Posted on 09/25/2003 9:18:42 AM PDT by Greg Luzinski
Jewish leaders continue to decry Mel Gibson’s forthcoming Jesus movie for supposedly threatening to whip up anti-Semitism. Due out next April, "The Passion" identifies Jewish priests as instigators of the crucifixion. Maimonides, too, in his Mishnah Torah, affirms Jewish involvement in Jesus’ execution — which must make the greatest of medieval Jewish sages an anti-Semite, too.
But the film I’d like to see produced that would really make some Jews nervous, while teaching a healthy lesson: an honest depiction not of Jesus’ death, but of his preaching. The Christian Bible makes clear what was probably the main theme of his sermons. It is a theme that many liberal rabbis, to their discomfort, would feel obliged to endorse.
Today’s secular historians generally assert that Jesus was a loyal adherent of Pharisaic (rabbinic) Judaism. They argue against the conventional Christian understanding that Jesus radically critiqued Judaism. On this, the Christians are right.
True, Jesus is repeatedly quoted in the gospels as embracing Torah observance (e.g., Matthew 5:17-18). He must have accepted certain broadly defined mitzvot like the Sabbath and Temple sacrifice, because his followers were still practicing these commandments just after his death.
What Jesus rejected was the oral Torah that explains the written Torah. Essential to rabbinic Judaism, this notion of an oral Torah recognizes the Pentateuch as a cryptic document, a coded text. It posits that the Bible’s first five books were revealed to Moses along with a key to unlock the code — for a lock is never made without a key.
This oral tradition was passed from Moses to the prophets to the rabbis, later to be written down in the Mishnah and Talmud. At least that’s the theory presented in the first chapter of the Mishnah’s tractate Pirke Avot, a theory that still animates traditional Judaism.
On point after point, Jesus derides not the written Torah but its orally transmitted interpretations. He does so on matters like the details of Sabbath observance (no carrying objects in a public space, no harvesting produce or use of healing salves except to save a life), donating a yearly half shekel to the Temple, refraining from bathing and anointing on fast days like Yom Kippur, hand washing before eating bread and praying with a quorum.
Stated this way, laundry-list fashion, such commandments from the oral tradition might seem like trivialities, as they did to Jesus. But from the constellation of such discrete teachings there emerges the gorgeous pointillist masterpiece of Torah — not merely "the Torah," the finite text of the Pentateuch that the Christian founder accepted, but the infinite tradition of Judaism as a whole, reflecting God’s mind as applied to human affairs.
For Jesus, oral Torah was a manmade accretion without transcendent authority. He tells a group of Pharisees, "So, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God," citing Isaiah. "In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men" (Matthew 15:7-9).
Elsewhere, "Woe to you lawyers also! For you load men with burdens hard to bear" (Luke 12:46).
From this position, it was a logical next step to that of the apostle Paul, who abrogated the Torah altogether, oral and written. Abandon the former and you’ll soon abandon the latter.
A phenomenally charismatic person, Jesus mocked the Jewish establishment of his day and was adulated by a following from Galilee, the region where he conducted his brief ministry, famous in this period (as professor Geza Vermes shows) for the ignorance of the local populace. Knowing no better, loathing Pharisees as their own teacher did, they thought Jesus uniquely had Judaism all figured out.
Sound familiar? Reform ideology has always viewed oral tradition as being pretty much nothing more than the "precepts of men," while the Conservative movement increasingly understands it as a human creation, "hard to bear." Having grown up in a Los Angeles-area Reform community, I can testify that most Reform and Conservative temples impart a level of lay education that is approximately Galilean. As radio commentator Michael Medved has memorably said, the majority of Jews in our country know little about Judaism other than that it rejects Jesus.
Yet when it comes to the oral Torah, most American Jews follow Jesus without know it.
Mr. Gibson, please consider making another movie, a prequel about his career before the crucifixion showing how much Christianity we have unwittingly absorbed.
Torah indeed necessitates rejecting Christianity, but that means rejecting also the Christian view on the most fundamental of concepts in all Judaism: oral Torah. A Jesus movie about his life as a preacher would be a good dose of reality, if unpopular with our beloved Jewish leaders — not, come to think of it, unlike the film that Gibson will give us next year.
David Klinghoffer’s new book is “The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism” (Doubleday, 2003).
No Catholic has ever believed anything you've described.
No one ever sold any indulgences ever. Name one person who sold an indulgence, name the price paid, name the buyer, give us the date.
The entire idea is a complete myth and is utter propaganda.
The religious leaders of Jesus' day didn't think that their traditions could contradict scripture either.Where does the Bible tell us that the church would be preserved from error and why do you think that the Christian church is protected from something that the Israelites were not protected from? Indeed, the writings of Paul were often motivated to correct errors within the church! God never promised error-free doctrines to either Israel or the church.
Not true at all... He told His Apostles (and Peter in particular) that whatever they bound on earth would be bound in Heaven ... He promised that the Gates of Hell would never prevail against His Church ... He promised to be with His Church until the end of ages. All these promises were not made to the nation of Israel. Perhaps your church is capable of teaching error. Mine is not.
True. But the vast bulk of all inquisitional activity took place in Spain between 1460-1580.
and it was about a lot more than the investigation of irregularities.
What it was mostly about was (1) The Spanish throne informing Moslems and Jews that non-Christians would be deported; (2) Hundreds of thousands of Moslems and Jews instantly converting to Christianity in order to keep their Spanish property and (3) the Spanish crown accusing the conversos of being backsliding apostates who had rejected their baptismal vows.
Tens of thousands of people lost their lives because they dared to disagree with the Roman Catholic church.
It really depends on what you mean by "disagree." Were the conversos executed for lying to the Spanish crown about their religious allegiance executed for disagreeing with the Church or lying to the crown?
