements of the so-called new testament clarify aspects of the old testament that haven't to this very day been properly vetted?



John
 
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John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
Jill Bolte Taylor, who was doing brain research, had a stroke which shut off much of her left side brain function. She was left with what might be that oceanic feeling you are referring to. The left side of our brains, which may be responsible for our ability to reason, might be blocking the unconscious right side which is in touch with a greater reality.... I'm just speculating, of course. Here's a link to her Ted Talk.

My stroke of insight

Kirk Douglas wrote a book, My Stroke of Luck, that seems to support the same idea. After his stroke Douglas became religious for the first time in his life. And yet what he wrote about religion --after his stroke ---strikes anyone knowledgeable about religion as painfully simplistic and misguided. Which suggests that the frontal lobes must become engaged and get married before the soul attached to them gets a holistic concept of God and divine revelation.

In this vein, the artist Betty Edwards wrote a now famous book called, Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, where she claims artistic ability is related to the right lobe, but that the successful artist, like the successful theologian, must find a happy marriage between the mute right lobe and the left lobe required to articulate the revelations received in the right lobe. Nature has endowed the left lobe with a bull-at-a-gait mentality such that once it starts talking for itself it forgets all about the husband of the soul and starts off on its life-long adulteration of what the marriage was intended to produce; the average brain being mostly barren and infertile so far as genuine thought is concerned. The average mind mostly regurgitates left-brained, that is lame-brained, ideas and concepts fit mostly for a merely mortal meme-sphere.

In his final book, Freud laments his lack of access to the limitless depths of the oceanic right lobe. He wonders out loud why some persons are so endowed while other's appear to be locked out of the garden of divine delights from the get-go? Col. R.B. Thieme, Jr., taught that the soul can become scarred like a biological organ such that each time the left-lobe commits adultery against the right lobe a scar forms creating what Thieme calls "scar-tissue of the soul." If, so Thieme says, this scar-tissue becomes thick enough, the right and left lobe divorce and go their own way; an event Thieme labels "blackout of the soul."

It is indeed no trifling task, but very difficult to realize that there is in every soul an organ or instrument of knowledge that is purified and kindled afresh by such studies when it has been destroyed and blinded by our ordinary pursuits, a faculty whose preservation outweighs ten thousand eyes, for by it only is reality beheld.​

Plato.​



John
 
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John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
In the context of the foregoing we have the fortuitous fact that the lineages of the parents of the messianic-figure in the crosshairs of the examination throw us a bone. The father's lineage stops at Abraham, while the mother's lineage goes all the way back to the genesis of the first human ha-adam. Catching a glimpse of this udderly important nuance, the Jewish Chachamim legalize the counterintuitive law that states that the lineage of a genuine firstborn Jew is matriarchal not patriarchal. The true Jewish firstborn's matriarchal lineage goes all the way back to the prelapse genesis of the human race implying typologically that he's the firstborn of ha-adam as though the first human is the first Jewish firstborn's (פטר רחם) mother rather than his father. Consequently, the first Jewish father (and the messianic-figure's lineage makes this link) is Abraham rather than ha-adam.

In the Gospels, two lineages are given for the birth of the purported Jewish messiah. His mother's lineage goes all the way back to the first human, while, ironically, his step-father's lineage goes back only to Abraham? Realizing that this Jewish firstborn, thought to be the messianic-personage, has only a step-father, not a biological father, is key to the preceding paragraph, since this one little nuance (no biological father) threatens to unify three elements of the current deconstruction of Jewish thought. 1. Messiah's mother's lineage going back to the first human. 2. A Jewish law making Jewish identity come singularly from the mother. 3. Messiah's step-father's lineage going back only to Abraham.

In reverse engineering Judaism, using the Gospel account of the Jewish messiah's two lineages, we focus a bright light on the founding ritual that makes Abraham the father of the messianic brood. That founding ritual, if indeed this examination is on target, would needs-be relate directly to the fact of messiah's mother's lineage passing by Abraham and going all the way back to the first human, ha-adam, rather than stopping with Abraham or Sarah as it were, and as was the case concerning messiah's patrilineage. To this end we have the fortuitous exegesis of Rabbi Samson Hirsch whereby he points out that the true Hebrew of the text recounting the establishment of the Abrahamic covenant claims not that Abraham is given a newly established covenant, but, according to Rabbi Hirsch, the Hebrew text, faithfully exegeted, says Abraham will be given the renewal of a previously existing covenant, which, presumably, has (the previously existing covenant), at some point prior to the establishment of the Abrahamic reinstatement, become defunct.

