Nope, he says the ones who lie are not Jews. He's not speaking of the ethnic Jews (identified by Ignatius as I just linked you) who let the Gentiles call themselves Jews even when they weren't circumcised.
We can infer from Jesus's words that he identifies seven enemy works: the apostolate of satan (2:2), the synagoguing of satan (2:9, 3:9), the throne of satan (2:13), the dwelling of satan (2:13), the depths of satan (2:24), the livings of satan (3:1), and the riches of satan (3:17). Don't limit your view of the enemy when Jesus says otherwise!
God means the actual jews from the OT are no more. They’ve been replaced by imposters who say they are jews but are not. These replacements are the Synagogue of Satan, like Netanyahu.
Ignatius
As I said earlier, you’re using non-Scripture to
come to Scripture-based conclusions. Be careful.
That's a whole lot to infer from an offhand verse in 96 AD. There is a continuous Judahite people from the first century to today and there is no time at which the whole people have been replaced, that's just history. There is no church teaching that the Judahites are no more, or that the word Jew (French "Ju" ca. 900s) is any different from an elision of the word Judahite (Latin "Judaeus" at the same time). And Ignatius in 108 AD says the Gentiles who spoke so highly of Judaism were surprised that his Spirit-inspired teaching was so direct in countering them, which suggests they really did bow at his feet in Philadelphia, just as Jesus said. So I'm using the guy who watched the Scriptures be written, but you seem to be using some racist ca. 1900. Be careful.
It’s not “offhand” if it’s in the Bible. Written by God through John, Revelations 2 and 3 are God’s message to the Christian churches. How can you say something like that but put strong emphasis on Ignatius’ non-Scripture notes?
96AD
That’s right, which is after the jews and Romans killed Christ.
The Book of Revelations is divided into a series of visions, some of which are partly or fully veiled, others are comparatively clear in their teachings. Chapters 2 and 3 (KJV) cover vision 1 which is God’s message to the seven churches. Since this is after Christ has been killed, he provides a warning to Christians about jews in chapter 2 when speaking to the Church of Smyrna (Rev. 2:9) and in chapter 3 (Rev. 3:9) to the church of Philadelphia.
There is a continuous Judahite people from the first century to today
Is it accurate? And what about before that? “Jews” are first mentioned in the Bible well before the first century AD, in 2 Kings 16:6. Most “jews” in Israel today have European descent, like from the Ashkenazi lineage. How does that happen?
So I'm using the guy who watched the Scriptures be written, but you seem to be using some racist ca. 1900.
I’m using God’s Word and you’re not. You’re drawing conclusions from supplemental writings. You do realize the Bible is a “racist” book, right?
Oh, and one more thing, look around you and the state of affairs today. Look how “jews” are behaving and what they’re doing to Christians in Palestine, the rightful Semite owners of the land. Does that line up with my interpretation or yours? Do you support their behavior or do you condemn it?
Not really, you're taking two verses out of context and adding much context that assumes many other things not in the Bible. I cited the whole context, where (like other patters of sevens) there are seven works in various verses identified either as being explicitly of satan or as not being what they claim to be (or, in the case of the synagogue, both). That indicates the synagogue doesn't operate alone. Many things in the Bible are "offhand" in the sense of incidental to more important points; the important point of Rev. 2-3 is the church itself, with the various infiltrators being only a subtheme, and the synagogue being one of seven branches of a fork of that subtheme.
The reason Ignatius is important is that it's history and it gives the background of several of the same seven churches Jesus spoke to (Ignatius is believed to be one of the children Jesus blessed). When I read the Scriptures for many years and came to Rev. 2-3, I assumed that characters like Antipas and Jezebel were actual 1st-century people, as well as the synagogue of satan (it was pointed out to me that, historically, one of the best candidates for a "synagogue" member was the young Gentile Onkelos, who much later got an actual circumcision). We routinely use history and geography to tell us about other people and places in the Bible, and geography tells us that John literally traveled to these seven churches in Asia Minor with seven copies of the inspired text.
