But I already said that, didn't I.

>>> with a sheep <<<
HAVING GROWN UP AS A JEW and having gone to an upper middle class synagogue throughout my childhood up through my young adult years, I am uniquely qualified to do an expose on the inner workings of the Jewish mind. Now that I am an Orthodox Christian, having converted in 1971 to Christianity, I can see very clearly how the Jew thinks: ...

4. The Jew is hell bent on his self-preservation. Though American and European Jews love the good life, they promote Zionism, in order that they will always have a place to escape to.

5. The Jew would like to see the New Testament destroyed, defamed, discarded, and mocked. For in it contains the historical record of the Jewish leaders committing Deicide against the Eternal Son of God Who became man for our salvation, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Jew wishes to eradicate this historical fact for it places him in a position as having to repent, an act that the Jew finds repulsive.

6. The Jew though he may be non religious still honors the rabbis as having final authority on all religious questions and matters. The rabbis have as their authority the Talmud which contradicts the Old Testament and blasphemes Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Christians.




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Christian History Corner: Good News to the Jew First
Critics of The Passion of the Christ assume the story embodies an anti-Semitic message. But does it?
Steven Gertz | posted 11/01/2003 12:00AM


Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ sure is getting a lot of heat these days. With more than two months left to go yet before its theatrical release, prominent Jewish leaders, foremost among them New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, have labeled Gibson's film as anti-Jewish. "This film can potentially lead to violence directed against the Jewish community," Hikind asserted. "It will result in anti-Semitism and bigotry. It really takes us back to the Dark Ages … the Inquisition, the Crusades, all for the so-called sin of the Crucifixion of Jesus."

It's true that Christians have directed hatred against Jews throughout church history. But if Gibson is correct in saying his movie is faithful to the Gospels, Hikind is protesting the heart of the Christian story itself. Conservative Catholic John McCloskey notes, "If you find the Scriptures anti-Semitic, you'll find this film anti-Semitic." And so some have, like Irwin Borowsky, who has cut out entire sections of the New Testament that Jews find offensive and has published his version as the American Holy Bible.

But are the Gospels anti-Semitic? Most Christians today would contend anti-Semitism and Christianity clearly can't be compatible—Jesus' command to love one's neighbor overrides any kind of rationale permitting violence against Jews. But then how do we explain passages in the New Testament that seem to come down hard on the Jews?

Two recent books help us unpack this question—and come up with quite different solutions. Constantine's Sword, published in 2001, garnered widespread acclaim among the media, though some Christian critics refused to join in the praise. James Carroll, a former Catholic priest who wrote his book on a fellowship with Harvard University, traced the history of Christian anti-Semitism, beginning with the early church all the way into modern times. His theory concerning the roots of anti-Semitism is interesting: Jesus, a faithful Jew, was anything but anti-Semitic. He faithfully observed Jewish law and customs, celebrated Jewish holidays, and made pilgrimages to the Temple. And he hated the brutal Roman occupation of Judea and Galilee as much as any other Jew.

But when we read the New Testament, argues Carroll, we are reading the text of writers a generation or more removed from its events. By then, the church was losing its Jewish identity (owing to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in A.D. 70 and the phenomenal growth of the Gentile church through the missionary journeys of Paul and others). "The tragic difference that would set in motion the razor-edged arc of this narrative," writes Carroll, "was that they who now heard this story, and who retold it, were not Jews." In other words, a Gentile church had no sympathy for Jews who rejected Jesus as the messiah, and so it resorted to anti-Jewish sentiment, while Jewish Christians (had the church remained Jewish) would have instead mourned their people's choice and stayed in relationship with them.

Rather than carving anti-Semitic passages out of Scripture, Carroll's solution is to recover the "Jewish" character of Jesus and Paul in his reading of Scripture. But he does so in a disturbing way—the writers of the New Testament wrote with a Gentile, anti-Semitic bias, Carroll claims, so we must read between the lines to perceive the "real" Jesus. In doing so, he questions the Resurrection and divinity of Christ, suggesting instead that his disappointed disciples formed a "healing circle" to comfort themselves in their grief. "His love survived his death," writes Carroll, "which is what the Resurrection means."

And that's where orthodox Christians part ways with Carroll. A writer equally conscious of the Jewish character of the early church but faithful to the message of the Gospels is Oskar Skarsaune. In his newly published In the Shadow of the Temple, Skarsaune busts the myth that Carroll buys—that Christianity lost its Jewish roots by the end of the first century and consequently turned anti-Semitic. No, says Skarsaune, Christians returned to Jerusalem after Titus left the ruins smoldering. And fourth-century historian Eusebius records a list of Jewish Christian bishops beginning with James, brother of Jesus, running unbroken until 135 A.D., when Jewish revolutionary Bar Kokhba challenged Roman rule and Hadrian responded by leveling Jerusalem and prohibiting Jews (including Jewish Christians) from living there.

What about the charges of anti-Semitism in the New Testament? If we look at the letters of Paul (some of the earliest written) we find him following Jesus' own policy by taking the gospel "to the Jew first" during his missionary journeys. Gentiles who listened to Paul and converted to Christianity were almost always "God-fearers" already attached to a local synagogue. Such people esteemed Jewish law highly, points out Skarsaune, and they understood their newfound faith in Christ to be in continuity with the promises made to God's chosen people, the Jews. Rather than despising the Jews, these new believers held them in highest regard for having introduced them to the one true God.

What do we do, though, with "difficult" passages like Stephen's speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7, in which he blasts the Jews as "stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears?" Understand it, rather, as a rebuke from within, much as the prophets of the Old Testament called their people to repentance. This is the pattern we find throughout Scripture—the Jews falling away from the true worship of Yahweh and God calling a prophet to turn them back. These same people now refused to accept the incarnate Word of God, Stephen would say, much as they had jeered and shamed the prophets of old. His intent was not to smear the Jewish name, but to reconcile his Jewish brethren to the risen Lord.

This is a message Hikind and other Jews protesting The Passion of Christ don't want to hear. But if they would give Gibson's film a chance, they might perceive the good news in Jesus' story—that their messiah has come, and that those who believe in him will reign with him in his second coming. And this coming will inaugurate that kingdom Jews have been awaiting for so long.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today.


The project turned out to be ''a huge undertaking,'' he said. ''Unlike Christianity, which covers 2,000 years, the Jews cover 4,000. And like Christianity, the history of the Jews deals with all parts of the world.'' He devoted the last four years to it, but he also drew from a lifetime of travels as a journalist. ''These experiences have found their way directly and indirectly into the book, experiences like meeting David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and Menachem Begin.''

Mr. Johnson makes no claim to being a scholar, but says he is ''a man of letters who writes history. Some academics don't like the idea of history being written by journalists,'' he added, ''but my knowledge of the contemporary world helps me understand history and my knowledge of history helps me understand the contemporary world. Academic historians don't meet politicians and world leaders.'' -- ARI GOLDMAN

A HISTORY OF THE JEWS
By Paul Johnson.

------------------------------April 19, 1987
Trying to Answer the Ancient Questions----------------------------------------------


As Paul Johnson explains in the preface to his new book, it is impossible to write a history of Christianity, as he did several years ago, without having to consider the Jews. Throughout the centuries, Christians have continued to ask the same questions: why have the Jews persisted? What power has sustained them? What has been the content of their life? Mr. Johnson has readdressed these questions in ''A History of the Jews.'' The book is a tour de force. Inevitably, as a nonspecialist depending entirely on secondary sources, Mr. Johnson gets some facts wrong. For example, despite Mr. Johnson's claim, there is no evidence that Jesus was a disciple of Hillel (andthe dates when each lived make that highly improbable). Some of Mr. Johnson's generalizations are overbold and glib, and occasionally he describes Jews in the very stereotypes he himself often decries. Thus, he dislikes Spinoza intensely - an arguable position that I do not share - but it is more than a bit thick to describe a principal founder of the Enlightenment as an example of the Jewish destructive spirit. How about Abraham, who broke the idols - to the continuing acclaim of Jews and Christians (including Paul Johnson)? Was he destructive or creative?

Nonetheless, this book is a remarkable achievement. It is all the more remarkable because, even as Mr. Johnson was trying to answer the ancient questions about Jews, he was himself wrestling with a sensibility that had been fashioned by Christian culture. His continuing self-education in Jewish history keeps moving the author, chapter by chapter, away from seeing Jewish experience as a function of Christianity and toward understanding Jews in their own terms. It is this journey that gives Mr. Johnson's writing its unique tension.

