09-29-2008, 03:26 PM
http://christianism.com
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Guignebert: "Strictly speaking, we do not find any original body of doctrine in the Gospel." Harnack: "Jesus brought forward no new doctrine....<b>It is not difficult to set against every portion of the utterances of Jesus an observation which deprives them of originality</b>." Glover: "there was little new in Christian teaching." E. Carpenter: "anyone familiar with the writings of antiquity...knows perfectly well that the reported sayings of Jesus and the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly from these sources." Baron: "Both Jewish and Christian scholars have repeatedly emphasized the fact that, individually examined, the sayings of Jesus can be traced to similar apothegms in rabbinic literature, many of which must have come down from an age preceding the Christian era." Cardinal Newman as quoted by W.S. Lilly perceived: "There is little in the ethics of C which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers, and which here or there...has not in fact been anticipated." Robertson: "There is not one teaching in the Gospels' that cannot be paralleled in the "ethical literature of the Jews, Greeks, Romans and Hindus..."
The parallels fill volumes and can only be suggested here. <b>Sermon on the Mount</b> Wernle: "there is no lack of parallels to the Sermon on the Mount." Charles: "reflects in several instances the spirit and even reproduces the very phrases of" the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Reinach: "To speak of the authenticity of the Sermon on the Mount...is hardly consistent with serious criticism." Rodrigues and others have shown that everything in it can be found in Jewish and other sources which could not have borrowed from the Christian. (On the correct translation of this and other matters in the NT see Moffatt, The Parallel New Testament.) Renan perceived that the sayings of the Sermon were "the current money of the synagogue." Lord's Prayer Klausner: "Every single clause in it is to be found in Jewish prayers and sayings in the Talmud." McClintock and Strong: "based upon expressions and sentiments already familiar to the Jews, indeed parallel phrases to nearly all its contents have been discovered in the Talmud." Of the Jewish Kadish, which contains much of the Prayer, Basnage says it is "the most ancient of all that the Jews have perceived." Trattner: "It is possible to match the Lord's Prayer sentence for sentence, phrase for phrase, and word for word, with passages culled from the OT, the Talmud, and Jewish liturgy." The Beatitudes, says Loewe, more biblical than rabbinic, "go straight back to Hannah's song, or to the Suffering Servant, or to the 'meek' of the Psalms." <b>Angus: "There are many pagan texts, especially in Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius, parallel to 'the Kingdom of God is within you'."</b> J.E. Carpenter: "the proverb to which classical wisdom supplies so many parallels, 'they that are whole have no need of a doctor, but they that are sick'." Hannay: "Confucius was the first to clearly teach the Golden Rule..." Pick: "In one of the treatises of the Talmud called Challah we find, almost verbatim, what our Lord says in Matt. v, 28..." Rabbi Simeon said: "Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them." (This was said a century after Jesus but it is utter nonsense to argue, as so many Christians have, that Jewish parallels after Jesus were copied from him. It takes amazing obtuseness to argue that Jews would imitate and copy those whom they regarded as abomination.) Montefiore: "except in a few polemical directions, Gospel teaching had no influence upon Rabbinic teaching." As for the golden rule statement, it was of course ancient; Christians have argued that it appeared only in its negative form before Jesus, but Strack and Billerbeck found it in both its positive and negative form in Aristeas. Besides, says Kittle, "The idea of a difference between them was quite unapparent to the men of antiquity." That is, whether it is, Do not unto your neighbor...or, Love your neighbor as yourself. And finally Olmstead points out: "Were not our ears to attuned to the familiar phrases of the Authorized Version, the outlandish phraseology and syntax, the monotonous repetition of 'and' and 'for', the constant appearance of apparently superfluous 'therefores', the highly irregular sequence of tenses, the large number of strangely placed participles, all would have warned us that we were reading an Aramaic-English jargon[?]."'<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Guignebert: "Strictly speaking, we do not find any original body of doctrine in the Gospel." Harnack: "Jesus brought forward no new doctrine....<b>It is not difficult to set against every portion of the utterances of Jesus an observation which deprives them of originality</b>." Glover: "there was little new in Christian teaching." E. Carpenter: "anyone familiar with the writings of antiquity...knows perfectly well that the reported sayings of Jesus and the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly from these sources." Baron: "Both Jewish and Christian scholars have repeatedly emphasized the fact that, individually examined, the sayings of Jesus can be traced to similar apothegms in rabbinic literature, many of which must have come down from an age preceding the Christian era." Cardinal Newman as quoted by W.S. Lilly perceived: "There is little in the ethics of C which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers, and which here or there...has not in fact been anticipated." Robertson: "There is not one teaching in the Gospels' that cannot be paralleled in the "ethical literature of the Jews, Greeks, Romans and Hindus..."
The parallels fill volumes and can only be suggested here. <b>Sermon on the Mount</b> Wernle: "there is no lack of parallels to the Sermon on the Mount." Charles: "reflects in several instances the spirit and even reproduces the very phrases of" the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Reinach: "To speak of the authenticity of the Sermon on the Mount...is hardly consistent with serious criticism." Rodrigues and others have shown that everything in it can be found in Jewish and other sources which could not have borrowed from the Christian. (On the correct translation of this and other matters in the NT see Moffatt, The Parallel New Testament.) Renan perceived that the sayings of the Sermon were "the current money of the synagogue." Lord's Prayer Klausner: "Every single clause in it is to be found in Jewish prayers and sayings in the Talmud." McClintock and Strong: "based upon expressions and sentiments already familiar to the Jews, indeed parallel phrases to nearly all its contents have been discovered in the Talmud." Of the Jewish Kadish, which contains much of the Prayer, Basnage says it is "the most ancient of all that the Jews have perceived." Trattner: "It is possible to match the Lord's Prayer sentence for sentence, phrase for phrase, and word for word, with passages culled from the OT, the Talmud, and Jewish liturgy." The Beatitudes, says Loewe, more biblical than rabbinic, "go straight back to Hannah's song, or to the Suffering Servant, or to the 'meek' of the Psalms." <b>Angus: "There are many pagan texts, especially in Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius, parallel to 'the Kingdom of God is within you'."</b> J.E. Carpenter: "the proverb to which classical wisdom supplies so many parallels, 'they that are whole have no need of a doctor, but they that are sick'." Hannay: "Confucius was the first to clearly teach the Golden Rule..." Pick: "In one of the treatises of the Talmud called Challah we find, almost verbatim, what our Lord says in Matt. v, 28..." Rabbi Simeon said: "Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them." (This was said a century after Jesus but it is utter nonsense to argue, as so many Christians have, that Jewish parallels after Jesus were copied from him. It takes amazing obtuseness to argue that Jews would imitate and copy those whom they regarded as abomination.) Montefiore: "except in a few polemical directions, Gospel teaching had no influence upon Rabbinic teaching." As for the golden rule statement, it was of course ancient; Christians have argued that it appeared only in its negative form before Jesus, but Strack and Billerbeck found it in both its positive and negative form in Aristeas. Besides, says Kittle, "The idea of a difference between them was quite unapparent to the men of antiquity." That is, whether it is, Do not unto your neighbor...or, Love your neighbor as yourself. And finally Olmstead points out: "Were not our ears to attuned to the familiar phrases of the Authorized Version, the outlandish phraseology and syntax, the monotonous repetition of 'and' and 'for', the constant appearance of apparently superfluous 'therefores', the highly irregular sequence of tenses, the large number of strangely placed participles, all would have warned us that we were reading an Aramaic-English jargon[?]."'<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->