Jesus, Hater of Talmud. Talmud reciprocates.

A most interesting Publisher's Weekly piece:



What the Talmud Really Says About Jesus
by David Klinghoffer, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2007

Will Peter Schaefer's new book, Jesus in the Talmud (Mar.), be controversial? "I'm afraid so," Schaefer told RBL. "That's why I'm nervous."

His editor at Princeton University Press, Brigitta van Rheinberg, laughed but agreed: "You think, oh, whoa, this is not going to go over well in certain circles."

Schaefer, who heads up Princeton's Judaic studies program, has collected and analyzed all the passages in the Talmud that apparently refer to the founder of Christianity, texts that were previously censored from Talmud editions for centuries. In his book he argues—against other scholars—that the scandalous passages indeed refer not to some other figure of ancient times but to the famous Jesus of Nazareth.

What exactly is so scandalous? How about Jesus punished in Hell for eternity by being made to sit in a cauldron of boiling excrement? That image appears in early manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud, as does a brief account of Jesus' trial and execution—not by the Romans but by the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin. The Jewish community, to the extent Jews were even aware of these excised texts, has been content to let them remain obscure and unknown.

Schaefer, a distinguished German-born Christian scholar who describes classical rabbinic literature as "my first love," has now definitively let the cat out of the bag. This undermines a widespread assumption that, of Judaism's and Christianity's respective sacred texts, only the Christian Gospels go out of their way to assail the rival faith, whereas Judaism's classical texts refrain from similar attacks.

It seems fair to say now, however, that the Talmud is every bit as offensive to Christians as the Gospels are to Jews.

The Talmud's scattered portrait of Jesus unapologetically mocks Christian doctrines including the virgin birth and the resurrection. Which isn't to say that the rabbinic invective is meant simply to insult. In his book, the author calls the Talmud's assault on Christian claims "devastating."

"It is a very serious argument," said Schaefer, who emphasizes that the rabbis' stories about Jesus were never intended as an attempt at historically accurate narrative. Rather, in the classic Talmudic style, they encode legal and theological argumentation in the form of sometimes-imaginative storytelling.

One naturally wonders, when Jesus in the Talmud is published, what the results will be for Jewish-Christian relations. "I certainly don't want to harm Jewish-Christian dialogue. God forbid," Schaefer said. But dialogue requires honesty, and "I'm trying to be honest."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6411679


Up until a hundred or so years ago, Christianity and Judaism were mutually pretty much at odds. But in the 1800s, a number of people with ulterior motives started the process of re-Judaizing Christianity. Rather than alter the Christian Bible, they attacked the traditional attitude via commentary. (The irony will be apparent later.)

From Wikipedia (excerpt):

The Scofield Reference Bible promoted dispensationalism, the belief that between creation and the final judgment there were seven distinct eras of God's dealing with man and that these eras were a framework for synthesizing the message of the Bible. It was largely through the influence of Scofield's notes that dispensationalism grew in influence among fundamentalist Christians in the United States. Scofield's notes on Revelation are a major source for the various timetables, judgments, and plagues elaborated by such popular religious writers as Hal Lindsey; and in part because of the success of the Scofield Reference Bible, twentieth-century American fundamentalists placed greater stress on eschatological speculation. Opponents of biblical fundamentalism have criticized the Scofield Bible for its air of total authority in biblical interpretation, for what they consider its glossing over of biblical contradictions, and for its focus on eschatology.[2].

((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible ))

There you have it: the injection point for the thousands of gallons of hog slurry filling the Jeboo-neocon swimming pool.

Jesus of Nazareth (hereinafter JoN) was a character in a novel, of sorts, written in the manner of Atlas Shrugged or The Turner Diaries (I'd say Hunter, Pierce's later and far better novel, but it's far less famous) as a broadside against Pharasaism and Sadducceesm. Pharasaism, of course, is in essence nothing more than Ur-Talmudism: the Talmud is the congealed legalism already present in the Jewish intellectualism, but not then so codified. In that sense, Christianity is nothing more nor less than anti-Talmudism, and modern Judaism-Judaism in any sense but, perhaps, a few and much detested splinter groups like Samaritans and Karaites-is Talmudism. The Judeo-Christianity that permits "Messianic Judaism" and "Christian Zionism" and the manifold re-Judaization of Christianity in all its forms is itself, a bastard and self-contradictory system.

And like all self-contradictory systems it will implode. The problem is that given its hold on American society, if we do not kill it, it will take us with it in a thousand pieces.