But it was clear from the context of 1 and 4-22 that Rev. 2-3 could be read as more than just encouragement to individual churches, as all the churches in the world can learn from the others; this is consistent with all apocalyptic and all parables. Obviously any woman who meets the qualifications of Jezebel, including the original Jezebel of Ahab, could metaphorically be called Jezebel; but in each case the metaphor is only as good as the fit to the text. One reading that was recognized recently is that the seven churches in order represent different phases of the universal church over its first 2,000 years, so that the synagogue of satan in Smyrna would refer to those who claimed to be Christians but weren't (because they got baptized without cautious heart inspection, which happened a lot in the 4th century), and the synagogue of satan in Philadelphia would refer to the same phenomenon later (as many in the 18th and 19th centuries claimed to be church members but ceased believing in the creeds, leading to the Laodicean or lukewarm church). Because the sequential reading of Revelation is well established among eschatologies, that would be a valid application of the meaning of synagogue of satan.
Now the problem is that we had a late (antibiblical) movement of judging that the Jews as a whole were all incapable of salvation and then looking for this in the text. The NT says both that all the early church members were Jews (so often that it would be burdensome for me to weigh you down with the list), and that "the Jews" were big persecutors of the church: it gives both types of characters to the same people-group, so that's the actual context we should be using. Similarly Deut. 28 gives both blessings and cursings to the same Israelite people, to be carried out at different times depending on whether the nation is generally behaving or misbehaving. But certain people who were fully separated from the Near East culture of the OT and all the references to it in the NT (too many to list, I have Lightfoot's four volumes on all those references) got the idea that we should only listen to the negative descriptions of the Jews, and then when they come to Rev. 2-3 they see the word synagogue and assume it's about Jews even though Jesus explicitly says they are not Jews.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, because persecution against Jews was very strong, some Ashkenazi and Karaite Jews proposed (on different grounds for each subtribe) that there was enough intermixing from Khazaria and other sources that local groups should be exempted from persecution against Jews in that era, because they could be technically excepted from being fullblood Jews. (Very similar to Jews calling themselves white today.) Unfortunately this backfired and gave rise to even worse antisemitism, when various critics started arguing that no Ashkenazi should be counted as descendants of Jews, even though they had fully converted, been circumcised, intermarried, and been absorbed into the Jewish people at large. And now this is said of all Jews (and it happened in part originally because of the Jewish equivocation I mentioned).
But by the Golden Rule a people has the right to identify itself. If no outsider can tell Americans that they're not American but that other people are true immigrant Americans, then no outsider can tell Jews that they're not Jews but that other people are true spiritual Jews. (We do have a right to the title "spiritual Jews", but not to reject ethnic Jews.) The Jewish people have continually maintained their identity since 1797 BC, where I put the birth of Judah in Genesis. When they were constituted under Moses they already included a mixed multitude of Egyptians, Ex. 12:38, but all were accepted as Israelite (and their children eventually adopted as Judahites, a subset of Israelites) because all were circumcised, naturalized, law-abiding citizens. Throughout the Bible from Genesis on, the household of Judah (Yehudah) is a notable subset of Israel, and as you note in 2 Kings it is first treated as an ethnonym (Yehudi) but it was a household since the 18th century BC. Because of the divided kingdom and the return and perpetuity of the Judah kingdom, other tribes of Israel were incorporated into the tribe of Judah such that Judah became in large part a synonym of Israel. There's so much OT and NT on that that there's no doubt of the continuity of the people and the purity of Jesus's Jewish genealogy.
Now when you ask about the history after, obviously I can't use Scripture except prophetically. However, briefly, I've pointed out here that the people were called Judaeus in Latin for as long as Latin was circulating, and in the 900s the French shortened this to "Ju" in the same way many other words are elided to their first syllables. And there were very many variant spellings of these two forms as long as language was not standard and I was not distinguished from J except by ligature. But the word "Ju" is older than the disappearance of Khazarians into the Jewish people, which was after c. 1000 and wasn't in France. The migration of the same Jewish people around Asia, Europe, and Africa is well-known and there's not a real doubt that the Ashkenazi are descended from Judahites; many of them have full genealogies, some back to Levi and Judah themselves.
