dog-on

Because there is nothing Jewish about Matthew except for the desire of a certain portion of scholarship to view it as such.

Wishful thinking, I suppose.

Solo

The 'blood curse' appears to be just that. I don't buy Petergdi's interpretation. PAS HO LAOS would normally be denoting Jews as a people: 'laos' being rendered by Strong as:

1) a people, people group, tribe, nation, all those who are of the same stock and language

2) of a great part of the population gathered together anywhere.

James Carroll (in Sword of Constantine, p 39) reads it that way, contrasting Matthew with Mark who describes the hostile Easter gathering simply as a 'crowd' (ho okhlos). (The crowd, further to Carroll, is egged on by the Sanhendrin).

Like Mark and. even more so, Matthew's gospel denotes the chief opposition to Jesus as 'the scribes and Pharisees' (there are 7 'woes' issued to them by Jesus in Matthew).
My sense of the blood libel is that it is likely a later, 'gentile' redaction done in the same spirit as John (whose Jews - as ethnos - disown Jesus, 18:35). It is John uses the 'Jews' to describe the malicious, hypocritical opponents of Jesus. There is only one place in Matthew where such a descriptor is used, in the spreading of the story that disciples stole the corpse of Jesus (28:15), also more than likely a later addition.

Jiri

Petergdi

Do you read "pas ho laos" that way in Acts 3, verses 9 and 11? If not, then how do you justify your reading in Matthew 27:25?

ph2ter

Mathew essentially presents the ritual of human sacrifice.
For every such ritual is normal that the whole community participate in the act of killing and subsequent eating of the victim body broken in pieces.
Benefits which are the result of sacrificing can gain only those who participate in both, the killing and eating.
So those who state "His blood be upon us and on our children" are the same who after that eat the body and blood of Christ.
Every priest when breakes the bread actually 'kills' the body of Christ, and people who then eat the hosts actually eat the body of Christ, according to Christian doctrine.
Christian eucharist is essentialy the ritual of human sacrifice and Mathew here presents exactly that.
The statment is not anti-Semitic, because it stems from ritual practice. But, of course, it could be misunderstood as anti-Semitic.

dog-on

I somewhat disagree.

The gospel writers seem to be explaining why the Jews are no longer God's chosen people.

The reason given seems to be that, though God sent his savior to save the Jews, the Jews did, in fact, reject the savior.

As a result, the Jews are no longer God's chosen ones. This blessing now falls on Christians.

jon-eli

I don't think it's fair to refer to the gospel writers as a group... since they clearly had different beliefs and purposes. Moreover, Paul (who I think Mark would have agreed with) says just the opposite.

Cf. Romans 1:16:
Here, the Jews still benefit from God's favouritism. Paul is trying to minimize the idea of "the chosen people" so that he can push the idea of "Jesus as a saviour for Jew and Greek alike," but he's also preserving that slight notion of favouritism, in order to not disavow Judaism, in which Christianity is necessarily rooted. The Jews are the chosen people; they already had salvation; Jesus was sent by God to extend the offer of salvation to all mankind. This is Paul's point of view, and he was likely not alone in this.

ph2ter

Your understanding comes later, because in the begining it was not clear that Jews would not accept Christ.
The statement fits the ritual of human sacrificing.

But maybe even Mathew misunderstood the material which was in front of him, because in his time Jews already rejected Christ.

dog-on

I don't believe that I ever specified that the gospels writers where a "group".

I also wouldn't impose any additional meaning on the word gospel, when used by Paul, to mean anything more than good news. I especially would not read Mark, Matt, Luke and/or John into it...

Additionally, Paul says pretty clearly that there is only one way to be justified, that way being through faith in Christ. From this, one can garner Paul's view of the possibility of justification through the law, which is that it is not possible.

Paul offers a complete repudiation of Judaism, in my opinion.

dog-on

It was clear to the omnipotent god now, wasn't it...

(Of course, I believe that Christianity's god is not YHWH the demiurge, but is, in fact, the unknown and most excellent god. This fact was simply obscured by centuries of edits and re-writes. The proof however, is in the pudding.)

jon-eli

True. I may have jumped the gun there. My bad.

I tend to view Paul as an extra data-point whenever it seems useful to do so. I'm hopefully not transposing an interpretive framework for the Pauline epistles onto the gospels, but it's certainly possible that I am. Moreover, I wasn't actually paying any reference to the word "gospel," in that quote; I was really only interested it the Jew vs. Greek tidbit. (For what it's worth, I do happen to think that Mark and Paul meant "euaggelion" in the same way, even though that wasn't exactly my point.)

He may have repudiated it, but that seems to have been a tad reactionary. He was trying to get gentiles and Jews to coexist, but there was such great tension between the two that he was forced to shift more and more toward a middle ground. Think about the whole kerfuffle with circumcision, where gentiles were getting circumcised and Paul had to tell them to stop. Prior to Paul telling them it wasn't necessary, I suspect they were confused by the intrinsically Jewish nature of Christianity, and identified Christianity as a sect of Judaism (and therefore, what are we supposed to be repudiating? Ourselves?). This confusion had to have arisen from somewhere, and I bet it was with Paul himself (in the early stages, I bet he had a lot less vitriol for the Jews). He was forever confusing the people he proselytized, forever switching feet whenever he had to... as seen with 2 Thessalonians, which was clearly a response to confusion over his first letter. The point is (masked though it may be by my gibberish), Paul tailored his views to fit the situations that arose within the various communities... His theology evolved, and changed in light of the problems he encountered, and I think his repudiation was forced on him to some extent, by the realities he faced; I don't think it formed part of his original conception. And I think this counts in favour of a fairly pro-Jewish beginning to Christianity.

And yes, I apologize for making no sense whatsoever.