There’s bigotry in the New Testament too, and great wisdom in the Old. Neither is without merit or flaw. The idea that the NT is insufficient for finding bad ideas that one must trawl back into the OT for such things is fundamentally what I was critiquing.
I think it’s fair to say that some Jewish text is incorporated into Christianity, but the interpretation is generally not the same. Christians may see themselves as practicing a logical extension of the worship of the God of Abraham, but from a Jewish perspective they’re doing their own thing.
Objectively I think that holds. A rabbi could explain it better I’m sure, but Christianity is quasi-polytheistic, often iconoclastic, and importantly rejects pretty much all Jewish law, supplanting it with the particular interpretations of one rabbi who is also the son of God but is also God himself.
Fair enough. I never said that people have to go back to the OT to find bigotry. Just that they often do.
and importantly rejects pretty much all Jewish law, supplanting it with the particular interpretations of one rabbi who is also the son of God but is also God himself.
Was Jesus actually recognized as a rabbi, though? I think he was just a preacher and not part of the official hierarchy, such as it was. This is irrelevant to the point you were making but it got me curious.
Rabbis are teachers, and Jesus was often called “teacher” by his followers. I believe the Aramaic word for teacher is something like “Rabboni”. I’m using the term in a loosely descriptive fashion for Jesus too I guess. Granted the 2nd Temple was still standing so it was the priestly era and not the rabbinical era, but yeah, rabbi, why not. There are schools and social networks that maintain traditions and connections but the hierarchy as I understand it is pretty flat in the rabbinical system, which was only maybe in a proto form in Jesus’s time.
As for the OT, yeah it’s a pretty good source to fish out awful things, but I think it gets a bad rap for that so I always bristle at the assertion or implication that it’s the “bad” part of the Bible. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it. By volume probably more than the NT. The truth of the matter is that the whole book is self contradictory and problematic in parts with a number of good ideas sprinkled in. You’ll only get something useful and moral out of it with thoughtful interpretation and careful exegesis. And I do happen to think Judaism does that well mostly.
Oh, absolutely. Proverbs is full of wisdom, for example. And in the NT there’s some fishy stuff like Jesus cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit for him even though it wasn’t the season, or when he made a herd of pigs commit suicide. The reputation of OT=bad and NT=good isn’t deserved. But to be fair, Jesus never said to stone the gays or that slavery was okay and 99% of the times people discuss bigotry in the Bible, they’re talking about one of these two.
There’s bigotry in the New Testament too, and great wisdom in the Old. Neither is without merit or flaw. The idea that the NT is insufficient for finding bad ideas that one must trawl back into the OT for such things is fundamentally what I was critiquing.
I think it’s fair to say that some Jewish text is incorporated into Christianity, but the interpretation is generally not the same. Christians may see themselves as practicing a logical extension of the worship of the God of Abraham, but from a Jewish perspective they’re doing their own thing.
Objectively I think that holds. A rabbi could explain it better I’m sure, but Christianity is quasi-polytheistic, often iconoclastic, and importantly rejects pretty much all Jewish law, supplanting it with the particular interpretations of one rabbi who is also the son of God but is also God himself.
Fair enough. I never said that people have to go back to the OT to find bigotry. Just that they often do.
Was Jesus actually recognized as a rabbi, though? I think he was just a preacher and not part of the official hierarchy, such as it was. This is irrelevant to the point you were making but it got me curious.
Rabbis are teachers, and Jesus was often called “teacher” by his followers. I believe the Aramaic word for teacher is something like “Rabboni”. I’m using the term in a loosely descriptive fashion for Jesus too I guess. Granted the 2nd Temple was still standing so it was the priestly era and not the rabbinical era, but yeah, rabbi, why not. There are schools and social networks that maintain traditions and connections but the hierarchy as I understand it is pretty flat in the rabbinical system, which was only maybe in a proto form in Jesus’s time.
As for the OT, yeah it’s a pretty good source to fish out awful things, but I think it gets a bad rap for that so I always bristle at the assertion or implication that it’s the “bad” part of the Bible. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it. By volume probably more than the NT. The truth of the matter is that the whole book is self contradictory and problematic in parts with a number of good ideas sprinkled in. You’ll only get something useful and moral out of it with thoughtful interpretation and careful exegesis. And I do happen to think Judaism does that well mostly.
Oh, absolutely. Proverbs is full of wisdom, for example. And in the NT there’s some fishy stuff like Jesus cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit for him even though it wasn’t the season, or when he made a herd of pigs commit suicide. The reputation of OT=bad and NT=good isn’t deserved. But to be fair, Jesus never said to stone the gays or that slavery was okay and 99% of the times people discuss bigotry in the Bible, they’re talking about one of these two.
Every religion has its good and bad parts.