Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 04-08-2007, 03:09 PM

An interesting, if a little unsettling indeed, article in today's New York Times:

Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah'

Quote:

“Messiah” lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for Christmas but for Lent, and that the "Hallelujah" chorus was designed not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most Christians in Handel's day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.

. . .

To create the "Messiah" libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and a friend of Handel's, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible. As a traditionalist Christian, Jennens was deeply troubled by the spread of deism, the notion that God had simply created the cosmos and let it run its course without divine intervention. Christianity then as now rested on the belief that God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. For Jennens and others, deism represented a serious menace.

Deists argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the Messiah. Since Christian writers had habitually considered Jews the most grievous enemies of their religion, they came to suppose that deists obtained anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical scholars. The Anglican bishop Richard Kidder, for example, claimed in his huge 1690s treatise on Jesus as the Messiah that "the deists among us, who would run down our revealed religion, are but underworkmen to the Jews."

The author, Michael Marissen, is a professor of music at Swarthmore who has written on anti-Semitism in Bach's music, and has defended Bach against those charges. (see the article Perspectives on the St. John Passion and the Jews, and the book Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion: With an Annotated Literal Translation of the Libretto (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Toto · 04-27-2007, 04:49 PM

Michael Linton in First Things reacts: Assault on Christendom

Quote:

Ah, that “Defender of the Faith” business. The Protestant Faith, of course. It’s hardly news that the English saw themselves as Israel’s heirs. They were a new chosen people whose election had been confirmed by the “holy wind” that sank the Spanish Armada and the much more recent defeat of the Catholic-backed Scots at the 1746 Battle of Culloden (an event which Handel celebrated with his oratorio Judas Maccabaeus). English Protestants were the new Israelites (look at all those “Salems” they founded in North America).

They were Christians who believed that the Old Testament could only be understood properly when read through the saving work of Christ—and Christians who believed that those who didn’t read the Old Testament that way were endangering their immortal souls with hellfire. (It’s not particularly insightful to notice that this caused tension among the church, the synagogue, and the chattering philosophers.)

...

The many-branched assault on the fabric of Christendom, which appears to go into overdrive around Christmas and Easter, has hardly passed unnoted in First Things. Marissen’s piece on the “Hallelujah Chorus” is simply the New York Times’ Easter-morning sortie. And, as in the case of other raids, the subtext of Marissen’s piece, within the context of the Times’ other writings, is that traditional Christianity is malicious and hateful. . . .

Linton thinks that this is uncalled for Christian-bashing, although Marissen appears to have no such evident biases.

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