As for comprehension, humans have a limit on that. If a person does not understand or seek for a truth, they should pray to whatever god they believe in to give them the capability to understand. Even for neurosurgeons, they have been gifted with divine insight at times when they just couldn’t figure out how to intellectually separate conjoined twins. Even later, they could not explain it, but the witnesses saw what happened.

I understand the individual words in your last paragraph, but I really don’t understand what you are saying. I wish I did, but I just don’t. (Eventually, Pickard figures out how to communicate with the alien. Maybe it’s possible.)

Jean De Arc was educated by the Holy Ghost in 4 years, to such an extent, even though she was illiterate, that she routinely defeated professional knights, trained from birth, in military sparring. That is not a feat you can get by being Mother Teresa.

As someone who has sparred against bigger, stronger, faster opponents, this is not something you can “win” by various human deceptions or cheats. And people back then, didn’t have the concept of “holding back” like martial sports do.

This could only be purely knowledge, wisdom, and skills gained from the Holy Ghost, the spiritual conduit to the godhead, which conferred actual military knowledge and skills unto a human, without the necessary human training period and skill pass down methods.

Even I cannot be certain that I could train a teenaged girl, for 4 years full time, and be assured she can win against male warriors trained from birth for 1-3 decades, nor that she would survive an actual siege and battlefield on the front lines, even while in plate armor. That’s using the full technology and martial wisdom of the 21st century, standing on the shoulders of every previous martial clan lineage’s fruits and labors.

Girls do not have the physical capabilities to match professional warriors in muscle combat, and nutritional accelerated growth using hormones or additives would take more than just 4 years. It would have been impossible in their day, for a woman to have gained access to the teachers and experience necessary for her to stand a chance. Even in today’s world, there’s a limit due to the number of higher level teachers. Some high level martial arts won’t teach women self defense, because they aren’t confident they can accommodate for a woman’s natural weaknesses and disadvantages, psychologically and physically.

For the House of Israel to believe God will save, and has saved their people, yet do not exert the efforts to comprehend or emulate the conduit of the Holy Ghost, that is why I think the House of Israel rebelled against God so many times, and lived to tell about it. All prophets and saints receive their inspiration and their message/orders, from the spiritual conduit to the godhead, what some may call the Holy Ghost.

You don’t mention the details such as lifting the siege of Orleans. Those are important pivots, which can’t be understood by merely glancing at the timeline. Military strategy and tactics is not obtained nor learned, by glancing at the results of battles or looking at the political timeline containing battle marks.

The equivalent would be whether Washington died or lived at Long Island. Or when the French fleet lifted the blockade of the colonial ports, or threatened the British fleet to the point where the British decided to leave or retreat, no longer having a monopoly on sea logistics.

There was just no way that the Jews, without unity, training, discipline, and arms could have beaten the Romans.

You wrote of why Jews back then didn’t accept Jesus as the promised Messiah by Moses. I’m writing in the same vein, by describing what the Jews back then believed in. And they believed under God’s power and authority, they would be capable of throwing off Roman shackles, declaring independence, or beating the barbarians off.

The pivot point is more back then, not right now. Although now is also a pivoting point.

Our concept is that the messiah BRINGS redemption; as I understand it, your concept is that the messiah LEADS to redemption.

It’s because of stories like Moses praying to God and manna falling from the heavens, feeding the people. The part of the Jewish people, the ones who got destroyed vs the Christians who followed the word of Christ to leave and not go back if they heard there was another messiah alive once more (because that messiah would be false ones), believed too much in reliance on God’s power. Similar to the Quakers, except in reverse, where war like tendencies are accelerated whereas the Quakers accelerate pacifist tendencies instead.

Human nature only gets worse when people become overly reliant on God as a crutch and on messiahs as some kind of automatic welfare dispenser. If divine level entities exist, surely they would know this about humanity by now. That is why they needed a mortal avatar, to lead humans, using a human. Otherwise humans start thinking God will provide everything, and stop working to feed themselves due to the manna falling from heaven supposedly.

The difference you highlighted is perhaps a good reason why many Jewish branches of the Diaspora, punished for their rebellion against God by being scattered to the four corners of the Earth and treated with hostility by the gentiles, decided to adopt Marxism and socialism. If they cannot wait for the kingdom of heaven, then instituting a government where people are equal and are given welfare, feels similar to the time of Moses when manna fell from the sky to feed the people of Moses, when they had left Egypt without livestock and thus no food while in the desert.

Maybe looting the Temple treasury wasn’t bad enough to merit a revolt, but how about Caligula’s erection of a statue of himself as a god in the Temple? Or Hadrian’s ban on circumcision and other Jewish practices? Does giving in lead to the Golden Age in Andalusia or the Holocaust? I don’t know.

BTW, I don’t see Joan of Arc as a great example of what you can accomplish with a spiritual leader, any more than Bar Kochba was. Joan was burnt at the stake and the Hundred Years War lasted another 22 years and ended because of divisions between the English and the Burgundians and a weak English king.