But I found that some people here do doubt the claim and so I asked about it. I knew an Ashkenazi Jew who pointed out that black African Jews have a better genealogical record than Ashkenazi do; so the intermixing is admitted but it doesn't remove Jewish identity. That was forthright of him to discuss the facts; but the people here don't generally put forward facts on their theory, they rehearse old (unenlightened) canards that at some point the Jewish people ceased to be and others completely took over their name. But there is no such point in history when this could have happened. So I ask and ask, and nobody can give me a coherent theory, they can only give the conclusion that the Jews must not be what they and the Bible says they are. Jesus says there are people who call themselves Jews (which was recognized as meaning circumcised) but they weren't; he also says, same context, there are people who call themselves apostles (which was recognized as meaning anointed by laying on of hands) but they weren't. Similar problem. It's not about people who have valid Jewishness or valid apostleship, it's about liars. It's rather silly to say this of someone whose family goes back Jewish for thousands of years, just as it would be silly to call someone an apostle of satan whose chain of succession goes back apostolic for thousands of years. That just isn't what Jesus meant. If you wanted to twist the metaphor almost entirely out of proportion and say that some modern Jews claim to be white but they're not, and that makes them a synagogue of satan, I would reply it's such a poor eisegesis that it shouldn't be used: you actually mean a "whiteness of satan" instead, namely a lying whiteness. So, compared to the actual exegesis of Scripture, the racists who added Rev. 2-3 to their list of antisemitic Scriptures were just overreaching.
Now I do call out racism, or more accurately collectivism, because the Bible is not racist. It is valid to speak about demographics of races, which the Bible does a lot (and it teaches how to recognize the many national blessings and cursings around the world). But racism is when you prejudge individuals based on demographics instead of just considering them likelier to certain activity because of their character. And the Bible clearly rejects that consistently, starting with the plea of Abraham (the grandfather of Israel) that we never judge the innocent with the guilty, Gen. 18:23. When you lowercase "jew" (against dictionary usage, knowing in particular that the verb "jew" is highly offensive), you're rejecting what people call themselves (we don't get to argue that others lowercased "white" first and that makes it right for us to reply in kind), and that's the mild start of collectivism. When you give the context of the Jews (contributing) and the Romans killing Christ, you're building on it by not noting the myriads of Torah-observant Jews, not just in Jerusalem (Acts 21:20) but around the Roman world, who believed in Christ; you're not noting that the first 5,000 Christians were Jews from around the world, and that many hundreds of them were the same crowd that called for Jesus's death (Acts 3-4). Those are pretty salient limits to the thought "the Jews killed Christ"! When you finally (AI-assisted?) say Rev. 2-3 is about Jews when Jesus says it's not about Jews, you contradict the Lord flatly and judge a whole people as guilty when he's only speaking of those (Gentiles) who are knowingly guilty of lying; it's not a passage about Jews at all, according to its plain reading as well as any levels deeper than the surface. So, no, we don't get to be racist. You are free to believe what you want, but if you contradict Jesus you have him to deal with and not me.
Nope, he says the ones who lie are not Jews. He's not speaking of the ethnic Jews (identified by Ignatius as I just linked you) who let the Gentiles call themselves Jews even when they weren't circumcised.
We can infer from Jesus's words that he identifies seven enemy works: the apostolate of satan (2:2), the synagoguing of satan (2:9, 3:9), the throne of satan (2:13), the dwelling of satan (2:13), the depths of satan (2:24), the livings of satan (3:1), and the riches of satan (3:17). Don't limit your view of the enemy when Jesus says otherwise!
God means the actual jews from the OT are no more. They’ve been replaced by imposters who say they are jews but are not. These replacements are the Synagogue of Satan, like Netanyahu.
As I said earlier, you’re using non-Scripture to come to Scripture-based conclusions. Be careful.
That's a whole lot to infer from an offhand verse in 96 AD. There is a continuous Judahite people from the first century to today and there is no time at which the whole people have been replaced, that's just history. There is no church teaching that the Judahites are no more, or that the word Jew (French "Ju" ca. 900s) is any different from an elision of the word Judahite (Latin "Judaeus" at the same time). And Ignatius in 108 AD says the Gentiles who spoke so highly of Judaism were surprised that his Spirit-inspired teaching was so direct in countering them, which suggests they really did bow at his feet in Philadelphia, just as Jesus said. So I'm using the guy who watched the Scriptures be written, but you seem to be using some racist ca. 1900. Be careful.
It’s not “offhand” if it’s in the Bible. Written by God through John, Revelations 2 and 3 are God’s message to the Christian churches. How can you say something like that but put strong emphasis on Ignatius’ non-Scripture notes?
That’s right, which is after the jews and Romans killed Christ.
The Book of Revelations is divided into a series of visions, some of which are partly or fully veiled, others are comparatively clear in their teachings. Chapters 2 and 3 (KJV) cover vision 1 which is God’s message to the seven churches. Since this is after Christ has been killed, he provides a warning to Christians about jews in chapter 2 when speaking to the Church of Smyrna (Rev. 2:9) and in chapter 3 (Rev. 3:9) to the church of Philadelphia.
