Chaucer

And that is simply hate speech.

spamandham

Huh? How is that 'hate speech'?

Chaucer

By propagating the just plain weird assertion that the NT is not Judaic literature(!), it props up the hateful traditions that have both separated Jesus from his very apparent Jewish background and correspondingly demonized all Jews. It may not be intended as hate speech, but that is its practical effect.

Sincerely,

Chaucer

bacht

I guess it depends on how you define "Judaic". In the first century this would at least include the Torah, and deference to the temple cult in Jerusalem. The NT wants us to think that Christianity originated in Galilee or Judea, but it's not clear that this was so.

What were ordinary gentiles supposed to think about the Jews? Not only had they invited the full military wrath of Rome against the Jewish homeland, but diaspora Jews caused disturbances outside Palestine also. Both Jews and Christians refused to offer sacrifices to the emperor, which in those times was akin to treason. The average Spaniard or Ionian could be forgiven for thinking the Jews were fools.

show_no_mercy

There's obviously "Jewishness" in the NT, but having a Jew walking aroung claiming that the Psalms are prophetic, claiming to be the literal son of god, or claiming to be god himself is most definitely not Jewish. The NT is just as pagan/Hellenistic as it is Jewish.

Toto

And this is the sort of inflammatory rhetoric that does not lead to a fruitful discussion.

Are you going to label the Gospels "hate speech" because of their anti-Semitic passages - at least passages that were interpreted as anti-Semitic by centuries of Christian readers?

Emphasizing Jesus' Jewish roots is a reaction to this history, and its culmination in pogroms and the Holocaust, so it is a healthy reaction. But you are trying to turn it into the new orthodoxy that cannot be challenged.

No Robots

The Jewish reclamation of Christ starts long before the Holocaust, notably with Constantin Brunner's 1893 "Rede der Juden: Wir wollen ihn zurück!" ["Speech of the Jews: We want him back!"], which is available online in full text (pp. 428-509) and in selections. Non-Jewish acceptance of the basic thesis of pre-Holocaust Jewish writers like Brunner, Klausner and Baeck is perhaps due to a feeling of guilt. However, resistance to the idea that Christ and the New Testament are of wholly Jewish origin is still a cause of concern for people like Shmuley Boteach and Howard Jacobson.

Chaucer

I'm certainly going to label John as that. Not only does it have no relationship whatsoever to the Synoptics and Thomas, suggesting a uniformly perverted and overtly anti-historical point of view that some dogmatically accuse other Gospels of showing throughout with no exceptions <roll eyes>, but its entire brand of theology is aimed solely at supplanting Judaism, in fact destroying it. Some may view that as a good thing. But in addition, John proactively preaches hatred of the Jews as people.

Old ideas are still old ideas. What was used to gin up genocide once can be used to gin up genocide again.

Chaucer

No Robots

Brunner writes that John and other Jews "had become such fervent Christians in their enthusiasm for the new knowledge that they had to demonstrate a commensurate hatred for the other Jews and their Judaism" (Our Christ, p. 441).

Chaucer

All one can say is, Sad. Not surprising, though, in the light of the writer of John's evident boredom with bothering to put down anything remotely resembling the kind of information occasionally provided in the less fanciful sequences of the Synoptics and Thomas. The writer of John's sole interest seems to be in getting back at others, not the split interests in providing both propaganda and some degree of historical biography as in the checkered Synoptics and Thomas.

Chaucer