topic by
i.hanan
(2468 posts)
Ancona,
Italy
8/9/2008 (16:58) |
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Judaism and Christianity
Critics of Judaism are accused of bigotry of race, as well as of bigotry of religion. The accusation comes strangely from those who style themselves the Chosen People, make race a religion, and treat all races except their own as Gentiles and unclean.
The notion that the Jews are to be maltreated because their ancestors by the hand of Pilate crucified Christ, has long been discarded and derided by all enlightened Christians. But equally baseless is the notion that Christianity owes homage to Judaism, has any particular interest in it, or any particular duty concerning it. To Talmudic Judaism, at all events, it owes nothing. Whether in its origin it owed anything to the liberal school of Hillel, we cannot tell. The Talmud is a vast repertory of legalism, formalism, ceremonialism, and casuistry. Nothing can be more opposed to the spontaneity of conscience, trust in principle, and preference of the spirit to the letter characteristic of the Gospel, in which even the Ten Commandments are superseded by the Two.
The pervading intention of the Talmud is, by multiplying ceremonial barriers, to keep the Chosen People separate from the Gentiles among whom they lived; in other words, to perpetuate the tribe. Christianity is a religion of humanity. Baptism is a rite of initiation into a universal brotherhood. Circumcision, the Jewish circumcision at all events, is the mark of enrollment in an exclusive tribe. The fundamental antagonism of Judaism to Christianity was shown, not only in the murder of Christ, but in the bitter persecution of his followers. Christianity had its antecedents, but it begins with Christ: it has no relation to Talmudic Judaism but those of reaction and secession.
Neither Accursed Nor Sacred
We have given up the fancy that the Jew is accursed. We must cease to believe that he is sacred. Israel was the favorite people of Jehovah, as every tribe was the favorite of its own god. The belief that the Father of all and the God of justice had a favorite race, made with it a covenant sealed with the barbarous rite of circumcision, pledged himself to promote its interest against those of other races, destroyed all the innocent first-born of Egypt to force Pharaoh to let it go, licensed its aggrandizement by conquest, stopped the sun in heaven to give it time to slaughter people whose lands it invaded without a cause, and gratified its malignity by enjoining it when it took one of the cities which were given it for its inheritance to save alive nothing that breathed, ought now to be laid aside, with all its corollaries and consequences, including the passionate, and, to the Hebrew, somewhat offensive effort to convert this particular race to Christianity. We have been told from the pulpit that at the last day the world will be judged by a Jew, and a religious lady once suggested to a Jew who had been converted to Christianity that he should go on circumcising his sons. We shall have little right to complain of the tribal arrogance of the Jew so long as the Old Testament continues to be indiscriminately read in our churches and we persist, by talking of a chosen people, in ascribing favoritism to the Almighty. The belief that 'God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth' is the foundation of a religion of humanity, and Judaism is its practical denial.
Struggling with the Old Testament
Jesus called himself the Son of Man. He was a Galilean, that is, in high Jewish estimation, an inferior Jew, setting aside the 'endless' or 'profitless' genealogies which the writer of the First Epistle to Timothy classes with fables and bids us not to heed. Born into Judaism, he accepted it and 'fulfilled' all its 'righteousness,' while he must have known, as his antagonists did, that his principles would subvert it. Because he did this, we have taken upon our understandings and hearts a belief in the divine authority of the Old Testament, that is, of the whole mass of Hebrew literature; we have bound ourselves to see inspiration, not only in its more elevated, spiritual, and moral parts, but in those which are not elevated, spiritual, or even moral.
We torture our consciences into approval of the spoiling of the Egyptians by a fraud, the slaughter of the Canaanites, the slaying of Sisera, the hewing of Agag in pieces before the Lord, and David's legacy of vengeance; our intellects into the acceptance of the Book of Chronicles as authentic history, and of such miracles as the stopping of the sun, the conversion of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, the speaking ass of Balaam, the destruction of the children who mocked Elisha by a bear, and the sojourn of Jonah in the belly of a whale. In church we read, with psalms of universal beauty, psalms of Oriental vindictiveness. We constrain ourselves to see divine meaning, not only in the sublime passages of Isaiah, but in the obscurest and most incoherent utterances of his brother prophets. We read theological mysteries into a love-song because it is a part of the sacred volume. Till this superstition is cast out we shall ill appreciate what is really divine in the Old Testament. Not in the darker side of the Puritan character alone are the evil effects of this idolatry to be traced.
There was much that was infinitely memorable, but recent criticism forbids us to believe that there was anything miraculous, in the history of Israel. Whatever may have been the local origin of the Jews, who spoke the same language as the other inhabitants of Canaan, the race, we may be sure, was cast in the same primeval mold as the kindred races. The story of the Patriarchs and the Exodus being in all its parts -- the primitive theophanies in the tents of Patriarchs, the supernatural birth of Isaac, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the transformation of Lot's wife, the wrestling of Jacob with Jehovah, the marvellous story of Joseph, the miraculous multiplication of the Israelites, the competition between the envoys of Jehovah and the Egyptian magicians, the plagues of Egypt, the drying up of the Red Sea, the forty years' wandering in the barren Sinaitic desert, the prodigies which there took place, the giants of Canaan, and the stopping of the sun -- manifestly poetical, it would seem that the narrative as a whole must, in accordance with a well-known canon of criticism, be dismissed from history and relegated to another domain.
Of the exact process by which the finer spirits of Israel attained a tribal monotheism, which at last verged on monotheism pure and simple, and carried with it a high morality, while the grosser spirits were always hankering after the groves and images of their idolatry, no exact account has been given us, though the prophets, as moral reformers, clearly played a great part in it. But it involved no miracle, since without miracle Socrates and Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus could rise to the same level. The peculiar service rendered to humanity by Judaism was the identification of religion with morality through the conception of a God of righteousness and of justice and mercy as his law. Against which we have to set the dark shadow cast on our spiritual life by the cruel fanaticism of the Jew and the sombre denunciations of his prophets. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul was extraneous to Judaism, and was rejected by one of its sects; the tribal idea of immortality being the perpetuation of the family in the tribe.
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