Is it accurate? And what about before that? “Jews” are first mentioned in the Bible well before the first century AD, in 2 Kings 16:6. Most “jews” in Israel today have European descent, like from the Ashkenazi lineage. How does that happen?
I’m using God’s Word and you’re not. You’re drawing conclusions from supplemental writings. You do realize the Bible is a “racist” book, right?
Oh, and one more thing, look around you and the state of affairs today. Look how “jews” are behaving and what they’re doing to Christians in Palestine, the rightful Semite owners of the land. Does that line up with my interpretation or yours? Do you support their behavior or do you condemn it?
Not really, you're taking two verses out of context and adding much context that assumes many other things not in the Bible. I cited the whole context, where (like other patters of sevens) there are seven works in various verses identified either as being explicitly of satan or as not being what they claim to be (or, in the case of the synagogue, both). That indicates the synagogue doesn't operate alone. Many things in the Bible are "offhand" in the sense of incidental to more important points; the important point of Rev. 2-3 is the church itself, with the various infiltrators being only a subtheme, and the synagogue being one of seven branches of a fork of that subtheme.
The reason Ignatius is important is that it's history and it gives the background of several of the same seven churches Jesus spoke to (Ignatius is believed to be one of the children Jesus blessed). When I read the Scriptures for many years and came to Rev. 2-3, I assumed that characters like Antipas and Jezebel were actual 1st-century people, as well as the synagogue of satan (it was pointed out to me that, historically, one of the best candidates for a "synagogue" member was the young Gentile Onkelos, who much later got an actual circumcision). We routinely use history and geography to tell us about other people and places in the Bible, and geography tells us that John literally traveled to these seven churches in Asia Minor with seven copies of the inspired text.
But it was clear from the context of 1 and 4-22 that Rev. 2-3 could be read as more than just encouragement to individual churches, as all the churches in the world can learn from the others; this is consistent with all apocalyptic and all parables. Obviously any woman who meets the qualifications of Jezebel, including the original Jezebel of Ahab, could metaphorically be called Jezebel; but in each case the metaphor is only as good as the fit to the text. One reading that was recognized recently is that the seven churches in order represent different phases of the universal church over its first 2,000 years, so that the synagogue of satan in Smyrna would refer to those who claimed to be Christians but weren't (because they got baptized without cautious heart inspection, which happened a lot in the 4th century), and the synagogue of satan in Philadelphia would refer to the same phenomenon later (as many in the 18th and 19th centuries claimed to be church members but ceased believing in the creeds, leading to the Laodicean or lukewarm church). Because the sequential reading of Revelation is well established among eschatologies, that would be a valid application of the meaning of synagogue of satan.
Now the problem is that we had a late (antibiblical) movement of judging that the Jews as a whole were all incapable of salvation and then looking for this in the text. The NT says both that all the early church members were Jews (so often that it would be burdensome for me to weigh you down with the list), and that "the Jews" were big persecutors of the church: it gives both types of characters to the same people-group, so that's the actual context we should be using. Similarly Deut. 28 gives both blessings and cursings to the same Israelite people, to be carried out at different times depending on whether the nation is generally behaving or misbehaving. But certain people who were fully separated from the Near East culture of the OT and all the references to it in the NT (too many to list, I have Lightfoot's four volumes on all those references) got the idea that we should only listen to the negative descriptions of the Jews, and then when they come to Rev. 2-3 they see the word synagogue and assume it's about Jews even though Jesus explicitly says they are not Jews.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, because persecution against Jews was very strong, some Ashkenazi and Karaite Jews proposed (on different grounds for each subtribe) that there was enough intermixing from Khazaria and other sources that local groups should be exempted from persecution against Jews in that era, because they could be technically excepted from being fullblood Jews. (Very similar to Jews calling themselves white today.) Unfortunately this backfired and gave rise to even worse antisemitism, when various critics started arguing that no Ashkenazi should be counted as descendants of Jews, even though they had fully converted, been circumcised, intermarried, and been absorbed into the Jewish people at large. And now this is said of all Jews (and it happened in part originally because of the Jewish equivocation I mentioned).
