Sun fire 874 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 8:31 am
it is quite possible this Jehovah and God of the new testament are NOT one in the same being. Meaning that this Jehovah or the other one is either lying or falsely believes they are the creator AKA source when they are not.
The god of the Old Testament made it quite clear that he was a tribal deity who spoke to the Jews alone; and if you weren't seven generations pure Hebrew, you weren't invited to the party.
This is alluded to later, in the book of Revelations, with the 144-thousand Chosen Ones (12-thousand from each of the twelve tribes) who had kept their blood-lines pure and received the right to march into the Kingdom of God singing a song no-one else can know.
In Matthew 10:5, we see Jesus commanding his disciples to "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, nor to any Samaritan (mixed Jewish and gentile blood) city, but speak only to the Children of Israel."
Later, in Matthew 15:22, we see a Gentile woman coming to Jesus, asking that he remove a demon from her daughter; which he initially refuses saying, "I am sent only to the children of Israel, it is not meet (loosely translated as right or acceptable) to snatch the bread from the children and cast it to the dogs."
If this isn't clear enough, in Acts 17: , we see Paul (who, interestingly, out of the vast body of early Jewish and Christian writing, is never mentioned in any primary source prior to the 4th-Century - only in later documents claiming to be copies of earlier ones) being rebuked by Simon, and later by Peter, for teaching among the Gentiles.
Clearly, the concept of one universal religion was foreign to the early Christians, and appears to have originated with the Stoic teachings of the Greek philosopher Zeno, which was probably popularized in Roman thinking by Marcus Aurelius in the mid-2nd Century
In the 4th-Century, Emperor Constantine saw the potential to use the growing Christian movement as a propaganda tool to unite his crumbling empire around a common cause, and called the Nicean Council to edit the scattered scriptures into a standard form of his own choosing and install himself the official role of Pontifex Maximus, the High Priest of the empire, giving him control over the movement
My own current instincts tell me this Jehovah is the fraud as he seems far too weak to be the deity I know of to be honest.
In modern usage, Jehovah seem to have become, at best, a figure head; and the new Right Wing Neo-Christian Jesus seems to be very different (to the point of being an open mockery) from the Jesus talked about in the Bible
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The first step in working miracles is realizing that you can.