Thank you for the opportunity to clarify Jolene. You know how much I respect you and your husband even when we disagree.
Remember also that Shem Tob’s Matthew wasn’t a stand alone work. It existed inside a larger book that was a direct attack on Christianity and Jesus.
The idea is dangerous because it originates with a self proclaimed enemy of Christ, an unbeliever who actively argued against the faith. He was honest about his project from the start.
The big danger though is that it opens the door to reduce Christ from the role of Messiah to a figure like John the Baptist. John baptized in his own name. Shem Tob wants to recast Christ as a John the Baptist figure, a reforming preacher who amassed a following.
In fact it’s quite common among secular scholars to speculate that Jesus never claimed any special calling for himself but simply John’s successor in that movement.
The Torah keeping community is under constant bombardment by this type of deception. Our natural sympathy towards Jews and Israel leaves us open to seduction from some of their more creative theories.
The road to apostasy (denying Christ) for Torah keepers is pretty well marked by now. Someone will decide some element of the New Testament is corrupt (usually Paul, this Matthew thing is a new for me) and then take it on themselves to start editing the New Testament. Very soon they have found that they have lost faith in the whole thing and just chuck it. I’ve watched it happen a fair amount, twice in this very forum.
Baptizing in the name of Jesus alone is not dangerous, after all thats still baptizing in thr name of all three. All three are one. That is not the strictest keeping of Christ’s direct instructions on how to baptize but it’s not a complete disobedience either. The problem is the approach; disregarding a specific instruction on a topic by substituting in verses that never claimed to be telling you how to baptize; simply that someone was baptized into faith in Jesus Christ and doing massive violence to the text and faith in the preservation of scripture to do so.
First off Shem Tob isn’t a translation. It’s a fabrication. There is no underlying text that can be identified that it was translated from. Some people speculate that there must have been Hebrew text that was known only to unbelieving Jews and then lost leaving no trace. This is highly unlikely as late as the 14th century.
Remember also that Shem Tob’s Matthew wasn’t a stand alone work. It existed inside a larger book that was a direct attack on Christianity and Jesus.
Again, this isn’t a translation error, @OttoMos claiming that all copies of scripture have been corrupted for all time. The “triune” baptism formulation appears in all the ancient manuscripts. If it’s false then we don’t have an uncorrupted copy of Mathew.
The idea is destructive on a number of levels; the first is the obvious one of preservation of scripture. If Matthew is irretrievably corrupt then the entire New Testament is suspect.
The idea is dangerous because it originates with a self proclaimed enemy of Christ, an unbeliever who actively argued against the faith. He was honest about his project from the start.
The big danger though is that it opens the door to reduce Christ from the role of Messiah to a figure like John the Baptist. John baptized in his own name. Shem Tob wants to recast Christ as a John the Baptist figure, a reforming preacher who amassed a following.
In fact it’s quite common among secular scholars to speculate that Jesus never claimed any special calling for himself but simply John’s successor in that movement.
The Torah keeping community is under constant bombardment by this type of deception. Our natural sympathy towards Jews and Israel leaves us open to seduction from some of their more creative theories.
The road to apostasy (denying Christ) for Torah keepers is pretty well marked by now. Someone will decide some element of the New Testament is corrupt (usually Paul, this Matthew thing is a new for me) and then take it on themselves to start editing the New Testament. Very soon they have found that they have lost faith in the whole thing and just chuck it. I’ve watched it happen a fair amount, twice in this very forum.
Baptizing in the name of Jesus alone is not dangerous, after all thats still baptizing in thr name of all three. All three are one. That is not the strictest keeping of Christ’s direct instructions on how to baptize but it’s not a complete disobedience either. The problem is the approach; disregarding a specific instruction on a topic by substituting in verses that never claimed to be telling you how to baptize; simply that someone was baptized into faith in Jesus Christ and doing massive violence to the text and faith in the preservation of scripture to do so.
