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Hi Thinkin’ Gal...

Happy New Year!

I’d like to respond to your Freepmail on the link you mentioned, as it may engender additional comment.

My mom took me to a church of seemingly every Christian denomination extant, though I’m sure there are a few she missed.

My favorite was the Episcopal church essentially for their musical tradition. I did a lot of singing there, both from the pews and from the choir.

Though as the poet Emily Dickinson observed, “All have gone to church, except me. I am one of the lingering bad ones.” And thus began her life-long struggle not so much with the existence of God, but with the divinity of Jesus.

Me too.

Deuteronomy 6:4 says, “Hear O Israel; The Lord is our God. The Lord is One.”

It finally took my going to synagogue to more fully experience this “oneness” of God, and the overall grandeur of the “Old Testament”.

Also from the Thirteen Principals of Maimonides (12th century), the third of which is, “The removal of materiality from God. This signifies that this unity is not a body nor the power of a body, nor can the accidents of bodies overtake Him, as, e.g., motion and rest, whether in the essential or accidental sense....”

When I read “The Jesus Puzzle” by Earl Doherty (which is available on the Internet), I was very taken with his assertion that Jesus had never existed at all.

That view however was given over to the arguments of Hyam Maccoby in his “Revolution In Judaea: Jesus and The Jewish Resistance”. That is that Jesus was aiming toward the acquisition of the title, “messiah” and “Son of God” in the same sense that these titles were those of David and Solomon who had likewise been among “the annointed” as kings of Israel.

This is not to deny the “essence” of Christianity in the sense of Deuteronomy 4:19 or Malachi 1:11, as I realize that America could not have been founded without it.

It’s on this basis that I not so much reject the NT as I think there is quite a bit to glean from the sense of Jesus as rabbi, which I think the Jews could take much from.

Though I do not accept the divinity of a man.

That “Jews for Jesus” do, renders them as non-Jews in my opinion, and certainly no longer among “the chosen people” who brought ethical monotheism to mankind.

I hope this makes my basic thinking on this issue a little more clear.