By the description of him driving the moneylenders from the temple, we can also tell that he fit inside the temple, which gives us an upper bound as well as a lower bound on his size.
It’s been said that Jesus Christ was larger than a baby but smaller than a temple
Jesus Christ was a brown Jew in the Middle East, conceived out of wedlock in an arguably interracial if not interspecies (deity and human) relationship, raised by his mother and stepfather in place of his absent father. He may not have had a Y chromosome. He spent his early youth as a refugee in Egypt, where his family no doubt survived initially on handouts from the wealthy (You think they kept that gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the wise men? Hell no, they sold that stuff for food and lodging). He later returned with his parents to their occupied homeland and lived in poverty.
Trump and his administration are xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, fear-mongering, warmongering, tax-dodging, anti-Semitic, anti-choice, anti-welfare, anti-equal pay, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, support tax cuts for the rich, support Citizen’s United, want to keep refugees out of this country, want to limit our ability to speak against the government, plan to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and they wrap all of that up behind a banner of “Christian family values.” If you support them, you have no right to call yourself a follower of Christ.
it’s so rare, yet so fulfilling, to see the J-man on my dash
One of my friends is literally the most religious Christian I have ever met. What does that mean in regards to her lifestyle and outlook? She loves everyone. EVERYONE. Unconditionally. And she supports healthcare and education and birth control and everything that’s necessary to have a healthy, stable society.
so exodus says that aaron stretched out his hand over the waters and the frog came up and covered the land of egypt and while english translators usually render “frog” as “frogs,” today at shul the rabbi challenged us to consider whether it could in fact have been one giant frog so we spent literally forty-five minutes arguing about whether there were swarms of frogs from the beginning or rather a single monstrous godzilla frog that split into multiple frogs once people started trying to destroy it and the congregation got so worked up that even after we’d sung aleinu and were heading out of the sanctuary people were still excitedly debating the moral implications of one frog versus many so what i’m trying to say is @judaism never change
I’d never heard of this before, so I looked it up.
The reason we’re certain it says “frogs” singular rather than just being an irregular noun (which was my first thought, especially since my dad was just lecturing me a few weeks ago on how Biblical Hebrew plurals aren’t nearly as regular as Modern Hebrew plurals because Modern Hebrew is more or less a conlang) is because in the first part of the passage God commands Aaron to call forth frogs, plural, but then the passage ends with Aaron calling forth frog, singular. So both forms are right there, they both exist.
The authority is considered to be Rashi (an 11th century French rabbi). He gives two explanations. 1) That a giant frog was called forth that covered all of the land of Egypt, and whenever the Egyptians struck it, it split into multiple frogs. 2) In some languages, some animals have both a regular plural form and a plural that’s the same as the singular (e.g. “fish” in English), so maybe that was the case for frogs in Biblical Hebrew.
The counter-argument to (2) is that the regular plural was used in the very same passage, which is why we need both explanations.
Rashi apparently gets this argument from the following Midrash (Biblical quotation in all-caps, Midrash in regular text)
AND THE FROG(S) CAME UP, AND COVERED THE
LAND OF EGYPT. Rabbi Akiva said: It was only one frog, but this bred so
rapidly that it filled the land of Egypt. Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah said
to him: ‘Akiva! What business have you with Haggadah? Leave homiletical
interpretations and turn to Neg’aim and Ohalot! Indeed, there was one
frog at first, but it croaked to the others and they came.’
The upshot of all of these interpretations is Aaron summoned one frog, but God provided many.
[I got so into reading about this I forgot I had water boiling on the stove, and it all boiled off and I didn’t notice until I smelled the pan burning. I feel like this might be one of the most Jewish moments of my life.]
I love that this is basically the equivalent of the “would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck” debate.
Love the idea that Aaron was told to summon a plague of frogs but he either 1) accidentally summoned a single frog instead due to mishearing or misspeaking or better yet 2) thought to himself, you know what would be really great though, is just one GIANT FROG PIÑATA
To expand on this, Jesus’s name is Anglicized in this way as well. We get Jesus from the Latin form of the Greek “Ἰησοῦς”(Iēsous), which is derived from the Herbrew “ישוע”(Yeshu’a, which meant “YHWH is Salvaion”, YHWH, or Yahweh being the name of God). When another form of that name, ” יְהוֹשֻׁעַ”(Yeoshu’a) was allowed to Anglicize through a different set of corruptions, it entered the English Language through Reformist Protestants as the name “Joshua”.
Donald Trump is exactly the kind of person that Jesus would have thrown out of the temple and beaten with a stick, and the fact that so many self-identified Christians want to put him in office tells you pretty everything wrong with white American Christianity.