Were the Huguenots slaughtered on St. Bartholomew's Day killed because they were Protestants or because they represented a threat to the political ambitions of the Medicis?
I sincerely doubt that if the Spanish Moslems and Jews had no land in Andalucia that they woudl have been put in the position of conversion or flight.
I also sincerely doubt that if the Huguenots had backed the Medici family politically there would ever have been a massacre.
The number of people specifically executed solely on the basis of their religious opinions at the behest of the Catholic Church might run into the hundreds - but not into the tens of thousands.
And, I also know lots and lots of people have died at the hands of the Protestants.
Yet, it's the Inquisition which comes up again and again, while the far bloodier persecution of the Recusants is rarely mentioned.
Again, my sub-point (one of them anyway) is that it don't matter whose doing the killing in the name of Christ, it's not of Christ.
This is true.
Of course, for every Catholic theologian who grudgingly approved of such measures, a hundred can be produced who disapproved and spoke out against them.
Bernard of Clairvaux and Dominic of Calaroca are two of the Church's most revered saints. Torquemada is not.
But that isn't what the Catholic Church teaches about Indulgences. It's the most misunderstood doctrine in Christian History. Go here for the teaching:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm
Yeah, so where's the part about being free from error? Why does the New Testament teach that we must be on guard against error if we're automatically protected from it?So do the teachings about selling indulgences still stand? What about the other documented errors taught by the church through the centuries?
Your church's claim about being free from error is its biggest error.
If you don't mind, could you ping me as well?
Before you take this gentleman's well meaning but wrong advice, please read the works of the Fathers of the Church. Sola Scriptura was definitely not the position of the Early Church, and was unheard of until the late Middle Ages.
If He is with us, error is not. But error is constantly appearing from jumped up, self appointed experts who think they have access to the truth, but don't. They have a long pedigree, beginning with the Arians and Nestorians. The heretics have been amongst us from the beginning, and it has been the ongoing job of the Church ("my" Church) to correct their errors.
So do the teachings about selling indulgences still stand?
What teaching? That such behaviour is sinful? The "selling" of spiritual goods has been consistently condemned, by my Church, since Apostolic times. So yes, those teachings still stand.
1 Timothy 3:15
The so-called documentation is in error.
A complete and utter falsehood. I suggest you read a book on the history of the Inquistion by Henry Charles Lea, a Protestant who was quite biased against the Catholic Church. He conservatively estimates the number killed by the Inquisition as being a few thousand over a four hundred year period, hardly "tens of thousands" or the absurd claim of "100 Million" that Catholic baiters make.
I'm sure the Protestants in Europe, Great Britian and in the Salem Mass. area put just as many people to death as sinful members of the Catholic Church did.
You really believe that? It was Simony and the selling of "indulgences" that sparked the Reformation in the first place. Pope Leo X needed money to rebuild Saint Peter’s Basilica, so he did what popes and bishops had been doing for 4 centuries -- he raised a fortune by selling indulgences. Leo X asked the famous Dominican indulgence seller, Johann Tetzel, to offer a plenary indulgence to those who donated funds for the reconstruction of the Basilica. That's a fact and there's no dancing around it.If the selling of "spiritual goods" has been condemned by "your church" since Apostolic times, then you must not be a Catholic. Either that, or you're believing bad information that's being fed to you.
I agree with you on this one. The Catholic church almost certainly killed more, but the numbers are close enough.
While I would say that far too many have died at the hands of those who claimed to have the interests of Christianity at heart, there is little verifiable information availiable to suggest that the Protestant community was in any way better than the Catholic, although there are abundant claims to the contrary. As a rule of thumb, though, Europe has always been better at being Barbarous than the Romans. (something to keep in mind),
"Contrary to widespread belief in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Inquisitors were, with few exceptions, not psychotic sadists who were insatiably seeking vengeance upon heretics through death penalties. The Inquisitors were normally well trained canon lawyers and frequently Dominican friars or members of another religious order.RECENT RESEARCH HAS SHOWN THAT THEY WERE SUFFICIENTLY ASTUTE TO BE SKEPTICAL OF THE WITCHCRAFT CRAZE OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES AND TO FIND THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE ACCUSATIONS AGAINST OLD WOMEN AND SIMILAR MARGINAL PEOPLE WHO WERE ALLEGED TO BE WITCHES TO BE WITHOUT SUBSTANCE.
Therefore, the courts of the papal mandated Inquisition should never be considered in the same category as the Nazi holocaust or Stalinist purges. Surviving Inquisitorial records are sparse. But it is a good guess that even including the Spanish Inquisition of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which in a more Draconian fashion operated directly under the aegis of the Spanish crown rather than the papacy,
THE TOTAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO DIED AT THE HANDS OF THE CATHOLIC INQUISITIONS DID NOT EXCEED FIVE FIGURES AND PROBABLY DID NOT TOTAL MORE THAN TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE." [over hundreds of years]
N. F. CantorThe Civilization of the Middle Ages. Harper: New York 1994
The Protestant "Inquisitors" were much less astute and they did mostly burn old women and other marginal people. The Roman Inquisition was executing a few tens of people a year, while in Germany thousands of innocent women were burned at the stake by Protestant (mostly) fanatics. The difference was that the men burned by the roman Inquisition are very famous, like Giordano Bruno, while the women burned in Germany are largely nameless.
I should have stated that my only reason for believing that more died at the hands of "Catholics" than "Protestants" is that the "Catholics" have been around longer. I tend to disount these murders because I don't believe that true Christians -- either Catholic or Protestant -- committed them. The murderers were wolves masquerading as sheep and I'm not going to blame the sheep or the shepherd for something that the wolves did.
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