We're going to acapulco/abracadabra with bd/db ~~~

This concatenation can hardly be coincidental; some very early version of a controversy of the permission to heal on sabbath is to be found in this passage. There is a tendency among certain Christian scholars to insist on an absolute contrast and hence conflict here between
"Judaism" (bad) and "Christianity" (good). The sabbath is delivered to Israel as a gift, and, therefore, it is permitted to heal Jews on sabbath.

Lest matters be less than clear, I (DB) emphasize that I am not denying the highly significant difference between Yehoshua and the Mekhilta
( the Rabbis) here: the rabbis surely restrict the permission to heal on the sabbath to Jews, while Yehoshua seems to intend this to be gene- ral permission to save all human life. It remains the case, nonetheless, that the rabbis here use exactly the same argument to justify healing on the sabbath as YESHUA does, namely, that the sabbath was given to human beings (Israel) for their welfare and that the humans were not given to the sabbath! Our point, then, is not to deny the possible moral superiority of YESHUA's position over the rabbis but to protest rather the assertion of absolute and total difference between allegedly polar opposite religious approaches, one allegedly rigid, harsh, & legalistic and the other promoting a humanistic religion of love. Even more offensive is the opinion that "The Sabbath was made for man" etc. is annauthen tic saying of Jesus owing to its alleged DISSIMILARITY from Judaism, following the highly questionable criterion that only what is NOT like s.c. "Judaism" can be asserted to be "the actual words of the Lord!? This statement is dissimilar from Judaism and therefore allegedly authentical-ly dominical, since precisely the same statement when it does appear in Jewish texts (the Mekhilta) "means something different."

If there ever was an example of begging the question, this is it. The perversity of this kind of argument must be obvious, for even Occam's razor would demand that of we find the same (or virtually the same) saying in a similar context in two historically related texts, they must mean roughly the same thing. The special pleading involved in distorting the rabbinic saying from its obvious meaning in order to make it dif-ferent (& "worse" than Jesus' & then using this this as an implicit argument against "Judaism" is simply anti-Judaic special pleading.