Interplanner
Well-known member
No, then how do you explain his words here?:
"and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God who created all things" (Eph.3;9).
It was a mystery to Judaism who read the thing 'kata sarka' (veiled) 2 Cor 3. Paul is saying it always was embedded there in the Law and Prophets for anyone in Christ. That's why the grammar of Eph 3:6 puts all its weight on 'in the Gospel.' Judaism would have said in the law, where a Christian says in the Gospel or in Christ. In Christ is how the promises and inheritance of Israel are shared. Not in the ordinary sense. "Behold, I make all things new"--Christ. That is also why there is no interest in the 'ordinary sense' of a restored Israel, and it would have been illegal to support it in 1st century Judea.
There is tangible proof that the first believers at the time of the birth of Christ did not use the OT language about a kingdom and deliverer in a seditious way: Luke was free to use all that language in the songs of Lk 1-2 in a way where Roman admins would hear it, without running risk of an accusation of insurrection or sedition like the zealots. Because it was being fulfilled in Christ, not in weapons and HQs and secret desert campouts. Pilate: "I can't find any true accusations about him (about disrupting Roman rule)". Exactly. The Jerusalem parties that wanted to accuse Christ as just another disruptive Galilean were stumped.
This fact narrowed the reason to God's redemptive plan, because the trial crowd said the most irrational thing: Give us Barrabas; away with Christ. They sided with an insurrectionist. (They may have been threatened by zealots in the city hoping to manipulate the trial crowd; there are not a few studies of that!).