When I was a boy I read James A. Michener's The Source which posited the "source" of all religion in Judaism, but I eventually learned of Vedic religion and Zoroaster and most recently Eckart Otto's work on the reliance of Deuteronomy on Assyrian vassal treaties, so I don't understand why we continue to talk about Jesus and Judaism as if they are in a vacuum or as if Judaism was still the "source" of all religion and everything that came after Judaism must be understood only in relation to Judaism, the "source." Jesus' feat was a feat of the Vedic shamans who had to memorize and internalize their oral traditions using hymns/song because they did not yet have writing. This was the most ancient method of transmitting a religious corpus to the next generation. What Jesus memorized and internalized was the Jewish Law, a discipline Jewish tannaim did not even permit disciples to study until they were 40 years old. Jesus is remarkable because he is depicted as having accomplished this feat as a boy, which, over the course of time, was then extended to his always having internalized the Law and he was eventually believed to have been born with the Law "written on his heart" (Jeremiah 31:31-34), a veritable "son of God" though he called himself the son of Man (Mark 2:10, Mark 14:62 among many other passages). Rabbinical Judaism and the earliest Jewish Christianity developed at the same time along diametrically opposed trajectories: the Jewish Christians believed in Jesus' feat of memorizing and internalizing the written Law while rabbinical Judaism chose to equip each diaspora community with a written Torah scroll because the technology was available. Is it so difficult to see that a rabbi with a reference book is inferior to a Jesus with the entire Law memorized and "written on his heart," a living example of embodied tradition? Is it so difficult to see that Christianity arose out of an internal argument within Judaism over the superiority of the memorization and internalization of the written Law over the use of Torah scrolls for reference? The "supercession" of Christianity is a misnomer misunderstood by Jews and Christians alike. It is simply the recognition that memorizing and actualizing the written Law was superior to reading it from a text, no more than that, but that makes all the difference and that was Jesus' argument which he lost.
"Responsibility intensifies when it is taken (1998). Something similar could be said about Christianity’s indebtedness to Judaism: the debt increases when it is recognized."
This statement is only possible by refusing to recognize that Judaism owes a debt to Zoroaster and the Vedic hymns, a debt yet to be acknowledged because Judaism is still posited by Jews to be the "source" when scholarship has proven it is not.
I attended the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in 2000 at Amherst College to attended the symposium on evolutionary biology and religion because they would be discussing Kevin MacDonald's trilogy on Judaism. In my journal note of that symposium, I wrote: "We now had the tools to properly understand the evolution of religious beliefs and practices and the means (but perhaps not the courage) to end the 'anti-Semitic' cycle forever." That was 20 years ago and there are still the accusations:
"Understanding indebtedness can lead to a Christian approach to Jews and Judaism that is appropriate for the post-Shoah situation, for Christian indebtedness to Judaism today is necessarily a post-Shoah indebtedness. The dialogue of the religions, where everybody simply rejoices in the beauty of each other’s otherness is an ahistorical construct. It is not appropriate with regard to the painful history of Jewish-Christian relations."
I've been thinking about these issues for 20 years. I recently wrote a paper: 'The Darwinian Threads in Genesis and their Link to the First instance of the anti-Semitic Cycle in Exodus.' It is posted on my page @ academia.edu. You have to say to yourself, if the first instance of the anti-Semitic cycle is in the book of Exodus, Christians cannot be held responsible for the cycle, and if rabbinical Judaism chose to abandon Man's highest and most ancient expression of religious achievement: the memorization and internalization/actualization of a religious corpus for written texts on portable scrolls, that was their choice, and Christians cannot be held responsible for that either. However, Christians cannot entirely escape blame. I spent another 20 years of my adult life on parish councils, and most Christians no longer remember what Jesus really did either.
When I was a boy I read James A. Michener's The Source which posited the "source" of all religion in Judaism, but I eventually learned of Vedic religion and Zoroaster and most recently Eckart Otto's work on the reliance of Deuteronomy on Assyrian vassal treaties, so I don't understand why we continue to talk about Jesus and Judaism as if they are in a vacuum or as if Judaism was still the "source" of all religion and everything that came after Judaism must be understood only in relation to Judaism, the "source." Jesus' feat was a feat of the Vedic shamans who had to memorize and internalize their oral traditions using hymns/song because they did not yet have writing. This was the most ancient method of transmitting a religious corpus to the next generation. What Jesus memorized and internalized was the Jewish Law, a discipline Jewish tannaim did not even permit disciples to study until they were 40 years old. Jesus is remarkable because he is depicted as having accomplished this feat as a boy, which, over the course of time, was then extended to his always having internalized the Law and he was eventually believed to have been born with the Law "written on his heart" (Jeremiah 31:31-34), a veritable "son of God" though he called himself the son of Man (Mark 2:10, Mark 14:62 among many other passages). Rabbinical Judaism and the earliest Jewish Christianity developed at the same time along diametrically opposed trajectories: the Jewish Christians believed in Jesus' feat of memorizing and internalizing the written Law while rabbinical Judaism chose to equip each diaspora community with a written Torah scroll because the technology was available. Is it so difficult to see that a rabbi with a reference book is inferior to a Jesus with the entire Law memorized and "written on his heart," a living example of embodied tradition? Is it so difficult to see that Christianity arose out of an internal argument within Judaism over the superiority of the memorization and internalization of the written Law over the use of Torah scrolls for reference? The "supercession" of Christianity is a misnomer misunderstood by Jews and Christians alike. It is simply the recognition that memorizing and actualizing the written Law was superior to reading it from a text, no more than that, but that makes all the difference and that was Jesus' argument which he lost.
"Responsibility intensifies when it is taken (1998). Something similar could be said about Christianity’s indebtedness to Judaism: the debt increases when it is recognized."
This statement is only possible by refusing to recognize that Judaism owes a debt to Zoroaster and the Vedic hymns, a debt yet to be acknowledged because Judaism is still posited by Jews to be the "source" when scholarship has proven it is not.
I attended the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in 2000 at Amherst College to attended the symposium on evolutionary biology and religion because they would be discussing Kevin MacDonald's trilogy on Judaism. In my journal note of that symposium, I wrote: "We now had the tools to properly understand the evolution of religious beliefs and practices and the means (but perhaps not the courage) to end the 'anti-Semitic' cycle forever." That was 20 years ago and there are still the accusations:
"Understanding indebtedness can lead to a Christian approach to Jews and Judaism that is appropriate for the post-Shoah situation, for Christian indebtedness to Judaism today is necessarily a post-Shoah indebtedness. The dialogue of the religions, where everybody simply rejoices in the beauty of each other’s otherness is an ahistorical construct. It is not appropriate with regard to the painful history of Jewish-Christian relations."
I've been thinking about these issues for 20 years. I recently wrote a paper: 'The Darwinian Threads in Genesis and their Link to the First instance of the anti-Semitic Cycle in Exodus.' It is posted on my page @ academia.edu. You have to say to yourself, if the first instance of the anti-Semitic cycle is in the book of Exodus, Christians cannot be held responsible for the cycle, and if rabbinical Judaism chose to abandon Man's highest and most ancient expression of religious achievement: the memorization and internalization/actualization of a religious corpus for written texts on portable scrolls, that was their choice, and Christians cannot be held responsible for that either. However, Christians cannot entirely escape blame. I spent another 20 years of my adult life on parish councils, and most Christians no longer remember what Jesus really did either.
Richard Faussette