As Mr. Johnson reminds us in his opening lines, the classic Christian explanations of the continued existence of the Jews are well known: they were, and are, a stiff-necked people who rejected Christ; they must continue to exist until they expiate that sin and become Christians; until then the Judaism that continues to exist is, by definition, narrow and inferior. In much more sophisticated versions, this older, theological assessment of Jews and Judaism has persisted into the modern age. As orthodox belief waned in recent centuries, a reverse attack was leveled. Postbiblical Jews and Judaism were declared, on supposedly objective grounds, to be uncreative or even subversive. Even a liberal like Montesquieu asserted in the early years of the 18th century that in all the generations of their diaspora the Jews had not produced a single person of genius, and he said this even as he mentioned Moses Maimonides by name.

A whole host of scholars declared in the 19th century that the Jews had fallen behind the march of humanity toward true universalism in morality and culture when they did not accept Christianity. This identification of Christianity with progress was expressed in the 1930's in the sharpest and most wounding form by Arnold Toynbee in ''A Study of History.'' He coined the gibe that Judaism is a ''fossil'' civilization; it lives, but only as an uncreative deviant that is now irrelevant to culture and history. Such talk is a not-too-distant cousin of racism, which, in its Nazi form, soon began to use gas chambers to rid the world of such deviants.

There are, fortunately, two other Christian approaches to thinking about Judaism. Mr. Johnson is heir to both of them, and he seems not quite to have made up his mind which of the two he prefers. It is possible for a Christian to assert that Christianity is the true and full meaning of the biblical revelation, superior to Judaism, and yet to remain open to the evidence of Jewish piety and creativity in the centuries since the break between Christianity and Judaism. One could go farther still, and assert that Judaism and Christianity are coequal heirs of different parts of the biblical revelation and that Christianity itself - and all mankind - therefore require the persistence of Judaism for all of God's truth to be manifest.

The first approach was defined three centuries ago by Jacques Basnage, a Huguenot pastor who was a refugee in Rotterdam. He wrote the first modern history of the Jews. Basnage continued to insist, as a believer, that Christianity was superior, but he described the Jews from the time of Jesus Christ to his own day realistically and with little prejudice. The more spacious attitude, which posits ''two types of biblical faith,'' was defined more recently, in our own century, by such Christian theologians as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, both of whom were deeply influenced by a Jewish thinker, Franz Rosenzweig.

Dealing with the encounter between Judaism and earliest Christianity, Mr. Johnson follows Basnage's line: Christianity is the true, ultimate Judaism. To buttress this, he makes liberal use of the biblical prophets, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah, interpreting them as Christians have been wont to do. He even goes so far as to insist that Isaiah foretold a personal Messiah, a Christ figure. He does not even mention (and this in a history of the Jews) the interpretations in the Talmud and Midrash, which read these passages as applying either to the Jewish people as a whole or to the Messiah from the House of David who is yet to come. MR. JOHNSON asserts, without bothering to argue the point, that Isaiah and Jeremiah had consciously elevated Judaism to a universal ethic, which he defines as unrelated to the historical existence of any specific people. He is simply wrong about the facts. True, Jeremiah counseled the Jewish exiles after the destruction of the First Temple to build houses, to accept foreign rule and to find ways of ''singing the song of the Lord on foreign soil.'' That is not evidence that Jeremiah believed that the Jewish diaspora should ultimately disappear into some more universal society. On the contrary, he was creating the protosynagogue to sustain the Jews in their apartness. Mr. Johnson forgets that Chapter 32 of the Book of Jeremiah records that Jeremiah bought land in Judea on the eve of its destruction and put the deed into an earthen jar for safekeeping as a public symbol of his faith in the restoration of the Jews to their land. The Jeremiah of history can hardly be claimed as the spiritual ancestor of those early Christians who left Jerusalem, before its second destruction, for Petra, to distance themselves permanently from Jewish ethnic and political identity.

Once Mr. Johnson leaves the earliest encounters between Judaism and Christianity, his writing settles down to an excellent account of medieval Jewish experience. He understands exactly such diverse matters as what he calls the cathedocracy - the dominance in the diaspora Jewish communities of the rabbis who ruled its inner life - and the economic role of the Jews in the Middle Ages, when they were middlemen and outsiders who were forced into the pariah occupation of moneylending. Mr. Johnson exaggerates one point, the role of the Jews in inspiring such Christian heresies as the Albigensian and Hussite movements. The Jews are not always the harbingers of new ideas, for good or for ill, even though Mr. Johnson seems to think they are.

