Who are the seven heads of Revelation 17?

[Martn]

[Pickle]

3 minutes ago, MCBGM said:

Like I said. You don't listen.

Well, you last indicated you believe that the Writings are authoritative, but not as authoritative. That would agree with the WikiPedia article. But that article also stated that the Writings are viewed as inspired, something you appear to have denied previously because you seemingly would like to treat it as a smorgasboard, picking which part is and which part isn't inspired. And I got the impression that you claimed that this approach was what was held throughout Judaism. Yet that conflicts with the WikiPedia article.

[Pickle]

1 minute ago, MCBGM said:

No. The Messiah did not come then. Daniel says a messiah came then. Not the Messiah. We don't know when the Messiah will come. It is impossible to know, and it is forbidden even to try and figure it out, because it is not given to any man to know the day, hour, or even the year of his coming. God alone knows when.

If Dan. 9 isn't talking about the Messiah, why would the bones be blasted for calculating the 70 weeks? Your "No" makes it sound like it isn't permissible to calculate the 70 weeks.

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[Pickle]

16 hours ago, MCBGM said:

Jews (all Jews --Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.) do not accept that they are entirely inSpired.

Some parts are inSpired. Some are not.

This doesn't mean we get to pick and choose. It just means we need to judge them in accordance with the Torah and the Prophets, accepting them only insofar as they agree with that.

This is what I have said. Over and over. It is what all Jews believe.

And I don't believe you. All you give, repeatedly, are mere assertions, without anything to support what you say.

You're not the authority. God is.

The Wikipedia article makes no such distinction as you are making. It states that the Writings are considered to be divinely inspired. The part I quoted said nothing about only part of the Writings being inspired.

[Pickle]

16 hours ago, MCBGM said:

The problem is that is NOT what happened. At all.

You have been fed a very big lie.

History --overwhelmingly-- proves otherwise.

Mere assertions, yet again. And this time you've pitted your mere assertions against the writings of Jews themselves, including Psalm 2.

"Let God be true, and every man a liar."

 

[Pickle]

16 hours ago, MCBGM said:

Of course that is what Christians believe.

And some Jews too.

[Pickle]

16 hours ago, MCBGM said:

Even if Seth was born many generations after Adam, he still would have been born to Adam at 130, because he was in the one who was born to Adam at age 130.

Paul confirms this kind of thinking (which was a common way of counting descent, among ancient peoples) when he says others paid tithes to Melchizedek because they were in Abraham when Abraham paid the tithes.

Paul nowhere confirms the idea that someone can be said to beget a son at 130, when the one named is actually his son's son's son's son.

Jude 14  And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,

Enoch is the seventh from Adam.

[Pickle]

16 hours ago, MCBGM said:

This is one of those stories which gets told all over the internet so many times that people believe it is true.

The problem is Christians don't read the previous portion --39a-- which tells us that the miracles of the temple didn't suddenly stop. They gradually diminished --over a period of several centuries-- until, eventually (around 40 years before the temple fell), no miracles remained. The bad omens, likewise, grew over a period of centuries. They didn't just suddenly start happening when Jesus died.

What was the cause?

According to 39a, it was the crime of murder, of Jews murdering fellow Jews, which (under Roman oppression) eventually became so bad that the religious courts had to give up and wouldn't even rule on such cases any more. The high murder rate, it says, is what led to destruction of the temple.

39a is at http://juchre.org/talmud/yoma/yoma2.htm#39a. I can't find where it mentions "murder" or "kill" or "slay." Could you please quote the part you are referring to? Thanks.

I do not recall you explaining yet in what way Paul or Peter rejected the Torah, as you previously claimed. Did I miss that?

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15 hours ago, MCBGM said:

You miss a great deal.

You don't listen. Instead you argue, for argument's sake.

Since you don't believe anything I say, regardless how I say it, you might try asking this fellow:

http://outreachjudaism.org/yomkippur/

I specifically asked you awhile back to substantiate your assertion that Peter and Paul and others like them rejected the Torah. I don't recall you stating anything that would approach being a response, and so I asked you whether I missed it. And this is your response to that question?

I'm not going to ask the guy at that link to tell me whether or not you already answered my original question. And I see little point in asking him to answer for you because you don't want to.

As far as the material goes at that link, it seems to be arguing in favour of a Catholic-like doctrine regarding oral tradition. The problem with the Catholic view is that there is no way to substantiate that a tradition really was handed down from the apostles. And certainly parts of the Talmud could not have been handed down from Moses, such as the teaching that Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes were three names for the same person, or that Esther was the wife or concubine of Mordecai, if I'm remembering correctly.

And really, there is nothing wrong or contradictory with citing a non-authoritative source to make a point, contrary to what this web page tries to say. Only if a Christian believes that everything in the Talmud is factually in error, even records of historical things, would it be contradictory to cite the Talmud. And since the citation in question concerns what might be called an admission against interest, I think it has greater weight.

One thing I find a problem with that web page is its use of words to bias the reader to one side of the topic, without giving anything solid to base that prejudice upon. I'm a third through so far, and there have been a lot of such words, but nothing really solid yet.

He asserts that Ezekiel's prophecy about the temple and all will be fulfilled in the Messianic age. So does he really think the temple will be built outside of Jerusalem, aways to the north? Or does he think Jerusalem will be moved aways to the south? Or did he overlook this detail? At any rate, those last chapters of Ezekiel specifically say that Gentiles will get to inherit the land too, and will be accounted as members of the tribes where they live. That certainly sounds to me like the NT concept of being grafted in, a concept which lay behind much of the Jewish persecution of Christians in the NT, it seems.

"When quoting this Talmudic text, however, missionaries are careful to sidestep the crucial backdrop of this quote in the Talmud."

Pathetic! I wasn't "careful to sidestep" anything when I brought this up.

But at least it does appear that this web page proves that your statement was wrong. When saying that the increase of murders was the reason for the signs in the last 40 years, it cites elsewhere, not Yoma 39a.

"Needless to say, this profound teaching deals a fatal blow to the core teachings of the Church."

I don't get why the page says this. The Jewish scholar Saul of Tarsus wrote that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins, and I think I can demonstrate that from the Torah. But that certainly doesn't mean that the blood of Jesus can't or doesn't. And its contention that good deeds atone, rather than that good deeds are evidence of repentance, I don't get that.

If the reason for those signs the last 40 years was the increase in murders, how about the murder of the Son of God and quite a few of His followers?

When exactly did the Sanhedrin stop adjudicating capital cases?

I have finished the web page, and I don't see where he proved that the signs happened because of murder. All he did was try to put forward an alternative explanation for the historical occurrence, but he didn't prove that that is why it occurred.

The Talmud states certain identical chronological facts regarding the dates of the two destructions of the temple. I think it possible that these details weren't really so regarding the first destruction. Similarly, I wonder whether the tradition of the first 40 years was added to the historical record of the last 40 years, but that the tradition of the first 40 years isn't really so.