Didymus

Who is trying to appropriate what?

If there's an act of cultural appropriation in the mix, it's gentile Christianity's successful effort to appropriate the Torah for its own purposes. But, as Lewis Black shouts, "It's not your book!"

Didymus

No Robots

The overall consensus among Jewish scholars is that Christ is a Jew.


Here's what Leo Baeck wrote:

This man could have developed as he came to be only on the soil of Judaism; and only on this soil, too, could he find his disciples and followers as they were. Here alone, in this Jewish sphere, in this Jewish atmosphere of trust and longing, could this man live his life and meet his death—a Jew among Jews. Jewish history and Jewish reflection may not pass him by nor ignore him. Since he was, no time has been without him; nor has there been a time which was not challenged by the epoch that would consider him its starting point.
When this old tradition confronts us in this manner, then the Gospel, which was originally something Jewish, becomes a book—and certainly not a minor work—within Jewish literature. This is not because, or not only because, it contains sentences which also appear in the same or a similar form in the Jewish works of that time. Nor is it such—in fact, it is even less so—because the Hebrew or Aramaic breaks again and again through the word forms and sentence formations of the Greek translation. Rather it is a Jewish book because—by all means and entirely because—the pure air of which it is full and which it breathes is that of the Holy Scriptures; because a Jewish spirit, and none other, lives in it; because Jewish faith and Jewish hope, Jewish suffering and Jewish distress, Jewish knowledge and Jewish expectations, and these alone, resound through it—a Jewish book in the midst of Jewish books. Judaism may not pass it by, nor mistake it, nor wish to give up all claims here. Here, too, Judaism should comprehend and take note of what is its own.

"The Gospel as a document of history". In Judaism and Christianity / Leo Baeck. Philadelphia : Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958. p. 101-102.

Lubavitch rabbi Shmuley Boteach says, "I think it's time to take back Jesus from the anti-Semitic Christians. He's one of us."

Mythicism is the last-ditch attempt to deny the wholly Judaic nature of Christ and the New Testament.

Didymus

Well, he was certainly portrayed as one. This does not exactly come as news, and isn't being disputed. I'd still like to know what culture it is that mythicists are trying to "appropriate."

That in itself is a myth. You're conjuring up motives that aren't there.

There's an accusatory tone to your words. Are you saying that mythicists are motivated by anti-Semitism? If not, then what ARE you saying?

Didymus

Clivedurdle

Symbolic human sacrifice and cannibalism in the eucharist judaic? Please look at the anthropology links I've posted above. And just because a modern Jew is working from xian assumptions, maybe it would be better to state myth is plausible!

No Robots

Mythicists operate with the assumption that Christ and the New Testament are not wholly Jewish. In attempting to assign the origin of the NT to non-Jewish sources, they misapprpriate Jewish history, culture, and literature. This activity is not anti-semitic in intent, as far as I can see. However, the separation of Jesus from his Jewish environment by traditional Christian scholarship is condemned by William Arnal, who goes on to praise recent trends:

In the case of critical scholarship on the New Testament, earliest Christianity, and especially the historical Jesus, thing have been improving for the last thirty years or so. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present, numerous studies have appeared which not only acknowledge his identity as a Jew, but which emphasize it, and make it central to their reconstructions…. Thus is it a normal feature of the recent works emphasizing Jesus' Judaism that they tend to normalize him, make him an understandable and more ordinary figue among his contemporaries, comparable to other Jewish figures from the same time and place. (Arnal, 15-16)

Doherty moves in the opposite direction to the scholarship praised by Arnal. Doherty removes Jesus completely from his Jewish environment and makes him absolutely abnormal. This effectively returs Jesus to the status an alien "other" to Judaism.

It seems obvious to me that if traditional Christianity is to be condemned for separating Jesus from his Jewish environment, so to must mythicism be condemned. This is for most mythicists I'm sure an unexpected consequence of their position. It seems that most mythicists act out of a humanistic opposition to Christianity, and hold no grievance against Judaism. The problem is that Christianity and Judaism are inseparable.

No Robots

As far as I know, the only book that addresses this in depth is Constantin Brunner's Our Christ.

Didymus

How, if Christ didn't exist at all, could he have been a Jew, a Gentile, or a member of ANY human ethnicity?

Perhaps you mean something other than "misappropriate." If we happen to think the NT is only partly Jewish in origin, what should we do? Ignore the evidence and expunge such thoughts from our minds?

That sentence would only make sense if mythical figures were members of cultural and religious groups.

Didymus

ggazoo

Just curious... why can reference to Earl Doherty be accetable but refernce to Lee Strobel is immeditaley refuted around here?

Toto

Lee Stobel is a Christian apologist who presents flimsy arguments that have been refuted time and time again.

Llyricist

There is also no shortage of people "refuting" Doherty around here.