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Does the New Testament Criticize Judaism from Within or from Without?

July 20 2015

Historians of ancient Christianity have long debated the meaning of New Testament passages that appear to criticize Judaism. For many scholars, these passages represent a sort of family squabble in which followers of one Jewish sect are attacking another. Charles David Isbell disagrees:

The . . . writers of the [the books of Mark, Matthew, and Luke] were not part of either mainstream Judaism or any identifiable Jewish sub-group of the era. The . . . points being made [in these books] fit a Roman or Hellenistic context far too often to sustain the idea that we are reading nothing more than the saga of some Jews involved in a petty dispute. In addition, the [later] Church Fathers, who were certainly not Jewish, had no difficulty in using the New Testament to denigrate Judaism in a most derogatory fashion. This they could do without the necessity of rephrasing as Gentiles what they read in a Jewish New Testament. All they needed to do was to take seriously the New Testament on its own terms as they read and understood it. As it stood, it fit well with . . . decidedly non-Jewish world views and cultures.

Read more at Bible and Interpretation

More about: ancient Judaism, Christianity, Hellenism, History & Ideas, Jewish-Christian relations, New Testament

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic