Like him saying he is the "way, the truth etc" to God. A spiritual mediator between God and person isnt something that is supported in the Torah. I mean who did Abraham have to go thru? Moses? Noah? David?
With this there are a lot of potential points I could raise but some of the basic things here:
1. The role of a Prophet defacto is to he "the way, the truth and light" in the Old Testament, so the sentiment he echoes is nothing new, unless you pose an exclusivity towards Jesus which would obviously be in massive dissonance with the Old Testament and would naturally imply a kind of Marcionite view because to claim such a thing about Jesus would require rejecting the Old Testament to varying degrees.
2. Yes an exclusive mediator is not supported by the Torah, salvation comes only through God (YHWH, as called in the Old Testament)
3. Abraham, Moses, Noah et al were all themselves mediators, clearly - as with the whole purpose of the existence of angels themselves
4. In interpretations of John 14:6 there is also the very clearly not understood (within any mainstream Christology) of the divine voice and the personal voice. John 14:6 could easily be Jesus not speaking of himself but speaking of YHWH - a perfect Old Testament example would be the entire book of Deuteronomy which is not Moses' own personal opinions, but rather him explicating YHWH's message (and summarizing the doctrine and law). If we were to take the contents attributed to Deuteronomy as Moses' own personal voice (as Christians have done with Jesus) then we would have to assume some kind of deification of Moses, which would of course be very very strange.
I agree though on the misunderstanding of Messiah. The OT doesnt talk of a mystical messiah thats going to die for someone sins, or thats half god/half man (essentially paganism) who comes to be killed, mocked, spat on by his own creation so he could forgive everyone. Its talking about a DELIVERER who would help deliver Israel out of the hands of their oppressors. For example:
Well in the Old Testament itself there is only very narrow inference leaning towards the eschatologically evolved concept of "The Messiah", most of which is based off the concept of both fate (Zion or the promised land, et al), justice and redemption (of the 'fallen' Israelites who keep disobeying the Torah apparently).
This subject is a very complex and intertextual debate between the Talmud and the New Testament, both of which have contradicting views of this. The problem of course is that the New Testament relies on the claims of the Talmud to even get the idea of "The Messiah" in the first place.
As already explicated, there are many "messiahs" (anointed ones) in the Old Testament already of various kinds and no direct messianism views aside from the Zion concept of the promised land etc.
For Christianity it is a very slippery slope, lol.
Thats who supposed to come in the last days to Israel. Not someone who comes, doesnt deliver them, makes a false promise that some of them would be alive when he returned, and 2000+ (allegedly) years later he's still nowhere to be seen.
Yes I do agree with this, in the case of early prechristianity, it was clearly perceived to be an imminent end-times situation not projected to some distant future but literally some time that century.
I think this is a natural issue with all religions that have 'messianic' elements, is that there is a clear disconnect between the essence of a teaching and what the early followers perceived. There are furthermore also obvious problems regarding the relentless battle between "literal vs metaphor", which would be very easily alleviated with basic historical understanding of where when how and why various statements came to be in these texts.
Kinda off topic but thats one of the reasons why I stopped believing in Jesus though I pretty much believed as you outlined here which is why I asked if you were muslim or maybe of some other denomination (or no label altogether)...
Well yes I am, but I hardly consider it important to the discussion, I tend to for all intents and purposes, identify myself simply as a Monotheist when it comes to debate as I am not trying to support any preconceived views held but rather come to the truth of whatever subject is being discussed. I am not afraid of having my views changed and have had it happen many times.
I do not like what comes with labels or group banners but I will leave my thoughts on that for another discussion.
And in terms of what we've been discussing at least, all my views come from the texts and anthropology of Judaism and early-Christianity.
