myDidiversifications, -controversies and divorces.

(DB) There is perhaps one feature that constitutes all as members of the Judeo~Christian family, manely, appealing to the Hebrew Scrip-tures as revelation. Similarly, there was one feature that could be said to be common to all ancient groups that we might want to call (quite anachronistically) Christian, namely, some form of discipleship to Jesus. Yet this feature hardly captures enough richness and depth to produce a descriptively productive category, for in so many other vitally important ways, groups that followed Jesus and groups that ignored him were similar to each other. To put this point another way, groups that ignored or rejected Yehoshua haNatsri aka haMashiah may have had some highly salient other features (for instance, belief in the Son of Man) that bound them to Yeshua groups and discon-nected them from other non-Yeshu Jews. On the other hand, some 'Jesus Jews' may have had aspects to their religious lives (following pharisaic, or even rabbinic, HALAKHA) that drew them closer to some non-Jesus Jews that to other 'Jesus People'. Moreover, some Jesus groups might have related to Jesus in ways more similar to the ways that other non-Jesus Jewish groups related to other prophets, leaders, or Messiahs than to the ways that other Jesus groups were relating to Jesus. That is, some Jews in the first century in Palestine might have been expecting a Messiah who would be an incarnation of the divine bur rejected Jesus as THE one, while some other Jews who accepted Jesus might have thought of him nor as divine but only as a human Messiah. The model of family resemblance therefore seems apt for talking about a Judaism that incorporates early Christianity as well! This expanded understanding of "Judaism" completely allows for the inclusion of the earliest Gospel literature with in its purview, thus making the earliest and in some ways most foundational texts of Christianity - Jewish. By now, almost everyone recognizes that the historical Jesus (Yeshu, Yeshua, Yehoshua) was a Jew who followed ancient Jewish ways. There is also growing recognition that the Gospels themselves and even the letters of Paul are part and parcel of the religion of the People of Israel in the first century A.D. What is less recognized is to what extent the ideas surrounding what we call Christology, the story of Jesus as the divine-human Messiah, were also part (if not parcel) of Jewish diversity at this time. The Gospels themselves, when read in the context of other Jewish texts oftheir times, reveal this very complex diversity and attachment to other variants of "Judaism" at the time. There are traits that bind the Gospel of Matthew to one strain of first-century Judaism while other traits bind the Gospel of John to other strains. The same goes for Mark, and even for Luke, which is generally considered the "least Jewish" of the Gospels. By blurring the boundaries between "Jews" and "Christians" we are making clearer the historical situation and development of early "Judaism" and Christianity. We can understand much better the significance of our historical documents, including the Gospels, when we imagine a state of affairs that more properly reflects the social situation on the ground of that time, a social situation in which believers in Jesus of Nazareth and those who didn't follow him were mixed up with each other in various ways rather than separated I to two well-defined entities that we know today as Judaism & Christianity. (Anyway, this determined my life ...)! OK!
12 apr 2012 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 80 jaar
   
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