Adventism is not Judaism


by koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

15 May 2009


Jewish religion operates outside the parameters of the Word of God also. That means in essence that the scholars and rabbis of Jewish religion consider the words of the scholars of the Mishnah and Talmuds as of equal importance to the value of the words of the prophets and authors of the Old Testament.

The hermeneutical rules as set out by Rabbi Hillel and conventionally accepted by them for better understanding of their religion, also that of Rabbi Shammai, indicate that they know that there are inconsistencies, conflicting views, contrasting opinions in these post-biblical traditions of theirs, and these rules also indicate that they are trying to use the political tool of democratic vote of the majority to fix the truth by quantity of voters.

Seventh Day Adventists regard truth as only contained in the consonantal text of the Hebrew text, called the Masoretic Text, but without the vowels. The Masoretes added the vowels and although that interpretation of the 9th to the 10th centuries were not necessarily wrong, probably much less than 4%, they embody what is known to us as the very essence of the Word of God, period.

There are Hebrew scholars who try to tell us that the Hebrew Manuscripts of the  Middle Ages differ in variants, but they miss the point. Human slips of the tongue, ear, eye, hand, memory during the transmission process is a subordinary mishap to what was actually there to be copied in the Vorlage. The Vorlage was stable, in fact, 4QDana at Qumran, 1000 years before, indicate that the ratio of correspondence is 99.9%. Unparalleled in any version of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, whether in Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Greek in all its forms, Old Latin, Vulgate, Armenian and Ethiopian.

For Seventh Day Adventists, only the consonantal Hebrew text of the Old Testament is the very Word of God. The deviant readings of the socalled LXX, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Coptic cannot compare at all with this.

The Septuagint that was used by the New Testament is not exactly the same as the one that survived in Byzantine times. Qumran Greek manuscripts indicate that the Septuagint was much more literally pro-consonantal text of the Masoretic Tradition or Hebrew text, than the later survival of that text. At Ptolemaic Alexandria in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, librarians changed the text, or corrupted the text to harmonize it, to correct what they perceived as inconsistencies or questionable readings. They did it with Homer, they did it with the Septuagint. Two Septuagints were circulating in Jesus day, one that was very close and literally to the Hebrew, another the one that survived for us known today as the LXX. The present LXX is mostly, maybe as much as 80% similar to the consonantal text of the Hebrew tradition, but 20% is still a large variation from the original Word of God.

Jesus was not involved in textual correction utterances but that could be because they were not using the Greek in the Synagogues but the originals. For Seventh Day Adventists, Jesus is Yahweh and thus the Editor of the whole Old Testament, thus not dependent on the memory or reading of it. He is the living Word of God, a walking and living consonantal text of the Hebrew tradition.

Jesus' conflict with the Jews of His day, was that they gave priority to the sayings of the fathers above that of the consonantal text of the Hebrew tradition, or the Word of God. They knew that the Word of God is holy, and still today they know it also. They do not deny it ever. But, they added concepts, and conflicting ones in separate books, or oral traditions, that do conflict with this essential corpus of the Word of God and that is the problem. Truth mixed with error, the error of plusses and minusses. They do profess that you cannot add or subtract from the Word of God but then they invent all kinds of arithmetic and mind games to still keep to the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition but actually sidestepping it by large. This is considered by Seventh Day Adventists to be no longer in the parameters of the Word of God, but outside of it.

For Seventh Day Adventists, not scholars or readers are the interpreters of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is its own interpreter and there is a harmony, consistency, inner truth, inner theology that, when put together as a complete engine, provides one with a fantastic truth about everything we need to know in living on this earth and going after this earth life.

For Seventh Day Adventists, this norm cannot be substituted by the words of a church council, a rabbi or rabbis, scholar or scholars, pope or popes, church father or church fathers, imam or imams, monk or monks, pastor or pastors, synod or synods.

For Seventh Day Adventists, this norm is available to anyone who wants to read it, and the Holy Spirit will guide the interested reader through trial and human error [in initial readings] to eventually grow to the fullness of understanding embodied in its essentials necessary for that individuals' relationship to God and salvation.

The Old Testament expects the new and the New Testament is a true rehearsal of the Old, unaltered.

The commonalities that Seventh Day Adventists and Jewish scholars enjoy are that they are talking reverently about the same consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition but the difference that separates both is that Seventh Day Adventist thinking is not willing to go outside the borders of the covers but Judaism carries in from the outside opinions that they have selected through a method of eclecticism and quantity of votes to be more important than internal veracity. This is the greatest conflict.

The more orthodox they are, the more they cling to these outside sources of "truth" or as we view it, pseudo truth, and the least orthodox they are, the more they cling to watered down versions of the same.

The Jewish version in Seventh Day Adventism or the group that erected a Seventh Day Adventist church for the Jewish Adventists and Jewish outreach in California, is probably the closest version of a New Testament Jesus that one can get. Prof. dr.   Jacques Doukhan in Adventism could give a Jewish person the closest resemblance and flavor of the New Testament era Jews in modern times. He is currently at Andrews University, Michigan, USA.  His books are widely available.

Adventism is not Judaism but there are many Jewish elements and remnants remaining, remnants that are shared also by other Protestant churches, in the jewish remnants that they incorporated from either the Old or New Testaments (New Testament Christian Jews).


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