> However, the New Testament has anti-Semitic undertones throughout (The
> Gospels, sections of Acts, Mark, John, Matthew, Thessalonians and Revelations).
Cite?
> I was just making a statement.
What does this mean? This sounds to me like an expression that I hear people say (and read on the SDMB) occasionally, “I’m just saying.” Does this mean that you’re just talking (or writing) to hear the sound of your own voice (or the look of your own writing)? Do you have any concern whether what you say is true or not or do you just write any random idea that occurs to you?
Non-dd: “You shithead”
DD: “You’re an anti-semite! I’m calling my lawyer! Waaaaaa!”
Seriously, the New Testament is largely written by Jews, about a Jew. Any anti-semitic “feeling” is purely in your imagination.
To be sure, it was used by MORONS to persecute Jews, under the rather bizarro claim that “the Jews killed Jesus” (who was a Jew, lived in Jewish lands and lived under Jewish law. So 1> Who were they expecting to kill him, the Spanish Inquisition? and 2> His entire mission was to come to Earth and DIE FOR US, so if anyone, blame GOD, because that was the whole freaking plan, you morons!)
There is definitely some anti-Jewish polemic in the Gospels and in Paul. It’s not, strictly speaking, antisemitic, in a modern sense, but there is rhetoric in the NT which blames the Jews for the crucifixion and for rejecting him as the Messiah.
The NT was mostly written by Gentiles, by the way, and TO Gentiles as well.
Interesting statement. There are 27 books in the New Testament, of which thirteen, or almost half, were written by Paul (a Jew).
[ul][li]Romans[/li] [li] First Corinthians[/li] [li] Second Corinthians[/li] [li] Galatians[/li] [li] Ephesians[/li] [li] Philippians[/li] [li] Colossians[/li] [li] First Thessalonians[/li] [li] Second Thessalonians[/li] [li] First Timothy[/li] [li] Second Timothy[/li] [li] Titus[/li] [li] Philemon[/ul]Hebrews seems to have been written for a Hebrew audience, hence the name. (Authorship of Hebrews is not known.) The Gospel of Matthew is fairly clearly addressed to a Jewish audience as well. Jude ascribes itself to a brother of James and Jesus, both Jews. The Gospel of Mark is usually thought to be by John Mark, a Jew.[/li]
The Gospel of John, the letters of John, and Revelations, are also all ascribed to a Jew.
So basically, the only books of the New Testament not ascribed to or addressing Jews are the Gospel of Luke, and Acts. So you are essentially 2 for 27.
I’d put it differently - that the Book of Job is simply an attempt to explain why, with this all-powerful God thing happening, bad stuff still quite observably happens to good people.
Job’s buddies come up with the usual range of explainations - you must have pissed God off somehow; or you are not really a good person - all untrue.
Then God shows up and basically says “you can’t understand it - only God can understand his own purposes, so deal”.
This seems to be the only way of addressing the paradox of the belief in the existance of a “Good” God and the observation that bad stuff quite often happens.
I prefer it to the Buddhist notion that the universe is essentially a bad place and life is suffering, or the Hindu notion of Karma (which implies that bad stuff happening to you really is your fault). I do not however believe it is literally true.
Was it? Other than Paul (a Jew), do we know the specific persons that wrote any of the New Testament or whether they were Jews or Gentiles?
I would agree that audience is Gentile for most of the NT, but do we really know that much about the writers? I know you are really knowledgeable on this subject, and I have started to get interested in the NT.
Only 7 are generally accepted as having been athentically written by Paul. The rest are pseudoepigraphic works written in the 2nd Century.
All different authors, all unknown, none of them the apostle, only one of those books (the multiply authored Gospel of John), having any likelihood of Jewish input in the earliest layers of its development (though the finished product ended up being one of the most anti-Jewish books in the NT)
The authorship traditions you are appealing to arose in the 2nd centrury and are essentially regarded as spurious by all modern scholarship. The only books for whom the author is known (or at least regarded as a having a high likelihood of being known) are the 7 authentic letters of Paul.
No one knows who wrote any of the Gospels, but one thing that is fairly easy to assertain is that their traditional authorship traditions do not hold up to scrutiny. I can (and have before on this board) go into significant detail as to how and why we know that if you wish.
The reason we know that the majority of the NT was written by and to Gentiles is that the time and place and audience is all Gentile. Every book in it was written after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Theye were written outside of palestine to Gentile audience in Gentile cities, mostly after Christians were expelled from Jewish synagogues. Jews are spoken of virtually throughout as “they,” not “us,” and some significant errors are made about Jewish beliefs and practices.
The burden to prove that these unknown authors were Jewish rests on thos making that claim. Very little positive evidence exists to support claims that most of these authors were Jewish (especially for the Gospels), and all the circumstanial evidence points away from it. Gentile location, Gentile language, Gentile audience, lack of internal claims to Jewishness, anti-Jewish rhetoric and ignorance of Jewish beliefs and practices (as well as significant ignorance of Palestinian geography).
The only rational default is to assume that these authors were not Jewish until someone can show compelling evidence (something better than highly dubious, sometimes demonstrably spurious, 2nd century folklore) to the contrary.
The trick here would be for Gay men to start a trend. Remove Gideon bibles from the room every time you are in a hotel. Toss them in the trash or whatever. If every gay person did this, or a large proportion of them did it, it would blow the Gideon budget, and they wouldn’t be able to afford to replace them.
See my response to Shodan. I hope I’ve offered some answers to your questions. Please bear in mind that what I’ve given is highly encapsulated. If I was to really unpack a lot of this stuff it would run to multiple pages.
Opinion is divided on that. It’s possible. Matthew contains some of the most explicit Jewish mythological parallels, but it also contains some of the most scathing anti-Jewish polemic (including the infamous “his blood be on us and our children” line from 27:25).
Some argue for Matthew for having the best chance of the Gospel writers of having been a Jewish-Christian, but GMatt is schizophrenic enough (it contains some seemingly pro-Jewish, pro-Israel elements as well) as to make the issue cloudy. There is a decent chance that it was the product of a Jewish-Christian community which had some context-specific grievances against Pharisaic Jews (eventually the basis for Rabbinic Judaism), which wre not intended to be seen as universal.
Well, that’s fair enough. You, on the other hand, have asserted that they were mostly written by and for Gentiles. Therefore, the burden of proof lies with you, and, as we have seen, seems to rely on statements which are either unproven or demonstrably false.