We Jews are a very simple, practical people. Our concept of the messiah and Christians are vastly different. It’s axiomatic to us, as is was to the Prophets, than when the messiah comes, big, easily noticed things happen: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not threaten nation, neither shall they learn of war any more. Each man shall sit under his own vine and his own fig tree, and none shall make him afraid.” Micah 4:3-4.

Our concept is that the messiah BRINGS redemption; as I understand it, your concept is that the messiah LEADS to redemption.

Not saying that one view is better, they’re just different. Mine is good for me, yours is good for you. I don’t denigrate your understanding, don’t denigrate mine.

“For let all the peoples walk each one in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Eternal our God for ever and ever.” Micah 4:5.

Peace, brother!

The Marines would be of little virtue if their liege lord wasn’t the United States Constitution and its civilian authorities.

Jews fighting wars by rebelling against their own god, is about equal to the worth of a Marine fighting for the Nazis against the US. It’s really pointless in the end.

If they had direct revelation and the holy ghost, they could have. Look at Jean De Arc.

But extremely high level military strategy requires figuring out the Roman’s weakness, which wasn’t their military at the time. To take down Rome or to declare independence from Rome, one must subvert them, a march through the institutions. Which the Christians eventually did, although not as originally intended.

The proof of whether the Jewish clan leaders chose correctly, can be seen in their military results, as an appeal to the Lord/God of Hosts.

This is a little bit different than using logic to start from a historical figure such as Jesus of Nazareth and go through the records, trying to strain out what is true or false. I prefer to work backwards from the end result when there is a lack of corroborating primary sources: reverse engineering.

So that would suggest that accommodation would have been the better option. On the other hand, there were things that the Romans did that the Jews just could not tolerate: looting the Temple treasury being the prime example.

That’s not exactly a justification for war, since the Zealots, at least, were killing pro Roman Jewish clan leaders at the same time as they were losing the rebellion in 70 AD. So if the issue was the Temple, then the Temple is empty of the word of God. There was no point protecting that kind of place, when doing so would go against the House of Israel’s plan created by their God. By elevating a place, such as the temple, to a higher place than God’s commands to the House of Israel, the Jews aren’t paying attention to the letter or spirit of the law of Moses. Jesus chased out corrupt money lenders, but he did not start a war of extermination, or hire mobs to lynch people, as the US pro slave factions did in 1830. They could have easily done so, in 10 AD. If people think they can consecrate a holy place like the temple by killing infidels and starting a holy war of annihilation, perhaps they need to look into the Aztec’s blood magic, as they would be better for them. However, the whole point of Moses was to get people away from Egyptian Bhaal and idol gods, which included human sacrifice.

The Jews should have obeyed their rightful authority. It’s pretty easy to figure out if you are following your liege lord or rebelling against him, if the liege lord’s designed subordinates are giving you the message. The source of the House of Israel’s protection is the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. It’s not Maccabe, it’s not false prophets, it’s not King David or a warrior king that can holy war the Romans to death. Whether one looks at it from the outside in or from the inside out, the outcome is the same.

The Romans, in the end, were a blip on the radar historically. Rome fell far sooner than the Jewish exile of 2000 years. For divine level entities that plan the creation of solar systems within virtual days, where their virtual days are equivalent to thousands of human years orbiting this sun, it’s not something primitive humans back then could have accepted as true without an authority telling them. But they could obey, even if they didn’t know what the future plans were. The Jewish culture of before 70 AD, was almost totally destroyed. What were left, is in the Dead Sea scrolls. The Jews that became Christians, spread out further and ended up first persecuted by the Romans since Christian=Judaism to them, and then ended up converting the Roman Emperor.

If Judaism wished for proof of the power of god to defeat the Romans, they would have needed to wait a few centuries to see what that power is really about. To win a war, without ever fighting an enemy. That is one of the highest skills mentioned in Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

So that would suggest that accommodation would have been the better option. On the other hand, there were things that the Romans did that the Jews just could not tolerate: looting the Temple treasury being the prime example.

“Better to die on your feet that live on your knees?” I don’t know.

All of that being said, the Jews did what Marines are supposed to do: “Improvise, adapt, overcome!” As a result, we have rabbinic Judaism, which has long outlasted the Roman Empire. Go figure!

“…Jews didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah because things didn’t get better, as they are supposed to, they got worse, i.e., the Jewish Wars of 67 and 135 CE….”

To say that the Jews didn’t accept Jesus is not 100% correct. Many did accept Jesus, and were leaders of the Christian church until the destruction of Jerusalem. After the destruction of Jerusalem the remaining Jews lost much of their influence in the church.

Form a purely ethnocentric standpoint perhaps the argument that Jesus didn’t make things better could work. Undoubtedly, if Jesus had been a warrior like the Maccabees the remaining Jews would have followed him but of course that would have been counterproductive to Jesus’ mission which was a spiritual mission to change hearts and minds. Unfortunately the Maccabees success encouraged a militarism and a penchant for violence in Israel which was not very appealing.

The funny thing about Europe and Westerners is that they have lacked a religious foundation for so long, that even saying they are missing it, is missing an accurate description of the religious hierarchy.

This is a description of the Southern Baptist convention, an alliance or confederacy of churches.

As such, each church is nearly sovereign, in terms of autonomy.