Jonathan Wolfman's Open Salon Blog

Some Theologies are Simply Incompatible w One Another

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:05:18 -0400

A reason people do not realize that Judaism and Christianity are not and cannot be theologically compatible (let alone "merged" as some have suggested) is because they know that Jesus' friends and followers were Jews, that the man lived and died a Jew, and that the earliest Christian evangelists were all Jews, and that Christianity emerged from Judaism in place and in time. They assume, then, that Judaism and Christianity must be compatible theologically. They could not be more mistaken.

The central tenet of Christianity...that human blood may atone for sin (a specific human's blood)...and is necessary for redemption from sin and spiritual death...is so contrary to Judaism and always has been that the two belief systems are unbridgeable. Judaism forbids human blood sacrifice for any reason and for all time very early in fact, in the Genesis playlet in which God first orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his son, and then stays the patriarch's hand.

For Hebrews, and later, for Jews, far from being about the appropriateness of contemplated human blood as sacrifice, that scene is about (and is solely about) obedience.

I make no case here against Christianity. None. (If some insist that I do that's about those making the charge.) My case is that no religion (not simply Christianity) in which there is blood sacrifice/blood atonement cannot be theologically compatible with Jewish Thought. This is (among other reasons) because the first of the Hebraic commandments is about the One, Incorporeal God.

And whether or not you believe in God---and I do not---is beside the point. This is about comparative theology, not what you or I may believe or not believe.

Why Must Justice Require a Born-This-Way Argument?

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:05:10 -0400

It may seem an odd or off-putting question; it may strike you as offensive. That's not my purpose. Pressing some boundaries in the interests of justice is what I'm after.

Much of the growing support for marriage equality rests on an increasingly-held assumption among those in the West that we are, as to gender-identity, born as we find and largely acknowledge ourselves to be by our late pre-teens or earlier (and, sometimes, later). We say that we are innately gay, straight, or bi-sexual. I hold with the spreading consensus that we do not choose sexual orientation; I find it a somewhat surprising and good reflection of Justice that Western European and American majorities seem to get it.

Still, I've a question:

Were there still, today, among the majority here and in Western Europe, a more than simply lingering conviction that sexual orientation is chosen, wouldn't marriage equality remain a mandate for a just society?

If we rely wholly on the born-this-way argument for the recognition of marriage rights, if we primarily anchor our demand for equality in that argument, are we not, at least in a small way, suggesting that our LGBT friends and relatives aren't fully deserving of equality under law simply by virtue of the fact that they are, as we are, adult citizens?

I'm for equality under law. It's irrelevant to me and should be to you and to the law whether or not our LGBT colleagues, companions, and relatives ever chose to be who they are.

How Most Jews Regard "Jews For-Jesus", and Why

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:05:57 -0400

This is a response to an issue raised yesterday in my post-thread.

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My readers know that I admire the Jewish itinerant performance artist whom scholars identify as Jesus, the first-century Galilean agitator for Hebrew prophetic social justice demands in the face of increasing Roman occupation-oppression, forced urbanization, and Jewish priestly collaboration. My readers know, as well, that I separate the person-who-lived from the object of personal and institutional worship people subsequent to his murder made of the man.

The historical issues are simply not the devotional ones. I am fascinated by the former and I've largely and rather easily ignored the latter. At the same time, in our era I have interested myself in the work of the organization, Jews For Jesus.

The central concern most Jews have with Jews For Jesus is not the fact it attempts conversions away from Judaism to a form of evangelical Christianity. Many, many organizations have made those attempts pretty much since Rome adopted Christianity. (Of course, lions in stadia can be more immediately convincing than college campus pamphlets and pasty smiles.)

The concern most Jews have with Jews For Jesus is that it promotes itself as somethng it simply isn't. Jews For Jesus was founded in the mid-1960s as an evangelical arm of the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas. The SBC remains J4J's most significant fundining source.

The primary concern actual Jews have with Jews for Jesus, then (and, I should fast say here that no authentic Jewish system of belief can possibly include human blood atonement for sin...that's just one ideological issue involved) is that the organization portrays itself and its work as an authentic expression of Jewish belief and way of living while it has always been an expression of the American Baptist evengelical movement; this is to say, it's a fraud.

WHAT'S OLD IS NEW: Spanish antiSemitism Intact

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:05:59 -0400

I've shared here how some historians articulate three historical stages of European anti-Semitism, covering the past 1700 years from the time Christianity became antagonistic and then lethal to Jews; that is, from the point when Rome adopted Christianity.

In brief:

Stage One I called Religious anti-Semitism. Jews were told: you may not live here as Jews; you must convert in order to live here.

Stage Two I called Political anti-Semitism. Jews were told: get out; you may not live here. (By "political" I am referencing political, national boundary maps.)

Stage Three I called Racial anti-Semitism. It assumes that Jews are a blood infection, a blight on the body of humanity. Jews are told: you may not live.

When the Inquisition's Alhambra Decree expelled Jews from Spain, for example, in the year Columbus sailed, Stage Three was still half a millennium off. Spain's expulsion of Jews was an example of State Two anti-Semitism: Jews were told that conversion no longer would make us tolerable; we had to leave.

Six months back, reports Raphael Minder in the New York Times (5.20.13), the Spanish government promised to ease naturalization process for Jews of Sephardic (Spanish) ancestry. Six months later, no real movement has taken place: only 20 Jewish descendants of those expelled asking for Spanish citizenship have had their requests granted. Just under 3,000 requests remain under consideration. The (Spanish) Federation of Jewish Communities which has been given the responsibility to certify the Spanish lineage of applicants says it has a thousand new applicants awaiting government action.