If Abraham is reinstating the original covenant between God and the first human (ha-adam), then the central ritual used to signify this as being the case, i.e., taking a knife and cutting the male flesh on the human body, bris milah, ritual circumcision (perhaps ritual emasculation), lends itself to messiah's mother's lineage going all the way back to the first human, since, in the re-establishment of the first covenant, what must have been "strange flesh" (new flesh), that is male flesh, the male organ, the cause for the break in the covenant, the cause of the fall of mankind, is targeted, in the Abrahamic reinstatement, for removal (bringing a blade to the male flesh that broke the first covenant). What appears to have been added to the first human in order to break the original covenant, and yet allow for the propagation of the fallen epoch, i.e, male flesh, the serpentine organ, is, when Abraham renews the lapsed covenant, symbolically, ritually, significantly, removed, rendering messiah's founding father (Abraham) incapable of passing on the testimony of the broken/lapsed covenant, in the old-fashioned manner: phallic-procreation.

Voila! Messiah's birth is marked by the fact that since he has no biological father, his mother acts as both, so that her lineage goes all the way back to the only other time a human was originally designed to act as both mother and father to offspring: prelapse, pre-phallic, ha-adam.

Abraham situates himself as the father of this messianic personage by the very act that symbolizes, and thus points backward, to the only time one human was intended to be both father and mother, which is to say the prelapse human, ha-adam. By ritually unmanning himself, and thus his ability to pass on the now contaminated testimony of the first covenant, Abraham reveals the most significant aspect of the renewal of the re-engineered covenant: the birth of the messianic firstborn of humanity by means of a single-gendered conception, pregnancy, and birth, that points backwards to one verse in Genesis as the genesis of the fall and the contamination of the biological and theological scroll: Genesis 2:21. Messiah's paternal lineage goes back to father Abraham since father Abraham symbolically unmans himself to reveal that the true firstborn of humanity, the intended son of ha-adam (not the s.o.b. Cain), was supposed to be, and in the Gospel account is, fathered and mothered by the same singular person such that per Jewish law the true firstborn Jew has only, gains his lineage only through, a Jewish mother.

In the Gospel account, four people are theologically significant in messiah's conception and birth: his mother, his stepfather, Abraham (the start of messiah's patrilineage), and ha-adam (the start of his matrilineage). By symbolically emasculating himself, Abraham ritually eliminates himself and his phallic-progeny (to include messiah's stepfather) from the theological equation leaving only messiah's mother, and ha-adam, as theologically significant to the conception and birth of the Jewish messiah.



John
 
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metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
Jeremiah claims Israel broke the covenant affected through the stone tablets such that it requires repair, renewal, a rebirth if you will (and most of you won't). From Jeremiah's point of view this thread is legit for those who brake the original covenant as well as those who think they're surveying the landscape of the new. The purpose of this thread is to reverse engineer the original covenant using aspects of the alleged new covenant to see if elements of the so-called new testament clarify aspects of the old testament that haven't to this very day been properly vetted?

Deuteronomy 4:(2): "your G-d…shall not add to what I have commanded you or subtract."

Dt. 13(1): "You shall be careful to observe, neither adding to it or subtracting."

Dt. 13(5): "His commandment you shall observe, holding fast to Him alone."

Dt. 29(28): "Concerns us and our descendents forever, that we may carry out all the words of this Law."

Joshua 1(5): "I will not leave or forsake you…(7) observe the entire Law … do not swerve from it."

Psalms 19(8): "The Law of the Lord is perfect… (10) the ordinances of the Lord are true; all of them are just."

Ps. 119(160): "permanence is Your words chief trait, each of Your just ordinances is everlasting."

Isaiah 42(21): "pleased the Lord in His justice to make His Law great and glorious."

Is. 66(17): "they who eat swine’s flesh … shall all perish."

Baruch 4(1): "the Law endures forever."



A reminder that the "Law" refers to all 613 Commandments: A List of the 613 Mitzvot (Commandments) - Judaism 101 (JewFAQ)
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
Deuteronomy 4:(2): "your G-d…shall not add to what I have commanded you or subtract."

Dt. 13(1): "You shall be careful to observe, neither adding to it or subtracting."

Dt. 13(5): "His commandment you shall observe, holding fast to Him alone."

Dt. 29(28): "Concerns us and our descendents forever, that we may carry out all the words of this Law."

Joshua 1(5): "I will not leave or forsake you…(7) observe the entire Law … do not swerve from it."

Psalms 19(8): "The Law of the Lord is perfect… (10) the ordinances of the Lord are true; all of them are just."

Ps. 119(160): "permanence is Your words chief trait, each of Your just ordinances is everlasting."

Isaiah 42(21): "pleased the Lord in His justice to make His Law great and glorious."

Is. 66(17): "they who eat swine’s flesh … shall all perish."

Baruch 4(1): "the Law endures forever."



A reminder that the "Law" refers to all 613 Commandments: A List of the 613 Mitzvot (Commandments) - Judaism 101 (JewFAQ)

. . . How do you reconcile these statements with Jeremiah 31:31-33?




John
 
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