Responding to Made-Up Stuff…
Rabbi Dennis responds to one of my favourite tricks, making something up and saying it’s “really” Jewish: in this case, a Dispensationalist trick called the “Prophetic Calendar”. The Rabbi’s research is a good way to avoid
allowing Christian exegetes to redivide the total number days into 490 artificially constructed 360-day years, allowing actual history to be forced into a Procrustean bed of Christocentric time.
Usually this trick works the best when the parties speaking (and listening) know *nothing* about Judaism.
The only problem is that most folks only find one version of Christianity out there, be that “one version” Dispensationlist, or Roman Catholic or whatever. So while I don’t want to accues Rabbi Dennis of being such…
Most (but not all) Jewish Writers on Christianity seem only to know about Post-Augustinian (but pre-Vatican II) Roman Catholicsm and a few sundry flavours of Protestant Fundamentalistm. They seem oblivious to the implications of a more liberal Christianity or one salted with Eastern (instead of Western) spices. And a few of them don’t even understand the one flavour they have. To play fair, most (but not all) Christian writers on Judaism seem only to know of a Judaism they made up in their head: basically, liberal Christianity minus Jesus (or with a hidden Jesus that, well, you know, we can see but they can’t).
Michael says:
In the past year I have done some reading on Judaism, and I have to admit that I was (still am) woefully ignorant. I think that, like many Christians, I thought Judaism was the version of the Old Testament I had been taught in Sunday School and later in seminary. Without reflecting on it at all, I thought as if Judaism had no history after the New Testament period. Of course, many Christians seem to think Christianity had no history after New Testament times, too. Just as I assumed the Old Testament described Judaism today, the fundamentalist church in which I was raised assumed that the New Testament described fully and adequately the church as it was then and as it should be now. (We were actually told that there was an underground Christian church that maintained all the beliefs we held so dear for 1900 years before it could emerge into the bright light of the American day.)
Of course, once upon a fundamentalist time, I also believed Roman Catholicism was the evil straw man I had been taught about in Sunday School and heard described in lurid Sunday sermons. When I became Catholic, I was a bit disappointed to discover Mass was not pretty much like a debauched idol-worship scene from one of those old biblical epic movies.
I now read about all sorts of religious traditions — Western, Eastern, Native American. My awareness of the circle of my ignorance grows even as the small circle of knowledge increases.
12 May 2008 - 8 אייר 5768 at 10:15 am
david says:
Lundi de Pentecote!
12 May 2008 - 8 אייר 5768 at 5:15 pm