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Tuesday 8 July 2008

Extra, Extra! Read All ABout It! Some Jews Don't Believe Jesus Christ Is Lord!

And some non-Jews do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/middleeast/06stone.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day...[Uh, yeah... unless of course He was God, in which case there would be a better way of "understanding" Him.]
...It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation,” also the title of their article.
Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, [Poor thing]
partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.
When he read “Gabriel’s Revelation,” he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.
Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit.


I'm not quite sure why this article brought out the usual anti-NYTimes invective in comboxes.
It seems a straight-forward and unbiased bit of reporting on a scholarly conversation about and perhaps disagreement over a 1st century Jewish artifact.

Note that the driving force behind the conversation sought to shake up the world of "Christology" not "Christianity."
One does wonder about such a person... imagine a member of the Flat Earth society devoting his academic life to Magellan.
Interesting obsession.
It goes back to the old statement about Jesus's significance.
Either Jesus was the Son of God and the most important figure and His Incarnation the most important event in the history of all mankind, of all creation---- or He wasn't and He simply couldn't matter less, and let's move on, shall we?
I suspect that this man has terrified himself by discovering that in his heart of hearts he knows the former proposition to be the true one.

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