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To: Tzfat; Tax-chick; Dr. Sivana; Nachum; SJackson
Tzfat:

As a Catholic, I will leave it to Lutherans and reformed Christians generally to defend Luther.

You reference what you call "the filthy anti-Semitism espoused in the theology of the likes of Justin Martyr, Augustine, Origen..." Would you care to provide the details of such charges? I doubt that most FReepers are any more familiar with such claims than am I. Substantiate or withdraw the scurrilous editorial.

St. Justin Martyr apparently engaged in a written debate in which he disagreed with Judaism and is said to have attacked Judaism. He was beheaded by Roman authorities in about 165. At the time of his martyrdom, Christianity was under Roman persecution for sharing the Jewish reluctance to engage in pagan worship of emperors. Did St. Justin Martyr claim that Judaism was somehow incomplete or that Jesus was rejected by His fellow Jews? If so, that is no more anti-Semitism than is any other theological disagreement (and a milder form of offensiveness than parts of your #21).

I make no claims to scholarship on this subject. However, in a quick study, I have found no references to anti-Semitism by Origen. I am at a loss to review the massive works of St. Augustine to see what it is in his writings that may have drawn your colorful objections.

In any event, it is a bit much to somehow attribute the Holocaust as you suggest to the influence of St. Justin Martyr, St. Augustine and Origen on 1930's Europe and the reign of those pagans who ruled Germany and its brief and brutal empire in the Third Reich.

There was a great Conservative Jewish scholar Saul Lieberman (d. 1983) who apparently may have studied on the dispute between St. Justin Martyr and Judaism but, if so, there seems no easy reference to his work in its details. He was the general editor of Judaica acting through Yale University.

When you are baited by someone who wants to diminish the very real 20th century suffering of Jews and the genocide that they suffered by trying to substitute the self-inflicted suffering of Palestinians held in concentration camps by their own, you might want to refrain from responding as though such a repulsive argument were somehow mainstream Christianity much less Catholicism.

Americans of all faiths and none liberated the camps (much later than should have been the case but that is on FDR). Few have expressed regrets over doing so. Most Europeans of the 1930s would have been altogether ignorant of St. Justin Martyr and of Origen. Most would have heard of St. Augustine and of Martin Luther but few would have read the written work of either. It was not some golden age of scholarship on matters religious.

I have had the privilege of becoming acquainted with one elderly Holocaust survivor who had arrived at Auschwitz as a strong 19-year old man in about 1939. He and I had a very lengthy conversation one afternoon when my family had been invited by his daughter's family for a Passover Seder. He dug the graves of the victims for about five years and lived to be liberated. He came to the US after the war, met and married an American Jewish wife, established a small store to support his wife and children and died very recently. Despite all the evil that he personally witnessed at Auschwitz and his own personal sufferings there, he lacked entirely the vitriol you express against Christians and well understood that his torment did not arise from Christianity much less from St. Justin Martyr, St. Augustine and/or Origen.

We exist in anonymity on Free Republic. I feel certain that I am not personally acquainted with you and, if you have suffered personally, I am certainly not familiar with the details. OTOH, it is no more reasonable for you to blame all of Christianity with a broad brush for the very real sufferings of Jews than it was for the anti-Semites of history to act upon the infamous blood libel or to pretend to be justified by the demagogic ravings of Annas and Caiaphas.

I have not responded to your #21 on the assumption that you actually believe its contents. Jesus was certainly a Jew. He certainly resurrected. He certainly taught from Hebrew Scriptures (there were no others at the time). He was crucified by permission of the Roman governor by Roman soldiers of whatever legion and whatever ancestry. Pilate was a pillar of jello but he gets a worse rap in history than perhaps even he deserves. Pilate was a moral coward in the face of public pressure. You need not be a believer in the New Testament but it certainly disagrees with your analysis as to whether Jesus started a new religion. See particularly the Peter passage in Matthew and the New Testament generally. Also the historical evidence of Jesus includes the writings of Flavius Josephus, a contemporary, who was a Roman General but also a Jew from the Holy Land. It is remarkable and puzzling that you concede His resurrection (and capitalize His), the central belief of Christianity, but deny that He founded Christianity.

33 posted on 10/22/2011 3:35:35 AM PDT by BlackElk (Dean of Discipline, Tomas de Torquemada Gentlemen's Club: Burn 'em Bright!!!)
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To: BlackElk

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0011_0_10501.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0002_0_01603.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0011_0_10225.html


36 posted on 10/22/2011 4:51:22 AM PDT by jjotto ("Ya could look it up!")
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To: BlackElk
Martyr, Origen, Augustine, and Luther (among others) conceptualizer various components of what is called the theology of Supercessionism (or Replacement Theology). Supercessionism is what made the systematic persecution, torture, and murder of Jews theologically acceptable.

if you are truly interested, you can easily read up on it; which if you do, you may then understand why the Vatican was so concerned with Jewish relations in the past 50 years: ie a philosophical underpinning to anti-Semitism in Christian theology.
37 posted on 10/22/2011 5:21:24 AM PDT by Tzfat
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To: BlackElk
Also the historical evidence of Jesus includes the writings of Flavius Josephus, a contemporary, who was a Roman General but also a Jew from the Holy Land. It is remarkable and puzzling that you concede His resurrection (and capitalize His), the central belief of Christianity, but deny that He founded Christianity

You missed the point. I hold the Greek Scriptures as inspired, as well as the Hebrew. Since the first disciples continued practicing Judaism, including the next generation such as Clement of Rome, "Christianity" was a wholey new religion that transitioned out of Judaism in the 2nd Century. Scholarship is united in this fact. Which means Messiah was not a Christian, and did not start Christianity.

BTW, Josephus was not a Roman general. He was a Pharisee who fought against the Romans, and after his defeat, became a historian and advisor to Vespasian.
38 posted on 10/22/2011 5:31:05 AM PDT by Tzfat
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