When Jews disliked their own Torah

Checking in the anti's of Unz, we witnessed end-of-May a dustup between the counterjews and the countersemites. Michael A Hoffman II argued (against Dalton) that Jesus was a Jew who objected to what was about to become the Rabbinic consensus. Jesus would be a protoQaraite, if one might project; in tension with at least Paul, who later had to explain to Christians (not to Jews!) that "the letter mortifies but the spirit vivifies". Hoffman's piece goes on (and on) to discuss how nonQaraite/nonChristian Jews compiled the Mishna, whose successors commented upon that - in preference to Torah.

[INTERJECT 3/28/24: This is the same Hoffman who did A Candidate for the Order, and uttered similar comments over the late 1980s, which he doesn't much talk about these days.]

Some of us were awaiting E Michael Jones to cast the deciding vote. [UPDATE 1/12/24: hold on for the punchline] He hasn't (yet?). Instead, at the end of that month, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg came to AJR to promote her book saying the exact thing as Hoffman. Seriously: try to spot the daylight between these articles. If Hoffman's post were put beside The Closed Book in space you could deepfreeze a superconductor in their shade.

According to both: the rabbis, after receiving the Masoretic Text, decided they... didn't like it. On this I'd speculate: because the Temple was rubble and nobody had direct use for the "Tabernacle" text anymore; nor, we suppose, for the Temple-relevant traditions in Mishna. In fact that sort of talk tended to spark rebellions which Jews couldn't afford, especially after Trajan and Hadrian. At the same time the rabbis never dared "fix" their Bible, as scholars have endeavoured in our own times. Hoffman (now), Jones, and I would prefer that they had embraced Christ but, well, most didn't.

The rabbinate's solution: raise up Mishna as oral-Torah. Many traditions were related about how - for instance - Ezra "re"-compiled the Pentateuch (and others). Only later, in the Middle Ages, did Jews commence formal commentaries upon actual-Torah, as opposed to upon "oral-Torah". Or at least Jews in nonQara orthodoxy, as other orthodox might deem worthy of preservation.

As to Wollenberg's article: I might take those Ezra traditions a bit more seriously than she seems to take them. Ezra-ascribed apocalyptic was popular in Jewry, maybe even late Second Temple Jewry. Ezra's own book has (famously) two major recensions. Ezra's stature doesn't seem something which Torah-ambivalent Jews would simply latch onto, after the fact. And (as she seems to accept) modern Biblical scholarship tends to bolster the Ezra hypothesis, inasmuch as Holiness Code is generally considered a Second Temple interpolation inspiring a revision of, for instance, the Noah and Solomon-Temple cycles. If the Jews forgot that these editions happened, the very state of the text might have inspired them to speculate, as it would for Spinoza and Wellhausen.

BACKDATE 6/7. Also consider Piero Capelli ed. Daise & Hartman. Deuteronomy 20 after Hadrian was abruptly... no longer cited, for Jewish military revanchism.

UPDATE 1/12/24: I admit: I became Jones-curious between March and June 2023, Keeping An Open Mind afterward. No longer.