Talk:Mara bar Serapion on Jesus

message: The thing that strikes me with the possible identification of the Jewish King with Jesus is the 'new law' that is mentioned. It suggests to me the "command" or "law" or Jesus is most famous for: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:31 - KJV). More or less the same idea is presented in John 13:34 (KJV): "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." I suppose it could also refer to the New_Covenant. It doesn't prove anything about who Mara bar Serapion was referring to, but it does seem to fit anyways.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by TrnsltLife (talk • contribs) 08:24, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  'New Law' 

message: This article is noticeably biased. A casual reading would see the letter as evidence for the historical Christ, when it is clearly not. The method employed has been quite unscholarly in that it attempts to interpret the facts to fit a wished-for conclusion. I cannot see how "their wise king" can be anything other than ambiguous.
It is clear that many would very much like Mara bar Serapion to be of a definite religion, preferably Christian, and almost all have pre-supposed that the wise king of the Jews is Jesus for which there is a lack of evidence. I quote an earlier comment in this “Talk section”: 
“On the other hand, he also is quoted as stating that God (capital letter - obviously a monotheistic usage)”
Hebrew does not have capital letters. Therefore it is far from obvious, in fact it is erroneous. Whoever translated and wrote “God” in English made the similar unwarranted assumption that Mara bar Serapion was talking about Yahweh: it could have been any local god.
In reading the complete letter, I was struck by 
1.	the fact that the other two people referred to are Socrates (470/469 BC – 399 BC) and Pythagoras (c. 570 BC – c. 495 BC). It is clear that Mara bar Serapion, an educated man: he also mentions Darius, Polycrates, Achilles, Agamemnon, Priam and Archimedes (all from the then distant past) as well as the god Palamedes. Mara bar Serapion is willing to delve deep into history that he has studied to find examples. 
2.	Many Biblical kings have been killed by the Jews, and if we wish to follow Biblical sources, Christ was condemned by the Jews but killed by the Romans.
3.	The linking of the Destruction of the Temple - Siege of Jerusalem, 70CE and the Crucifixion, c.35 CE is a bit of a stretch.  
4.	As Mara bar Serapion refers to the Jews in the third person, it is probably that he is not Jewish, so his idea of a “wise king” may not be a Jew’s idea of a wise king, rather someone who espoused ideas that Mara bar Serapion approved of.
5.	Mara bar Serapion writes: "What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king?... He lived on in the teaching which he had given." Were Mara bar Serapion a Christian, he would have known the answer to the question, and would have mentioned, in the second part, the Resurrection.
6.	I suspect the the date of the letter to be later rather than earlier: “the Jews, brought to desolation and expelled from their kingdom, are driven away into every land.” There were two Exiles and many other wars but, even assuming that Mara bar Serapion, who knows history, is referring to the destruction of the Temple in 70CE, it is clear that much time has passed since then. The Jews are scattered and he knows they are in many other lands. He is referring to something that happened a good while earlier.
GaryGMason (talk) 01:40, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The point of this is what the sources say about the topic.  It is because of the idea that he may be talking about Jesus that has attracted so much interest in this document.  This is why this article is written this way.  The language used is Syriac language not Hebrew, but the same lack of capitals applies, but that does not matter as it is the usage in English that is relevant. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:43, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  On Bias in the Article.