Notes on Paper
4: Judaism and Christianity
Writing about
the separation of Judaism and Christianity, many students fall
into the trap of
attributing everything positive to Christianity, and therefore,
everything
negative to Judaism.
For example:
In
Judaism they followed the
Old Testament which was very tough and things were black and
white. There wasn’t
the idea of forgiveness and eternal love as seen in the New
Testament.
You might want
to consider, for example, Psalm 103:
He
does not deal with
us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our
iniquities.
For
as the heavens
are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards
those who fear
him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove
his
transgressions from us.
That sounds like
forgiveness and eternal love to me. Jesus did not invent these
ideas, he was
drawing on Old Testament traditions.
An example from
another paper:
Another
example is the
cleansing. Jews think they should be apart from things that make
them “dirty”
especially during ceremonies … He (Jesus) wanted to tell people
that they could
socialize with publicans and sinners without fear of going to
hell because what
matters is to keep being a good religious person and trying to
make other
people be a good religious person too; nonetheless, Jews didn’t
like this point
of view very much. For them, God chose their people and they
have always been
and always are the only chosen ones. For Jesus, anyone could be
part of God’s
community.
Notice that the
teaching about cleanliness is attributed to all Jews, and the
use of the
present tense suggests no differentiation between Judaism now
and in the time
of Jesus. In class, I discussed the role that cleanliness played
in the
teaching of the Pharisees. I pointed out the asking everyone to
maintain
cleanliness was a visible sign that the whole nation was a
priestly nation –
God deals with everyone, not just an elite, and that visible
signs of loyalty
to God’s law had a political motive, demonstrating national
unity against the
Romans. Of course, some Jews did object to Jesus’ breaking
social boundaries,
but the tax-collectors and sinners he ate with were themselves
Jews. Eating
with them, the lost sheep of Israel, is not at all the same as
treating
non-Jews as members of the Kingdom. Consider what Jesus says to
the
Syro-Phoenician woman (a Gentile) who asks Jesus to cure her
daughter in Mark
7:27; Let
the
children first be fed, for it is not right to take the
children’s bread and
throw it to the dogs.
The children are
the Jews, the Gentiles are the dogs – that is Jesus speaking. It
is true that
Jesus does then cure the woman’s daughter, the story shows him
willing to help
gentiles, but it cannot be said that his language here breaks
down the barriers
between the chosen people and the rest.
The fundamental
error made by many students is this:
…
They had a closed mind
they couldn’t accept that Jesus was neither rich nor a king …
For a Christian,
a Jew is someone who doesn’t believe.
It is true that
the Jewish hope was to find a Messiah who would lead them in
revolt against the
Romans, and Jesus was not a military leader – that is the
fundamental task of a
king, and ‘Messiah’ was a title of the King. But Jews cannot be
defined simply
as people who do not believe in Christianity, with no reference
to what they
did believe or do believe. Americans love freedom. We British
are not
Americans. But you would not understand the British by seeing us
as,
fundamentally, anti-Americans who do not care about freedom. To
have an open
mind, you must ask not what they did not believe, but what they
did believe.
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