Mr. Johnson's chapter on the era of the emancipation, the liberal century and a half between the days of the American and French Revolutions and the appearance of Hitler, is a good summary of a vastly complicated period. There are omissions; the Jews of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire are not mentioned; Orthodox life, which persisted among the majority of Continued on next page Jews to the first years of the 20th century, is little discussed. On the other hand, Mr. Johnson describes with great sensitivity the Jewish elements, and problems, in the souls of a gallery of modern figures, from Disraeli through Freud to Rosa Luxemburg. There are a couple of brilliant pages on Jewish artists and men and women of the theater, as Mr. Johnson points out the tension between the moral and visual austerities of the tradition in which they had been bred and the passions depicted and lived in their new freedom in Paris and New York.

The book is at its best in the last two chapters. Mr. Johnson's account of the Holocaust is the best short summary of contemporary scholarship I have read. He has two basic propositions: the aim of Hitler, the very purpose of his going to war, was to destroy the Jews. The gas chambers were not an afterthought; Hitler kept them running to the very last days of the war, even when manpower and transport had to be diverted from the direst necessities of the Army. And the Allies had the power during the war, to help the Jews of Europe and save at least some, but they preferred to look away.
...
Mr. Johnson sees the Jews as having given the world, in an early, believing age, the doctrine of ethical monotheism and as having continued their leadership through a series of modern figures who taught the world to apply ''the principles of rationality to the whole range of human activities, often in advance of the rest of mankind.'' He is certain that ''the Jews will persist in pursuing truth, as they see it, wherever it leads.''

He has thus asserted the most angular and difficult of all Jewish doctrines, the notion of the chosen people, or in secular terms, of a self-choosing people, as the essence of Jewish history. One ends his book with the feeling that he is, of course, right about the past. But one must ask the inevitable question: will that past be continued by Jews who seem, almost everywhere in the West, to be becoming a normal part of the bourgeoisie? The last, and most eloquent, pages of Mr. Johnson's book give me hope.

Arthur Hertzberg, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College, is finishing a book on the history of the Jews in America.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/03/spec...hnson-jews.html


How The Jews Think - Pt I | Real Zionist News
But the Jew believes that Judaism is the only true religion and it is his province alone. For the Jew looks upon the Gentiles, “the Goyim” as being inferior to him.
... a stubborn, stiff-necked hater of Jesus Christ, and a supporter of the Jews Who
.... Yes you are Gods chosen people, but you have rebelled against God many ...
http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=27 - 64k

Judging "Jews" as a homogenous type is itself anti-semitic, regardless of what experiences, personal or otherwise, as Jew or Gentile, you base it on. The simple fact is that Christianity is a radically transformative expression of Judaism and, like any radicalization of any ideology or tradition, social conflict is bound to result. Such conflict is mostly an expression of the tension between the commonality of two different expressions and the underlying desire in radicalization to create something new.

Jews find the idea of repenting repugnant? How many Christians find it just as repugnant, albeit quietly, and prefer to avoid confession and convince themselves that they are "basically good people" instead of leveling with themselves about their sins. This is really the cornerstone of Christian spiritual and ethical practice, but it is also probably the most difficult, so people avoid it to stay in favor with their church peers who, ironically, are not supposed to judge them anyway but forgive. There is a lot of hypocrisy in any religion or other ideology, so why would anyone expect Christianity, Judaism, or Islam to have less than it's fair share of hypocrites, fakers, and abusers?

I once thought that the difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity recognizes all sinners who accept Christ, because they were "already forgiven while they were yet sinners." I thought that Judaism was for people who go beyond the cycle of sin and confession and choose to obey the laws of God without the possibility of forgiveness. Islam means "submission" (to God), so maybe this is an even greater observation of God's power as not just involving observance of laws, but total submission to "His" will. Theoretically people could move between religions based on the level of commitment to God they are willing to take on and what they want their relationship to sin and virtue to be. This is just my own vague notions, so please don't go crazy saying that my idea is totally unfounded - it's not really founded at all, except on a vague rational comparison of some aspects I know about these three religions. You'll have to find your own authority to get the truth.

If Judaism is less forgiving, i.e. more strict, than Christianity then wouldn't it make sense that there would be more people angry at Judaism and "Jews" as a result of their own experiences with be treated so strictly? Likewise, the forgiveness and judge-not aspects of Christianity make people feel included instead of excluded by laws and rules they fail to obey. Again, this is a generalization and, of course, Christianity has its own mechanisms for compelling people not to sin and recognizing the will of God, etc. I'm just saying it sounds less strict on the surface, and it's explicit guaranteed forgiveness of sin is very welcoming and inviting.