sotto voce

:wave:

spin

Funny thing about the mainstream Jewish response found in the Talmud is that it is all quite late. Worse still the Palestinian Talmud says nothing at all about Jesus. What we see is a late response apparently from Babylon. It is not a response to Jesus so much as a response to christians, rather odd had there been any continuity of tradition regarding a Palestinian messiah. This is true especially when we consider the response Aqiba got to having indicated Simeon as the messiah: 'Aqiba! Grass will grow on your cheeks and still the Son of David does not come!' (Palestinian Talmud, Ta`anit 4.5). It's here you get silly theories about the Jews having written out mention of Jesus. Input from the Talmuds is no use to us regarding early Jewish reaction to Jesus.

Celsus was a Greek who knew of the Panthera tradition that would eventually be recorded in rabbinical writings.

Nazarenes, burp, which? From which sources?

Ebionites, anything but legendary sources?

Solo

I wonder if people who live in the English-speaking world will ever understand the intra-Jewish squabbles and cat fighting. Here is a re-post of my Jewish family history:

On personal level, the Jewish sense of identity is a quite amazing thing. I am saying this is a descendant of a family of Catholic Jews, who converted and ended up in Bohemia because of the messed up 1781 Toleration Edict of Joseph II. of Austria. The measure was to grant Jews equal status of subjects (as it did to Protestants) but because of a strong anti-Jewish reaction, the situation actually worsened as new quotas were established regulating the number of "tolerated Jews" in the provinces of the Habsburg Empire. A number of Jews converted to Catholicism to avoid hassles and resettlement. So did my father's ancestors who lived near Salzburg. They were resettled into Bohemia anyhow ! They retained their Catholicism, initially to avoid trouble in the new place but eventually became regular Catholics, wearing their hateful attitude to unconverted Jews. My grandmother was packed to the Theresienstadt ghetto by the Nazis whence she wrote to the archdiocese in Prague every week, imploring to be released from the captivity rightfuly designed for the Christ-killers but pray not faithful Catholics like her. Her pleas went unanswered and she died in the ghetto of typhoid fever.

Yet, even though the grandma I never knew hated Jews, she had mostly Jewish friends, talked Czech with hundreds of yiddish words, made traditional šoulet (goose with trimmings) every šábes (sabbath) and would have been very indignant if anyone criticized her adherence to things Jewish. So said my dad. He was caught by the Gestapo in 1944 living under assumed identity to avoid being sent to Auschwitz. He was promptly sent to Auschwitz. When he came back, some people thought he was one of the kapos (the notorious murdering inmate helpers of the SS guards in the camps). My father won a lawsuit against the libellers but the rumour resulting from his pathetic and public anti-semitism, he received next to nothing in damages. Yet my dad too was fond of his Jewish heritage. All the boys in his family were circumcised (a practice which was rationalized as hygienic measure by non-religious Jews and performed as hand surgery by Jewish physicians), and he often brought me books of Jewish legends and showed me the haunts of the old Prague ghetto. Incidentally, both of my dad's character witnesses at his trial were friends who were traditional Jews. They cleared his name so far as it could be done. I remember overhearing my dad and one of them, Felix (also an Auschwitz survivor), who was visiting, shortly after the trial. They were laughing and arguing and calling each other "kike" (židák) and "meshumed" (mešumet).

I believe the diaspora experience has had some constants, in the sort of pressures it exerted on the exiles. Even outside the periodic assaults on the Jews, culminating in the WWII Holocaust, the tension between the Jewish belief in being the chosen people of God and the reality of a technically and culturally dominant civilization which was not Jewish defined their attitudes both, to the outside world, and to each other. For the smarter Jews, the restrictive religious code, the parochial traditions (enforced by the ghetto culture) , and their implied hostility to, and mistrust of, the outside world, were always management issues. For most of them a formula had to be found by which they would remain members of the community (which had access to an international network with often unmatched resources) and at the same time, present themselves to the outside world as people properly 'civilized': reasonable and dependable.

The tension was always particularly felt by the Jewish intellectuals. I see in the likes of Karl Marx and Rudolf Steiner the modern equivalents to Philo and Paul; a cry for Jewish assimilation to a philosophical universalism (or, in the case of Josephus, a political universalism represented by Rome). Did Paul (of the Galatians) go to Jerusalem to convince James' saints of his revelation that the ascended Jesus of the Nazarenes fulfilled the law, and that it was time to modernize the faith ? I'd say, yes, probably.

Jiri

sotto voce

There is no God, but if there is, he's Catholic.

Solo

Or as G.K. Chesterton observed, the Catholic Church is superior to all others, in that it admits every kind of faith, even the respectable one.

Best,
Jiri

sotto voce

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried. As G.K. Chesterton observed.

We may now accept that James was not in charge of anyone at all.

stephan huller

Solo,

1781 ten years before Jacob Frank died. People always underestimate the significance of what was going on in Europe then. Very interesting. What is life but the inheritance of family myths.

James The Least

Christianity starts to emerge out of the darkness in the second century. Where are all of the notable Jewish Christians from 100-150? Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Marcion, Papias, Valentinus, Polycarp of Smyrna, Justin ... no Jews. Instead, Gentiles writing reams of anti-Jewish literature identical to the ideology and theological ideas expressed in the so-called "intra-Jewish" sectarian warfare that supposedly produced the NT.

I don't see much convincing evidence of this "intra-Jewish" religious battle. Instead, I see Gentiles convincing themselves they are Yahweh's chosen few and writing gospels from that perspective. Mark was not a Jew.

outhouse

jesus in judaism failed early on while the real apostles were still alive.


if paul had not spread the movement through the roman empire for gentiles, the sect woul dhave died off quickly.


remember, pauls targets were the god-fearer's. These were romans already worshipping yahweh, that were not really jewish, but worshipped in a synagogue.


No notable jew really would have followed this false messiah.

spin

All you need to do is show that there was a Jesus in Judaism before Paul. Paul doesn't give you one iota of help there. You don't know exactly what anyone believed before Paul had his revelation about Jesus. What sort of messianists were those who Paul met in Jerusalem? If you can answer this without retrojecting from sources of unknowable dating, then you might have something to say. As is, you seem to be passing on religious status quo with no justification.