One issue that has arisen is that the Spanish government now says applicants must renounce their other citizenships. This wasn't at all clear six months back.

Stage-Two anti-Semitism appears intact in Spain.

Seminal Historical-Jesus, Dead Sea Scroll Scholar, Leaves Us

Fri, 17 May 2013 07:05:30 -0400

You know that among my reading and teaching, as well as writing interests has been the remarkable scholarship of the men and women in what has come to be known as Historical-Jesus Research. These historians have used traditional historiography, along with economic and anthropological models to understand the man-who-lived, Jesus, in his first-century Jewish context, well before Christianity was an idea let alone a going concern.

One the foundational researchers in the field, as well as an original translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Professor Geza Vermes, died last week in England. I share here with you his 'New York Times' obituary, published this morning, in the hope that some of you will be interested in reading more in the area.

I'll be pleased to share again (as I have by request before) the names of some books, books by scholars but quite accessible to general, interested readers in Historical-Jesus research. Just write me.

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Geza Vermes, Scholar of ‘Historical Jesus,’ Dies at 88

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Geza Vermes, a religious scholar who argued that Jesus as a historical figure could be understood only through the Jewish tradition from which he emerged, and who helped expand that understanding through his widely read English translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, died on May 8 in Oxford, England. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by David Ariel, the president of the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, where Dr. Vermes was most recently an honorary fellow.

Dr. Vermes, born in Hungary to Jewish parents who converted to Christianity when he was 6, was among many scholars after World War II who sought to reveal a “historical Jesus” by painting an objective portrait of the man who grew up in Nazareth about 2,000 years ago and emerged as a religious leader when he was in his 30s.

Drawing on new archaeological evidence — particularly the scrolls, which were discovered by an Arab shepherd in a cave northwest of the Dead Sea in 1947 — historians of many stripes agreed on a basic sketch of Jesus, but their religious biases sometimes colored details.

“You can cut out the Jewish part — that is the traditional Christian path,” Dr. Vermes said in a 1994 interview with Herschel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review. “But if you are more demanding and want to go back to the sources, you will realize that Jesus stood before Christianity.”

The scrolls, written over several hundred years before, during and after Jesus lived, offered new insight into religious, cultural and political life at the time. Dr. Vermes became one of the scrolls’ essential translators and a vocal advocate for their broad dissemination. His 1962 book, “The Dead Sea Scrolls in English,” has been updated and reissued multiple times and is regarded as the most widely read version of the scrolls. It is often used as a course text.

Dr. Vermes had long been frustrated that only a handful of scholars had direct access to the scrolls, and he eventually made his frustrations public. In 1977, he said that their handling was “likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century.” More than a decade passed, but the scrolls eventually became more easily accessible in their original form and through photographs.

The scrolls helped deepen Dr. Vermes’s interest in Judaism and in how perceptions of Jesus changed as Christianity spread. He argued that the messianic Jesus worshiped by modern Christians was largely created in the first three centuries after he died. In 1973 he wrote “Jesus the Jew,” the first of several books in which he placed Jesus in the tradition of Jewish teachers.

“When it came out, it sounded like a very provocative title,” Dr. Vermes recalled in 1994 of “Jesus the Jew.” “Today it is commonplace. Everybody knows now that Jesus was a Jew. But in 1973, although people knew that Jesus had something to do with Judaism, they thought that he was really something totally different.”

Dr. Vermes’s interest in cultural context echoed his personal history. His family was of Jewish ancestry but had not been practicing Jews since at least the first half of the 19th century. In 1931, with anti-Semitism rising in Europe, his parents converted to Roman Catholicism.

He enrolled in a Catholic seminary in Budapest in 1942, when he was 18, seeking to become a priest but also to protect himself. Two years later, his parents disappeared after being taken to a Nazi concentration camp.

He did become a priest — in the late 1940s he joined the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, in Louvain, Belgium — but he left the priesthood the following decade after falling in love with his future wife, Pamela Hobson Curle, a poet and scholar who was married to another man when they met. Dr. Vermes later returned to Judaism.

Dr. Vermes was born on June 22, 1924, in Mako, Hungary. His father was a liberal journalist, his mother a teacher. He received his doctorate in theology from the Catholic University in Louvain in 1953; his dissertation was the first written about the scrolls.

He did research on the scrolls for several years in Paris before moving to England, where he initially spent eight years teaching at what is now Newcastle University. He published the first edition of his English translation of the scrolls while there. In 1965 he moved to Oxford, where he eventually became professor of Jewish studies and a governor of the Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He was named professor emeritus in 1991.

Dr. Vermes’s survivors include his wife, Margaret, and a stepson, Ian. Pamela Vermes died in 1993.

Even as Dr. Vermes’s work challenged some Christian beliefs, he often talked of improving dialogue between Christians and Jews, and he was widely respected among scholars of various beliefs. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion, praised Dr. Vermes last year in a review of his final book, “Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea,” which traces the first 300 years of Christianity.

Writing in The Guardian, the archbishop called the book “beautiful and magisterial” but said it “leaves unsolved some of the puzzles that still make readers of the New Testament pause to ask what really is the right, the truthful, way to talk about a figure like the Jesus we meet in these texts.”

Lawrence H. Schiffman, a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and the vice provost of Yeshiva University, said in an interview that Dr. Vermes had worked in an academic and religious environment in which “everybody knew Jesus was a Jew, of course.”

“But,” he added, “the refusal to acknowledge it — that he truly thought, acted and lived as a Jew — that took a while to get across.” Dr. Vermes, he said, “was a major force in making that happen.”