Showing posts with label R.L. Solberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label R.L. Solberg. Show all posts

Saturday, August 7, 2021

My challenge to Christian apologist R.L Solberg

 Solberg and I have in the last month exchanged replies at his blog, see here.



text:

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Wednesday, June 16, 2021

My reply to R.L. Solberg on Jesus and Isaiah 53

 R.L. Solberg is a Christian apologist and attempts at his blog to respond to Jewish objections to the Christian interpretation of Isaiah 53, here.

I posted a reply as follows, which is crossposted here, given my experience of Christian apologists deleting my polite and scholarly challenges



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Barry Jones

The NAU of Isaiah 53 translates the Hebrew words “zerah” and “tseetsa” as “offspring” and in the immediate context of each, only “biological” offspring is meant. You are thus forced to argue that the meaning of zerah in Isaiah 53:10 is an exception to the rule.

What would be unreasonable in the skeptic who says “offspring” in Isaiah 53:10 means only naturalistic biological offspring, so because Jesus didn’t have any naturalistic biological children, he is not the suffering servant of Isaiah 53?

How do you know the canonical gospel authors weren’t simply creating fictions about Jesus to make him sound more like the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 than he really was? Of course you will tout the historical reliability of the gospels, but I would provide scholarly resistance to that conclusion every step of the way. The question is not whether YOU can be reasonable to see Jesus as the Isaiah 53 servant but whether skeptics can be reasonable to deny this allegation.

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I could have thrown many other reasonable objections at him:

Isaiah 53:10 says if the servant offers himself as a guilt offering, he will prolong his days.  Christians will blindly insist that because Jesus died for our sins as a guilt-offering, God raised him to immortal life.  But because there is no record of any Jew in the 1st century or before thinking that the messiah would have to die and come back to life, its pretty safe to assume that Isaiah's originally intended recipients would have understood "prolong his days" to take the normal sense of "delay the day of his death".

Worse, if it is not unreasonable for a person to refuse to get drawn into the reasons why the U.S. Supreme Court disagrees with the 9th Circuit on whether the 2nd Amendment created a right to private gun ownership, simply because it seems to be an unresolvable quarrel of fatally ambiguous words, then the fact that Christians and Jews have been disagreeing on Isaiah 53 for 2,000 years would similarly make reasonable the unbeliever or skeptic who considered such a debate too convoluted to justify an expectation that any amount of study would be capable of yielding conclusions of any degree of reasonable certainty.  And the disagreements about the meaning of Isaiah 53's words would also constitute the "word-wrangling" which apostle Paul forbade in 2nd Timothy 2:14.


 

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