But by the Golden Rule a people has the right to identify itself. If no outsider can tell Americans that they're not American but that other people are true immigrant Americans, then no outsider can tell Jews that they're not Jews but that other people are true spiritual Jews. (We do have a right to the title "spiritual Jews", but not to reject ethnic Jews.) The Jewish people have continually maintained their identity since 1797 BC, where I put the birth of Judah in Genesis. When they were constituted under Moses they already included a mixed multitude of Egyptians, Ex. 12:38, but all were accepted as Israelite (and their children eventually adopted as Judahites, a subset of Israelites) because all were circumcised, naturalized, law-abiding citizens. Throughout the Bible from Genesis on, the household of Judah (Yehudah) is a notable subset of Israel, and as you note in 2 Kings it is first treated as an ethnonym (Yehudi) but it was a household since the 18th century BC. Because of the divided kingdom and the return and perpetuity of the Judah kingdom, other tribes of Israel were incorporated into the tribe of Judah such that Judah became in large part a synonym of Israel. There's so much OT and NT on that that there's no doubt of the continuity of the people and the purity of Jesus's Jewish genealogy.
Now when you ask about the history after, obviously I can't use Scripture except prophetically. However, briefly, I've pointed out here that the people were called Judaeus in Latin for as long as Latin was circulating, and in the 900s the French shortened this to "Ju" in the same way many other words are elided to their first syllables. And there were very many variant spellings of these two forms as long as language was not standard and I was not distinguished from J except by ligature. But the word "Ju" is older than the disappearance of Khazarians into the Jewish people, which was after c. 1000 and wasn't in France. The migration of the same Jewish people around Asia, Europe, and Africa is well-known and there's not a real doubt that the Ashkenazi are descended from Judahites; many of them have full genealogies, some back to Levi and Judah themselves.
But I found that some people here do doubt the claim and so I asked about it. I knew an Ashkenazi Jew who pointed out that black African Jews have a better genealogical record than Ashkenazi do; so the intermixing is admitted but it doesn't remove Jewish identity. That was forthright of him to discuss the facts; but the people here don't generally put forward facts on their theory, they rehearse old (unenlightened) canards that at some point the Jewish people ceased to be and others completely took over their name. But there is no such point in history when this could have happened. So I ask and ask, and nobody can give me a coherent theory, they can only give the conclusion that the Jews must not be what they and the Bible says they are. Jesus says there are people who call themselves Jews (which was recognized as meaning circumcised) but they weren't; he also says, same context, there are people who call themselves apostles (which was recognized as meaning anointed by laying on of hands) but they weren't. Similar problem. It's not about people who have valid Jewishness or valid apostleship, it's about liars. It's rather silly to say this of someone whose family goes back Jewish for thousands of years, just as it would be silly to call someone an apostle of satan whose chain of succession goes back apostolic for thousands of years. That just isn't what Jesus meant. If you wanted to twist the metaphor almost entirely out of proportion and say that some modern Jews claim to be white but they're not, and that makes them a synagogue of satan, I would reply it's such a poor eisegesis that it shouldn't be used: you actually mean a "whiteness of satan" instead, namely a lying whiteness. So, compared to the actual exegesis of Scripture, the racists who added Rev. 2-3 to their list of antisemitic Scriptures were just overreaching.
Now I do call out racism, or more accurately collectivism, because the Bible is not racist. It is valid to speak about demographics of races, which the Bible does a lot (and it teaches how to recognize the many national blessings and cursings around the world). But racism is when you prejudge individuals based on demographics instead of just considering them likelier to certain activity because of their character. And the Bible clearly rejects that consistently, starting with the plea of Abraham (the grandfather of Israel) that we never judge the innocent with the guilty, Gen. 18:23. When you lowercase "jew" (against dictionary usage, knowing in particular that the verb "jew" is highly offensive), you're rejecting what people call themselves (we don't get to argue that others lowercased "white" first and that makes it right for us to reply in kind), and that's the mild start of collectivism. When you give the context of the Jews (contributing) and the Romans killing Christ, you're building on it by not noting the myriads of Torah-observant Jews, not just in Jerusalem (Acts 21:20) but around the Roman world, who believed in Christ; you're not noting that the first 5,000 Christians were Jews from around the world, and that many hundreds of them were the same crowd that called for Jesus's death (Acts 3-4). Those are pretty salient limits to the thought "the Jews killed Christ"! When you finally (AI-assisted?) say Rev. 2-3 is about Jews when Jesus says it's not about Jews, you contradict the Lord flatly and judge a whole people as guilty when he's only speaking of those (Gentiles) who are knowingly guilty of lying; it's not a passage about Jews at all, according to its plain reading as well as any levels deeper than the surface. So, no, we don't get to be racist. You are free to believe what you want, but if you contradict Jesus you have him to deal with and not me.