Because Jesus had authority at temples and beat people.
I 100% can’t tell if you’re joking here but he actually did chase people out of a temple at least once for using religion for their own selfish gains, complete with literal table flipping and improvised whips
So really it’s not that he would have trump thrown out as much as he would storm in and accuse him of turning his father’s house into a den of thieves before upending a table on his head
Dude, Jesus not only chased them out, he broke stuff they were selling, let loose all of their animals, and fucking flipped all the money-changing tables.
Jesus 100% would have been chasing Trump out with a table leg.
Canon Jesus 10000% better than fanon Jesus
Canon Jesus did some very weird shit. Like, just before throwing the market out of the temple, he stole a donkey, then cursed a fig tree because it didn’t have any fruit on it. The next day, or possibly immediately, everyone was amazed that the fig tree he had cursed was withered. He must’ve been in a fuckin weird mood. Going through a Dark Period. The Chaotic Mage of Light losing his shit just a little bit.
“So, what the fuck was that, Jesus?” someone asked as they’re all looking at the horribly withered corpse of the poor cursed tree.
“The power of prayer,” Jesus said absently.
“… wait, is cursing literally a form of prayer? Because some Wiccans are going to be really upset about that, like, they have a whole threefold law thing, is this… okay?”
“Listen,” said Jesus, “If I tell a mountain to get back in the sea? The mountain will get in the fucking sea. Do you want me to tell you to get in the sea?”
And they were all like, “Good demo, Jesus. Good lesson.”
Meanwhile, he was having the aforementioned public brawl in the temple.
Just keep that in mind during this election cycle – viable answers for What Would Jesus Do include flipping tables, stealing animals and striking down shrubbery with magic, all in one week.
Before Holy Week in the church calendar comes the lesser-known festival of Christ Doesn’t Give A Fuck Week
I now have a mental image of Jesus as Negan from the walking dead, dolling out justice on religious heathens with a table leg studded with nails.
The fig tree incident happened because he was hungry and couldn’t find any fruit on it. Anyone who’s experienced low blood sugar can relate to that tantrum.
Jesus was hangry.
I believe this is my favorite post ever.
My favorite part of the “flipping tables at the temple” story is that before any of that went down, Jesus went out and wove his own whip with which to drive these people out.
I like to imagine him being just so angry, muttering under his breath while he braided together the scourge.
“And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.”
“Jesus, how can I avoid sin when all these hussies keep revealing the fact that they have bodies?!”
“Hmmm, tough call bro. Have you tried gouging out your eyes so you don’t have to see all those bodies anymore?”
“wut”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t you tell them to… stop dressing like that or something?”
“Don’t see why. It’s not their fault that the fact that they have bodies makes you a fucking sinful horndog. Gotta fix that problem yourself, buddy. Go on, blind yourself.”
“Uh….”
“Or learn to keep it in your g’damn pants no matter what they’re wearing.”
I can’t wait for Jesus to come back so he can drive the Merchants of Death out of Congress with a bullwhip
this is fucking powerful
Christianity isn’t the best religion. It’s not the most correct religion. And I firmly believe that the earliest followers of Christ and Jesus himself would have been horrified to have seen the religion that emerged in Jesus name.
Followers of Jesus were called to follow Christ into their own culture, religion, or context, not to join a new religion.
But within the hundreds of years after Jesus and his disciples were gone, the followers of Jesus began to advocate for a certain set of religious practices, certain doctrines, certain hierarchical structures- they began to do exactly the opposite of what Jesus himself did- they created institutions of privilege and power.
They diluted the simple way of Jesus and created a religion that had very little to do with giving to the poor or loving your enemy, and more to do with appeasing God and paying one’s religious dues to an institution in exchange for salvation after death- something Jesus rarely talked about at all.
And you have heard it said, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”
“And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.”
“Jesus, how can I avoid sin when all these hussies keep revealing the fact that they have bodies?!”
“Hmmm, tough call bro. Have you tried gouging out your eyes so you don’t have to see all those bodies anymore?”
“wut”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t you tell them to… stop dressing like that or something?”
“Don’t see why. It’s not their fault that the fact that they have bodies makes you a fucking sinful horndog. Gotta fix that problem yourself, buddy. Go on, blind yourself.”
“Uh….”
“Or learn to keep it in your g’damn pants no matter what they’re wearing.”
He goes on for like several examples too.
“How can I avoid like, an accidental slip of the hand when…they’re dressin like that?”
“Cut it off.”
“wut”
“Cut it off. Your hand. If it’s a problem, stop having a hand.”
wupacing 