One of the 6 Christians here! (I assume you mean “around 6 Christians” and not negative 6 Christians)
I appreciate your Substack a lot because I’ve had some interest in Judaism for a while and have poked around on Jewish subreddits, but I’ve been wary of engaging because they seem to view Christians as intrusive. So it’s awesome that you’re clearly so open to engaging with Christians!
I’m glad you enjoy my posting! I have Christian friends so I enjoy the interactions as long as everyone is polite, which tends to be the case. I like to learn about other faiths and that’s usually mutual. As for the math, I tend to refer to myself as having a negative 7 or so readership (same with my readers being “hypothetical”) as a sort of exaggerated humility bit.
Christians often take for granted how their own doctrines were elaborated on by various theologians over the millennia, so it makes sense that Judaism (and arguably all religions) continued to grapple with emerging problem sets and continuing the age-old debates.
I find there's a similar issue with Christians with paganism, in that they expect us to have a single book or text that has all of our beliefs coded within it, or that we believe our myths are both literal history or making definitive infallible statements about the Gods. In reality, pagan beliefs encompassed variations on mythologies, temple writings, philosophical works, and lists of aphorisms and proverbs. This desire for a one size fits all single document is largely a Protestant *sola scriptura* affectation, and I think that same assumption makes them think that the Talmud is just like a counter-New Testament.
Not a Christian, but since we're admitting our ignorance of Judaism one thing I have always been curious about is the Jewish response to a criticism often levelled at Evangelicals. Critics of Christianity often point to how archaic a lot of OT morality strikes us today. Christians often defend it by pointing to the NT superseding it. I have always been curious then what the Jewish remanding give that they "only have the OT". You did provide a good first step in pointing out how Jewish scripture is more diverse than we realize so thank you it was informative.
I speculate the difficulty (in addition to exotification driven by antisemitism) comes from what I regard as a sort of... modern Protestant view of Christianity as "believing what's in The Bible." Bc of course Christian thought and elaboration is 2,000 years old at this point, and in documents like Pope Leo's encyclical Catholics talk about their church in very similar terms, as a sort of ongoing discourse which changes its boundaries very slowly. But even then, if one is seriously into Protestantism, they are going to have a lot of opinions about Zwingli, Luther, and Calvin, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Niebuhr (something about the German soul going on here)....
Or maybe what I'm putting my finger on is that *I* think the Talmud is very cool and I wish it was more common to put reverence on a discursive tradition in itself.
There's certainly usually different relationship to the tradition of Christian thought , it's not typical for this discourse to be treated as a thing in itself to be consulted. Growing up w/ the idea of an Anglican 'three-legged stool' I would think of the discourse as "Reason" and the consensus that falls out of it as "Tradition." [I get the sense nerds online don't like the stool so I guess we can slot those into the Wesleyan Quadrilateral... but idk what Methodists are about.] I think it's true to say all Christians treat scripture as primary, to the extent that suggesting a group doesn't is usually a prejudiced canard. But with churches concerned w/ Apostolic succession, and particularly Catholics, it is true that there's often a sense of "Well, St. Augustine said [x], and Aquinas built on that with [y]..." to any given scriptural discussion, which idk, I always found kinda romantic.
Yeah, not that we Catholics don't have our own misunderstandings of Judaism, but the ones listed here do seem pretty Protestant-tinged. For example, any educated Catholic should be well aware that the Catholic Old Testament is not identical to the Hebrew Bible, and in fact the reliance of the Jews in the New Testament on the Septuagint is a common Catholic apologetic talking point in favor of the inclusion of the Greek-only books.
One of the 6 Christians here! (I assume you mean “around 6 Christians” and not negative 6 Christians)
I appreciate your Substack a lot because I’ve had some interest in Judaism for a while and have poked around on Jewish subreddits, but I’ve been wary of engaging because they seem to view Christians as intrusive. So it’s awesome that you’re clearly so open to engaging with Christians!
I’m glad you enjoy my posting! I have Christian friends so I enjoy the interactions as long as everyone is polite, which tends to be the case. I like to learn about other faiths and that’s usually mutual. As for the math, I tend to refer to myself as having a negative 7 or so readership (same with my readers being “hypothetical”) as a sort of exaggerated humility bit.
Christians often take for granted how their own doctrines were elaborated on by various theologians over the millennia, so it makes sense that Judaism (and arguably all religions) continued to grapple with emerging problem sets and continuing the age-old debates.
I find there's a similar issue with Christians with paganism, in that they expect us to have a single book or text that has all of our beliefs coded within it, or that we believe our myths are both literal history or making definitive infallible statements about the Gods. In reality, pagan beliefs encompassed variations on mythologies, temple writings, philosophical works, and lists of aphorisms and proverbs. This desire for a one size fits all single document is largely a Protestant *sola scriptura* affectation, and I think that same assumption makes them think that the Talmud is just like a counter-New Testament.
Very much agreed! I think that’s a good way to put it. Judaism doesn’t have anything like sola scriptura and the canon can be a little wobbly.
Not a Christian, but since we're admitting our ignorance of Judaism one thing I have always been curious about is the Jewish response to a criticism often levelled at Evangelicals. Critics of Christianity often point to how archaic a lot of OT morality strikes us today. Christians often defend it by pointing to the NT superseding it. I have always been curious then what the Jewish remanding give that they "only have the OT". You did provide a good first step in pointing out how Jewish scripture is more diverse than we realize so thank you it was informative.
I speculate the difficulty (in addition to exotification driven by antisemitism) comes from what I regard as a sort of... modern Protestant view of Christianity as "believing what's in The Bible." Bc of course Christian thought and elaboration is 2,000 years old at this point, and in documents like Pope Leo's encyclical Catholics talk about their church in very similar terms, as a sort of ongoing discourse which changes its boundaries very slowly. But even then, if one is seriously into Protestantism, they are going to have a lot of opinions about Zwingli, Luther, and Calvin, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Niebuhr (something about the German soul going on here)....
Or maybe what I'm putting my finger on is that *I* think the Talmud is very cool and I wish it was more common to put reverence on a discursive tradition in itself.
There's certainly usually different relationship to the tradition of Christian thought , it's not typical for this discourse to be treated as a thing in itself to be consulted. Growing up w/ the idea of an Anglican 'three-legged stool' I would think of the discourse as "Reason" and the consensus that falls out of it as "Tradition." [I get the sense nerds online don't like the stool so I guess we can slot those into the Wesleyan Quadrilateral... but idk what Methodists are about.] I think it's true to say all Christians treat scripture as primary, to the extent that suggesting a group doesn't is usually a prejudiced canard. But with churches concerned w/ Apostolic succession, and particularly Catholics, it is true that there's often a sense of "Well, St. Augustine said [x], and Aquinas built on that with [y]..." to any given scriptural discussion, which idk, I always found kinda romantic.
Yeah, not that we Catholics don't have our own misunderstandings of Judaism, but the ones listed here do seem pretty Protestant-tinged. For example, any educated Catholic should be well aware that the Catholic Old Testament is not identical to the Hebrew Bible, and in fact the reliance of the Jews in the New Testament on the Septuagint is a common Catholic apologetic talking point in favor of the inclusion of the Greek-only books.