Interesting Links for 15-04-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Important things to understand about the Christian festival of Easter

(tags:Easter Christianity Jews satire funny )

2. The UK isn't moving asylum seeker processing to Rwanda, it's dumping refugees there.

(tags:UK Rwanda OhForFucksSake asylum refugee )

3. 12 best ways to get cars out of cities - ranked by new research

(tags:cars transport viaDanielDWilliam )

Comments

[wildeabandon]

I can appreciate that to some extent. Supercessionism is a stain on the church, and certainly over the years there are many things that we can be said to have appropriated from Judaism. (I will rant at length about Maundy Thursday seders or covers of Hallelujah with resurrection motifs.)

But I don't think that can apply to the scriptures because the earliest Christians were Jewish, and had none of the social and political dominance that developed after Constantine's conversion. There has of course been significant theological and cultic divergence in both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism from Second Temple Judaism, which itself was a)hardly monolithic, and b)a significant shift from pre-exilic Israelite religion. (Although identifying which parts of the Tanakh, especially the Torah, are pre- vs post- exilic is obviously still very much an open question.)

[andrewducker]

I think we can all agree that this kind of thing is bad, at least
https://twitter.com/Michal_Rose/status/1514643740966547458

[calimac]

In my religious school years we went through a fit of ecumenism and attended several Christian religious services as guests. If you've gotten the impression that 1970s liberal worship consisted of everybody sitting in a circle and singing "kum-ba-yah", you would not be entirely mistaken.

Anyway, there were one communion service at which the ministers went down the aisle handing out the wafers. They were given to us, which they should not have been, and we were amused to discover that they were bits of matzo.

[calimac]

Oh, it applies to the scriptures, all right. The earliest Christians being Jewish only explains why they hooked on to them. The important part is that they then ceased being Jewish and became a new religion, and part of what made them so was the identification of Jesus with the Messiah. Whatever the Christ (as a concept) is, it is not the same thing as the Jewish Messiah, but an entirely new dispensation. The Christians can do that if they want, but by doing so they are appropriating somebody else's scriptures and using it for their own purposes.

I hope I would be misreading you if I thought you implied that, rabbinic Judaism and Christianity both being different from earlier forms of Judaism, they have equal claims to be considered legitimate straight-line descendants of it. I really hope that would be misreading you.

[wildeabandon]

They certainly didn't consider themselves as ceasing to be Jewish. Sure, they were in conflict with both the religious authorities at the time, but so were the Essenes, the Zealots, and the Sadducees; so were the Hasmoneans before they became the religious authorities, and we don't suggest that any of those groups stopped being Jewish. At some point Christianity as a whole, by accepting gentiles who hadn't converted, became a new religion rather than a Jewish sect, but that isn't the same thing as the Jewish Christians apostatizing. They were in a liminal space.

The concept of Christ that we have today is, I agree, not exactly the same as any of the various concepts of Jewish Messiah that were current in say 3rdC BCE-1stC CE, but the concept(s) set out in the Pauline and Johannine corpuses and the letter to the Hebrews are responding the events surrounding the death of Jesus of Nazareth from within a fundamentally Jewish perspective. The G-d denoted by the tetragram is a G-d who acts in history and makes things new, and when that happens our understanding of the scriptures changes and they get reinterpreted. Jeremiah re-interprets Amos and proto-Isaiah and his own earlier writings when King Josiah is killed. Ezekiel reinterprets Jeremiah as he experiences life in exile. Ezra and Nehemiah and the Chronicler reinterpret pretty much everything that comes before in the light of Cyrus's decree. We can of course disagree about both the veracity of the historical events that are being interpreted, and the interpretations being made, but that doesn't mean that the other perspective is illegitimate, merely mistaken.

I'm certainly not saying that rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are equally closely descended from Second Temple Judaism. As you might expect, my knowledge of the development of Jewish thought is a lot more extensive up to about 30CE than later, but my impression is that the shift that happened within Judaism after 70CE whilst significant was not as radical a change as the development of Christianity, but it's not obvious to me that a radical change is inherently delegitimising. I suspect that the change from pre-exilic Israelite religion to post-exilic Judaism was on a similar order of magnitude to the introduction of Christianity, but as there are no extant followers of that religion, the question of appropriation seems less relevant.

[calimac]

What you're saying is so slippery I can't figure out how to relate it to what I'm saying. I mean, I said that the earliest Christians considered themselves to be Jewish, so why are you arguing that they were Jewish? I said that they then ceased to be Jewish, so why are you arguing that Christianity became a new religion? That's what I was saying. That the concept of the Christ derived from the Jewish Messiah is true enough, but that doesn't mean it was the Jewish Messiah. And now you seem to be saying that Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are equally significant changes from earlier Judaism (even if "not as radical" a change) either because 1) you don't know enough to say otherwise, or 2) there aren't any followers of earlier Judaism still around to complain about it. (Actually, that last is not true: there are still followers of pre-rabbinic Judaism around.)

I either can't say anything in response to this, or what I would say would be so angry and abusive that our host would disapprove. And I don't have time for that anyway.

[wildeabandon]

Let me start by apologising for the lack of clarity and for offending you.

I would like to answer your questions in the hope that if I can manage to express myself more clearly then you might find my position more understandable. But I am conscious that this is a fraught subject and don't want to risk compounding my offense if you'd rather just let the subject drop.

[calimac]

No, I think it's better to drop it. I don't have the mental stamina to pursue this very far, and I fear that you're starting from premises I can't accept, the one I've alluded to twice now being the big one. Thanks for being considerate.

[wildeabandon]

Understood, and thank you for being gracious in the face of my clumsiness.

[andrewducker]

Can I just say that I appreciate how this conversation was handled.