Monday, July 3, 2023

A sanguine affair

One countersemitic argument is that Judaism is blood-obsessed. The Torah differs - and not just the website.

In olden times was wedged a crack between Deuteronomy and most of the Prophets; against Ezekiel and the Priests. The Holiness passages, I guess, would be some later attempt to bridge this chasma.

Rabbinic Judaism effectively downplays the Torah as we have it. This opens up space for text as was dissonant with the Temple (early Jeremiah) and/or exists without one (Psalm 137, perhaps late Jeremiah). Certainly anything in the Tanakh as came from the north could be used, where they rejected or at least opposed their own temples (the Elijah-Elisha cycle, Asaph's psalms, Hosea).

By contrast Christianity accepts the Priests, to the point Luke has Mary as a child of the then-incomplete Temple. Cerinthus perhaps had argued that Jesus was the Temple. In our orthodoxy, even for Nestorius, we don't say this; we say Mary became the true Temple - better, the Tabernacle - and her womb the Ark, in which God Himself took up lodging. [UPDATE 9/4: No, Scott Hahn was not making this up. Read Hippolytus.] A Dalton still might accuse Christians of inheriting barbarism, but we actual Christians assert we know better.

As usual I seem to be coming across the mutual incompatibility of rabbinic and Christian claims about the Scriptures... but not, necessarily, the superiority of one over the other.

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